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A useful MIDI player October 30, 2005

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I’ve been using LilyPond to write some music. One of the nice things about LilyPond is that it creates MIDI files. However, it doesn’t set the tempo outright but uses tempo change commands. Quicktime (and thus, all the apps that come with Mac OS X) doesn’t handle this properly so I end up with a file that plays way too fast.

So off I went in search of a non-crippled program to play midi files. I would never have thought it would be so hard! LilyPond recommends timidity but it requires external files which are only half documented and it’s a commandline app. I found a gazillion crippled programs. There were a few really old ones but they didn’t run so well (since Classic isn’t quite the same as Mac OS 9, especially when it comes to scheduling and sound).

Finally, I stumbled onto this blog entry. This “sample” midi player needs to be built first but that’s a snap if you have xcode installed. It’s perfect! It sounds good, handles opening from the Finder and plays back my files at the right speed.

So if you’re using LilyPond on Mac OS X, try the sample midi player on that blog. I might end up hosting a link to it here since it’s Open Source (I have to check the terms of the Artistic license).

Drainage October 22, 2005

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We’re getting drainage at our house. We need it because lots of rain tends to cause flooding. It’s not too bad but some areas (under the back door) have sunk due to the continual wet/dry cycling. There’s another reason though. Last time we got lots of rain the garage almost flooded. I don’t think I’d like it if that happened with all my stuff in there.

The plumber said we have the flattest block in Logan. There’s a 10mm from right to left and another 10mm drop from back to front. To be fair, the front yard does drop considerably more but that’s towards the street and there’s good drainage there.

Here’s a quick picture showing the proposed drainage trench.

Luksusdyret has an adventure October 21, 2005

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I just spent several hours trying to recover from Luksusdyret’s latest adventure. I did several things at once and I guess that was ultimately my downfall since I wasn’t sure which action triggered the problems.

First off, I half-unpacked the case. I should really have taken everything out (since I was about to get a drill involved) but I was too lazy. I just left as much plugged in as I could while getting the motherboard clear of the back panel (luckily my motherboard sits on a removable panel).

Next I used my drill to cut the case where it was covering the audio out jack. I thought I might be able to keep the case relatively intact but the ports are inset so the whole needed to be bigger than the metal strip. I ended up bending the floating bit back into the case. The bottom also needed some bending. This left a large amount of metal shavings everywhere and my thumb still bears the scars from the last time I drilled out a computer case. Luckily the vacuum cleaner lives in the garage (we don’t have carpet in the house) so I used it to vacuum up the metal shavings.

While I was putting the machine back together I decided it was about time I got around to putting on the new faceplate. It’s not that different from the old one but (most important to me) it it clear which button is POWER and which is RESET. Why the original case didn’t make it clear is beyond me. Thanks to my “clean” work last time it was a snap to disconnect/reconnect the cables. This time I have my PVC electrical tape so it even looks more professional than the regular tape I used last time. I still don’t have that resistor so the power led will remain dark for now. I had to move the optical drives back a notch to sit flush with the front of the case.

My next move was to setup the AMP and speakers ready for the computer to turn on. My speaker wire isn’t quite long enough (isn’t that always the case) so there’s cable running where I need to walk. I might be able to grab one of the longer cables from the house to use it here.

Everything was ready so I turned the machine on. That’s when things started to look bad.

The clock was set to 1970 (I think the battery on the motherboard is dead) but I have it set to get the time from Apple. I checked and sure enough, that’s what it was set to. I checked the Wireless Link and it was up. However, I didn’t seem to be getting DHCP responses from the AP. Worse, I kept getting kernel panics.

My first thought was “I’ve fried the card when I took it out”. I tried taking the card in and out. I tried a different slot. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the driver. All to no avail. I remembered the app keeps settings so I removed the file and cleared everything from the program. Then I entered all the info again. Finally, the kernel panics stopped and I got an IP address.

Just for fun I did an “insulation test”. I know the insulation is good at blocking sounds from outside (it can be storming and I won’t hear it) but I wanted to know how good it was at blocking noise from my speakers, especially bass. It turns out that the insulation is quite good at doing that. I could barely hear any sound outside with the music quite loud and bassy. That’s a relief because I was wondering if late-night gaming sessions would annoy the neighbors (I know, headphones and all but if you can’t feel the sound it’s not the same).

