10 seconds ago I unsubscribed from someone who texted constantly. I mean ALL THE TIME. I could get 2 new messages an hour and if I’m lucky enough, there will be up to 5. He is an experimental electronic music producer and it used to be fun to monitor his progress until he realized that sending “Released new album [link]” ten times in a row in different forms is good for karma. After that I could no longer stand it.

Another edge case is excessive granularity. What people don’t realize is that even keeping all democracy and freedom of speech in mind, Twitter is probably not the place to post “making a cup of coffee”, “drinking coffee”, “ah that’s nice”, “finished coffee, cleaning the cup” type of messages. That’s stupid and only obsessive followers can stand it.

Finally, how on earth people can follow more than 10-20 twitters? Reading must be a day job for someone the one below:

I have (well, had) one buzzing person on my list and it was enough to distract me from whatever I do all day long and this user has 2K. That’s IN-SA-NE!

Next, as I understand Applications have to bring value, but apparently most of them are quite useless. The LinkedIn Applications concept seems to play the first fiddle — you see the mention of them twice on each square inch of the screen place. I tried to ignore them for a quite some time and then gave up only to find there’s no option to disable them altogether on the settings screens. Ouch.

Can’t say it’s all that awful, but hey, it’s got an ill trend of ad-monetizing and poluting the interface with secondary functions that probably most people won’t find as important. Not everyone spend whole day in LinkedIn working on their profile and making sure their Wordpress blog posts are displayed nicely. Normal people have some work to do, and if some tool stands in a way or simply annoys, it’s likely to be abandoned.

Let’s see where it gets with all that.

Over the course of the last few months I was taking part in different Rails projects. Some of them used RSpec and some Shoulda/Mocha for unit testing. The original .autotest script that I picked and adopted was intended for RSpec, so I had to modify it over and over to support the environment I was currently working in. Finally, as I realized there was not a slightest hope to end this jumping back and forth, I came up with a multi-environment script that works with both RSpec and Test::Unit.

It detects it all automatically, and the only thing you need to do is to give the paths to your pass / fail / pending icons.

Here’s the script for your copy-pasting convenience. Name it “.autotest” and place in your home directory. Enjoy!

Hopefully, they will fix that soon. Otherwise, great job!

The original post on this is at wesen’s where you can pick up the idea and hear some samples. In this post I simply show the Ruby implementation of the algorithm. It doesn’t work with lists, but rather does simple math to achieve the same effect.

The idea of distributing pulses is curious. It lacks one important aspect though — shifting. Currently all patterns start with “1″. Thanks wesen, for sharing this. Here comes the Ruby version.

Now after several tireless attempts to find a password that it will accept, I’m about to give up. It gives NOT A CLUE why the password I’m entering can’t be used. It just keeps saying…

Another piece of stone age art. It must be my lucky day!

Half a year ago we were promoting The Product on many software download sites. By many I mean thousands. Now the time has come and some of them coming back with these idiotic messages notifying of the ratings they awarded after careful reviews of whether it’s the application quality or the absence of viruses, or … you name it. In fact, the smallest and the least known sites show the most activity bombarding us every week. Why are they so kind?

All is very simple as usual. When you put their 5-star award banner on your site, you link to them. So what? So the rating of your pages, combined with ratings of other happy winners, contribute to the rating of their site. They don’t really care about you, forget it. It’s another wave of spam, yet more intelligent and nicely veiled. The page rating builds up and up until finally, they wake up one day being a well-known and highly rated software site. Google knows about them, your users/readers know about them, rating is high, life is good, and all you got is their 5-star banner. Enjoy!

Clever trick, isn’t it?

It seems the community has started to work towards a common set of guidelines for a beautiful and readable Ruby code. Nice…

The idea behind any style guide is largely based on aesthetics and readability. The number of spaces to use for indentation, how to break statements into several lines, when the chain of statements is to be broken into several clauses — all is simple, yet no less important than the code itself.

These days we have many self-taught programmers who neither have a taste nor any special education. What’s worse, many of them don’t really care about clarity and maintainability of their code, preferring to quickly throw some pieces together to get their payments quickly without any proper design, testing, formatting and anything else. It’s a “poor job” and a “job poorly done”. I encourage everyone who purchase code to demand The Quality, and I equally encourage everyone who produces code to do their homework — study the best code samples, read guidelines, do their testing and follow (if not all, but as many as possible of) the best established practices. It’s the hard work that eventually becomes fun.

Here’s one of the attempts to summarize good coding practices into a guideline that I stumbled upon this week: The Elements of Ruby Style. It’s obviously incomplete, but it’s a good start that has all chances to evolve. There always will be people who disagree with certain points (including me, who would rather use “boolean ? 3 : 5″ instead of “if boolean then 3 else 5 end”, which is redundantly complex), but if you need to start from somewhere, it still is a great starting point.

In the same vein, here’s Rails Code Quality Checklist and the Code Quality Checker. These are mostly for the code design control, but since we talk about code quality today…

Enjoy your weekend studies!

Analog sounding. Why they still continue to argue about the digital vs analog sound. Where the hell can you still hear it in the original analog form? Almost everything that is recorded these days is distributed on a digital media, which is bits and bytes in its essence. Having that, it all comes down to creating the “correct” analog-sounding sequence of bytes to reproduce that unique sound that you still want to hear on your iPod. Am I right or am I right? What about vinyl records? What about them? I love vinyl and have the collection of my own. Nothing can beat a great grind and especially in techno domain, but… from a producer standpoint, hey, you still need to get the sounds to someone who cuts the plates. Do you use magnetic tapes for that?

