The generation of people who defined modern computing seems to be passing this year. Following Max Mathews, another Bell Labs titan is lost to us: Dennis Ritchie is the man who created the original C programming language (again at Bell Labs) as well as co-developed the UNIX operating system. President Obama commented that many people learned of Steve Jobs’ death on a device “he invented.” For all Jobs’ contributions, it is as untrue to say that as it is true to say the same of Ritchie: you are quite literally reading this story as served by software derived from his creations on UNIX, using tools written primarily in the language he, with others, devised.

For music, C endures in some form as the basis of the vast majority of tools we use for musical computation – that is, his creation is at the heart of the software with which we all make music. And just as Mathews made the computer sing for the first time, C is a lingua franca on which musical expression is based, the kernel of the vast array of sounds computers today make.

But C is important not simply because, in some form, it remains at the heart of much of the computer code written today. It also introduced in a material sense the idea of portability and cross-platform code, allowing in turn music tools like Csound and others to appear on new computers rather than pass away. It formalized coding concepts that, even in radically-different, more “modern” languages survive. That means that for people expressing musical ideas in code – and anyone using the software that results – software is not tied to specific hardware, lost as new generations of gear cause the old to pass away. The ideas behind C allow computer music to pass from one generation to another – to outlive us.

Ritchie would probably at this point hasten to add that he didn’t work alone, that his work was based on others, that he had colleagues like Ken Thompson who worked with him on C and UNIX. Such is the nature of invention, and unlike the titanic egos of the past (yes, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, we’re looking at you), some of today’s creations were built by people whose impact was no smaller, but who have been far humbler and lesser-known.

So, get to know Dennis and the many colleagues who survive him. Marvel that the “machine” is not some alien robot at all, but that in your hands, you hold the contributions of creative human beings, the thoughts of complete strangers encapsulated in front of you, and that at the end of the day, you can make it all sing a song.

Via TechCrunch

We live and die by hard drives for music. There’s no substitute for redundancy and backups (hey, you could be Matthew Dear and have a drive stolen during your set). But it is helpful to know whether a drive is healthy or not. S.M.A.R.T. monitoring features built into drives can help.

Lifehacker today points to a free Windows utility for the job called CrystalDiskInfo:

CrystalDiskInfo Monitors Hard Drive Health and Uptime [via gHacks]

But that got me thinking about other tools. There’s quite a range of choices for Mac, Windows, Linux, and even some obscure operating systems. The only bad news: generally you’ll only be able to monitor internal drives, unless your external drive is eSATA rather than USB or FireWire. (eSATA is where I’d like to go generally – it’s quite a lot faster, and frees up your USB and FireWire buses for other things — but that’s a discussion for another day.)

Cross-platform / Linux

The smartmontools package is a powerful ATA/ATAPI/SATA monitoring tool that runs on – well, pretty much everything. There’s a Windows package, plus a *nix version for Mac, Linux, BSD, Cygwin on Windows, Solaris, OS/2, QNX, and so on. This looks like your best choice on Linux.

Mac OS X

SMARTReporter (pictured at top) is probably the friendliest way to get at SMART data for SATA, ATA, and eSATA drives on the Mac. It even includes a handy menu bar item so you can monitor how your drive is doing at a glance. It’s free via Open Source “MIT License.”

You can also use the command line, via something like this:

diskutil info disk0 | grep SMART

Windows

In addition to CrystalDiskInfo, you have a number of options:

SpeedFan is a general-purpose monitoring and management tool for just about everything, including (as the name implies) fans.

HDD Health is a hard disk-only monitoring tool, like the others here. One thing it has going for it: friendly feedback and tidy tabs to view it.

More Information

The good folks at SpeedFan have an article on what SMART is and how to interpret data you get – well worth reading whether or not you’re a SpeedFan user.