Last night I edited LUGRadio Episode 1. For those unfamilar with the concept, LUGRadio is four of us from Wolves LUG sat round my studio with microphones chatting about Linux and having a bit of fun. Anyway, the edit is complete and the recording will be released any time now – we are just waiting for the website to be built. To top things off we have a LUG meeting tonight. Mucho celebrating I think. I will let you know when the recording is online. 🙂

Yesterday I listened to the On Writing Well tape again with Sooz. We had an interesting discussion about writing style. I then checked my mail and had some 1/3 reviews come in for the Manning book. Everything seems to be going quite well. There are still bits to fix, but that is normal for any project.

We have a new chap who has joined up on Forge called Amos. Thanks for getting involved Amos and I hope you can add some interesting contributions to the documents. Incidentally, if anyone else wants to get involved, email me.
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I have the great pleasure of announcing that I will be one of the judges in the Linux User & Developer Awards. I am looking forward to being part of this, and I can also announce that I will be giving a presentation on desktop Linux development on the first day of the Linux User & Developer Expo. I hope to meet some of you there. 🙂

Today I finished off my Qt article (part two) for Linux Journal in Germany and I have been doing some other work. I also arranged some products to be sent over here that are related to my What Guitar? series. Cool. I need to finish an article tonight and then I am going to get Yellow Dog on the Powerbook ready for the MacFormat article.

I have a jam tonight with the guys in the band Looking forward to putting the Vetta II through its paces. 🙂
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This site seems to be getting a lot of traffic recently. I am putting a lot of this traffic down to the recently announced Blender documents that are in the writing section. Let me give you a summary of the hits.

On the 15th Feb I was averaging out at just over 2000 hits a day. Then traffic started rising (16th: 3495 hits, 17th: 4663 hits, 18th: 3293 hits, 19th: 6783 hits) and then on the 20th, bam!, I get 20856 hits. On the 20th jonobacon.com shifted 669MB of data that day. On a normal day before the 20th we seemed to shifting around 150MB a day. This is pretty cool. What is pretty cool is that the hit rate has been steadily rising since the site went online.

Other interesting stats while I am here. This month we have shifted 3.6GB of data so far and average at 148 hits an hour. The Blender masterclass documents have had a total of 822356 hits. Wow.

Thankyou people. Thankyou for giving these crazy site stats and coming on here a lot. I look forward to meeting more and more of you every day. 🙂

Yes, thats right, it has arrived. Today I had two huge boxes delivered to my house, one containing a Line6 Vetta II and one containing a Line6 FBV pedal. Are they good? Are they what they cracked up to be? Well, yes!!

I plugged the Vetta II in and went through the presets. I have heard how these are pretty rubbish and they are. The distortions sound like something in 1992 from Zoom. After some tweaking though I started making the beast work as I want it to. I played with some sounds, adjusted EQs and I am beginning to get some good sounds. I am not expecting to get a great sound straight away – I have been warned of this by many people and it is true. This is a complex bit of kit and it is going to take some time to tame it.

I think the best way for me to play with it and get it to work for me is to re-amp a guitar part. This is where I record a clean guitar part on my PC and play it through the Vetta II inserts. I then apply the sounds on the amp and mess around with sounds without constantly having to play my guitar. The amp actually supports this with inputs I think – I need to look into this through. The manual is big enough and will take me a while to read. 😛

The thing that impresses me about the Vetta II is that once I have my distortion sound as I like it, it does everything I will need it to do. It has all the effects, all the amp models and some truly weird synth sounds in it. Expect some weirdo guitar sounds in the next songs that I put online. Oh, and yes, I am going to stick some more music online – I am just waiting to finalise my setup.

I can’t wait until the MIDI box arrives now and I can start poking around with the Vetta II. Until then there is going to be many a sleepless night exploring what it can do.

Last night I hacked my Qt program some more. Got the file input/output working and it is all coming together nicely. This is great stuff and should make my writing far easier.

Today is another busy day. I want to clear out a number of articles so I can get some book work completed tomorrow. All this Qt coding is helping me prepare for a big KDE development series that should be coming up soon. I am also doing a Qt tutorial series for Linux Journal Germany and a studio series for What Guitar? magazine. 🙂

I called the BBC again today regarding my complaint about the story discussed in my ramble. It has now been over two weeks since I filed my original complaint; so much for the 10 day response time. The BBC has lost my reference number and not stored my details and from what I can see there has been no effort made at all to get in touch with me. I was assured today that I will get a call soon and my complaint has been marked as urgent. I look forward to getting the call finally. I will of course keep you updated.
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Well, the Debian machine I was setting up yesterday is now working. The problems I had with the 2.6 kernel were indeed because there was no IDE support compiled in. Thanks also go to Mark for leaving his advice on my last blog entry. 🙂

After I got 2.6 working I then got onto getting the wireless card going. This driver was intended for a 2.4 kernel, but some chap has ported the Makefile to 2.6. I compiled it and managed to compile and insmod it fine but then had trouble getting it to grab a DHCP address successfully. I posted a message to the thread where I discovered this hack and I am yet to try out the /etc/network/interfaces tip. Fingers crossed this will work. I did compile a 2.4 kernel to play with this driver too – not much time to mess with it though.

