Think it is too late by now to wish a Happy New Year to you all, right
Today I received my Yamaha N12 and after lots of issues with setting it up, I have to say it simply rocks.
But as Michael did describe his issues on his blog and I think this is a brilliant idea, I’ll do the same.
Though most machines tend to be 64bit these days, software companies still need to fill that gap. It is hard to find 64bit software in relation to audio producing, many companies rejected or a very long time to provide updates. Luckily it seems like times are changing due to the big user demand. Steinberg has a 64bit version of its Cubase 5 Studio per default (another thing I recently bought and which is awesome as well), Toontrack seems to recognize that their VST drum plugins should be 64bit as well and offers a beta version since a few weeks and finally Yamaha has a 64bit driver setup. This is where my troubles started.
Without going too muchintodetail, here’s the soluion and scenario how you can really get the firmware and the drivers installed successfully:
Turn off the N12 and connect the firewire cable to your machine
Install the update available from the yamaha website (Tools for n Version2)
Install the IEEE1394_Firmware Updater v1.07
Press Prev and Click Remote On buttons while turning on the N12
Install the N12 Firmware Updater v1.03 (NOTE THAT THESE ARE DIFFERENT THINGS!)
Be happy. For internet redundany reasons here is a picture provided by a guy(wiseg) on this forum:
That’s it. From now on you can start using it. Being a software engineer myself and getting tired of people not reading the documentation properly sometimes, I have to say, that it took me hours to figure the correct order and items to install.
However, expect some updates of the recordings of my band Tokks Voitto soon.
Time is almost over where each and every TV Channel has its résumé shows. But still it is time to give a best of 2009 related to music. So here are my favorite candidates for best album:
Kreator surprised with a rather classical album, remembering more on the Coma of Souls times. Nevertheless, this album is awesome and I really enjoyed listening to it. I don’t like Miland’s clean vocals, but the rest simply shines over that.
Behemoth stays Behemoth with each and every album, but still it does not get boring. Their latest work is really good stuff, which had wakened me in the train for months each morning. Daimonos is a perfect starter and very clearly shows the message of the album. Fast, hard and brutal. Definitely a win for this year.
Seems like this is a polish year, ay? Vader absolutely surprised me with that album. I was (and guess I still am) a huge fan of the Lithany album. Even though some albums might be better from a technical level, the sound was awesome. And this time, Vader managed to get that sound fitting with their music again. Drums are tight and straight forward, absolutely like it. Also the fact that Devilizer starts rather slowly was more of a help to get into the album. The only thing I did not like on that CD are the bonus tracks containing cover songs by Venom and Metallica. But as they are bonus material, they should not get into account for the measurement. This album definitely made my year 2009.
And I hope that after listening to Vader for almost 13 years, I will finally manage to see them live. I guess everyone in the whole world has seen them but me! So I guess this is going to be my proposition for 2010 then
Happy New Year everyone, I hope you will enjoy the evening and parties…
Some of you (at least the people living in Germany should have) probably heard about the latest proposals by our Federal Minister of Family Affairs. Basically it is about to enable better protection from child pornography in the internet. Just to be 100% clear, I absolutely consent with putting all available efforts in finding those criminals and adjudge them with maximum punishment the law allows to.
But the suggested way is to enable filters for webpages. While this sounds like a perfect solution for a dummy, most of the readers of this blog are no novices when it comes to online technologies. Firstly it is no problem at all to circumvent such systems by simply using proxies. In addition this opens all doors for enabling a fully working censor system in our country.
Consequently this proposal must be avoided by all means. The German Bundestag allows to create online petitions and if enough people sign such a document, the topic has to be further discussed.
Though I was asked to blog about leaving projects and reasons, I won’t. Sorry to disappoint you frank
To give you some general updates, I have started another musical project, which might be interesting for some of you. We are waiting for people to join the Open Death project. As far as I can tell some folks already stated interest and hopefully we will be able to keep you updated. Even if you are not a musician, this is your chance to create music as you like it, well…. given the fact you like Death Metal…
To sum up, I found a very cool link. Unfortunately it is in german, but having a look at the pictures will give you an impression about this extremely great hobby, which is building your own drum pedal. Actually it is a double bass drum pedal and the final result really looks awesome. Also following the milestones in between is totally cool, so have a look here.
Wow, more than half a year again, between two posts. I won’t start apologizing, things like this loose their impact, when you say them too often.
So, what am I up to currently?
Spare Time:
Searching for a band to play drums in Berlin, anyone who wants to play something between Opeth, Arch Enemy and Strapping Young Lad?
Still doing my piano lessons
Still expanding my DVD collection
Anything coding related?
More accidently I kind of contributed here, among other commits and joined the KDE on Windows project. This is mostly work related, but as I am searching for a new audio player on Windows, I have to admit, that amarok2 on windows is really cool. Using Qt 4.5 is still breaking some stuff, this is what I’ll try to investigate on during the coming weeks.
Haiku related? Hm… nothing serious to talk about, see this screenshot and try to remember, from where you might know this application:
I think that was basically it. I won’t start telling that I’ll write more often, you know that this won’t happen
When I was a teenager, I started to get interested in this whole computer thing. Yeah actually much later than most of the others. I remember a discussion with my father at that time, that if I decide to do IT, I should not go into software development and rather decide to go for robotics. Some weeks later I got a book about it. But I was never talented when it came to dexterity and/or real construction of things (Damn I’m even afraid today, if I have to open my desktop box ). So I lost interest in this part of today’s technology….