I’ve been playing around with the wireless link too and it’s really sensitive to the position of the antenna and the computer. I’m thinking some kind of external (so it can be away from the big metal case), directional antenna is in my future (probably a DIY cantenna because I’m too stingy to buy stuff like that). As it is, I have the computer on the desk, rotated almost sideways with the antenna horizontal because that seems to get the best reception. My AP has 2 antennas so diverting one to a directional antenna shouldn’t hurt Bree’s wireless reception.

Well, that was a long post. I think it’s time to get to bed.

Photos of Emily October 19, 2005

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I finally uploaded some pictures of Emily. Pretty much every month from birth to now is represented. Go here or follow the “My Family” link to the right.

Bree's Surprise Party October 16, 2005

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We had a surprise birthday party/baby shower for Bree on Sunday. Bree had no idea what was going on and was totally surprised. She was a bit annoyed that I gave her my present (pixel panties) with other people present.

Severe Storm Warning October 12, 2005

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There was a severe storm warning yesterday. I didn’t think much of it until I found out that it had hit my mother-in-law’s house.

More than 50 roof tiles were damaged and it took 6 tubes of silicone and more than 4 hours to patch up the roof. A family friend who’s more handy than me volunteered their time (I helped by driving to Bunnings to get the silicone).

I drove around the Helensvale train station to check how bad the damage to my brother-in-law’s car was and it was like a riot zone. There was broken glass everywhere and dents in all the cars. Luckily his car didn’t have any broken windows but it’s got some big dents.

Hardware Failure October 11, 2005

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It seems I may have been a bit harsh when I criticised Apple’s filesystem (HFS+) the other day. I was complaining about how I’ve managed to lose data with it several times recently. However, it seems my troubles are actually due to a hardware fault rather than with HFS+ itself.

I’ve heard the infamous “click-of-death” coming from my main hard disk. So far the problem appears to be limited to just 1 partition on the disk (the boot partition) so it might be a bad sector rather than a disk failure. Hopefully that means I’ll be able to copy off all my data without too much trouble (it’s all on another partition that hasn’t experienced any problems in recent times).

Recovering from the weekend October 11, 2005

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My ‘bro moved house on Sunday. Instead of getting in removalists he relied on the goodwill (and vehicles) of family members. It was hard work and I picked up a couple of minor injuries too. My sister was there to help and brought a cold with her so I spent yesterday in bed. I figured it was better than going to work and getting everyone sick just before a release. It seems to have paid off too because I don’t feel like I’ve got a cold coming on anymore.

I also seem to have screwed up my back, though it may just be a cumulative thing (my neck’s been sore for weeks now). Time to find a good massage place in the area.

First post from the garage October 8, 2005

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The big move happened today (yep, it was this weekend) so I’m now setup in the garage. The wireless connection (now my only source of ‘net access) isn’t coping nearly as well as I’d hoped it would. I’m getting less than 10% signal strength at around 50-70% quality with transmission rates from 1-12Mbps. The situation will actually get worse before too long since we’re not planning on keeping the AP where it is (it’s in the new baby’s room) and the only convenient location is further away. It’ll probably (we’re not sure yet) end up sitting inside the TV cabinet which is on the other side of the wall it’s sitting on now. I might have to invest in a better antenna for my computer. If it’s a big enough problem I might hijack one of the antennas from my AP and hook up a directional link from the house to the garage. I think my initial tests (which were from Bree’s laptop many, many months ago) were all done with the roll-a-doors up which might explain the poorer-than-expected connection. A couple of Pringles cans could fix that up nicely.

I know what you’re thinking… Why didn’t I just move the cable point to my garage? Doing that would mean that Bree’s computer would be the one trying to do long-range wireless and with such a bad connection, that would have been disastrous. Bree hates it when I steal bandwidth so her computer already has higher priority than mine (QoS settings on the router). At least I have a relatively simple option available to me to get a decent connection (since my machine is fixed). The other problem with moving the cable point is that we’d need to put in a new conduit from the house to the garage. The electrician squeezed the required extra power cable down the existing one but nothing else will fit. Besides, if we put in a conduit I could just connect to the house with Ethernet. That would be cheaper than moving the cable point all the way over here.

I HATE fixed-width layouts October 6, 2005

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I thought I’d picked a nice Blogger theme but no, it’s one of those “I can’t write HTML for crap so I’ll just fix the width of the content” things. Ugh. I HATE fixed-width layouts because it makes my posts look really long and wastes perfectly good screen space.

Luckily, the template wasn’t too complex (ironically, most of the size is taken up in CSS statements) and I managed to shoehorn some lovely CSS I got from somewhere to give me a content section.