Today I went to our first band practice of 2004. We have been off due to our drummer being very ill but he is fine now. Great practice, lots of energy and we are all very excited. Tonight I am also going to look into getting LUGRadio edited. This should not take too long, but I want to record some bits of music to use with it. When it is ready I will post a link. 🙂

Last night I was hacking some Qt in-house software that I have been writing. This software is being written because I have not found an editor that does everything I want it to do, and I can also bolt in some extra functionality that will make my writing more professional. Last night I developed the UI of the app and it is all working quite well. If I have some time tonight I might look into getting some of the core functionality up and running. I am quite chuffed with it so far. Incidentally, this will not be released or GPLed due to the fact that it is written for my specific requirements, requirements that would not apply to most other people and I don’t want to code in all the configurability of making it less specialised.
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Last night I was hacking away at some Qt code to play with sockets still. I spent most of the time revising old code to handle QWidgets though. Finally fixed it after some head scratching.

Today I brought the studio box downstairs and plugged it into the LAN. I upgraded it to Debian/Unstable and then used apt-get to grab the 2.6.2 source code and build dependencies It is quite cool how apt can grab these dependencies and install them for you – it also got the packages to create docbook documentation of the kernel source. Hmmm, interesting.

It seems that the Delta 44 sound card is supported in ALSA and that my Belkin wireless card needs to be installed with a package that contains the 2.4 driver but has had the Makefile hacked to create a 2.6 module by someone. I compiled by kernel the Debian way, rebooted and then bang, i works but cannot access the root partition. It seems that IDE support is not on my default for some reason. If this is indeed the case it is a bit silly – I would have imagined that 95% of people use IDE disks by default. I might be wrong, but I am currently recompiling to hopefully fix the problem. When it is working I can then get the wireless card driver working.

I might write some of this up if I get some time. 🙂

After some discussions with Telsa today regarding remote X sessions over a LAN, I felt compelled to give this a whirl on the Mac with its suped up X installation. To say impressed is an understatement. This is incredible. I can now have my KDE kicker menu running on the desktop. All the fonts are mapped too, and the windows are rootless. 🙂 You can see a shot of the desktop to left or a full size shot by clicking here. Cool.

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I drove to Wales today. It was a complete belter of a drive getting there – nearly 3 1/2 hours there and another dose of 3 1/2 hours back. My meetup with Telsa was cool; work done, randomness discussed and paper spread everywhere. 🙂

Wales seems quite a nice place. The last time I was there was to see Pantera play in Newport. That was oneheckuva drive back to Bedford. Luckily the drive today was not quite that bad. It was just a shame I needed to leave a little early. Oh, and I missed Alan; a shame really as I was looking forward to having a natter with him in a context where there are no Alan Cox fans surrounding him, hanging off his every word.

While driving to Wales I was listening to On Writing Well by William Zinsser. This is an audio tape that discusses good practices for writing non-fiction better. It really is a great tape; Zinsser has a great authority that is truly inspiring. I liked the tape so much that I sacrificed Soilwork and Nocturnal Rites to listen to the tape twice, there and back.

Tonight I have been playing with Qt a little. I have been exploring the world of Qt networking and so far I have got…nowhere. I plan on playing with it a little bit later. I am basically poking around with an RPC site. This is partly inspired by Aq’s superb Bloglines Monitor for the Rox desktop. It is a little weird using Python code for inspiration when you have never used Python before. 🙂

This weekend I have lots of stuff to sort out. I need to get the studio Debian box all set up and the wireless network working. This involves bringing the box downstairs to connect via wire to the net to upgrade to Unstable. I can then compile 2.6 and get the wireless card working. In addition to this I need to get Yellow Dog Linux installed on the Powerbook in preperation for a MacFormat article.
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Ahhh cool, it seems my story that I submitted to the Blender website has been posted. I noticed 10 people online in the Writing section a few minutes back. Wow.

Fingers crossed my whopping 11 part Linux Format Blender series will be made available sometime soon. 🙂
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