Tonight I have taken a few more photos to stick in the About section and for some of the publications. I am emailing all of this out tonight hopefully. I also changed the image in the Forums and Forge. I do plan on taking some of these pages out of the IFRAMEs by the way. This will need a bit of CSS hacking, but it should be fairly simple. It is just finding the time really.

I emailed the author of Pod Control tonight. I mentioned this little tool in my blog entry on Sunday – it is a little application to send patches back and forth between a Line6 POD. The problem was that Pod Control was not Open Source due to the author (Mick Kappenburg) having some concerns about his code looking a bit silly. I asked him if he would be interested in GPLing Pod Control as I would love to read the code and possibly submit patches. To my great delight Mick said yes and Pod Control will be GPLed over the next few days. This should make MIDI programming a bit easier for me as Pod Control (a) uses MIDI code and (b) is written in Qt. Thanks Mick, everyones a winner. 🙂

Right, I need to print of some directions for my trip to Wales tomorrow to see Telsa. Should be a fun jaunt. 🙂
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I drove to Bath yesterday to see a couple of guys from What Guitar? magazine and also see the Linux Format guys. I set off quite early and got to Bath a little while before my meeting with What Guitar? magazine. I then quickly realised that Bath really is not a place that likes the car. It took me ages to get into the center fo Bath and then I had the joy of driving around a car park for 45 minutes trying to find a space. A big pain in the rear, but when I finally found a space it was great meeting everyone.

We recorded the very first LUGRadio last night. Considering it was out first shot at something like this, I thought it went pretty well. I just need to edit it and then it will be going online hopefully quite soon. We may need to make a few changes here and there so I will run it past the other guys first and see what their views are. I plan on editing it over the weekend.

Played with KDevelop today while I was reviewing it for Linux Format. What a stunning piece of software. The whole code completion thing is pretty cool too. I always thought code completion was a good idea but only seemed to available for classes in your project. KDevelop now does persistent classes though so you can include Qt methods and suchlike. Cool.

Oh yeah, and I bought the MIDISport 2×2 today finally. All is ready for the Vetta II arrival. I might have a go at poking around with my Pod with MIDI when before the Vetta II arrives. 🙂

It seems initial responses to the new cut seem quite good. It is weird having no hair – I have had long hair for years and it is taking some getting used to. It is a strange kind of out-of-your-head feeling. I suppose it just takes a little while to adjust.

Had some fun last night reinstalling Windows 2000 yet again on the studio machine. I am now experiencing the legendary slow Windows 2000 boot and I am having trouble formatting disks. I think I will just format them in Debian if I can. This is a real nightmare. I was hoping to have it fixed before tomorrow when we do LUGRadio. Tonight I am jamming with the band so won’t have time.

I am off to sunny Bath tomorrow. I am going to meet Stephen from What Guitar? to discuss some work. I will hopefully get time to drop in on the Linux Format crew and say hi while there. I am looking forward to going up there. In addition to my trip to Bath this week I will be going to Wales to see Telsa Gwynne to discuss some work. Should be cool. 🙂
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So annoyed. I was just typing up a blog entry and then Mozilla Firebird (yes, not Firefox) chucked up this stupid font problem. No idea what triggered it, but I will have to look into it and send a bug report if it is not fixed in Firefox.

For the last few years I have not done much KDE development due to work on other things, but I have been thinking about doing some again. I checked my CVS account and it still seems to be working fine. I am just wondering what to work on though. I am tempted by documentation, possibly some coding and even adding some multimedia aspects to KDE. I will have to think on it.

While looking around the net I did see some hacks that have been made to my ancient DevCenter application. I wrote this as a frontend to compiling KDE. Nice one. I will have to compile this up sometime soon. I am also looking for a copy of my old KWebStat application. No idea where the source for that is now. I did start hacking a new version but it never made it out and it was wiped in a reinstall I think.

I have been reading the great C++ GUI Programming with Qt 3 book. This is a great book and it makes me like Qt even more. Although much of it is already floating around in my head, there are some interesting topics and little nuggets of information that clarify things. Good stuff.
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It seems that various parts of my grand home network strategy do not want to play together. This all came to a head when I tried to install Debian 3.0r3 on the studio machine. While I downloaded Debian I hunted down my Belkin drivers and put the drivers into a directory on my windows disk to mount later in Linux.

The problem here though is that MS in their wisdom decided that I can only make a Windows 2000 partition use an NTFS filesystem. Although I did not think of this as a problem, when I mounted the disk to transfer the files over, the Windows 2000 behemoth would later not work correctly. Cue another Windows 2000 reinstall. Oh, and yes…I do need Windows 200 for the studio software.

After months of discussion and putting things back later and later it seems that LUGRadio is actually going to happen. We are recording the first session on wednesday night and it should be fun. We have no script, no plan and generally no idea, but you will soon hear the fruits of what a bunch of Linux fans can do with a a few microphones. I do mean that in a nice way, so do not post any GIMP images please.

