(and it ruled)

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"My friend Will, he's wicked smart."

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I should really get into the habit of updating this. Usually I'm busy as hell coding and running around at home.. but now I've spent the last 10 days or so travelling around and getting utterly sick of travelling.. I remember this feeling, from a few years back.. Need to go back to normal life.. Just a few more days left. brain frazzling. need to feel like I have a purpose and am accomplishing something, even if that something is just relaxing.. appear to be doing none of the above. sad panda.

That and need to have pictures up here or something. I think I have an automated way of doing that still in place, wonder if it'll work with the iPhone. Let's test.

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Can you please configure your mail servers to check the reverse-DNS on incoming mail? For example, if an email comes from "soandso@somedomain.com", please, for the love of God, check the MX record for "somedomain.com" and make sure it matches the server trying to deliver you mail?

For some reason people like to spam faking some of our addresses, so we get a bazillion "delivery error" messages. UGH.

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Oh my god this one is so good:

Scrubs Theme Remix of Ode to ZB.

Laughing my ass off here.. awesome

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Apparently someone remixed the vocals to the song "Ode To ZB" (which was an improv with me and Dave Biderman), and it appears it was played on some faraway radio station:

Kivonat Radio

The original track is here:

Ode to ZB

Woohoo!! So awesome!

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Radiohead's Remix Thing looks neat a glance. But I think they missed the boat here and should've done it differently.

1) Don't make us use iTunes, for the love of God (sorry, Steve, but you know I'm right). 7digital or whoever else would've been forgivable.

2) Making people PAY for stems is dodgy. It would be one thing if we could buy stems for our own enjoyment of the whole album.. THAT would be worth buying... I understand they probably want to not be paying for the bandwidth--but seriously, use BitTorrent then or something. Nevermind that, if they didn't want to pay for bandwidth, why would they have all the remixes on their site? None of them seem to play for me, so maybe they didn't get enough...

3) The terms of the remix site are pretty terrible. I mean, giving them total ownership of everything that you upload just sucks. It's completely one-sided. Not only do I have to PAY them for stems, but anything I give back to them they get ALL rights to, and I get absolutely NONE? This is a tough sell.

Anyway, it's just disappointing. With just some slight changes this could feel like so much less of an marketing stunt and more like something legit and good.

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Here we go:

The Long Stretch and Not The One

(these are very preliminary, 2 hour mixes)

Recordings:

the last 99
the last 99 slow

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Mariah Carey is on.. ran out of record-ahead on the TiVo, so somehow I'm watching until the end, even though it's probably over after this anyway. The digital short this week was pretty funny, I thought...

Here's a song I made last night: Radon.

Umm, what else in the last month? OK so I'm boring..

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Was reading an article on Bruce Schneier's blog about software lock-in, and found this quote intruiging:

Economists Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian even proved that the value of a software company is the total lock-in. Here's the logic: Assume, for example, that you have 100 people in a company using MS Office at a cost of $500 each. If it cost the company less than $50,000 to switch to Open Office, they would. If it cost the company more than $50,000, Microsoft would increase its prices.

JUST KIDDING. Quite the opposite in fact. It's been really exhausting porting stuff to OS X. Here are some reasons why:

1) Poor (and often hard to find) documentation-- Yes, some of the newer APIs are decently documented, but dig in and try to use ATSU to render text, and it's a world of pain. Looking through header files that all seem to assume you know what to do. This is tolerable, though, with enough digging you can find what you want.

2) The AudioUnits SDK-- the API for AudioUnits is defined in a header, but not documented. So to use AU, you'd have to either just use the SDK (with EXTENSIVE amounts of code), or reverse engineer it to figure out what calls you need to do to control the plug-ins yourself. Someone obviously spent a lot of time defining an extensible plug-in API, why the fuck don't they document it?! I mean, really, just a "first, call this, then, call that, then, when you're ready to process X, do Y." If this info is somewhere, someone please let me know... (see the next point)

3) The previous two points might to be related to the fact that Apple seems to assume that as a Mac developer, I've been developing for macs continuously since 1984, and have religiously read the developer mailing list since whenever it was created. Apple: for the love of god find some way of getting those mailing list posts linked to/from the relevant documentation pages.

4) There are WAY too many ways to accomplish similar things. The classic example which I bitch about a lot is text rendering--last I checked, there is CoreText (apparently awesome, but 10.5 only), CoreGraphics text functions (seem nice, but lots of limitations including non-functioning text measuring), HITheme rendering (which is nice but doesnt give you much for font style selection), AppKit NSString/NSAttributedString drawing (great, but slow), ATSUI (seems to be the best all around but takes a bit to get to the point where you get what's going on). I understand that there are historical reasons for these APIs, but again, this can be fixed with proper documentation (perhaps a page describing all of the APIs and their benefits and drawbacks).

