First few days with the iPad

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I gave into temptation on Sunday and picked up an iPad at Apple’s Regent Street store in London. I have to admit I was somewhat hesitant and almost ducked out the queue as I approached the front. A few days on and I’ve been using the device extensively. My laptop and Eee PC don’t even have a look in when it comes to catching up on RSS feeds, browsing the web or even typing emails.

Probably my favourite experience so far has been reading the complementary copy of Winnie the Pooh in the iBook reader which is free to download from the app store. The book looks glorious with lovely full colour images accompanying the text. I’m still not sure if I’m ready to trade in paper books for this thing just yet but the experience is very pleasant and my eyes seemed to have survived the first chapter unharmed. Unfortunately it seems I need a separate app to load PDFs onto the device. The most popular at the moment appears to be GoodReader but the interface is a little clunky in the current version.

By far the majority of my time is being spent in Safari. The browser is fast and the screen is the perfect size for keeping up with the news or Google Reader while reclining on the sofa. There is already is pretty decent WordPress app which I have used to tap out a couple of posts. It could definitely use a few improvements, the addition of formatting options and perhaps a way to view stats which relies on Flash in the web version but it’s usable none the less. For video YouTube plays videos nicely embedded in pages rather than switching to a separate app. In addition Vimeo and BBC iPlayer have Flash-free, iPad friendly videos.

Apps like the Guardian’s Eyewitness Photo App show that there is plenty of scope for creating truly beautiful content and it’s going to be interesting to see how the device grows as more apps hit the store in the coming months. So far it’s my favourite device for watching short videos, reading online content and even writing blog posts and emails.

By The Throat

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Part Wild Horses Main On Both Sides kick off proceedings at The Luminaire taking us to another place with flute, drums, sampled birdsong and bells. The crowd sits on the floor meditating as we are pulled into Part Wild Horses’ ritualistic free-jazz. The audience was then asked to stand to let more people in as the next act, Teeth Of The Sea, prepared to begin. Teeth Of The Sea increased the tempo with a kind of prog/punk rock. The drums providing a primal beat on top of which the guitars, keyboard and trumpet created a feedback heavy sonic landscape. Nothing, however, could prepare us for what was to come.

Ben Frost at the Luminaire

Ben Frost took the stage in his bare feet, guitar around his back. As he built the first sounds of the performance he rocks back and forth before his laptop as if charging it with his energy. He then turns his back on the crowd to play guitar before the two massive amps at the back of the stage. The sound is so intense the whole venue is shaking. Glasses slide across the floor and audience members clutch their heads for fear of exploding. The music shakes us and I find myself moving with the beat. The closest reference point I have is the work of Burial et al through some of London’s loudest club sound systems. Between tracks Ben trades remarks with the crowd telling a fellow Scotsman by my side to “just be quiet” and later announcing “here’s the hit single” before commencing a performance of Killshot. The whole of London seems to be crumbling around us as I begin to feel the title By The Throat is incredibly appropriate. Then we start to smell burning. The set continues as smoke pours from one of the monitors. When I get outside I feel like my entire body has been shook to its core. Nothing will ever be the same again.

The Fall at Shepherd’s Bush Empire

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I last saw The Fall on the tour of Imperial Wax Solvent in Cambridge only a few days before I moved to London. Mark E Smith was wheelchair bound at the time and gave an awesome but rather strange performance, at one point singing from behind a door off the back of the stage.

I arrived a little early after work so wandered around the nearby Westfield shopping centre which on two separate occasions has been described to me as a likely site of any future “zombie apocalypse”. Shepherd’s Bush Empire isn’t much better, a medium-sized venue run by O2 with a rather soulless atmosphere. The opening act is inexplicably a teen pop-rock outfit who get complete silence from the audience with the exception of a few hecklers. They are followed by a laptop performance which irreverently mixes video and sound sources from the likes of Elvis and Michael Jackson. A similar performance was given on the last tour and I was somewhat taken aback by the intolerance of the Cambridge audience to anything that didn’t involve guitars; Shepherd’s Bush seems more appreciative but their attention starts to wane about 10 minutes into the set. Not long after The Fall storm the stage and launch into Y.F.O.C Showcase.

Tonight’s set draws mainly from Our Future Your Clutter and Imperial Wax Solvent with Mark E Smith giving the kind of performance he is famed for. The band ploughs through the material as Smith snarls fragments of lyrics which loosely resemble what’s on the album. He wanders the stage turning the volume on the amps up full and when that’s not enough presses his mic against them to give the sound an extra boost. The only quiet moment is when the band perform Weather Report 2, towards the end of which Smith seems to be talking to the audience. As I strain to make out the words all I pick up is Smith stating “This song, Weather Report, is the worst song I have heard in my entire life” before he turns his back on the audience and laughs dementedly into the microphone. The band return for a rampaging encore of Sparta FC and when I reach the underground platform the fans are still chanting its lyrics.

