Just spent a bit making NINJAM run with ALSA on Linux. Had most of the code
written, just had to write a little glue. Works great, yay! If anybody wants
to test, let me know. You'll need to be comfortable compiling things on linux,
and have libasound and libvorbis installed, among other things. Should be 
releasing this version on NINJAM.com later this week or maybe next.

The other thing I'm going to be doing (which is sort of porting) is making a
native win32 GUI for Jesusonic. It should actually be pretty easy, though a 
touch time consuming to do, but will be very awesome (and make Jesusonic very
usable for most people, vs. only people who love text mode). Oh, how I will 
love it in embedded DX plug-in form, too. If it works out well, I'll do a 
Cocoa UI for the Mac version as well, making it much more usable for Mac people
(the current Jesusonic Mac version is really quite pathetic, having to run
in terminal and all). The first step of doing all of this I did last night,
while slightly tipsy, which was seperating out the UI-specific code from the
backend effect code. Was pretty easy, too. yummy.

Well let's see, it has been some time since my last post. Let me enumerate
things:
  * Been improving autosong.ninjam.com, which now has elite things such as
    ratings and whatnot. Some decent music in there, and tons of it!
  * Brennan, Christophe and I began practicing again, for a show we plan
    to have near the end of October.
  * (Sorry, ladies,) Allison and I got married a month ago (yay!).
  * Wrote some crappy lyrics for some music I made a while back, here's Bob 
    singing it.
  * Bob also sang a great version of the other song ("Sentry"), available here.

AND MORE! Err...

I mean really, if a beach ball bounces up on stage, what do you do? Stop playing, complain, 
complain about the promoter who had their logo on the ball, then make the 4000+ people who
paid you $40 each for a show wait 5 minutes as a penalty? Stupid bitch. I mean really. If it
fucked you up, that's understandable, just be cool about it (which in fairness you were later,
once a guy got on stage). 

It happened during that terrible doorbell song, which was a plus, but then when you came back
on stage after 5 minutes (5 minutes in which I nearly left), you started over playing that
painfully crappy song. Don't make me suffer twice, too.

For someone who talks so much shit about "all analog" and everything, you seem to be going
a little bit too complex and digital (I mean really, a drum trigger that plays a guitar sample?). 
And you've finally succumbed to the "guy singing on piano is cool" wagon, too, it seems. *sigh*
Not that there's anything wrong with it, it's just that all the talk gets old.  

The opening band was pretty decent, though...

So I finally got an Athlon64 X2, and whoa, I love it. I had to get a cheap
PCI-E video card, though, because the integrated video didn't like the dual
core chip AT ALL. Was sorta a pain in the ass, but it's all good now (though
I'm out another $60 for a crappy X300SE). Whenever I'm running lots of stuff
(including autosong which loooves to chomp CPU) and I see the combined CPU 
use go above 50%, it makes me giddy. And everything UI stays so reponsive.
The other big thing that I appreciate is when some buggy application with
a high priority thread chews 100% CPU, I can still kill it trivially. This
has already saved me a couple times today. On a sour note, it seems my little
ST20G5 is slightly noisier with the added load of the second core and the 
video card (which is passively cooled, though), but is still quite quiet.
I've just gotten very spoiled.


songwriting

August 12, 2005
I started writing some lyrics for some music I wrote a month or two ago
("sparseish") today. Once I have inspiration for a song, and the music
done, I find it pretty enjoyable to write the lyrics themselves. Now if only
I could sing. Oh well, I'll enlist other people to help. Or wait, tons of 
people, maybe even. Here are my two initial versions crappy and crappier.
Here are the lyrics as a text file. If you want to sing on them, go for it,
just send me a copy. :)

Just note that you should take liberties with the timing, melody, and the lyrics
themselves (I'm really interested in what other people will do).

too addicted. way too addicted. that and jet lag, I guess.

in other news, there's other news, but I'm not going to post it here
just yet, because, err, I dunno why.

...and a happy birthday to my sweetheart.

This blurb is surprisingly shallow and shortsighted given the time spent by various people 
talking to the author. Maybe it was his editor's fault. At any rate, I'll take credit for coining
the phrase "fake-time" and point out that it's a feature, not a criticism. And that NINJAM has more
than a slight delay, but a huge delay--presumably, the other software/service/vaporware mentioned
has a "slight delay". Nevermind the other huge differences-- NINJAM working with actual audio 
streams, free software (as in speech), etc. I know it's just a blurb, but hopefully people will
investigate to see the truth. 

The other thing that bugged me was the use of "critics". Personally I haven't heard anybody be
too critical of NINJAM (i.e. haven't gotten any negative feedback, just positive and suggestions). 
At least, nobody who's actually used it. Some people who haven't yet will say "oh that sounds 
like it would be terrible", but everybody who has used it seems to enjoy it tremendously.

It's really a hugely addictive and fun form of entertainment.

