:: GussetBLOG ::

:: Sunday, March 02, 2008 ::

ReViSiT & Gig Lowdown

ReViSiT - racking software for VST hosts

Before the Gusset vs Hoonboy set at The Cooler on Thursday Thom and I were setting up and practicing backstage. That turned out to be the highlight of the night as it was sounding good but in the end we didn't get to play. I bailed out at 1am as there was hardly anyone in the place, we weren't due to start until 3am, and the sound was awful for poor Rich Defazed. We tried to get the venue to sort it out put the sound guy had already fucked off home. We were told, "there's nothing wrong with it, it's been set up by professionals." What? Professionals who go home and leave it to run itself? Anyway, I cut my losses and got out and that turned out to be the right more as the venue decided to shut down an 2am anyway. Shame, it was a great line up and could have been a great night, but a Thursday was not the time for it and the promotion could have been better.

Chatting during set-up I mentioned how cool it would be to have a tracker in a VST. Thom pointed out ReViSiT, which does it already. I presumed it would exist but hadn't been bothered to search for one. Cheers, Thom. And sorry you wasted a night coming down from Manchester for a gig you didn't play.

We also have an interesting couple of hours chatting with Juxtaposeur, and have put the breakcore world to rights. Maybe more on that later.

Labels: FOSS, Gigs, Gusset, Software, Tracker, VST

:: Dan 2.3.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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James Binray gave me a copy of his Dave Smith Evolver VSTi editor some time ago, and to my embarrassment I've not really got around to using it despite his requests for comments. He demoed it to me when I dropped by one time and I have to say that it looks amazing and seems to piss on both of the commercially available editors [Sound Tower and Vyzor].

Driving home after the January Goatlab radio show I was talking to him about possibly making it available to other users. He was hesitant as he didn't want to have to provide technical support. However, he has done so now, on this blog page and, cheekily, on the Vyzor yahoo group.

If you have an Evolver and are considering buying one of the commercial editors I’d strongly advise you to test this one out first.

Good work, James!

Labels: Evolver, FOSS, Synths, VST

:: Dan 4.2.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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Sony has become the last of the four majors to agree to release its music DRM free

Labels: Copyright, DRM, FOSS, Music, News

:: Dan 19.1.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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Null Device collects some links and quotes extensively on the possibilities of crowd behaviour modelling. (I used to work at a private company that modelled crowed evacuation from buildings and stadiums in exactly this way, interesting to see that academia is playing catch up here.) Some interesting ideas for things to try with emergent systems. A lot of the ideas posited are akin to game play, which reminds me that "the classic urban-planning simulation game, SimCity, has now been released under the GPL."

Labels: Computing, FOSS, Maps, Modelling

:: Dan 15.1.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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"Opinion is polarised. Some believe that the mass collaboration ethos that gave us Wikipedia and YouTube could also beneficially transform politics, the public sector and business, while others hold that it kills culture and undermines economies. Shane Richmond investigates"
[thanks to Tania for leaving a copy of the RSA Journal in the house]

Labels: FOSS, Media, Politics

:: Dan 10.1.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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Free Our Data: Make taxpayers' data available to them
"...government-funded and approved agencies such as the Ordnance Survey and UK Hydrographic Office and Highways Agency are government-owned agencies; they collect data on our behalf. So why can't we get at that data as easily as we can Google Maps or the Xtides program?"

From the blog:

• Want to put maps online cheaply? Get a paper licence and scan them
  
• Crown Copyright: time for an end?

OS Explore portal includes useful user generated route maps like pubcrawls! Note that, "any “walk” you submit becomes OS’s property. ... In other words, OS can resell your stuff if everyone creates walks it likes. Not exclusively, but for itself. Which in fact is exactly the same as we want the OS to provide its data to us, the citizens. Except that things seem to have gotten turned on their head, and OS is acting like a big media company such as MTV wanting to piggyback on the submissions of its viewers. ... Still, it’s movement, of sorts. But what we really want is an API so we can create mashups."

Labels: Copyright, FOSS, Law, Maps

:: Dan 26.9.07 [Arc] [1 comments] [links to this post] ::
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Previous post here

CUBE COLA ALL SPIRITS NIGHT
Sat 8th Sept/ 7pm/ £3

The Cube Microplex is possibly the only cinema in the UK to manufacture its own cola from scratch. Internationally famed and media-courted, cube-Cola tonight celebrates 4 years on the path to food science enlightenment.

A non-brand promotion bar party, expect guantanamo libres, home brewed snacks, bands and dancing.

On Saturday Sept 8th (rescheduled from Aug 25th) Cube home-brewers will be celebrating 4 years of adventures in producing our inhouse cola drink. We would like to invite anyone who also makes produce* to join us and sell their fruits from the bar.

