As I’ve said throughout the intro to this series, becoming an awesome singer consists of three kinds of tasks: doing the less of the wrong things, doing more of the good things, and doing both of that more consistently. All of these need to be approached in slightly different ways, but there’s one thing common to all of them:

You have no idea.

Your first and biggest enemy is your ignorance of what exactly you are doing while singing (you do most of these things so automatically that you’ll have a hard time noticing them at all, even if they are patently obvious to an impartial observer)… and if you do notice things, good luck figuring out which of them are “good” and which are “bad”.

Both of these are trickier than you might think. Sure, I can tell you a whole lot of theory about good and bad things to do… but how can you tell whether the thing you’re doing is the bad thing I just described, or just something similar? How can you know that you’re actually doing the good thing the right way?

Noticing what you are doing, on the other hand, seems like such a simple thing to do. But even if, impossibly, you were not somewhat preoccupied with trying to sing half-decently while you’re observing yourself, you still don’t really often have a reliable baseline. Do you know how many people have extreme neck or shoulder tension and they don’t even know it? There are people who have their shoulders pulled up to their ears but are completely convinced that their shoulders are in a neutral position.

Luckily there’s a solution!

Purposefully doubt yourself

When people talk about “doubt”, especially about their own ideas and thoughts, almost inevitably they’ll be portraying it as a negative thing. People who doubt themselves are seen as weak, as easily manipulated, as characterless.

That’s complete hogwash. Doubt is the reasonable, the rational way of thinking. It says, “I’m not really completely certain about this. There are many reasons why I could be wrong without ever realizing it.” In someone with a stable personality, it says, “I’ve got a pretty good idea of what’s right but I’ll always be ready to seriously reconsider. My goal is to improve, not to convince anyone that I’m really smart. And if improving means I have to do some extra thinking, so be it!”

Your mind defaults to ignoring things that are exactly as you expect them, i.e. normal relative to the context you find yourself in. If you always frown, it’ll be hard to notice that you’re doing it. If you have a strong tendency to hold your breath all the time, it’ll be hard to notice that, too. If you hunch, chances are you don’t even know you’re doing it. If you always grip the steering wheel with entirely too much force, your mind won’t typically send you a postcard about it. It’ll tell itself: this is what always happens, why should anyone care? Next I’ll be asked to send out a notification for every heartbeat… lunacy!

What you can do to work against that is wonder. For example, you could ask yourself, “could I improve my posture? From which angles do I need to look to get a complete picture of my posture, and might there be differences to an ideal posture?” You might not have an answer, but asking yourself these kinds of questions will nudge the mind from “ignore this, it doesn’t matter” to “pay more attention to this”.

Note that I didn’t say ponder or obsess. If you start spending every free minute thinking about your posture, it’ll start to get in the way of other things. You’ll start trying to micromanage yourself, and may even end up with things being more awkward than before. So, instead, just be curious. “What’s going on? Are there other ways? What’s the difference?” There’s no need to spend hours researching. In fact, if you come out of the research with a fixed conclusion, you’re pretty much back where you’re started, in terms of mental flexibility. Instead, you’re just looking to open your mind a little bit in a certain direction, and get exposed to some of the right ideas so that your open mind has some kind of basis to reference future data against. That’s all. You can do the wondering part, and I’ll try my hand at the ideas part.

Monitor yourself… but no carrot or stick!

Perhaps this whole idea of doubting yourself sounds demotivating or depressing at first… but it absolutely doesn’t need to be! Remember, you’re just learning to do something better. No one breezes through absolutely all learning experiences. It’s only to be expected that you’ll start out with a bunch of roadblocks already firmly planted in your way. If you’re any realistic at all, you’ll know that before you start, and start anyway.

There’s one thing I haven’t talked about at all, yet, but it’s time to come clean. When becoming a great singer (or a great anything else), that won’t be all that’ll be happening. With all the things we’ll be looking at changing, your whole self-image will be affected. I’m fairly certain that I wouldn’t be nearly as comfortable with “being myself” to the max if I hadn’t gone through my singing lessons so far. A story for another day, I suppose.

You’re in for a very exciting experiment. It’s pretty much impossible to predict how quickly you’ll be proceeding, or exactly what changes you’ll be seeing. It took me ages to figure out what my ideal voice probably sounded like. There were many, many bad habits and other problems with technique that distorted the sound. I happen to have documentation of my process because I kept recording songs while going through the lessons. If you are any serious at all about awesome singing, make your own recordings every couple of weeks. It doesn’t matter what you record, though I hope I don’t have to tell you that singing should be in it, and your singing at that.

Why? Because you’ll be missing the forest through the trees. You’ll be so caught up in your current singing status that you’ll be mostly incapable of seeing how you’re doing in the grand scheme of things. Most of the improvement will not actually register, and that’s horribly demotivating. Don’t do that to yourself.

Similarly, don’t do yourself the disservice of discounting your successes, or mentally flagellating yourself for mistakes. Sure, you want to be aware of mistakes, because otherwise you can’t fix them. You don’t want to obsess over them, though, because obsession feeds itself and, at some point, really screws things up. Just note them. They’re part of the journey. They’re to be expected. In fact, you’re relying on them in your quest to get better. Taken to the extreme, you might actually rejoice whenever you made a mistake, because you just learned more about what you’re doing and how well various strategies work for dealing with problems. If that sounds over the top, just don’t take mistakes too seriously and you’ll be fine.

On the other hand, feel free to treat yourself to all the mental fireworks you like whenever you do something right. That reinforces to your mind that you want more of that. It won’t always deliver immediately, but there’s a cumulative effect. Keep doing this and it will slowly increase your rate of improvement.

Getting help is good

Take any help you can get.

Just kidding. Take any good help you can get. If you know someone who is capable of observing you and telling you what they notice without any stupid nonsense getting in the way, enlist them. If finding a vocal teacher is generally feasible for you, do it. If the devil appears to you at night in a fiery vortex and offers you an awesome voice in exchange for just a small little signature, do i… well, I guess that one depends on your moral code.

