Roadcasting

Wow.. apparently some crafty individuals from Carnegie Mellon University are already quite a ways into developing Roadcasting, a system where drivers can broadcast their own “radio station” as well as tune into others’ over an ad-hoc wireless network. But it’s also much more than that. It allows a listener to have established “tastes” that influence their own track selection as well as the stations they listen to. In addition, you will be able to vote what plays next on a remote station between 3 songs that are automatically chosen from everybody’s “tastes”. It sounds like they’re incorporating all sorts of nifty usability and otherwise features like that into the system to make the whole experience as seamless and enjoyable as possible. They say they were contracted by a “major auto manufacturer” to develop this for commercialization by 2010. The java source is already even available for download, though. Sounds pretty damn neat to me.

Mixxx R0x0rz my S0x0rz

So I’ve been on the Mixxx mailing list for a little while now, exchanging messages to and fro its developers/users regarding getting my Sound Blaster Live’s two pairs of outputs to work independently with Mixxx so I can actually have a proper dj headphone cue to hear the song before I bring it in.

Well, the list wasn’t able to pinpoint my problem. It was only after some web research that I found that the problem is that the alsa driver in my 2.6.11-gentoo-r6 didn’t have the special output channel listed in /proc/asound/devices as described in this thread. So, by removing all alsa components from my kernel, rebuilding, and then emerging alsa-driver 1.0.9rc2, I was able to attain the additional input line. And by launching jackd like so…

$ jackd -v -d alsa -P hw:0,3 -C hw:0,2 -S

I was able to see not two, not four, but SIXTEEN inputs AND outputs for my sound card in qjackctl. By routing the first pair to master out in mixxx, and the second pair to headphone, I was able to achieve ALMOST what I wanted. Unfortunately, the headphone routing in Mixxx 1.4.2 doesn’t work the way anybody would want. (Toggling on headphone for a channel meant that will never be heard in the “final mix” channels, so you’d have to turn off the headphone cue before you xfade into it—almost worthless.) So… I built the CVS version of Mixxx.

And today, I properly finished installing the realtime kernel module so my user can run jackd in realtime priority. So now, I don’t have any of the nasty skips in the audio like I had before. Word up to DJing in Linux!!

Secure Delete

So I’m selling off my old laptop to someone who found my listing on AllMSU, and so I decided to do a proper secure delete. After some quick research I found Secure Delete from The Hacker’s Choice. They’re some very flexible tools to delete files/partitions/etc so they can never be recovered. What I ended up doing in this case, though, is wiping the entire partiton clean off while booted from a Knoppix CD. This article shows how to use the “shred” tool.

# shred -n 2 -z -v /dev/hda1

Which will overwrite every bit on the drive with random (or otherwise generated) 1’s and 0’s bits for TWO passes before going back over again on a THIRD pass to make everything 0 again. Needless to say, this is taking quite some time…

Paranoia? Perhaps… but any security savvy person would say it is generally good practice (that many still do not follow).

KMP v0.5, Released!

So after about a year and a half, and after sitting on basically the final release for about an extra week, we’ve finally done the last part and actually posted the link to the new version. Of course, if you were following the kmp development in svn, you’d have had most these improvements for quite a while. Anyway, visit the KMP page and get your copy today!

The Scary Future of DRM

I’ve been reading startling stories about DRM, or Digital Rights Management, for quite some time now, but it hasn’t been until recently that the major PC makers (Dell, HP, IBM) started putting these TC chips into new computers. TC stands for Treacherous Computing, or as the imposing companies like to call “Trusted Computing.” This could be the seed to a much larger ploy the Corporations have to control consumers and take away their rights. I just read This very interesting BBC article that explains the current state of affairs much better than I’m going to here. A quote from the article that I must put here:

Ho man they nailed it there, didn’t they…

House Party, Upcoming DNB, and Desktop Blather

So I usually post a bunch of cool stuff when I go to shows, but last night’s house party show wasn’t quite everything I was hoping for. My friend Matt and I got there way early, so we did a lot of hanging around and meeting of the people before the music even got kicking. There was quite an unexpected lineup of breaks DJ’s that spun before Scottfro’s “12:00” show came on at about 2:30. Unfortunately, Matt and I were exhausted by then, and only stayed for about 30 mins of Scott’s set before it came to my attention that I had a parking ticket. Oh nice.

