Recent blog entries for conrad

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.

Subwoofers,

I've discovered the raw joy of holding bare feet against a subwoofer. Parents should use this for funk training; train those leg muscles young, you'll need them for dancing someday.

Socialism,

yakk, your Dad's a legend mate. No matter what manner of government a place has, the most powerful actions are those of the individual.

and Free Software.

As hackers we understand the value of each other's work. We each give a small amount (of code, documentation, advice, or whatever) and, indirectly, understand that we are making the Free Software world a better place.

If we only apply one thing learnt from our involvement with Free Software to the rest of our lives, let it be the understanding that the aggregate actions of individuals are the most important actions in the world. Movements are more powerful than governments.

And teach this to your children. Chances are they will be better dancers than hackers anyway.

Redundant Cooking

2am, time for a coding snack. "Thai Coconut" 2 minute noodles with a dash of extra chilli sauce should do the trick. Now, how to boil the water?

Option 1: Boil water in kettle

Option 2: Boil water in saucepan

Previous experiments[1] showed that Option 1 is faster, but only by a small margin. Option 2 had the advantage that after boiling the water needed to be in the saucepan anyway.

However I wished to perform the boiling stage of the cooking process unattended. This would be possible using Option 1 as the kettle is fitted with a whistling device. Option 2, though relatively safe to perform unattended[2], lacks a remote notification mechanism.

In order to satisfy these criteria a compromise solution was employed. Both options were taken, that is sufficient amounts of water were boiled in both the kettle and the saucepan. A plan of action was prepared such that in the event that the kettle is the first to complete boiling, upon such notification it would be a simple task to replace the unboiled water in the saucepan with the already boiled water from the kettle. However during the course of the boiling process I became distracted rearranging my computer's speakers and allowed the kettle's whistling to continue unfettered. Upon attending to the kitchen it was noted that the water in the saucepan was boiling hence the boiled water in the kettle was not needed.

Opportunistically, it is clear that:

• the kettle is an efficient device for timing the boiling of water.
• although the use of multiple redundant boiling devices gave added assurance that the water would be boiled, it did little to hasten the boiling process.

Although the expected usage policy was clearly defined, anomalous behaviour resulted. This can be ascribed to the incomplete redundancies of the devices used. Such configurations would usually be avoided either by the addition of all required functionality into each component of the system, or by ensuring that there is no overlap in the functionality of system components. Neither solution presented itself in this evening's activities: it was late, and I was hungry.

I recommend that whistling devices be made mandatory on all household items.

References

[1] Boiling methods were previously raced using equal (1L) volumes of water. Smaller volumes of water were used in the course of this report; it can not be assumed that the saucepan would not win in small-volume events.
[2] Personal experience, viz. I have never been involved in a gas explosion.

Some guy compiled tractorgen for VAX, and also a couple of OpenBSD architectures, here. He's going to build it for his RS/6000 too. Bizarre. And just last night I was discussing the Debian packaging with Gus. It's good to see the community of ASCII tractor theorists is growing.

Released a new version of my sound wave editor sweep today, with nicer layout and docs. Yesterday, Mark Taylor over at LAME used it pretty extensively to document some decoder bugs in winamp, like so. I'm damn surprised considering I first released this thing less than two weeks ago.

Screenshot junkies: click here. That's my screen plastered with 61 vocal samples, with random bits of editing till I got bored.

Like lots of other people around here, I'm both moving and fighting off a flu. I got the keys to my new flat in Pyrmont today. I got a blue key; my key is blue. I'm pretty happy about that. Happier still, I'll soon be about a ten minute walk from the centre of Sydney. The flat is really close to the Harlequin Inn and the Pyrmont Bridge Hotel, pubs you may or may not remember if you were at the recent Linux Expo here. The local bottle o (liquor store :) is a small shop amongst all the sandstone buildings, and does accounts. There is an actual coffee shop down the road that both serves and sells coffee, and coffee machines. And yes, the local butcher sells pigs heads and "quality giblets by the bucket". Can't wait ;-)