Practice makes perfect…

but only if done smartly. One hour of smart practising a week beats two hours of dumb practising a day, especially if the latter one sucks all your motivation out of you. Personally, I will not practise singing (nor anything else) whenever it feels laborious. I only start when I really feel like it (of the “okay, time to do some singing! Cool!” variety, not the “I’ll only sing when the desire pounces on me out of the blue” variety). That ensures I’ll only ever progress as quickly as I’m ready to do the work. Read through that sentence again… I triple-dare you to come up with an argument that that’s not a good thing.

Executive summary

Hah, I put this at the end, just to force you to read through all the things that actually make this make sense! It’s part of the “big meanie” image I’m trying on.

1. Don’t delude yourself into knowing what’s going on. You have to work for that.
2. Doubt is good, as long as it doesn’t jump past open-mindedness right into “there’s nothing I can trust, so I’m screwed” territory.
3. Keep track, or you’ll be flying blind.
4. Celebrate, don’t castigate. (Double score for combined alliteration and rhyme! Yay!)
5. Since you don’t have to be concerned about being right: be smart instead.

The bad news is that I don’t have any technique in this first part. The other bad news is that hearing about the technique is the easy part. In this case, two negatives make a positive, I think… but then again, that may be the tiredness speaking.

That’s it for today. If you’re still with me, the next part will start being more specific, e.g. by telling you what to actually pay attention to, and giving you a few points of reference so you can actually start changing things. And that’s even before we have finished the first level of certification! With that kind of schedule, by the time we bill you for the incredibly expensive Junior Vocal Executive certificate, you’ll be ready to take on the world of singing all by yourself! (The Senior Vocal Executive certificate includes more technical vocabulary so you can use to impress and/or bore people at parties, and start your own certification programme.)

I’m still tired. I have no idea what I just wrote. I’ll just go dream a few things. In the meantime, let me know how this post works for you.

So, here’s an introduction to all the stuff you’ll find on the internet, and which parts of it really matter (if you ask me). (Note: I made substantial changes to this article shortly after first publishing it.)

My background

I’m not a voice teacher. Thankfully. Because that means that you’re not going to get a sales pitch for my new and revolutionary voice teaching product at the end of this post… I don’t have stuff to sell, after all.

Of course, that raises the question of why the heck would I know anything? Well, I might not be a teacher, but I’m a student. And I’ve looked a lot of stuff, most of which hasn’t worked. I’ve even looked at physiology. Turns out it kind of matters… and some of the material on the web doesn’t really take physiology into account all that much.

Why technique matters

This is my story as someone trying to sing.

I’ve always been able to sing on pitch pretty well. Most people would probably say that that’s all there is to singing well, but like many other I’ve spoken to, I didn’t really like the sound of my voice. The internet (and many people who gave me advice) was quick to reassure me that that’s purely a psychological thing, that nobody likes the sound of their own voice. Okay then… better accept the way my voice sounds. Right? (Yeah, but only sort of…)

Still, there were obvious problems in my singing. I had serious problems getting out of a fairly restricted range of note I could sing comfortably. I would have to strain and I would sound even less amazing then. So, I started looking for advice on technique. One thing I found eventually was an online course for that, one that aimed to reduce tension in the vocal tract that interferes with good singing. It worked, too: my voice sounded less strained (still some “strainy” sound left, though)… but also much weaker, wimpier in the upper part of my range. My eventual conclusion was: well, probably that’s just the way my voice is. Nothing to be done for it. And I focused my songwriting on vocals designed for a somewhat quiet, light voice, and I fought my way through the strainy and wimpy sound (a particularly obvious example of that is my 2008 song “Going Down” – download link and Flash player on that page – notice how the higher notes in the chorus sound weak at first and then, later, somewhat less weak but more strained).

I considered taking singing lessons, but really it seemed like a waste of time – I was aware of some problems, e.g. that I tended to have shaky intonation at the onset of phrases and some notes, but I thought that if I focused on fixing that I could probably do it without help.

Eventually, I performed a little song at my cousin’s wedding. I was incredibly nervous and forgot the lyrics at least a dozen times, but people kind of liked it anyway… and apparently it came across that I really loved singing. At that point in time, I wasn’t really quite sure what to do with my life, and my mum said I really ought to consider getting more serious about music. I didn’t actually decide to enrol in music school or anything, but for my birthday my mum gave me a gift coupon for a year’s worth of singing lessons, and had already made an appointment with a teacher in my area. “Right then,” I thought, “why not give it a try?” And so I went.

I don’t quite remember what happened in that first lesson… but it really convinced me to come back. With just a single lesson, I managed to add a quality to my voice that I’d randomly had in perhaps two or three short phrases I’d recorded in the past year. It took much longer for me to be able to do it consistently (I suspect that’s partly because the teacher hadn’t been teaching for very long and was still working on his concept), but it was an intriguing start. Here’s a song I cobbled together less than three months after starting lessons, called “Welcome Home Frank“. It’s hardly an example of great or even consistent technique (and the intonation isn’t perfect, either), but notice how the higher notes suddenly sound much less strained and wimpy. Wow!

The main take-away from these lessons was that technique does make a difference, and that difference was bigger than in my wildest dreams back then. I was high on endorphins for weeks.

Is it just me, though?

At some point, my teacher started doing class meet-ups in which each attendant would perform one or two songs to the other students and their friends/family. Again, I was extremely nervous during those, but that’s a different story. More importantly, I had the opportunity to track the progress of other students.

Let’s just take a single other student as an example. She was a lady who sounded pretty much exactly like the stereotypical old woman trying to sing: shaky, and like she was almost choking on higher notes. My lessons have encouraged my high standards to become even higher, and honestly it was a bit painful to listen to her sing… though I didn’t tell her that, of course.

