Ableton 7 Suite Box Received

23 April 2008 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ music

Finally, it’s here in my hands. I’m very excited about it as it took 2 days to come to Kiev from Germany and long 2 weeks to travel a fraction of that distance to my city. The negative side is that customs took another $360 (given that the box cost $999) to give it to me, and UPS got $10 to perform a radiology test that never happened (just a rubber stamp on a paper). That’s the sad part about this country I’m going to leave with a special pleasure very soon. Everyone is robbing everyone else on the legal terms here and it’s fine. No one cares. Even those being robbed.

Anyway, it’s here and it’s what matters after all. Thank you Ableton for a great product!

Here’s a little nice video from their office in Germany:

Inside Ableton

Further Thoughts on Git and Rails

18 April 2008 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ technology

The idea of replacing (or augmenting) Subversion with Git in the development practice is quite fascinating. It’s a part of an agile development methodology to respond to client feedback and changes of mind quickly. Sometimes they ask for a small change that has to go before that monstrous feature you are already working for quite a while, and it hammers on the head. What on Earth do I need to do now? Roll everything back, apply a change, deploy and then paste my changes back and move on? That’s fine once, twice, but hey when it’s a habit… It’s a reality and this is how it is most of the time in development, in real life, everywhere.

Rails, TinyMCE and JavaScript in IFrame

17 April 2008 ⋅ 3 min read ⋅ technology rails

Browsers developed some really bizarre means of user data protection over the year of evolution. One of many is the JavaScript cross-domain protection. If you load a web-page into an IFRAME and access its DOM model or the model of the parent document from the loaded page, you get what you deserve – a permissions violation error that looks like ”Permissions Exception” (in IE) and ”uncaught exception: Permission denied to get property …” or similar in (FireFox). All is simple and clear once you know what to expect. It’s all logical. Today however I faced something different, really different and odd.

New iPod Nano 8Gb

14 April 2008 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ personal

Kate prepared a mind blending surprise for me today. When I got back from my streetball game a shiny new black iPod Nano 8Gb was sitting in its stylish leather jacket on my table. Ahhhhh. I love you my dear. She is full of surprises, isn’t she?

The screen of my first iPod Nano 1Gb was crashed half a year ago. I was walking out the house holding it in my jeans pocket and metal railings of the outside staircase served just right to make an iPod Shuffle out of my old nano friend. It played like that for a day or two, but then battery problems became obvious. Eventually it ended up on the book shelf. A sad story. Well, anyway…

The kind is dead. Long live the king!

Thoughts on Git

14 April 2008 ⋅ 3 min read ⋅ technology

Many of you, my readers, do programming for a living. Those who started early used CVS before they switched to Subversion, and there are many who still use it thinking it’s the best this world can offer. We, as lazy beings, look for faster and easier ways to accomplish things. We use version control systems that fit our needs, and personally, I felt that I’m doing the right thing when migrated to Subversion several years ago. So far, working mostly solely on the code base of the projects, I find it sufficient and convincingly simple.

Checking fav.or.it

11 April 2008 ⋅ 3 min read ⋅ technology

The invitation letter from fav.or.it almost made it to my spam folder today. The name looked suspicious and I had not a clue what on Earth do they need from me again. Now I recall asking to drop me a note when the beta-testing becomes available about half a year ago. Quite a wait if you ask me. At least, I got my chance to join in and give it a quick spin. Here are my notes.

Multi-armed Celebrity and Gold

9 April 2008 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ graphics

Intriguing title, isn’t it? Heh, well, not so bad. Get your Wednesday morning smile with these two gorgeous findings.

First comes Photoshop Disasters with their way-too-many-arms evidence of what happens when you are photoshoping in an unstable drunk smashed state. But, wait, there’s more to it. Be sure to check the comments for additional fun; you deserve it.

And this one is for a desert. The Cockeyed.com Citizen explores the Lippencott “Gold Kit” offer (don’t miss the second page) inside-out and has incredible fun with it. These two pages gave me a huge smile (as it’s still early and I can’t laugh out loud without a danger to wake up Kate). It’s simply hilarious, don’t you find? This service would never work here on the eastern side of the pond, not to mention the trick itself. Opinions are welcome.

Enjoy your morning!

Purchased the One and Only

9 April 2008 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ music

Finally, the Ableton Live 7.0.3 is officially installed and running on my laptop. No, the package hasn’t come yet if you wonder, but they were generous enough to send the download link (for the app only of course) and a bunch of the serials along with the order confirmation to get me started immediately upon charging my credit card. So, I spent 10 minutes downloading all the latest while they packed the boxed version for me.

The Ukraine is famous for its unreliable postal services (well, as many other distant corners of the world), however, I believe UPS or FedEx (still not sure are we in the EU or outside it) will do its best to save some silver hair to me. Hopefully there will be no problems with customs and everything. Even 5%-10% tax would be a LOT given the price I paid.

You may wonder, why am I drawing so much attention to the fact of the purchase? It’s easy to understand if you are in a music geek circles, and almost impossible otherwise. Long story short, (a) it’s the best music production workbench with all sines and saws world ever seen, (b) the fact that you purchased any software product in this country (and bordering Russia) is kind of … extraordinary and deserves attention by itself, and finally, (c) it let’s me immerse deeper into the creative part without a stupid thought “do I deserve to use this, or am I a smelly thief”.

Happy.

Ubuntu 8.04 is Coming

8 April 2008 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ linux

Ubuntu 8.10

You know, I’m a big fan of Ubuntu Linux and using it on my aging HP compaq nx9005 laptop for my business needs just fine for more than 5 years now. I’ve been running it since its childhood and my drawers are still full of Live CDs they generously send to everyone free of charge.

Today, when I was looking for an updated Pidgin 2.4.1 package (currently I’m running 2.2.0), I happened to see the front page of the official Ubuntu site and guess what? It struck me on the head. 16 days left until the next release!

It made my day. I’m well-taught that every next release takes so much enjoyment that it would be fair to make it an official world-wide holiday. No kidding. :) It is much like every next Mac OS X version, but without an additional weight. You still can run the OS on your granny’s i386, and do that comfortably. But if you have an up-to-date roaring monster under the hood, there’s a plenty of options to keep it busy.

Enough words. Let’s count out loud.

Upgrading my toolbox

7 April 2008 ⋅ 3 min read ⋅ music

Many of you know me as a music geek. That would be a correct assessment of my attitude to everything composing / hardware / software related. I like experimentation, layering sounds, playing with tune structure and working on tiniest sonic details that are so subtle that affect the listener only on the subconscious level, like ghost notes and other miniature stuff.