Steve.Savitzky.net / (Albums Concerts Songs | Doc Src Tools)

(On this page: Gigs Collections licensing naming)

Steve Savitzky's           Collected Works This is the official, cannonical URL and grandiose title for songs, recordings, and writings by hacker/songwriter/blogger Steve Savitzky (bio). Nominated for the 2009 Pegasus award for best writer/composer!! My complete list of songs is here; many have audio files posted, and more will be added over the next week or so. My biography page on the Pegasus site is here. The ballot, for anyone in the filk community, is here. Ongoing: Update on Colleen and the all-new Caregiver's Wishlist for any friends who might want to help out. New Band! Tempered Glass. (My other band is Tres Gique. We performed back-to-back concerts at Consonance, and on consecutive days at Baycon. Remind me not to do that again.) New Songs! A Talk with the Middle-Sized Bear -- Equal parts autobiography and Cordwainer Smith. Wheelin' -- For anyone who's facing their first trip with a wheelchair. Quiet Victories -- Almost certainly the best song I've ever written. New! My Toastmaster concert at ConChord 2008. New! Kat's great new layout for the Tres-Gique.com website. Hot! Chaos and Selkit's (Kat and Sean's) Wedding. Photos here on Flikr. Hot! Coffee, Computers, & Song! is available from filk dealers (listed on the album web page), and online from CD Baby and iTunes. If your favorite filk dealer doesn't have it, pester them to order some. A Few Notes on Songwriting -- notes originally prepared for Kathy Mar's weekend songwriting workshop, Feb 10-11 2007. Copyright Notice: unless otherwise noted, all material below is copyright Stephen Savitzky, and is released under a Creative Commons or free software license. See below for details.

Collections:

Music

Albums/ Coffee, Computers & Song! (blog)

Published and planned CDs. The first one, Coffee, Computers, & Song!, was released in August of 2007; three more are planned and the first of those, Amethyst Rose, is in the early stages of recording. There is a LiveJournal community (multi-user blog) devoted to discussion of my albums; some of that discussion will be moved back here eventually.

Concerts/

Recorded concerts. Mostly low-quality recordings and/or dodgy performances, but may be of interest to rabid fans, if I have any. Among the best, in terms of both performance and sound quality, are my concert at Consonance 2007 and my Toastmaster concert at ConChord 2008, both with Tres Gique.

Songs/ (index)

Collected songs: song lyrics and sheet music; occasionally sound files. Not all songs in this directory were written by me, but those that were not are either in the public domain, under a license (e.g., a Creative Commons license) that allows me to distribute them, or are published on the site with the explicit permission of the author. Songs in my repertoire that I do not have permission to distribute may be represented by mostly-blank ``dummy'' pages that give only key and timing information.

Other

Doc/ (doc/)

Textual works of nonfiction. Could have been called "Writings", but "doc" is traditional in the Unix world; I've been using it for a long time. It's also more accurate, since fictional text is in a separate directory. The lowercase alternative name is provided for tradition's sake.

Lit/ (Formerly Fiction)

Textual works of literature: fiction and poetry. At the moment all of this is "work in progress" stuff, and would take quite a lot of work to get it into publishable shape. It's included here mainly as background for some of my songs.

Src/ (src/)

(open) Source code. All of the code and software documentation on this site is distributed under one or more open-source licenses (e.g., the GPL or MPL) that give anyone permission to use, study, modify, and redistribute the code. The lowercase alternative name is provided for tradition's sake.

Tools/

Open-source tools, mainly scripts and Makefile templates, used only (or primarily) on this site. These include the tools for song formatting, album and track management, and demo CD production.

Weblog

I have a personal weblog called The Mandelbear's Musings on LiveJournal which might be of interest. In addition, there's a community (multi-user blog) called mdlbear_albums that my older daughter set up for discussing my albums.

Licensing

This is filk. Basically, you can do whatever you like with my music except make money off it, and you can do that by paying the usual license fees. So, unless otherwise mentioned, software and documentation are published under the GPL or LGPL, and music is published under the Creative Commons Non-Commercial Share-Alike US license v3.0. Except as noted (e.g. for third-party software, traditional songs, etc.) it's all copyright by Stephen Savitzky and published by Stephen Savitzky doing business as HyperSpace Express.

Naming Conventions

Collections

Collections have capitalized, single-word (usually plural) names. Being capitalized, they sort at the front of directory listings, which is where most people expect to see them. In a few cases lowercase alternatives are provided for historical reasons (e.g., src and doc).

individual_item/

Individual items have lowercase, usually multiword names with words separated by underscores. With lowercase titles one doesn't have to worry about such arcana as why the word "of" is capitalized in "Of Mice and Men" but not in "Lord of the Rings". Initial "The" and "A" are omitted. If the title contains a name that is supposed to be capitalized, both capitalized and lowercase versions will be provided (for_Amy and for_amy/).

The slightly unusual capitalization convention is one I've been using for a long time now; among other things, it makes collections sort first in a listing, keeping them separate from "items" (documents) even if, as in this case, they're both represented by directories. It also vastly simplifies the problem of error correction -- simply force everything to lowercase rather than trying all 2ⁿ combinations or making a linear, case-insensitive search.

Note: If you still have links into the old tree, especially /people/steve/Doc/Songs/*, you should change them; they will continue to work as redirects, but the new paths are better.