5) Addition of new APIs in new OS versions. I know Apple wants to sell new OS versions, but from a developers standpoint, it's really difficult to properly support multiple versions of OS X. I'd like to use new OS features if available, but fall back to old versions if not. If there's a clean way to do this, I'd love to hear about it -- on Windows we usually just load the appropriate DLLs if available..

6) Performance on OS X for basic graphics drawing seems terrible. Perhaps if you take advantage of the highly OS X specific stuff, you can get around some of this, but as an example I made two native projects, one for OS X and one for Win32, that create a 640x480 window and try to draw at about 30fps. They fill the background black and draw white lines. On Windows basic double buffering is used, on OS X the system buffers the drawing. The OS X version uses Cocoa and CoreGraphics to draw, and the view is opaque.

The source code which you can build is here (VC6/win and Xcode2.4+ for OS X required).

Results: on the same Core2 hardware: OS X: 11% CPU use. WinXP: 1% CPU use. In fairness to OS X, it was drawing pretty antialiased lines, however when I disabled AA on the OS X build, the CPU use went _UP_ to 20%. Go figure. It's not really the line drawing, either--make it draw just one line the numbers dont change much...

February 14, 2008
and Windows...

Well I don't have anything to really bitch about Windows right now, but I'm really disappointed with all of the VC++ builds after VC6. The issues are a plenty, but it makes it hard to upgrade. All dynamic linking uses msvcrt71.dll etc which even MS doesnt distribute anymore, so you end up having to static link. Bleh.

I guess most people don't care about the size of their software, but for us keeping the program size down is also part of keeping the development process fast and efficient. If I have to upload a 30mb installer and everybody has to download one to test...

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My old Canon XL1 finally gets some use.. I love putting it in full-manual mode, mmm.

Shot this in 45m, then spent an hour or so editing:

It's actually a lot better in high quality form (17MB XVID AVI).

Perhaps if I'd actually written a song ahead of time it would have been better...

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(this serves as a reply to those who texted me HNY and didn't get a response from me).

The Radiohead NYE special was (predictably?) good. Mmm. My tivo won't erase that for a while.

We migrated to SVN for version control a while back. Definitely liking it, and Tortoise SVN rules. No good free mac SVN clients I've found, though (anybody?). So for now the command line version isn't bad. I can't believed I'd used VSS and/or SourceOffSite for over 8 years. Eep.

I've set up an SVN server for use with audio and REAPER projects, to aide in some collaboration. It's sort of working, although I think most people aren't used to version control.

Someone REALLY needs to make a web site where you can upload projects with media, then other people can make derived versions, and upload them, and you can go through the whole tree of projects etc. Seriously. Either using something like SVN or whatever. Would be awesome to open up that sort of collaboration. I know there are sites out there doing half of this, but I haven't seen it done really well.

Oh and I never posted this link here, our show we played in November:

But now sadly Christophe has fled the country off to a beach somewhere, and we're lonely and drummerless.

What else? Well it'll have to wait til next time.

Recordings:

freeform jam with biderman

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We played a fun show last night, should have some video up soon.

Man this is funny shit though (which I first read on At Ease), Lily Allen complaining about Radiohead, "It's arrogant for them to give their music away for free - they've got millions of pounds. It sends a weird message to younger bands who haven't done as well.".

YEAH! THATS MESSED UP! And all those people making open source software shouldn't do that either, because it's unfair to all of the soon-to-be Microsoft's of the world as well!

(As a side note, sorry Craig, I know you like Lily Allen, but think how this could be directed at Prince, too)..

The comments on that At Ease article page are hilarious, though. Some great reading, especially if you are putting of write a tab control wrapper layer...

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OK I'm going to start using this more so REAPER users can see what's happening with development. The last bit of time has been spent on Mac porting. To do the mac port we are developing some software called SWELL, which is part of WDL.

SWELL allows you to easily adapt Windows code to target Quartz natively. It's not trying to be completely compatibility like WINE or WINELib, but rather is focusing on providing the minimal subset, with maximum efficiency and minimal overhead. I'm actually getting into it, too.

If you are a Windows developer considering porting stuff to OS X, you should check it out. Well, actually wait a few weeks cause we're in the process of making it a LOT better. :) Oh and don't forget to remap XCode's keys to make it behave more like MSVC!

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