During the last few weeks, largely inspired by the banks of sounds concept behind the hardware machines (thanks wesen and 909techno for the monomachine and machinedrum video), I came up with an entirely different setup for my Ableton Live session view when I’m working on a pieces. I now use a couple of Drum Racks that represent some branch of sound (minimalistic, synthesized sounds etc), but never write clips directly for them. Instead I use several MIDI tracks for each individual sample or a group of samples that I route to the channel holding the Drum Rack. This way, I can program patterns for the sounds individually. Let me illustrate it with a picture:

What I have here is the Drum Racks on channels 1 and 5. They are holding my custom kits. The channels 2 through 4 are routed to the first kit (channel 1) and the channel 6 is to the second (channel 5).

If you read attentively, you probably noticed I said I never use the Drum Rack channels. Well, it’s not true. It’s very convenient to create a clip there, play with it and once it’s finished, move it to a separate MIDI track. It’s like a sketch book.

What are the benefits of this layout:

• You keep all your related (kit) samples in one place
• You don’t duplicate kits in multiple channels just to keep things separated
• You do keep things separated, but in more natural way, like how would you do with the hardware
• Thanks to the flexibility of the Drum Rack (and Instrument Rack), you can add effects to each individual sample as well as to the whole channel. In other words, if I need to add some reverb to high hats, I no longer need to take them on a separate channel, I just open the rack and add it. Rarely do I need the same sound with different effects in my tracks. Even if I do, I can easily duplicate the sound in the rack for that.

And by the way, here’s how the piece sounds at the moment:

I had several awe moments, and in this writing I would like to attempt to share my own experience. It’s not going to be as nicely put, but still may be interesting to read and compare to your own views and techniques.

It’s probably an issue that almost everyone faced when trying to compose a musical piece. It’s easy to put together a short one- or two-bar sketch that you like and ready to listen infinitely, but it’s way harder to move on from there. I always felt a strange obligation to “finish” the job started and make an arrangement, make a song with the logical beginning, development and ending. I studied the structure of the tunes I like, attempted to replicate it in my own tracks, but it wasn’t really fun. It was something that I ought to do as opposed to something that I wanted to invest time into. On the other hand, there was a clear understanding that nothing of what I have has any long-term value unless it’s usable and serves some purpose. That’s how I got my main portion of stress and frustration.

Reading Wesen’s work, I was deeply impressed by how he admitted and stated in a straight way that he works with mainly 2-bar loops. It’s all that he ever needed, and it’s fun, and challenging. It sounded like a spectacular achievement, not like a flaw in psychology I considered myself. Now, as I’m seeing it from a different angle, it sounds entertaining. I have probably 20 tracks that I managed to finish in the last 15 years of irregular musical exercises intermixed with playing on private parties, in clubs and open-air raves. But I have several hundreds of techno themes presented in loops that I put together in Buzz, Fruity Loops, Reason, Reaktor and most recently in Ableton Live.

Several months ago the work on a new live set has started after seeing the video from Robert (”Monolake”) Henke’s workshop in Melbourne where he showcased the updated Ableton Live 7 and his Monodeck II. The way he described his live performance was universally simple. There’s the deck with buttons corresponding to clips in the Live’s session view, there’s the bank selector to move up and down choosing different songs and there are per-channel and global controls to manipulate the effects, volume and sends. The way the deck works lets him close the lid of the laptop and focus on the performance interacting only with the deck itself.

This was a shock to me and inspired to start two projects in the hope that maybe now I’ll get enough tools to start my regular live performances. The devices are now finished and can be seen on the pages of this blog. They are ALG Console and the Monome clone. One after another they were completed with an immense help of my father who did all the electronics and metal works. My own part was the software programming (firmware and drivers for Ableton Live) and face plates designs.

ALG Console

Monome Clone

As the result I’ve got the blend of the Richie (”Plastikman”) Hawtin’s console and Robert’s deck split into two independent parts that could be used on their own or stacked one after another to form a single workbench with buttons, knobs and faders.

The way it’s all designed let’s me work with the mix as with the set of musical themes. I can move from one to another, mix their parts and transit between them in any possible way using as many effects as I like and all the creative power that I possibly can come up with. This very concept brought a brand new problem with it though.

In the times when we had slow and weak CPU’s we had to minimize the load on them in all imaginable ways and it drove us to the simplst and most clear layouts possible. Today, having all that computation power at hand, we no longer care about the number of effects, instrument parameters and clips that are working at the same time and it’s a big help on one hand, while a huge trouble on the other. My latest frustration was this. Say I have two themes each of which takes 8 channels. Each channel holds a virtual instrument (drum machine or synth) that plays MIDI notes along with some effects. Now if I want to have two songs share the same physical channels on my mixer, I have an issue with placing two instruments on the same channel and selecting the correct one for the correct piece. If you still follow me, imagine what it looks like when there are 10-20 pieces in the live set. It’s simply insane.

Wesen reminded me of the way it was 15 years ago. We all used samples and audio loops in “trackers”. There were litterally no virtual instruments. The best the world could offer was Yamaha’s OPL3 that could not be used everywhere due to the lack of the saw wave. This taught me a great lesson, and the latest thinking is that I don’t need any instruments in the live performance situation but rather the collections of loops and 3-4 standard effects per channel (that also may be an overkill, btw). This greatly simplified design makes it way more comfortable even to think of the life set. I can work on all my pieces independently without any artificial restrictions on the structure, the effects and the channel layout that I use. Later, I will be able to render the clips in the raw audio and finally load them into the performance file.

As you could see, in this writing I focused mainly on my current setup and the way I see my live set being laid out and performed. Hopefully, this is only the beginning of the series of posts and the exchange of ideas and visions. If nothing else it was always a mystery to me how people do what they do on the stage and having a way to learn the tricks of others is always fun on its own.