Anyway... off to drink and eat a lot this week. woohoo.

Terrible is this. Not only is it stupider than stupid, they 
misspelled Shawn Fanning.

Saw some of Beck's show last night at Bill Graham Civic. I guess I've been 
spoiled by bands like Dungen, The Pixies, and Radiohead. Bands that know how
to do a proper live show. Beck's was just uninspiring, which I should've 
predicted, having seen him play SNL recently. And what's with the useless guy,
anyway? I can see the humor in it, but only to a point. What a lot of crap.
And all of the music, at least the parts not just played as samples by a guy
hidden way in the back, was a bit lacking in energy and execution, compared to
the album versions. It seems either Beck isn't that great of a guitarist, or
just doesn't try when playing shows... (OK so the tons of drums up on stage was
cool, but I didnt feel like they were properly used, and Beck doing his own 
little playing of them at the end of a song was kinda pathetic.. ugh)

Anyway. We've released NINJAM as GPL software. Yay. Rejoice.

The power supply for my Shuttle ST20G5 died. Their tech supprot number won't call
me back, so hopefully I can manage to order a new PSU for ~$60 from their sales
office sooner rather than later. They were supposed to email me a order form, 
but I'm still waiting for it (hoping it's taking its sweet time coming through
the spam filter).

Bleh.

Today, I put together new NINJAM and Jesusonic software releases. Yay.

The Jesusonic release is just a bunch of updates that I never really released,
and some fixes that come in especially handy for NINJAM (the drum sequencer
is a lot more advanced now, and less broken).

The NINJAM release updates the Mac client with a better connection dialog 
(I think that's about it!?), and the Windows client with a bunch of updates,
including an installer and bundled Jesusonic effects.

Dear bands who open for small big name acts in San Francisco,

Please, if you don't already have them, get drums.

I know, you see people like Tori Amos get by with just an amazing voice and a piano,
or Thom Yorke with a guitar and a wonderful sense of rhythm (among other things), and
think -- I can do that too! Get back to the basics, none of this modern stuff. Like
having some celtic singing style somehow mitigates the need for percussion! Let me
tell you, you're NOT pulling it off. There's a reason that the standard drum kit has
caught on. IT'S GOOD. USE IT. AND USE YOUR TOMS, TOO. Beating two peices of wood 
together, or worse yet random items found on the street, isn't cutting it! Really!

I don't know how these bands end up getting booked as opening acts. I guess the selling
point is that they don't have as much equipment to move or set up.

That is all.

BTW, Dungen was fuckin awesome, equipment failures and all. Wish I could see them again.

Finally, NINJAM is out! NINJAM is a software suite that 
allows groups of people to play music with eachother online.

Now I'm going to eat dinner and go see Dungen tonight.

In the last couple of days I've managed to track down and fix some of the last bugs
that I could find in the NINJAM architecture, making shit just work a lot better now.
Yay. Looks like we'll be making a public alpha version available tonight or tomorrow.
I know I've said similar things in the past, and it's been delayed a couple of weeks,
but this time I mean it, and it'll be worth it now, as the software is a lot more 
mature than it was a couple of weeks ago (and we have a GUI for OS X too, which I
think is hot.. almost makes me want to use a mac more, haha. I'll wait for the 
pentium M powerbooks, mmm). 

It has been a bit of work these past few days, but I managed to get the native
(Cocoa) OS X version of NINJAM nearly fully functional. So hot. The whole Cocoa
and Objective C thing is pretty decent, I must say. Takes a bit of getting used
to, but it ends up feeling a lot like PHP (i.e. with autorelease objects that
you don't have to worry about). I probably have a ton of memory leaks that I
haven't noticed, though.  Too bad it doesn't have the uber-easiness (and 
obvious of function names) and uber-well-documentedness (I find at times that 
a particular method has been deprecated, but without explanation or a 
replacement method) of PHP. Anyhoo, when we do finally release, Mac people 
(Mac using musicians, too!) might be happy too. Just gotta get text scrolling
for the chat box working, and do a bunch of preference items. Yay.

work will have to be on hold for a bit. time to smack my head 

                                 against 

the wall.

...before I go to bed, two things:
A song that will soon have lyrics.
A fun NINJAM song we made today.

... we still haven't publicly released NINJAM. I know it's late, but we're 
resolving some issues that probably would have bugged people (just this 
morning I managed to rearchitect a portion of code that made everything
run a whole lot smoother), and it'll be worth it. If you really can't 
wait, go on IRC where I described before and you can play with it. Honest. 
A download link is in the topic. But it won't be long before it's up on a 
public page as well. I'm dreading the traffic hitting my lowly T1, though. 
Normally I like releasing software and it getting attention, but sometimes 
it's counter productive. Anyway... we've been having some fun jams, this
stuff is so awesome (at least I think so, clearly you, the reader, can 
make up your own mind).