During the next meet-up, there were only traces of that left. I remember thinking: wow – she’s really getting this!

Without my lessons, had I heard her initial performance, I’m sure I would have given up on her straight away, and before I heard how she had improved I might still have been doubtful. But that one performance “proved” it to me: this stuff actually works, and not just for me!

Now, during those meet-ups I listened to lots of not-very-awesome singers, and not all of them are making progress at the same rate. But they are making progress, all of them. What’s interesting is that, after a while, I began to develop this sense that there’s a really awesome voice hidden in everyone around me… and wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to set it free? That’s why I’m writing this article. I want to encourage people to not give up, until eventually they discover the same kind of endorphins high that I went through.

Singing is one of those things where people get discouraged, often fairly early in their lives. Just like drawing. I was never horrible at singing myself, but I wasn’t exactly “pretty good”, either, even if many of my acquaintances claimed otherwise… probably because they thought I’d lop my head off if they told me the truth. Or because they, like me, bought into the idea that you can’t help the sound of your voice, so the only thing that really matters is pitch.

In any case, these people who improved a lot learned some solid technique. And it worked… even in seemingly hopeless cases. They aren’t rock stars yet, but they’re certainly in an entirely different league than they were before. I’m convinced that a solid understanding of the goals and the methods contributed to that, and I’m fairly sure that they’ll help you, too. Now it’s just a case of getting good information.

How the internet will fail you

I found a lot stuff about singing on the internet, and chances are if you’re interested in singing, you’ve found a lot of stuff yourself. Much of it is simple exercises, often without any explanation of what their purpose is, nor any help with actually turning that into improved singing. Another big category is medical jargon that ostensibly explains how the voice works. Well that would be awesome, wouldn’t it, if I could understand more than the individual words!

Worse, there are so many different philosophies among singing teachers it’s just not funny. You’ll read about vocal registers, sometimes conceptually based on what the teacher thinks they feel like, sometimes on physiological/functional research. Others will say that there isn’t really any such thing. Then there are those that tell you that the only thing that matters is breathing, and others exclaim that nothing could be less relevant than how you breathe.

Most of those are nonsense, of course. I’m not going to bother explaining them all. Consult your favourite search engine if you are interested. Instead, I’m just going to tell you what is required physiologically.

Singing physiology 101

You’ve probably heard of the vocal cords (or, more properly, vocal folds). They’re small flaps of mucous membrane that live in your larynx (top view). If they vibrate, they create sound. How do you get them to vibrate? Not by shaking your head rapidly, obviously, nor by vibrating some muscles in your throat. The trick is in letting them touch together, so that if air exits the lungs, the vocal folds act as a flexible barrier. When enough pressure accumulates below them, they are pushed apart, some air goes through, the pressure below them goes down again and the vocal folds go back together (“approximate”). There we’ve got it: vibration. Here’s an animation of ideal vibration (front view, cut open along the coronal plane, i.e. a cut right through the middle of your throat, parallel to your arms). If you sing or speak with ideal vibration, that’s called the modal voice. It sounds great because the maximized vibration creates a sound rich in overtones (if you’re not a student of acoustics and that went over your head, just pretend I said “it sounds great because!”).

The main challenge is that this needs a specific pressure level. Too high and the vocal folds won’t approximate (pressure doesn’t go down quickly enough or at all); too low and they don’t get pushed apart in the first place. There are several hacks you can do to work around that problem. For example, tightening up the throat in various ways allows the vocal folds to approximate even if pressure is too high. This is not healthy, the resulting sound isn’t very amazing and it tends to become a habit… often to the point that you no longer even notice that you’re doing it.

Another thing that makes it easier is if you reduce the “mass” of the vibration… that is, if you let less of the vocal folds vibrate. Here’s an animation of vibration with less mass. Here, the vocal folds are tenser (along the edges), so the pressure affects them much less and they can approximate more easily. On the other hand, a much smaller area of them approximates. Compare the two animations to see what I mean. The result in sound is that this sounds much softer and breathier (more air goes out, after all, but less mass vibrates), and less “individual”. Another interesting result is that it’s much easier to sing higher notes… imagine pulling a guitar string much tauter than normal. The notes are higher then, aren’t they?

This function is generally called falsetto and is typically not used for singing entire songs. It gets boring and/or aggravating way too quickly, but you can use it to soften specific passages of a performance. Some singers do that a lot, but few of them do it exclusively.

So, there are two main physiological functions for singing. You can fine-tune both of them. For example, you can reduce the vibrational mass of the modal voice without going into the falsetto function; this happens physiologically by lengthening the folds in a different way. Another thing that affects the result is how strongly the vocal folds are pushed together. If they are pressed together more strongly than ideal, the voice will sound “pressed” or “harsh”. If they aren’t pressed together enough, it will sound weak or even just whispery (this taxes your vocal folds more than normal speaking because it needs more pressure even though it’s ultimately quieter. So, now you know why you shouldn’t whisper when your voice is already hoarse).

Disregarding falsetto for now, that means two main things have to be right for your voice to perform at its best: the right level of approximation of the vocal folds, and the right level of air pressure. Additionally, excess tension (e.g. in the jaw or the root of the tongue) will mess things up quite effectively.

The truth about accepting your voice

With all that in mind, let’s revisit this idea from before… that you should just accept the way your voice sounds, because that’s part of who you are. Well, that’s true, but it’s also not. Your voice can change due to improved technique, but with perfect technique there is indeed a unique sound to your voice, based on your individual physiology, that you can’t really change. So, you can’t magically acquire the voice of your favourite singer, but you can make your own voice sound more awesome if you improve your technique. The question, then, is:

So, how do you improve your technique?

Tension

Getting rid of excess tension is easy once you are aware of that tension (which you might be able to manage on your own if you know what to pay attention to) and your technique is otherwise good. As long as your technique sucks, however, it’ll be impossible to fix these problems without creating others instead. Chances are that you acquired those habits for a reason: to fix a problem. You can only drop them once the problem goes away.

