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).
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
This is very much what I have been dreaming of having rubycube accomplish. A very slick presentation.
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.
Posted in blogging, work
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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.
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
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.
I love geeking out with musical equipment. Sometimes is hard to drag myself into work as I would much rather be messing around with a new track or learning some new technique. Over the years I have built a small collection of lowfi gear. Lately I have been trying to modernize a bit so that I can actually stuff effectively and continue to put out tracks. Over the years my setup has changed drastically. Right now I run what I consider a pretty minimal setup that is more sample heavy. That’s a whole subject in itself. Here’s some pics of stuff I use around home to make sounds and compose.
I use a Korg Prophecy as a master keyboard and controller and PodXT for recording currently although some day I would like to upgrade the audio in to a RME PCI card. I prefer trackballs for long mixing sessions and I’ve recently gotten a couple of Mackie MR5s for monitoring through a Mackie VLZ12 mixer.
Under the desk I have a small rack that I use when for playing live (hence the rack mounted lighting and patch panel). Usually the mixer stays in the bottom and is all wired up so I can just pull it out and it’s good to go. In this environment I’ve got a Korg ER1 and FutureRetro 777 hooked up with MIDI sync for doing some electro beats.
The MicroMoog is a never ending source of basslines, hooks and sound effects. It sounds amazing through the PodXT.
The cabinet on the rhodes is busted so I just line in into the PodXT. The piano has a very bright sound and is a good source for inspiration.
Over in the corner a couple of standbys. The electric guitar for riffs and chords and the Juno for basslines and analog pads.
As part of some research I wanted to play the newly free ShadowBane MMO.
I downloaded the client (hint use gamershell.com) and went to setup my account on UBI’s secure billing site.
First the site informs me that I need IE version 5 or 6 or Netscape 7.
Share a laugh and go download the User-Agent Switcher Add-On for Firefox. You will also want to import a good amount of user agent signatures from this link (linked via TechPatterns.com)
Once you are pretending to be MSIE 6 on windows XP you will notice that the form is malfunctioning (intentionally?). To get around this you can use some grease monkey trickery.
First add the GreaseMonkey Add-On to your Firefox install.
Then create a new user script for ‘https://secure.ubi.com/billing/default.aspx’. Here’s the contents of the script. You will need to end the portions below that say YOURUSERNAME and YOURPASSWORD:
f = document.forms[0]
inp = f.appendChild(document.createElement('input'))
inp.name = 'INPUT_TEXT-login'
inp.type = 'text'
inp.value = 'YOURUSERNAME'
inp.size = 32
f.appendChild(inp)
inp = f.appendChild(document.createElement('input'))
inp.name = 'INPUT_TEXT-password'
inp.type = 'text'
inp.size = 32
inp.value = 'YOURPASSWORD'
f.appendChild(inp)
When you go back to the site hit ‘next’ and you will be past the broken login screen.
