October 31st, 2008 by proj
Since my new nForce mobo supported sata raid I figured it would be worthwhile to have a bit of redundancy for my data in the event of a drive failure. I picked up a couple Half TB drives at Fry’s and put them into a SATA raid-1 configuration. This seemed like a safe bet and while it was fairly slow to bring this configuration online everything seemed fine.
About a week later I bring my machine up to notice some flashing red text in the BIOS. Once windows was up I had two drives and the nVidia tray icon was bothering me about my drives being in a ‘degraded’ state. This is just a fancy way of saying that the RAID setup failed and that I would have to choose a drive that would have the master data and rebuild the array from the BIOS. Note that nothing out of the ordinary had happened on my machine to cause this to happen. I closely examined the data, figured out which drive was on which controller port and dutifully rebuilt the array. I wasted a good evening going through this because I didn’t want to lose any data. I had some critical music data on the drive and wanted to make sure I wouldn’t lose everything. This was a night I normally would have been writing some useful code or recording some music.
To make a long story short this has happened over and over again. I have run integrity checks on the drives and they are both fine. Any time the machine crashes, the drives will go into a degraded state and require yet another manual rebuild. This of course is a complete waste of my time and really there is no excuse for a RAID solution to fail this UN-gracefully. The whole point is to keep me from having to deal with this kind of hassle. Not routinely force me to deal with it for no good reason. So here I am writing this post while I figure out again which drives have the latest files. I am done with NVIDIA SATA RAID. It is a complete and total epic fail. I would not recommend this to anyone.
No related posts.
Posted in fail, hardware, nvidia | No Comments »
October 20th, 2008 by proj
Just a small post, maybe more to come detailing actual implementation details:
Tree Structured Indexes
Design of BTRFS
Related posts:
Posted in algorithms, db | No Comments »
This article should be required reading for people working on the next wave of virtual world games: World of Evecraft.
Related posts:
Posted in game design | No Comments »
So I’ve got 10 of my songs chopped up into samples and loaded into ableton:
First Live Set
This makes for a really nice live improv tool. I can create mixes on the fly out of my music. The mixes are totally dynamic and never come out the same. I can mix pads from one song with the bass of another song.
The scheme I’m using is to do the following:
Each track represents a song component, drums, pads, leads, fx. I don’t have any vocals yet but eventually I would like to get some vocals in as well. I have a few tracks where I double up for more variety where layering doesn’t screw up the mix too bad (drums, FX).
Everything is labeled with the tempo to speed up cleanup within ableton. That’s probably not super necessary but it does make things faster.
Each song is a specific color so that I can visually find parts that should be together.
For drum parts I started labeling them with the type of drum pattern that is available and the song they came from.
For all melodic parts they are named first with the key they are in so that I can easily mix and match the songs that share the same key (amin = A minor, emin = E minor, f = F major).
FX are just named with the style of effect that I have.
All the sounds are my own creations from syths. Often the samples are recorded wet so I double up with a dry version if it makes sense.
I will post my first attempt at mixing this set after it’s encoded. It was rough in spots but has a some good moments.
Related posts:
Posted in music | No Comments »
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.
No related posts.
Posted in programming | No Comments »
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:
Posted in audiofaction, bandaids, music, rhodes, test tracks | 2 Comments »
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:
Posted in bandaids, music, proj_echts, uncategorized | No Comments »