Carla Bozulich

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On a cold Monday night we migrate from nursing a pint in The Kingsland pub for over an hour to the short line outside Cafe Oto. After some grumbling about the doors not being opened fast enough we’re on our way in. In the absence of a stamp my wrist is scored with a marker pen and we make our way to a small table right in front of the stage.
The night starts with Jack Shirt who plays a kind of sinister fairground music on a guitar and an array of effects pedals. The music is hauntingly beautiful but the feedback often spirals beyond his control and he finally apologises and gives up. The crowd applaud warmly in support, and Jack looks a little dejected as he packs up. We decide to grab his CD-R, nicely packed in a felt pouch and wait for the main event.

Carla BozulichSimilar technical difficulties occur near the start of Carla’s set as Francesco Guerri’s cello falls silent and he frantically unplugs effects pedals to try locate a fault. Thankfully with two on stage Carla happily jams away on her guitar until the problem is solved and they launch into the first song. One of the highlights of the night is when Carla lays down her guitar to perform Baby That’s The Creeps. Carla wanders through the audience, brushing past audience members and knocking over furniture, captivating the room with her intense performance. When I start to shiver I’m unsure if it’s really because of the cold.

As the set ends Carla asks if she’s played a good amount, gesturing the length of the set with her hands. After shouts of “more” and rapturous applause Francesco and Carla return for an encore. I’ve put a handful of my photos on flickr.

Life in London

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After nine months living in London I’m finding myself in an increasingly reflective mood. Life in the capital is pretty amazing. A trip to one of the many markets always has me returning with something cool like the Stylophone I picked up last week at Brick Lane Market or the yummy cheese and salami we grabbed at Borough Market the week before. The city is full of restaurants serving food from all around the globe and if I had a bit more money I’d probably try and eat through as many of them as I can. However, probably my favourite thing in London is music. Gone are the days when I flicked through the listings at the back of The Wire and lamented the number of cool gigs that I would be unable to go to. I’ve also discovered Cafe Oto and its amazing programme of new music which makes me think about moving to East London more and more each day.

Chelsea, London

It’s cool to just take the tube somewhere random and go for a walk and see what you find. Quaint little lanes in Chelsea, an independent record shop at the end of Portobello Road, stunning views on the South Bank or the awesome Dalston Peace Mural.

There are downsides to life here too, rent is ridiculously expensive and the quality of housing very low. It seems the demand is so high that landlords can be pretty much guaranteed a particular price based on area and don’t need to bother maintaining their property. My commute, although thankfully brief, usually involves being crammed into a smelly metal tube with a few hundred fellow Londoners. The hectic nature of life and work here can be tiring and a little stressful at times. Despite all this, I think it’s worth it to live in a place where I have the chance to discover something new every day.

Finding a loop in a linked list

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I have been reading through the excellent SICP recently which has been an enlightening experience. The book takes a unique approach to the introductory programming textbook focusing not merely on introducing various basic constructs but on the computer language as a “novel formal medium for expressing ideas about methodology”.

Chapter three introduces assignment along with set-car! and set-cdr! for the modification of lists. This leads on to an interesting discussion of how lists are structured in memory and the possibility of creating a looped linked list with the procedures:

(define (last-pair x)
  (if (null? (cdr x))
    x
    (last-pair (cdr x))))

(define (make-cycle x)
  (set-cdr! (last-pair x) x)
  x)

As you can see make-cycle connects the end of x to the start forming a loop. Exercise 3.18 asks the reader to define a procedure which will determine whether a list contains a cycle or not. This can easily be achieved using eq? and waiting until we reach a null or visit a node twice. The problem is that this seems to require some auxiliary data structure or temporary modification of the original list.

Exercise 3.19 pushes us further and asks for an algorithm which runs in constant space. A possible solution would be:

(define (cyclic? x)
  (define (fast-adv x) (if (null? (cdr x)) '() (cddr x)))
  (define (cyclic-check slow fast)
    (cond ((null? fast) false)
          ((eq? fast slow) true)
          (else (cyclic-check (cdr slow) (fast-adv fast)))))

  (if (null? x) false (cyclic-check x (fast-adv x))))

Unfortunately my Scheme isn’t great and there is a little bit of redundancy in my expression of the algorithm but it achieves the goal of finding a loop using constant space. This works by having two pairs: one which advances normally with cdr and one which advances two at a time using fast-adv. If there is a loop in our list the slow object will eventually catch up with the fast one, otherwise we will reach the end. If you aren’t familiar with functional languages you may be wondering about the recursion in the previous procedure but since it is tail recursive it is in fact an iterative process. This algorithm is due to Robert W Floyd.

Wikipedia has an interesting article on cycle detection in terms of iterated functions which includes a discussion of Floyd’s algorithm.