Some tension, on the other hand, creates problems with fixing the technique. For example, tense shoulders can really do a number on your ability to control air pressure. This is the kind of tension created not to fix problems, but as a result of stress or nervousness, often until it becomes a habit.

Approximation of vocal folds

I think this is fairly easy to understand once you know how it impacts the sound and go through a few exercises that help you recreate the basic effects. If you haven’t done this correctly in a long time, it might take a while until it’s easy and natural to do, but not exactly years and probably not even months.

Air pressure

Without the right level of air pressure, all of the other effort is pretty much in vain. Some people do this right intuitively, and others will intuitively do it right if everything else is corrected. That’s not guaranteed, however… especially if you are blessed with “difficult” vocal physiology (the upshot of which is an especially impressive voice once you’ve got technique figured out). Fortunately, the principle is very simple: you need to be able to reduce air pressure quite a bit during singing (remember how most problems are caused by too much pressure, and really the only thing too little pressure does is prevent you from making a sound at all). For that you need some fairly precise control over the air pressure. It’s really not feasible to do that with just a single muscle (this is where antagonists come in), so this involves two “competing” muscles.

How do you regulate air pressure in general? By expanding or contracting the lungs. Indirectly, of course. Using muscles. One way is to raise the chest (to expand the lungs, i.e. breathe in) and lower it (to compress the lung, i.e. breathe out). Unfortunately, lowering your chest messes up your posture and thus will tend to get in the way of breath to work ideally. What’s worse, apparently there’s some crosstalk of nerves and muscles in the body and lowering the chest will tend to create unnecessary tension elsewhere, too.

This is why people talk about the diaphragm and diaphragmatic breathing. There is nothing special about that, really. It’s the other way to control the lungs. The diaphragm lives right below your lungs. Pull it down and the lungs follow, i.e. they expand. Release it back up and the lungs return to their original volume. Anyone can do diaphragmatic breathing (just try it: keep your shoulders and chest in a fixed position and breathe), and if you’ve been told that the secret to good singing is diaphragmatic breathing, that’s not the whole truth. Diaphragmatic breathing is just normal breathing. Using that instead of controlling your breath with your posture doesn’t really change much.

We were looking for a way to expel less air in a controlled way, right? So something needs to antagonize, i.e. work against, that breathing out action, to slow it down. In other words: while you let the diaphragm go back up, letting some air, some (unspecified, for now) set of muscles should be in charge of keeping it down a little bit, reducing the air flow.

… and that’s all there is to basic technique!

I hope this gives you a better understanding of what really matters for great singing technique. Advanced stuff notwithstanding. :)

If you are interested in a sequel in which I start getting into how you actually do all this, just let me know!

Download source code: dmsetup-tc-0.4.tar.bz2 (21 KB, updated 19th February 2012)

Some credit goes to oli of l33tbox.de for bringing the issue to my attention.

Update: the latest version, 0.4, now also fixes a problem with approximately 50% of encrypted partitions… but apparently exactly those 50% that never complained. ;)

• HTML version: http://j.mp/opensource-licenses
• PDF version: download (A4 paper, 46 KB)

It focuses on just a few commonly used licenses (at least from what I can see), but covers more criteria than the other comparisons I’ve seen so far.

I hope it will be useful for you.

Update 3rd April 2011: footnotes fixed. Sorry.

Server Name Indication: one IP address, many certificates

Suppose you run a web server that has one IP address (and you don’t really need to waste more addresses for a simple web server, right?) but that hosts websites 0n several different domains. In the distant past, you were out of luck: only one SSL certificate per IP address, for technical reasons.

Along came SNI. It’s a little extension that allows your client (i.e. browser) to tell the TLS layer in your web browser the hostname you are connecting to before the certificates are even exchanged. So, this allows your server to select a certificate from a big bunch of different ones, based on the names found in the certificates.

Small reminder: certificates and names

When your client requests an SSL-encrypted website, the certificate is bound to the hostname by way of the “CN” (Common Name) field. If the hostname in the URL matches the CN of the certificate, the certificate is used. Otherwise you get a warning (and in recent browsers it’s a very, very discouraging warning).

Now, that’s inconvenient, because sometimes you might want to use the same certificate for two or three different hostnames, e.g. example.org and www.example.org at the same time. Setting aside solutions involving wildcard names, eventually an extension was developed for specifying alternative names in the certificate. With that, you can simply set one of your hostnames as the CN and all the others as alternative names, and the certificate can then be used by the client for all of those names.

StartSSL Level 1 certificates and alternative names

I’m mentioning StartSSL here specifically because they offer something pretty unique: free SSL certificates that are accepted by most of the standard browsers.

Of course, they don’t offer you maximum flexibility for free, which is perfectly fine as far as I’m concerned, especially since the certificates you do get are, in theory, very useful already. They rid you of SSL warnings on your domains, and for basic applications you don’t really need more than that.

Each of these level 1 (=free) certificates contains exactly one subdomain of a domain you own, and the domain name itself as an alternative name. For example, this might give you CN=www.example.org and subjectAltName=example.org.

So what’s the big problem? Nothing, usually, but with a certain combination of requirements it’s basically impossible to set up (but wait for my solution).

The problem with second-level domain hostnames

Now, suppose I’ve got two domains, example.org and org.example. Cute, aren’t they? Let’s also say that both are hosted on the same server and even on the same IP address. Finally, let’s say that I want the pages served as http://example.org/ and http://org.example/, i.e. without a www prefix.

First off, note that mod_ssl, the standard solution for SSL with Apache (in turn the standard solution for serving web pages on Linux and friends), doesn’t support SNI (which is what we need for all of this to work at all) before OpenSSL version 1.0.0.  And, well, the venerable Debian will apparently include an older version of OpenSSL in their upcoming release, so that SNI with mod_ssl is basically a no-go on Debian stable servers for the next couple of years.

