The Blog of Xangis

Since that last post about creating more audio software a year ago, here’s what I’ve built:

SigmaTizm - A virtual additive synthesizer.
SampliTron - A virtual sampler.
Song Length Finder - Lets you find songs in your music collection based on their length.
Genre Playlist Builder - Lets you generate music playlists by genre.
Vorbital Player 3 - Added .wav and wavpack format support to this Ogg Vorbis player.
Proxima Controller 1.1 - UI improvements to this virtual MIDI controller.
SpaceTheremin 1.01 - Sound generator changes for a non-clipping version of this mouse-based theremin.

And these audio-related releases:

Roland JX-8P wave/soundfont sample CD.
Yamaha RX15 Hydrogen drum kit.
Added about 35 samples to freewavesamples.com.

That’s enough for now, especially since the audio software market is over-saturated.

SigmaTizm was a tough challenge and I had to write quite a lot of custom controls for wxWidgets to get it done. There was also a lot of profiling and optimization to do because it required as many as tens of millions of calculations per second to operate.

Next challenge: 3d graphics. Only one minor problem with that: I’m visually retarded.

I haven’t written a single line of audio-related code since I stopped using C++ two years ago.

It’s not that you can’t write audio software with C#. It’s more that doing so would be more than unpleasant.

Since I’ve switched to Python as my primary language, I’m going to see what I can do with it audio-wise. It seems well-suited to the projects I want to tackle, but only time and effort will tell.

I know I’m the only one who reads this blog, but it’s now on Technorati if you want to follow it:

I forgot to list a domain yesterday, but it’s now up on eBay:

veygoth.com

Go ahead and bid, you’ll probably get it for 99 cents.

It’s time to do some domain cleaning again. This time I’ve listed the following domains on eBay:

allpossibleworlds.net
investor-advocate.com
vlacis.com
forexsavant.com
equitysavant.com
fmycompany.com + fuckmycompany.com
poll-vote.net
champion-analytics.com

If any of them sound interesting, you might as well bid because they’ll probably sell at 99 cents (since the domain market is kind of crap on eBay).

Don’t ever set a redirect from www.example.com to example.com when your Wordpress site is set to use www.example.com as the “siteurl” and “home”. You can get into an endless redirect loop that will require you to edit your SQL database to change those settings. That happened here and the blog was down for a couple days. Yuck.

Drupal 6 stores access log info in the ‘watchdog’ and ‘access’ tables. Although you can clear those with an SQL query, there’s an easier way:

1. Go to admin/settings/error-reporting and set “discard log entries older than” to 1 hour.
2. Run cron.
3. Go back to admin/settings/error-reporting and set “discard log entries older than” back to something normal, like 1 week.

This isn’t a full clear, but it will purge most of the search and error message spam.

My current project is figuring out how to build sites with Django. It’s a bit tough to get a handle on because it’s a moving target. I have a book based on a pre-1.0 version. There are plenty of tutorials and videos on pre-1.0, 1.0, and the current development version (1.1). In many cases, the method of getting something done has changed enough that an older/newer tutorial or HOWTO doesn’t work.

Despite that frustration, I seem to be wrapping my head around Django 1.0.2 (the current production version) fairly well. I can create models and sync them with a database, configure the admin interface, etc. Now I need to focus on the views and templates so I can turn the data models into something useful.

I’ve spent the past couple days setting up an Ubuntu Server on VMWare. I’m building a development environment that I can use somewhere like Slicehost or Linode, and I want to get it set up so that it can run the 20 or so domains I have without chewing up all available resources.

There’s a lot I want to be able to run on this VPS –

• Drupal (PHP + MySQL)
• Django (Python + PostgreSQL)
• Rails (Ruby + MySQL)
• ASP.NET Apps (C# + PostgreSQL)
• A MUD (C#)
• Silverlight/Moonlight Apps (C#)

Since the biggest bottleneck in a VPS is usually RAM and Apache is a gluttonous pig when it comes to memory, I’ve been working with nginx, which is fast and has a very small memory footprint. That comes at a cost, though — pretty much everything has to be configured manually.

Part of the configuration involves manually creating fastcgi entries for scripting languages that I’m using.  So far I have PHP and Python working (so I can use Drupal and Django).  I’m halfway there — I just need to get Ruby and C# going.

I wrote a random character name generator in Python today.  It’s HERE at Xangis.com.