*cakes, wine, moonshine, pies and modified commercial produce.

Arrive hungry and decaffeinated.

Labels: Food, FOSS

:: Dan 30.8.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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This is interesting. I wrote a post about the need for an open system and API for social networking back in March (see point 4) and guessed that someone must be working on it somewhere. It seems [via dev/null] that LiveJournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick is on the case, with OpenID. Although there are obvious privacy concerns about what information is held about you and where, especially if you actively wanted to keep different groups of friends linked to different accounts / aliases. Hopefully a robust set of rules can be written into it that might help to control aggregation sites like Spock and PeekYou, as Grom criticised last week. The biggest issue I have with these is the lack of control they give you over what information they collect about you. For example, PeekYou has scrapped my Blogger, LinkedIn and Flickr profiles together, which I'm not entirely happy about but can live with, somehow has failed to find my Facebook or MySpace, and has linked the wrong eBay account. Now, I'm not jumping to add the missing data, but I would obviously like to be able to remove the incorrect data. Having said that, there are data uses I wouldn't mind, especially having copied and pasted the same basic profile information into Blogger, Flickr, MySpace and Facebook, and rarely editing any of them, a simple "would you allow us to copy data from xx" dialogue during sign-up and one central point where changes cascade down would be very handy. But the user must have control over what data is taken from where.

Here's the link to dev/null's post again. I recommend reading the whole post if you skipped past the link previously.

Labels: Blogger, facebook, Flickr, FOSS, ID, myspace, OpenID, SocialNetworking

:: Dan 21.8.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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'A new front has opened in the War On Intellectual Property Theft: a campaign to block users of the open-source web browser Firefox from websites, because Firefox enables users to block ads ("steal content")'

Labels: FOSS, Internet, IP

:: Dan 20.8.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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How to Make Open Cola [via Natali]
Sounds like a royal pain in the ass to make something that tastes like sugary crap.

It made me wonder how many cola recipes are around, but a Cookin' with Gusset search only found recipes with cola in them, every single one of which sounds disgusting. Cola salad, cola soups, cola chicken; do these people have no taste buds?

Notes on Making Cola (chemistry lesson warning) on the Cube Cinema site. To my knowledge they aren't still serving the home brew. I'll check next time I'm there.
Edit: update

Urban legend* has it that those wanting to recreate something closer to the original Coca-Cola recipe need merely mix up coffee, red wine and cocaine. I don't know what sources or quantities of any of those three you would need but I'm sure it would be one hell of a party if you wanted to find out.

* Wikipedia confirms that it still contains coca leaf extract and snopes confirms that it did once contain trace amounts of cocaine.

Labels: Food, FOSS

:: Dan 30.7.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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Thanks to hard.off for putting me in contact with Andy Farnell, who he knows via the Pd list.

On his recommendation I popped along to a lunchtime talk by Jake Rayson on Free Free Software at The Cube last week. I was hoping to find out something about getting started with Pd (as I still haven't really got anywhere despite blogging about my intention to for a couple of years now). Although the talk was primarily about getting people who don't use any Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) to consider it I did find some very interesting stuff.

First off, heres some of Jake's recommended FOSS projects. They are all GNU/Linux, Windows and Mac compatible.

Apart form obvious stuff like The Open CD Project, Open Office, Firefox, GIMP (and a skinned version for PhotoShop users, which is of course named GIMPShop) there were also some more complex graphics packages I wasn't aware of. These were Illustrator clones Scribus and Inkscape.
Stunning animation from Blender (The Elephants Dream)
Basic web authoring with N-Vu
VLC Media Player
And audio editor & recorder Audacity

Audacity was demonstrated by playing an MP3 file that he had recently got his hands on from a DJ friend, of Mark E. Smith's new project with Mouse on Mars, The Flenderm Will Get It. It sounds great. Nice to see The Fall working with electronics again, as the material they recorded with Coldcut years ago was excellent (even though I'm not a big Coldcut fan) and this is in much the same vein.

I also found out from Ben at Bristol Wireless that an Open Source version of Buzz Tracker is in development.It goes by the fantastic name of Buzztard.

Most importantly, I found out that Andy and Jake are running a PureData beginners workshop in June, details as follows:

The Pure Data workshop has been booked for Saturday 9th and Sunday
10th June, 10am-4pm.
It will be over at the St Werburghs Community Centre
The workshop leader is Andy Farnell
Andy has some tutorials here
And here is the Pd site
and the download section
Cost will be £80, concessions will be £40.
Let me know how definite you are. Also, spread the word :)
cheers, Jake
--
Jake Rayson
[*] firebox.nu FOSS training
[e] jake[at]firebox[dot]nu

Labels: FOSS, Pd

:: Dan 22.4.07 [Arc] [1 comments] [links to this post] ::
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