So, if you want to stick with Apache, the most important contender (in fact the only one I know) is mod_gnutls, based on GnuTLS instead of OpenSSL. mod_gnutls is a fairly minimalistic implementation, and it has worked very well for me in the last year or two.

However, one of its ways of keeping things simple causes problems with the scenario I outlined above. mod_gnutls only matches against the first name in each certificate. With that in mind, let’s go back to my two websites with their corresponding (hypothetical) StartSSL level 1 certificates:

1. CN=www.example.org, subjectAltName=example.org
2. CN=www.org.example, subjectAltName=org.example

So, suppose I configure the web server to use these certificates and then I try to open https://org.example/ in my web browser. This is what happens:

• My browser opens a connection to the web server, initiates a TLS connection and tells mod_gnutls that I’m requesting from “org.example”.
• mod_gnutls gets a name from the first certificate. Aha, it has a CN, let’s use that. Does “org.example” match “www.example.org”? Nope, it doesn’t, so mod_gnutls forgets about that certificate.
• mod_gnutls gets a name from the second certificate. Aha, it has a CN, let’s use that. Does “org.example” match “www.org.example”? Nope, it doesn’t, so mod_gnutls forgets about that certificate.
• All right, we haven’t found a matching certificate, so mod_gnutls is just going to use the first one in the list.
• My browser gives me a warning: “the certificate’s name doesn’t match. You are visiting org.example but the certificate was for www.example.org.”

Whoops.

Quick fix

I already tried StartSSL certificates some time ago but found that I couldn’t use them due to this kind of scenario. Just a few days ago I looked into it again and finally decided to just write a small patch for mod_gnutls.

This patch is not a work of art. It simply extends the number of names mod_gnutls uses from each certificate. With the patch added, mod_gnutls obtains up to four names from the certificate (CN first, then subjectAltNames) and matches each of them against the SNI value. This effectively eliminates the problem described above.

The downside is that it’s not very efficient. Right now, for every request, mod_gnutls has to re-extract the names from the certificates and match against all of them. This is, of course, the main reason I decided to limit the number of names used. A better implementation might read all certificates during start-up, extract the names and provide a lookup table, with a bit of added magic to deal with wildcard names (e.g. *.example.org).

My setup doesn’t warrant this effort. I have fixed my problem, and perhaps my fix is sufficient for you, too.

The patch is available on Github (jast/mod_gnutls, branch subjaltname). You can (re)view it here (or download it).

I’ve been wanting to write something like this for ages. Often enough I want to explain concepts in IRC and find myself struggling to present all the relationships between different things in an understandable way. Now I can just use a private Instagraph instance to make a nice picture that will speak a thousand words for me. Awesome.

Instagraph is woefully underdocumented but shouldn’t be too hard to set up. It’s also extremely simple and has no user interface to speak of.

Now, if you understand GraphViz’s dot syntax, you can turn this:

a -- b -- c

Into this:

Get it

You can get Instagraph at http://github.com/jast/instagraph where you will find a download button as well as the Git repository URL.

Public graph pastebins

• I run Instagraph at http://g.jk.gs/. Feel free to use it for casual stuff, but it would be extremely nice of you if you didn’t directly link to the generated images from super-high-traffic sites. Thanks!

If you plan to host another pastebin (doesn’t even have to be the original Instagraph, just something comparably simple and with the same syntax) somewhere, let me know so I can list it here.

I suppose many think that intuition is something you are born with… some people just “know” certain things without being able to reason them out, and other people have to conduct an elaborate analysis of the facts in their minds to end up with the same conclusion. If that’s the way you think about it, you might believe that intuition is something of an unfair advantage.

Another widespread position seems to be that intuition is very risky… after all, intuition doesn’t give you the certainty that logical reasoning can give you, right? So perhaps if you go by that idea, you might say that it’s better to not use intuition at all.

I think that the answer is somewhere in between, as it often happens to be… and I’m going to tell you how intuition became a natural thing for me, even though I wasn’t exactly born with it, nor did I think it made sense to trust in it. But now I do have it, and I do trust it, because I use it in a way that I’m confident in. And don’t worry, I’m not going to cite the usual hogwash about left brain versus right brain… I’ll just explain a useful way of looking at intuition, and I’ll also waste a few words on how important I think it is for knowledge engineering.

While I grew up, intuition pretty much didn’t exist for me. I was socially awkward (feeling out of place and being bullied didn’t help) and I spent pretty much all of my time with computers. Computers aren’t known for their intuitive powers (except, of course, when they know just the right moment to crash to lose you as much of your precious work as possible)… they are just all about cold, hard logic. I could work with that.

I knew about intuition but I actually believed in an even blend of the two positions outlined above: I thought that intuition was a something you either have or don’t, and I didn’t have it, and that reason was actually much better anyway.

One thing that changed my thinking was that I started to wonder where mastery comes from, for example in programming. There’s a very, very small number of people who are really seriously extremely good at programming. The overwhelming majority of people who try it never get any farther than cobbling together things other people have done without really understanding how they work.

Many people say that programming needs certain cognitive skills that many people simply don’t have, and that it’s not possible to teach those skills. I used to think the same. At some point in my life, however, I started wondering whether being lauded as extremely intelligent by random other people (I’m not too shabby at programming, as it turns out) really means all that much. I mean, sure, it’s easy to just assume that the Extremely Superior Intellect™ you were gifted with is what makes you so great at everything and just leave it at that. But eventually I started doubting all allegedly foregone conclusions of that kind… and I started considering other ways of looking at what I could and couldn’t do.

Let’s try the purely rational approach

I’m deliberately overstating the intuition-free approach here. My purely rational argument for that is that caricature makes it a hundred times easier to see the important part… and it vastly increases the chances of seeing the important part in more realistic situations later on.

