i learned something today

[solarbird]

I guess it’s obvious in retrospect, but Monday I learned that a drum machine is basically just an overgrown sequencer. I kind of wonder if the original progression was the opposite way.

This is new to me because I’ve never used one before – all those drum tracks on previous work is microphone on live drums. Timing edited, sure, but live. But now I need a drum kit for a thing and I’m not a kit drummer and don’t have a drum kit, so OFF WE GO.

I’m using Hydrogen. It’s pretty cool so far. And really easy to use and comes with a lot of sampled drums. I wish it had arbitrary label marks so you could make notes on where you are in a song other than by measure count. But maybe you can and I just haven’t found it yet.

aaaaaait has a mixer i just found the mixer i was trying to figure out how i would do this later in ardour and i don’t have to i can do it here 😀 \o/ \o\ /o/

I love discovering new useful tools. Have you discovered any lately?

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Comments

[technoshaman]

Yes, but not for music, for extreme geekery.

You know how a typical website is set up; you've got a front end webserver and a back end database server and maybe some peripheral stuff, and this may get multiplied by 2 or 10 or 100 or 1000....

Well, take that container - one web server, one database server, and whatever peripherals, including load balancing - and be able to *clone the whole thing at once*... or better yet, migrate the whole thing to freakin' Singapore on the fly...

It's called Skytap. And it's got me *really* excited. Something goes splody on the database, and the devs want to test in production. *boom* I've cloned production for you, it's over here, break it to your heart's content while we continue serving users. Gotta do a demo. *boom* clone the latest test environment, demo on that. You wanna do a/b testing? *boom boom* Here's A, here's B. You can load balance across that.

If I could *get in there*, I would; they've got five Windows boxes in the whole outfit, and they're all jump boxes into Linux environments. But I would settle for being able to deploy into it for somebody that liked that idea.

[solarbird]

Oh, I wasn't restricted to music. Very useful!

[technoshaman]

Extremely so. I remember struggling at $PREVIOUSCOMPANY just to get the deployment of *one* node automated well; if we could build the whole *stack* once and just ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching... profit!

[vatine]

Not new, per se, but I discovered over this past weekend how bloody useful shell loops are (again).

background: I've recently started a project to translate Palaestra Svecana (a Swedish fencing manual from 1693) and decided that LaTeX truly is the way of making somewhat-appealing-looking diploma editions (the original is WAY too beautiful to not end up in the finished translation, somehow; plus illustrations). However, getting all the "scans from the original" PNGs uploaded to GitHub (well, it's source code, of sorts) was hitting many many timeouts. So, "shell loop adding small batches, doing a local commit, doing a push to GitHub" to the rescue!

And some Python to generate stub LaTeX files to hang the per-page translations in.

[solarbird]

shell is the eternal tool. :D

[technoshaman]

Hot damn! somebody else still uses \LaTeX! <3

[vatine]

last I used it, I used \LaTeX2e, now I am not sure what specific version (although I run "pdflatex" to generate a PDF). Still sufficiently far from usefully-much translated, so I haven't been checking in the generated PDF (so far, the translation is basically "this really cool king paid for this and I've been training his son, go me!" and "Swedes are really cool and brave and shit", that's about page and a half for the first sentence and (so far) half a page for the second, but it looks to be somewhere between 1 and 3 pages of that in total).