Well timc3.com keeps expanding, not sure whether it is getting any better but it is expanding! This time I have added a new blog called MusicTech to talk about music technology, synths, and any other cool pieces of kit that I come across.

I have been wanting to blog about this for ages but until now I have refrained as I didn’t want to clutter up this site anymore that it already is - after all it is holding both my personal information and my techie stuff at the same time as commenting on what is happening with my move to Bergen.

So there we have it. A fresh new blog, and what better to use than fresh new blogging software. In keeping with my like of Wordpress I have choosen the latest and greatest V2.01 which I must say is really slick to look at on the Administration side. I haven’t put anything on the front of musictech.timc3.com because I wanted to get the content put in first. I have many a redesign to do before I start just doing a design and creating a blog with WordPress is about the fastest way of building a fully functional site that I know of.

I am still messing around with Python at the moment, but I am thinking why don’t I just build my next site in WordPress instead of using Django. I would have had it almost built by now if I had gone for it!

Today I went down and took my employment contract into the Police Station. Apparently this will make the application for staying in Norway that much smoother that I had to mention it here.

Still not sure how long it is going to take before I get my number and confirmation but at least I know that they are looking at my application!

Just going to post up todays interesting links from my blogroll so I can check them out later!

OSX 10.4.4 Security broken
Whats wrong with blogs
How to scale video to HDTV
New Windows Spyware software
How long have you got test

This doesn’t seem to be common knowledge yet, but the Norwegian government in their quest for new rules and laws (not to mention new taxes!) has implemented a rule that everyone that comes to Norway after the 1st September 2005 will have to complete 300 hours of tuition if they want to stay permanently.

Slight bit of information on the UDI site as well as more in Norwegian on the ImDi

Norwegian is of course the first language of Norway, confused somewhat by the two written forms and hundreds of regional dialects, but none the less it is important if you want to live a life in Norway to understand it.

At my language school, my teacher also told of a new rule that requires all none-natives staying in Norway will need to undergo 50 hours of lessons in their native tongue about Norwegian laws and practises but I have yet to see any information written about this yet.

Velkommen til Norge indeed!

More about moving to Norway.

Well I have been really busy working at Vizrt, getting to know the systems, and getting to know python and a damn horrible Java website.

Python is really nice, been running through the tutorials at home, looking at this Django framework for websites which I might write my music site in, if I can get it to run properly on Dreamhost. Django doesn’t have the AJAX support built in yet, but otherwise it is fairly close to what Rails is doing to Ruby. Perhaps once I get it running I can do a video showing how easy it is to do a site.

But all in all, it is helping my aim to get to know Python better.

Oracle is the database of choice for applications at work, but for the small application that I am using I have been using MySQL 5.0.18 which has some nice tools on Windows for administration. There was a slight bit of trouble restoring a dump that was over 1Gb in size, but after changing some default configuration for max_packet_size=1G it was fine and the Blobs inserted fine.

I don’t think that I will get away from my allegiance to Postgres though.

The less that I say about the Java site the better really!

Running an SSH server on windows can be very advantageous particularly when the server has Cygwin running on it. Luckily if you are running Cygwin, it is very easy to start up your own SSH service and run it as a service.

Follow the instructions here.

I am currently using it on Windows XP, where it doesnt need quite so many details when it is setting it self up so just check out the ones you need on the instructions.

Just read on the register that VMWare is going to offer a free version of its server product. There is no mention of this on their site yet unless they are talking about the VMWare Player which can be used to host VMware / Microsoft and Symantic virtual PC sessions.

I am really interested to see where they go with this. For instance at home it would make for a really good test system and its a good competitor to Xen running on Linux.

Well the posts have been slowing down again, probably because I started at Vizrt this Monday, all going well so far. Will probably post more stuff regarding that when I am more settled.

Anyways, before I moved to Bergen I was looking through my cupboards getting rid if excess so that I didn’t have to take unwanted items when I found that I basically had enough bits of computer to build a complete new one. I managed to cobble together a Athlon 1.4 Thunderbird, an Abit Motherboard (with RAID and all sorts of unwanted features), an Nvidia Quadro 2 graphics card, 512Mb of Ram, 80Gb of harddrive, a case, a Hauppage card (from my long gone MythTV box) and most interestingly a Terratec 24/96Khz card that I used to use to make music.

So what possible use could I put this too, well not having a spare Windows license, and a liking to Linux I wanted to see what applications Linux had for making music.

I came across documentation on the excellent Linuxsampler project.
This project, is very much like Tascams gigasampler in that it can stream multiple gigabyte samples from harddisk for music. Linuxsampler supported the gigasampler format which I happened to have a couple of demos for including a 4×1Gb piano files.

Having read in the past quite alot about making music on Linux I was faced with too choices:

1. Install Debian, custom to build a Kernel to get audio latency to a minimum, and get the sound card working
2. Install an audio distro and hope that it was as nice as Debian

Now I must admit that I didn’t want to spend months on the project so I choose DeMudi, a project from agnula. It was a distro with the low latency kernel plus it was based on my favoured Debian. Best of both worlds?

Well almost. In fact the installation was easier than Debian, and it took me right to a GUI and it all looked very sweet. On logging in to a gnome desktop there was a read me that helped to get a really nice drum machine (hydrogen) working with Jack. It supported my soundcard very well and the latency is better than my fast lean Windows PC.

So on to linuxsampler. A look at the packages installed showed it was there but the frontend wasn’t and this is when the trouble started. I have no idea why they didn’t have a version of QSampler installed from the off, but Agnula if you reading this put it in the next version. So downloaded the source for QSampler, but DeMudi doesn’t come with any tools to compile let alone the libraries required.

The standard package source doesn’t have them so I ended up pointing it to debian’s and tried getting everything that I needed. I must have wasted hours trying to get the correct libraries and so forth, and then while I was waiting for yet another library to come down, I happened to find a binary already built for debian on the web ( a quick google should show where).

This installed very quickly, started no problem and started Linux Sampler with no problem. Once that was running I used Jack to setup the audio and then setup a Midi interface connecting everything together with a MOTU midi interface running on my PC. After loading the Gigasample in, I had a nearly prefect piano.

In fact the only thing wrong with it was that I hadn’t looked at it properly and in fact each 1Gb file was a velocity layer making the whole thing a 4Gb file! Once loaded I had a play and it sounded fantastic, except when I went completely mad and used up a lot of polyphony, the Linux box worked perfectly with really low latency.

All I think DeMudi should have is the development tools installed plus QSampler and then it would be complete, but for now I have a fantastic piano sound.