My good buddy Aq has been busy and has demonstrated the fruits of his DHTML labor. Nice. It does go to show however that a web browser can do a lot that Flash purports to do natively, with no plugin. Oh, and let us not forget sparkes’s little creation. 😛

I am really getting into the idea of doing a little MIDI programming. I checked the back of the Vetta II handbook and there are a load of details about different MIDI channels and what they do. I am assuming I just need to ping data back and forth between these different channels to do something useful. I also assume, and yes, assume makes an ass out of u and me, that different MIDI data will trigger different features of the Vetta II such as effects parameters and suchlike. I am going to explore this and check out the code of a few other little apps such as this little find and the rather intriguing C++ MIDI library midio. Before I explore all this though, I need to get my MIDI breakout box ordered and let the Vetta II actually arrive. 🙂

Oh, and thanks to Aq’s handy work, check out rthe new Planet Wolves page where you can see Wolves LUG member blog entries listed. 🙂
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Last night I updated my Writing section. Now all of you leechers can select just those articles with downloads. 🙂

I have been thinking about doing some Linux based MIDI programming recently. The reason for this is that I can pick up a MIDIMAN MidiSport USB interface fairly cheaply and hook it up to the Vetta II when it arrives. I quite like the idea of poking around with the amp via MIDI. Have any of you done any MIDI coding before? Any experiences you can share with me?

I assume most of you saw the Windows code leak news that is doing the rounds on the net. I share Pamela at Groklaw‘s view that you should simply not look at the code until you have obtained legal advice. Here are the facts. If you are known to have looked at the code and then write some free software, you just know that MS are gonna come down on you and claim that their code is in there. Combine this with the fact that the SCO case is flagging at the moment (a SCO win would be good for MS of course) and you need to think twice. Also bear in mind that this code is stolen property. No one should support theft, not even theft of substandard Operating System code. 😛

I fixed the studio box up last night. All seems good and I stuck in there the third hard disk and wireless card. I now need to get Debian on there and look at some driver support for the Belkin card; there does seem to be a driver for it available. The Delta 44 sound card should work fine with ALSA too. Bingo. 🙂

The next thing I am gonna do with regards to the network is get a spare 4GB disk I have installed to my server and get a backups mechanism working to that disk. I currently backup important data, but I am only mirroring it to a smaller disk.

LUG meet last night. Ate lots, drunk lots, debated lots. It was good fun. I got in about 1.30am with Aq and then I wrote a new O’Reilly blog entry called Open Source, Open Innovation. Let me know your thoughts. 🙂

Its been a tough year so far. Working hard in lots of different areas and it is great seeing these bits and bobs coming together. My books are progressing, my contacts seem to be growing, and I am meeting lots of cool people all the time. The studio is also growing too, and I cannot wait to get this new material recorded and put on the net.

I am going to be doing a lot more KDE coding quite soon. I have been thinking about getting back into it for a while, and it could possibly tie up with some work. I have been messing around with KDevelop quite a lot and it is cool.

I downloaded the latest Knoppix a few days back and gave it a try. Knoppix really is a great chunk of software. It is astounding just how well it works. I know some people are taking it and actually making hard disk installs and it literally detects just about everything on my laptop straight off. I think that when I get my hard disk installed to the studio box I will try putting Knoppix on there. It is after all Debian under the covers, and I could not imagine living without Apt. I am also going to give some of the Linux audio stuff a whirl. I suspect that it is not ready for me to move over to quite yet, but I am definitly interested in giving it a go, particularly now ALSA is in 2.6.x.

Right, must work before Karate tonight.
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Well, I went out last night to the computer fair and bought a new PC for the studio. I was going to go for components and build it myself, but I managed to snag a good deal with a company who would build it for me. I got the following system:

• Pentium IV 2.8Ghz (800MHz FSB)
• 512MB RAM
• 80GB Disk
• Flashy grey case with window and neon light

Last night I bolted in my CD-RW and another disk and started building the machine up. I still have to add my WLAN card and the third disk and then I will be done. I also bought a KVM to switch with my review machine.

Went to town today and picked up my specs. Everything looks wonky, but I have been assured that this is my eyes adjusting. I also picked up a razor – my hair is going soon, and there is no point no clinging onto it. I don’t want it to be shaved off but there is more and more face every day. 😛

The Vetta II and FBV are now ordered and will be delivered in March. This is because Line 6 are currently out of stock and are waiting on new units arriving. I have been reading the manual and it is amazing what this amp can do. This also brings up the legal issues of whether Line 6 can do this at all. The Vetta II simulates the amp sounds of Marshalls, Boogies, Peaveys, Fenders etc., but can they replicate these amps’ sounds and not be liable for copyright infringement. I spoke to Claire (Marketing Manager) at Line 6 and she thought that they were fine as they are not actually copying the circuits of these classic amps – everything is done in software. What do you think?

The other thing I find interesting about these amps is the sheer technology of them. If everything is done is software (which it is) it really amazes me how much tonal control they have in terms of modelling other amps. How on earth do they do that? Now, bear in mind that I have zero knowledge of sound programming, and I understand that they simply need to replicate the kind of sound properties of the original amps, but they not only need to model the sound, but also model the controls and how the amp behaves to different conditions. This is pretty amazing stuff; I would love to see how they do it. Fancy open sourcing this Line 6?

Today I am going to grab the parts for the studio PC. I am quite excited about building this machine as it is going to really open up the studio to more potential. If I can get most of the parts for this today I will then go and get the studio monitors at the weekend. When all of this is finished I will stick some pictures and details of the new setup online.

I added some more writing documents to the Writing section, and most of these have TBA publishing dates as I am unaware of them at the moment. I also wrote a little thing for Linux Magazine (Ger) and sent that off last night. Fingers crossed some more PDFs should be winging their way to me soon also. I will add a little feature in the writing section to only show downloadable documents soon.