A big part of programming is understanding what’s going on, and knowing which ingredient to fit where. Programming is a lot like cooking: you can just throw together a couple of ingredients and the result invariably does something, but it’s not necessarily useful or tasty. Or perhaps it’s useful but it’s so hard to chew that your teeth hurt after you’ve finished eating the program. Oh wait, I’ve gotten my metaphors all mixed up there.

The way to fail at cooking or at programming is to try and remember elaborate sets of rules, obtained from an authority in the field or by field tests. Let’s see… if the steak has this kind of sizzle, go to step 47a where you turn it over; if it’s the other kind of sizzle, increase the temperature by five percent and continue in section 87; if it turns this shade of red, call the fire department, and so on… you could easily fill several volumes with instructions like these, and even if you were extremely quick at looking them up while cooking your masterpiece, you’d be stuck in two ways: firstly, if something happened that wasn’t quite covered by one of your rules, you’d be stuck; secondly, improving more than a single rule at a time is going to be very tricky if you’ve got them all laid out in a huge tangled mess… and anyone who has ever had the delightful experience of working on multidimensional non-linear optimisation knows that optimising individual components is not one of the very best optimisation strategies, and it almost never leads to the very best solution.

That leaves us with two tangible limitations of an approach based purely on logic and reasoning:

1. The set of rules you have to maintain in your mind gets larger and larger and harder to manage as your experience increases.
2. An elaborate set of rules leaves you completely unable to deal with any case that isn’t exactly covered by one of the rules.

What is intuition, really?

I suppose it’s obvious that nobody really does anything that way, at least not if they do it very well. So what do they do instead? Well, let me tell you a little thing about the human brain.

The brain is completely unparalleled in learning things in a “fuzzy” way. What does that mean? Given a large base of experience, it somehow makes up an internal representation of what to do when, and it doesn’t provide you with a formal list of rules for that. You know that this happens whenever you do something without thinking about it. For example, try explaining to someone else how to tie shoelaces, step by step. I don’t know very many people at all who can do that without stumbling. Why? Because they know how to do it so well that they never need to think about it. They just go through the motions.

In fact, how about an even more pervasive example. Go ahead and lift your arm, now. Done? Did you have to think about how to coordinate the various muscle contractions involved in such a complex operation? Probably not. Your brain did it for you.

Neither of those are intuition, of course. They’re just learning. However, I’ll argue that intuition is more of the same.

Let’s look at really good programmers again. What are their defining attributes? I think it’s fair to say that one very important one is that they have a lot of experience. And quality experience, too, right? If you have a lot of experience with how to do something poorly, that doesn’t magically make you a wizard.

What don’t programmers do? See last section: they don’t have a huge Book of Programming Rules in their heads that they consult for everything they do. That wouldn’t work very well. So somehow they learn to “just know” what to do in any given situation. How? The same kind of learning I just described: the kind where you can make a decision without thinking about it, and perhaps you’ll even be hard-pressed to explain just why you decided that way and not a different one that might have been okay, too.

Rational intuition

So at some point I discovered I actually had plenty of intuition but I had never noticed it. I don’t think anyone will seriously claim that I was born with intuitive knowledge about how to write computer programs… not least because, to my knowledge, none of my ancestors ever programmed anything in their lives. So I had to have developed it somehow, right?

At this point, the way I understand intuition is actually so extremely simple it seems almost silly to break it down… but here you are, with programming as the example:

• Initial state: you don’t know anything about programming. You decide that you want to learn how to do it.
• You connect up the programming disk to your neural connector interface. Just kidding.
• You look at how other people do it… starting with extremely simple examples. I think it’s very important that these examples are inherently practical. I don’t really think it’d be a good idea to learn to cook with example recipes that don’t result in anything edible. This is, I think, the single most prevalent reason that people fail to learn how to program… either the first examples aren’t practical enough or they aren’t simple enough. It’s not a big secret that a weak foundation isn’t something that you can build on very well, so there you are.
• You try something simple yourself and get good feedback on it. (The quality of the feedback is probably the second most important factor here… often people learning how to program get no feedback at all, or feedback like “this piece here is wrong but I ain’t telling you in what way, or in a very cryptic way at best” (computers are very good of producing this very frustrating kind of feedback). Good feedback goes like “this piece here is wrong. You might think it might do X but it actually tries to do Y and that doesn’t work because of Z. Try this here instead. Can you see how it might work better?”
• Based on the feedback, you start trying more and more different things, and gradually step up the complexity and the range of things you experiment with.
• Repeat the cycle a few thousand times.
• You’re now a good programmer.

Did you notice that I cleverly hid a few pieces of rationality in there? And they’re very important pieces of rationality. One is: keep the amount of new information manageable at all times. Another: don’t fly blindly; get feedback and incorporate it into your experiments.

That’s how useful intuition develops: by controlling the amount of new information you subject yourself to at any given time, and by testing your results.

It’s simple and I believe it’s the only way to get really good at something. I also believe that all of us use intuition… perhaps it just takes a little nudge to notice it. Consider yourself nudged.

The pitfalls

Okay, I said it’s simple, but I didn’t say it’s easy. There are a few problems you can run into.

If you ignore my suggestion to avoid building huge sets of rules in your mind, intuition isn’t going to happen. Trying to be in full control of all the data is counter-productive. Do so at your own peril. Of course you’ll discover individual rules all the time while you learn to do something, and it’s just as counter-productive to prevent that from happening, but don’t try and stick any rules to the front of your brain. That will allow you to always be able to recite the rule, but it won’t magically integrate the rules into an intuitive understanding of whatever it is you’re learning. Just look at something until you really understand it, then move on to something else… that way it’s pretty difficult to mess it up.

The much more complicated problem is with bad feedback. If you’re new to something, you can probably distinguish useful from useless feedback, but it will be much harder to distinguish correct from incorrect. The most efficient solution is to get someone who is really good at doing whatever it is you want to learn, and who is also really good at explaining things (yeah, yeah, I realise I’m not telling you anything revolutionary right now). Alternatively you can just check multiple sources and hope for the best.