Until I saw that link:
Oh my freaking god, this thing is insane and one can only imagine what military use this will have at one point. Getting people to play with it for civil purposes will probably take its time, it has always been like that. But hey, I should have reconsidered….
P.S.: This entry was lying around for some time now on this blog without being published, so most of you will already know that link….
I am usually a very sceptical person when it comes to political news being pushed by the media. The yellow press in Germany is always against what has to be decided independent of who the current decisor is (well that’s political independence I guess ). It is always good to listen to both sides and start to formalize your own opinion, or simply shut up if you are unsure.
On the other hand I have been one of the first persons shouting and yelling at the latest happenings in China and Tibet. I guess most of you have seen the Tibetian flag on the sidebar and potentially I should say something about this.
First, let me show you why I am writing this entry. Today I found an interesting link: here.
Basically it is about the Chinese view on this whole thing. Of course one could state that this is typical chinese propaganda, which has been quoted in our media already. But this is the first time I could actually listen to what these people think about this issue. And as we all know (as you are all intelligent people), the truth is somewhere in between.
As a consequence I should remove the banner you might say now. Actually, no I will not. And this is for multiple reasons:
For me “Free Tibet” does not mean that it should be it’s own independent country. I am looking forward to freedom of choice, culture and religion. If the religious leader is not allowed to visit his people, this is plainly wrong. Consider the pope not being allowed to be in Vatican City because the Italian forbid it. Just think of a situation, where you are not allowed to wear a Christian cross with you, would you accept this situation?
I am looking forward to a dialog between both sides. As long as the mob riots and the corresponding leaders are not willing to negotiate, it will get worse and worse.
I am looking forward to our politicians accepting the fact that we do care about the people getting arrested, hurt or even worse, on both sides. It is time to put pressure on any participant that is not willing to open a dialog. The happenings about the olympic flame is simply the only catalysator to show everyone their displeasedness.
The teaches of Gautama are basically the total oposite of what is going on there currently, so please get back to your roots and get this thing handled peacefully and rational.
Many thanks to Matthias (Paradoxon) to inspire me about this entry, it’s hard to summarize this within that short amount of lines….
Not much going on currently, so it’s more time to just paste some links, I’ve seen during the last weeks.
First of all, a link to a company called 37Signals. It is really interesting what attempts are made world wide to increase the employee’s productivity. Really interesting to see that project progress.
Secondly, a link to a video showing six amazing drummers. It’s real fun…
As not much is going on currently, of which I am willing to talk about, it’s time to digg deep in the past. Unfortunately it feels like this.
While I was in my hometown during one of the last weekends. I met our former guitar player Holger. It was nice to see him again and get to hear that life was good to him for the last months. This hasn’t always been like this and that gives me positive emotions
One topic of that evening was, that the band page of Dragonfyre still exists and is available here. We’ve decided to shut it down a long time ago, but now I at least have the chance to backup two images, which mean a lot to me.
Unfortunately Holger is not on any of these images, maybe I’ll update this entry with some more, if my backup external disk survived the last moving.
Anyway, rest in peace Dragonfyre, it was always an honor to be a member…
It is quite some time now since my last employer opened Chapter 11. From that on it took some time, effort and self-control to get distance to this topic. A lot of things have been said from a lot of perspectives. But this post is not supposed to talk about the past, it’s just an intro of what I’ve been doing during the last days.
As most of this blog’s readers know, there is still an open source variant of the BeOS out there, namely Haiku. Sometimes (or on a regular basis), people on IRC asked me, if I took a look at it and always I’ve declined. But like it is with an ex-girlfriend, either you like it or not, at some point you’ll meet again.
In case you’re reading through all Haiku related blogs and internet pages, you can see that a few people are even brave enough to try this OS out on their daily basis. So I’d considered Haiku to be at some usable state. Still working on a 1.4 GHz Acer Notebook minimizes your fun in using today’s virtualization possibilities. I can run images, but the performance is not even discussable. Thus, I’ve tried to install it natively.
The build system has a very easy way to cross-compile and even copy the files over to a partition, which is going to be initialized with the bfs. Simply add the following two lines to your UserBuildConfig, and you’re ready to go:
Now, as I am not interested in running any of the spectacular, high-performance, super-killer apps which are still available on Bebits, I have decided to build a gcc4 build to have at least an impression that I am using something decent and updated.
Unfortunately the input_server hangs somewhere, neither mouse nor keyboard was working. I’ve also tried the USB Legacy mode, which gave me the chance to have a mouse. Unfortunately the system either KDLs or deadlocks somewhere after around 10-20 seconds. Talking to one of the developers of haiku, he asked me to give him a syslog. Luckily there is a BFS read-only implementation for Linux, so I opened the partition and was fairly surprised to not find any syslog. I did remember, that there was one in the few seconds, I could work on it. So I rebooted, instantly tried to copy the syslog (to get the data flushed on the partition), and went back to linux. Once again, no syslog. It seems like the bfs is having real fun. Discussing all these issues (there were more, but nothing worth mentioning compared to aboves) with a friend, he suggested to try out the gcc2 build and wohoo, it worked out of the box. So the solution to all these issues is to still stay in the 90’s to use an OS, which approximately will be out in 2010.
Anyway, all I can say so far is, it has been great fun watching a Be related OS again on my machine. It’s just reminiscent mood I guess, but still: it is almost tempting to just do something.
And the year just started…
