My oggwear bag arrived today, it's bright yellow with a xiph fish on it, and it rocks.

This afternoon I went to a lecture about Public Enemy and the history of hop hop, by Miguel de Souza. It was pretty interesting; my cs lecturers never brought turntables. We introduced him to Scrubby before that and he's threatening to tell a bunch of local DJs and journos; hooray :)

Innovation happens on Linux

Hey, I know I shouldn't get worked up about this kind of stuff but Steve Ballmer's recent comments about "no innovation happens on Linux" really piss me off. Obviously he's inciting us to be more vocal about our innovations, and to make the world at large know that we're not just cloning the crap that's already out there. It'll take more than just ranting on web pages -- we need to play the PR game even more so than we are already doing, we need to keep on writing world class code and just letting people know what's going on.

Sweep

I think mp3 importing is just about ready to go ... gotta fix up some random recording bugs that pia and jdub picked up on on saturday. Gotta keep the neighbours awake somehow :)

There's things crawling around in my coffee,
Things crawling around in my tea,
I don't quite know what they are
But now they're crawling around in me.

Bitrot

Last night I found some serious bitrot in code that I thought had been functioning ok for ages, and certainly worked correctly a couple of years ago. Now? loops nested wrongly, objects reinitialised for no apparent reason, bit ops flipped out randomly, and each bug living in a rotten sinful symbiotic existence with a corresponding inverse bug that caused the whole mess to fail transparently, discernible only to the trained ear.

ErikLevy: this all ties into my favourite tshirt; on the front "nothing will ever be the same again", and on the back in tiny writing:

FUCKING ENTROPY!

Fucking entropy.

Lots of cool submissions for linux.conf.au presentations have come in from people around here recently. Thanks everyone, it's shaping up really nicely. We'll still take submissions for the next week or so, so if you wanted to put something in it's not too late.

I woke up at 6am on a coderush. I wanted to finish writing up the plugin writer's guide for Sweep, but ended up porting the "byenergy" plugin I wrote a couple of weeks ago to the new API. It's pretty cool -- it lets you select all the loud or quiet regions of a sound given an energy threshold, kind of like "Select by color" in the Gimp. You can then go and do effects on that selection, which could be made up of hundreds of short snatches of sound. I wanted to include it in the next release because it's something other than a straight effects plugin -- people should be using the LADSPA API for those as much as possible. I think I'll make another plunger of coffee and get into the docs ...

I watched the closing ceremony and fireworks from Pyrmont Bay last night. I'm glad we didn't go into Circular Quay, as hypatia described it. Pyrmont Bay was much more civilised; still crowded of course, but enough room to lie around in front of the big screen :) Also, the security guards there were lame enough to only comment once on our two cases of beer (apparently there were "no glass" restrictions). Two of my friends were effectively forced by police to scull a six-pack in order to be allowed across Pyrmont Bridge earlier that afternoon. That was something to do with alcohol restrictions, probably along the lines of "excuse me sir, but you're not drunk enough to enter an Olympic party venue. Please drink all your beer, rapidly, before proceeding."

The conference will probably have a similar policy, but for energy drinks and caffeine :-)

Impressive social life

I picked my mother up from the airport and took her out to dinner tonight. After that we watched the fireworks over Darling Harbour and went for a walk. At no point did our conversation reference software.

linux.conf.au

Submit something! Don't let the bit about "writing a paper" stop you. This is a hackers' conference after all. Code, get your ass over here, code, crap on for an hour or so, code, party. Pretty simple really, and if you can string a few words together for the proceedings, all the better.

http://linux.conf.au/

January 17-20, 2001
Sydney, Australia

Call for Participation ... abstracts due Sep 30 2000.

Get in there with alan, davem, tridge, rusty, raster and the rest. Spend a week talking code, drinking Aussie beer and going to the beach. It's going to fucking well rock.

Hacking

One of the joys of hacking sound stuff is that people submit WAV files as bug reports. Today's was a recording from radio 2MMM Sydney of a contestant who couldn't spell ACDC. The file was sent to me by a guy in France (and yes, it crashes libaudiofile).

The most bizarre one I ever got was a guy who had recorded himself gargling Jingle Bells, with his kid laughing and yelling at him in the background. (He recorded it in xwave and it fucked up in sweep). It's interactions like that that make everything we do worthwhile.

Karma?

I made some sounds for Gnome events yesterday, and released them today. You can get them here.

Normally I'd make and release stuff on the same day,
but "having a life" just got in the way.

They're completely free, and made with aube and sweep of course. I had to fix a couple of random bugs in those to get the sounds done, so the day was a little too productive for my liking really ;-) Anyway, thanks to jdub for egging me on.

After that I was feeling all happy and Gnomey. I immediately broke 300 in gtali, being dealt a full house first up then getting a yahtzee in one roll. Karma, I tell you.

It's all good.

Having a life

I met up with a friend I hadn't seen in a while last night for some quiet drinks in a city cafe. Sounds innocuous enough, doesn't it? Now try doing that on a Saturday night in the party capital of the world.

We're halfway through the Olympics and Sydney is teeming with pissed bastards every night of the week. I'm not qualified to complain -- I was one of them last Friday after the opening ceremony, and again a couple of times during the week. Every pub in the city, without fail, is chockas; every city block has been vomited on, and every set of marble stairs holds a couple cleaning up, making out, or (most incongruously of all) breaking up.

We found somewhere that wasn't Sydney for a few hours and caught up.

Throw this at your subwoofers.