The best inoculation against bad feedback, however, is to keep looking at contradictory ideas. Whenever you’re good at something, it’s tempting to dismiss other people who go about it in a different way. Here’s a good rule of thumb: when two people are good at something but they disagree about the way it should be done, it’s very likely that both positions have something going for them, and there’s some kind of trade-off involved, and probably also some ego. Look at both sides, consider both their advantages and their disadvantages. There are few things that have no advantages, and there are few things that have no disadvantages.

Keep your options open, and you’ll keep getting better even if you sometimes learn wrong things out of bad feedback.

Hi, my name is Knowledge Engineering. Why should I care?

Software agents making use of artificial intelligence or some other newfangled approach to decision-making and prediction aren’t generally connected with the word “intuition”. After all, artificial intelligence is often defined as being about agents that act rationally, e.g. in “Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach” by Russell and Norvig.

Intuitive reasoning versus intuition-free reasoning is a bit like artificial intelligence versus rule-based systems (I bet you didn’t see that one coming). I don’t need to talk about the limitations of rule-based systems here… after all, I already did when I talked about cooking.

Artificial intelligence, especially if you use stuff like artificial neural networks, amounts to giving your agent a lot of experience with (hopefully) good feedback and it ends up constructing a decision algorithm that is not easily expressed in terms of rules. That’s totally the same thing as intuition, isn’t it?

The punchline, I guess, is that you can only act rationally through intuition, except in the simplest situations. Now go out and throw this sentence at random people and see a good percentage of them laugh at you and call you insane.

By the way, intuition is just as important in knowledge engineers, obviously. Without having some intuitive understanding of KE algorithms and concepts and the structure of synthetic universes as perceived by agents, I doubt you can do even a half-decent job. My personal approach to knowledge engineering has always been, and will continue to be, about developing intuitions. I’m not all that great at it, but I am confident in the madness to my method. Or was that the other way round?

Whew. That’s a rather provocative first paragraph, isn’t it? I’ll have to be extremely scientific to avoid getting shouted at by would-be scientists. Don’t worry, dear scientists, I’m not against science! I’m a huge fan of it. Until some “scientist” starts making overly general statements. That’s where it stops making sense. Why? Well, let’s have a brief look at how science works.

Science: the science behind it

First off, let’s define what science actually is. It’s a systematic way of drawing conclusions from observations, for the purpose of making predictions about future situations. For example, if you observe that objects that you pick up fall down when you let go of them, scientifically it makes sense to assume that there is a context (in this case, the gravitational field of our planet) in which things always fall down when let go of.

This definition doesn’t work too well for fields of science like mathematics (which exist in a logical system that doesn’t need observations in the real world to make sense), but I’m not going to talk about these. For all other fields of science, often called empirical sciences, things always work like this:

• Observations are made;
• Conclusions are drawn from the observations, assuming that there won’t be any conflicting observations in the future;
• A model or theory is formally stated that is consistent with the conclusions made in the previous step.

Note that one of the fundamental elements of empirical science is the assumption: firstly it’s assumed that observations actually say something about a real outside world (this is an assumption that can’t be formally proved, which you know if you’re into philosophy), then it’s assumed that when the observations made, exceptions were carefully outruled. Of course researchers try very hard to gather all possible kinds of observations, but again, it’s formally impossible (or so it’s thought; nobody has managed prove this either, yet) to know whether you have gathered all relevant observations that you could possibly make. Consequently, even the most rigorous research will never be able to state confidently that something is impossible: their model or theory might say that it’s impossible, but it’s based on an assumption that could be found to be incorrect later on.

A history of corrections

In fact, science frequently has frequently had assumptions that were later found incorrect. Take Newton’s laws of motion, for example… nobody doubted them for over 200 years, but then it turned out that they’re not very accurate when you look at very small things (particles), very high speeds or very strong gravitational fields. They’re still used because they’re useful for everyday applications, but it has been discovered that they’re not technically correct. And that’s just one example out of thousands.

It would be very simple to just assume that by now we have the full truth. Of course, reading that sentence, you can immediately see the problem with it: that assumption could be wrong. The problem is that many people believe their scientific knowledge is The Truth, anyway. These are the people who tell you that certain things “aren’t scientifically possible”. They are wrong, of course: in fact, these things just don’t fit today’s scientific models. In fact, we don’t know (to a degree of certainty that would be acceptable in science) whether these things are possible.

If you are in favour of a certain point of view without being able to prove it, it’s not science; it’s a belief. Beliefs are useful, in fact more useful than most people think they are, but they’re not something you can support your position with in arguments. That’s the link to religion that I hinted at: religion is the same way. It’s a set of beliefs, and probably a powerful one (perhaps positively powerful, perhaps negatively so) if you really believe in it, but your belief typically won’t be enough to convince others to believe the same way.

Both can go a step further from useful by adopting a dogma. In the general sense, that’s when you believe in something because an authority tells you to believe in it, and you better not argue. It’s often hard to tell apart from non-dogmatic beliefs, but you can only have a dogmatic belief if you have never critically examined it and haven’t ever really looked at opponents of the belief. If you’ve got some belief and know of an alternative belief that’s acceptable to you, yet you prefer the one you currently have, you can be pretty sure that that’s not a dogmatic belief.

So how’s that related to science? Often people parrot scientific knowledge when they don’t really know what they’re talking about. That’s dangerous, because they’ll often misrepresent the knowledge or even echo things that don’t actually have any conclusive evidence going for them. For example, many non-scientific journals and newspapers frequently report findings of a scientific study or another. You’ll often find them foregoing statements such as “in some cases this was observed”, simply because that makes the findings boring. Who wants to know that something is sometimes true? Thank you, we already knew that people are stupid sometimes. But a study that “proves” that people are always stupid, or is reported to have proved that – now that’s going to sell and create attention for your publication and your scientists!

