Jacob Repp

The post over at pragmatic programmer is timely for me because Tell, Don’t Ask is a concept that I have outlined in a programming style presentation for my new team.

The quote at the beginning of the article is perfect:

     Procedural code gets information then makes decisions. Object-oriented code tells objects to do things.
     — Alec Sharp 

This is a great example of taking a complex concept and boiling it down to one phrase. That is something that I try to do as much as possible. It forms a great foundation for effective communication.

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Construc and I are collaborating on a new project called audio faction. Right now it’s just a good place for us to keep in touch and catalog all the cool stuff we find on the net. Usually we just send each other links and such but I think we both prefer the web log format.

Hopefully at some point he can help me revamp the visuals on this site because he is a total photoshop ninja.

I’m trying to compile a bunch of tracks into a cohesive album format. I’m tentatively naming it ‘Band-aids for Androids’ but that might not work out because I think band-aid is trademarked or something. Maybe I’ll come up with something better. Any ideas?

I decided to heavily remix Eetar on the way home from work

I’m took some of my custom synth patches (and rhodes) and experimented on a new track

Related posts:

• New Test Tracks
• Two new game music track sketches
• Geeking Out With Music Kit
• Track Updates
• Beatbox: Track names

I’m very happy so far with my new controller keyboard. I haven’t really learned all the ins and outs yet but the universal auto-map feature makes it super easy to automate mixes without digging into the keyboard. I used to dedicate about 2 weeks of time to learning a new piece of equipment but this Novation ReMOTE is literally plug-and-play instant fader automation.

Now that I have one I’m noticing them all over. It is a really popular keyboard in professional studios.

I really like the action on the keys, they have a sharp synth feel but plenty of response on the aftertouch for playing more delicate pieces. I haven’t yet gotten my latency below 15ms which is just slightly annoying but totally playable. I may need to pick up a dedicated audio card to get it lower.

The drum pads are not so hot but hopefully I can get a pad kontrol or MPD24 in a few months. I’m going to experiment with hooking up my MPC2000 to the MIDI on the Novation and see if I can use it as a secondary control surface for beat sequencing.

Loopa

Pushing and Getting Up

New Version of Smeezle on the Eeter

I’m a bit torn on uploading tracks that are not 100%. On one hand getting a track to 100% is a huge task and would require real mastering. Since I can’t make music a full time job I have to just focus on getting them to a state that I’m happy with. I think that it at least forces me to get some kind of completion on the tracks and also encourages me to put more polish on them than I might otherwise since somebody may listen to them.

If you come along and listen to any of the tracks, let me know what you think (good, bad or ugly).

Related posts:

• New Test Tracks
• Two new game music track sketches
• Two new tracks
• Audio Faction

Download YouTube Videos as Mp4 via GoogleOS

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Sonic State

Their videos are quite good.

Live Sets

The forums seem pretty active and I found some pretty good resources in there.

Create Digital Music

Cool blog all about creating digital music.

Cycling ‘74

Products for new styles of music and media creation.

Reason Freaks

Comprehensive online reason resources

Related posts:

• Two new game music track sketches

This is very much what I have been dreaming of having rubycube accomplish. A very slick presentation.

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I have a backlog of over a dozen articles. I really need to chunk through some of these. If you come around much you’ll notice that I have been posting a bit more. I’ve moved into a new position to run ‘Consulting and Integration’ for NCsoft core technology group. This frees me up to do a lot more thinking and working with various NCsoft teams around the world. Interestingly I don’t think many cross-team problems are super technical. I think the best place to focus when working across groups is in communication. It can be really hard if you have a weird culture baked in around you. Scrum certainly isn’t going to fix anything. I think the real answer is getting face-to-face with people, being kind and respectful and letting your code walk the talk. A lot of executives talk about culture but very few get it right. The companies that do get culture right are the real winners. It may be necessary in some cases to spin off a new company in order to bake a new culture.

Related posts:

• Tips for Getting in the Zone

I’ve been spending time in dmd (via gdc) and libphobos as a research project. While I have enjoyed writing D code I quickly have run into some ugly aspects of D.

DMD source:

* Ambiguous labels with copious use of gotos
* Commented out printfs for tracing support
* Class and struct definitions scattered across multiple files
* Bugs?!

Phobos Runtime:

* Use of a stop the world, mark and sweet garbage collector! Suckage for realtime  * Signals SIGUSR1, SIGUSR2 are used to pause all threads while garbage is collected
 * Buggy meta-programming that results in strange segfaults in objectInvariant() and gc methods.
* Unpredictable thread stalls in the simulation
* Non-cache friendly touching of memory during marking and collection

Good GC research

Boehm collector

I’m kinda pissed because I realized I would have to rewrite the runtime and the garbage collector. I bet JY could easily handle that.

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I investigated make, cmake, cook, jam, bjam, ftjam, scons, cons, rake, ant. What I come to find is this wonderful little paper that turns my out-moded ideas about make completely on it’s head. I wrote a wonderful beginnings of a new build system using 300 lines of Make and 100 lines of bourne shell. Shane dubs it ‘Wookie’.

Recursive Make Considered Harmful Google HTMLized Version

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Mike is uber and Mike recommends: RESTful Web Services.

MMO back-end technology seems stuck in the 90s. Makes me glad I took a hiatus to work at a CMS startup.

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