How pseudo is pseudoscientific, really?

Let’s take something pseudoscientific as an example, from parapsychology: telepathy (communicating with other people over a distance without any gadgets). Looking at our current scientific models, that would indeed sound like a big load of nonsense. Is it impossible, though? We don’t know. Some people might conclude that I’m saying that it must be possible. Of course not… that would be even stupider. The point is: if it’s possible, we haven’t managed to systematically observe it yet. But it’s not entirely unreasonable. For example, there could be a force in the universe that we haven’t discovered yet, perhaps a force that can be manipulated directly with our minds. We haven’t managed to design an experiment that could prove the existence of such a force. Perhaps that’s because this force doesn’t exist, perhaps it’s because we haven’t been looking hard enough (or, how about this, because this force is completely impossible to measure; akin to Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty which basically states that when you measure something very exactly, you cannot prevent influencing its characteristics). Only time can tell, and even that isn’t certain.

Of course, all the complaints about pseudoscience aren’t completely stupid. The problematic point is that many pseudosciences claim that they can prove things, whereas the scientific community at large isn’t satisfied with the proofs or has come up with contradictory results. The question is: who’s wrong? That’s very hard to say. Both could be. Pseudoscientists are frequently not very educated about the scientific method; on the other hand, in “real” science, bogus theories have often survived long past their due, i.e. even when contradicting evidence had already been found. It just took some time until the scientific community was willing to acknowledge and accept this new evidence.

And the moral of the story is this: it’s easy to discredit claims. It’s a bit harder but still easy to conduct research that discredits the claim. It’s less easy to dissect the claim, pick the things that are actually consistent with what you know, and keep the rest in mind for future experiments. If these future experiments support the claim, you’ve done something great. If they don’t support the claim but you have still found evidence that expands the range of the possible, you’ve done something just as great. If you don’t find any evidence at all… better luck next round. And keep the claim in mind anyway; perhaps you’ll eventually stumble across something that supports it purely by chance.

Your homework: find a piece of pseudoscience in popular scientific arguments.

The following list will give you deep insight into the way I understand life, reality and science… if you want to find out, that is.

• Antireductionism – the belief that breaking things down into simple building blocks is misguided, in my case because I reject the assumption that such simple building blocks always exist or are an accurate enough abstraction of reality.
• Nondualism – the belief that all dichotomies and dualisms are illusory.
• Fallibilism – in my case, the belief that there is no irrefutable knowledge.
• Possibilianism – the dissatisfaction with both atheism and all established forms of theism, and the belief that one should actively explore new ideas and never completely reject any nor commit to any possibility.
  I feel that possibilianism should be applied to a much wider range of topics than just (a)theism. I think it’s generally desirable to be open to all possibilities. As such, I’m open to the possibility this article could eventually become outdated.
• Spiritual relativism – not strongly defined. For me, this is the belief that any kind of spirituality gains meaning only and exactly in personal growth. As such, I hold that any spirituality is only meaningful for those in whose lives it has made a positive difference. I reject the position that any spirituality is absolutely better or more “correct” than any other. I don’t fundamentally oppose attempting to explain and promote existing spiritualities, though.

On the other hand, here are some “isms” that you frequently see people having that I’m very much opposed to:

• Pseudoskepticism – a non-agnostic skepticism that construes the lack of evidence as a negative proof.
• Scientism – in the sense that science is held as superior to all other means of acquiring knowledge and/or producing explanations and predictions. I am demi-seriously considering calling myself “sciencer” to distance myself from this form of scientism.
• Optimism. Figuring out why I reject it is left as an exercise for the reader.
• Pessimism. Figuring out why I reject it is left as an exercise for the reader.

Here’s a somewhat unrelated observation: staying awake very long (like longer than 24 hours) creates blog posts. At least for me.

A great property of it is that it doesn’t distort the sound if the output is downmixed to mono. If you downmix to mono while using Stereo Pan in its normal mode, you get a flanger-style effect on the sound. That’s yucky. Now you can choose whether you want to get better mono compatibility or more noticable stereo expansion.

As requested, this post contains example sound files, so you don’t have to buy it without knowing what it sounds like. Then again, it’s for free anyway (feel free to use it for whatever you want but please refer people to this page instead of giving the plugin itself to others).

In subtle mode, the sliders titled “Ctr gain” and “Ctr lowpass” don’t have any effect. I was going to have the plugin hide them when subtle mode is enabled but it’s just too much work. I don’t really care that much. You have been warned.

Examples

This section contains six different versions of an excerpt of a song of mine, “Dry Spell”. The effect has been applied to the lead vocals in some of these files. It’s most noticable if you listen on headphones. I have removed the reverb on the lead vocals so it doesn’t get in the way of seeing what Stereo Pan does to the sound. All of the links refer to MP3 files of about 200 to 250 KB each.

• Stereo: no effect, normal mode, subtle mode
• Mono: no effect, normal mode, subtle mode

Boring technical details

Subtle mode uses the concept of comb filtering for real: it splits the frequency spectrum of the signal into bands, all the same “size”, and pans the “even” bands left and the “odd” bands right. That’s why downmixing doesn’t hurt the sound: you get pretty much the same thing you had before the effect was applied. The effect is more subtle this way because the transients (“sharp” sounds) in the signal aren’t actually duplicated, so the two channels sound less distinctive… taken together, anyway. Use the two output channels separately at your own risk!

Download

Current version for Windows: Stereo Pan 2.0 (ZIP archive, 219 KB)

Current version for MacOS X: still not available. I don’t have OS X and cross-compiling for it is a lot more complicated than I anticipated. Sorry.

To install, extract the ZIP archive to your VST plugins folder (often C:\Program Files\Steinberg\VstPlugins). You may need to restart your DAW after that, or tell it to re-scan the plugins folder. That’s it!

Documentation

If you can’t figure out how to use it, tough luck.