Some of the breaks were pretty good, but I was really there to hear Scott & Chris’s set. The main disappointment was how long it took for them to get on. And when they did, technical difficulties made getting started a challange… But anyway, alongside Scott, Chris had a laptop and some midi controllers sync’d up with Scott’s. (They use Ableton Live!) Chris also used a turntable to spin some beats and do some scratching over Scott’s sound. It was pretty neat to see some live collaboration from those guys.

In other news, I’m planning to go to The World of DNB II in Chicago on April 1 with my good friend Aren and his girl. Looks like a dope lineup… can’t wait to hear the sounds.

In yet other news, because I feel like it, I’m going to post a screenshot today. It’s the fresh gnome 2.10 (man, those nautilus windows pop up faster than ever now) with the torsmo system monitor. It’s pretty neat… I just know you wanted to see it.

(Yes, I’m running dual screens, but I cropped out the other one since you don’t need to see it. Also, a neat script lets me see what’s playing in mpd in the torsmo. In this case, it’s the almighty dnbradio.com! whOOt!)

Update, Noon on Monday: Well, the ticket only cost me $7. I paid it on the phone… better luck next time…

YourCollegeTees.com Goes Live

Of course I have to mention that the other day saw the launch of my friend Blake’s t-shirt selling business’s website, YourCollegeTees.com. After abandoning Yahoo!’s merchant solutions because they used proprietary and broken(!) technologies, I was able to whip up a nice site using the open source Quick Cart. (The website appears to be down right now.) I’m told that these t-shirts with funny sayings on them are a new fad; people are wearing them on those reality show things like the Real World. (Know, though, that that is very much second hand information.) Anyway, help support Blake’s t-shirts and pick one up!

Oh, and his more serious site offers bulk orders for organizations who want t-shirts made: SpartanSpecialtees.com.

Enjoying Break; Gentoo Fails

So I’m a week into my break, and it’s Christmas Eve! I’ve been mostly offline for the last few days as I’ve been trying to load Gentoo onto our server (from the flakey Fedora). Working with speeds literally around 800 b/s, I finally managed to get all the packages I wanted installed. (All the big stuff was downloaded elsewhere with broadband connections.) Weird stuff was going on with the nat firewall, though. I could ftp and ssh through the gateway just fine, but web requests (while they DO establish a tcp connection with the server) never received any response. And trying to get on the AIM network with Gaim caused it to hang and eventually time out when it says “Password sent.”

I tried kernels 2.6.9-gentoo-r10, 2.6.8.1, 2.6.6, and even 2.4.28… probably overkill, but I knew pretty much for sure it wasn’t the kernel at that point. I also tried FireHOL to test the workiness of my favorite projectfiles.com firewall script (which has worked every time in the past).

So anyway, after rebuilding the bare bones of Gentoo (from stage3) from scratch, and observing the same behavior, I gave up. Now, I’ve got Ubuntu Linux on there, and it’s working great. Ubuntu has recently become my second favorite distribution for being so damn simple in nature. GUI package managers and configurator dealios coupled with a solid Debian foundation and great autodetection etc etc… make Ubuntu one sweet distro. I was trying to go for a minimalist server with my Gentoo approach, but I guess my dad doesn’t mind a friendly Gnome desktop with lots of GUI tools.

Why BitTorrent is Here to Stay

So I wrote this paper for my TC201 class. It’s only about 3 pages long, but I thought it was sort of interesting and vaguely worth posting on my site. So, for whoever’s interested, you can read my paper. Just click the more link after the first paragraph.

BitTorrent is a truly amazing technology. Invented and implemented by lone hacker Bram Cohen and distributed for free, it has quickly become one of the most popular and revolutionary P2P-style file sharing systems on the Internet. It has been successfully used to distribute giant files ranging from several hundred megabytes to gigabytes in size across the Internet without the use of a monolithic server with fixed bandwidth. Companies like Red Hat have been distributing their free software (which can be several CD's in size) across the Internet without saturating their own servers' upload bandwidth -- a huge legitimate win for such legal content. This revolutionary technology, like so many others, has its potential for abuse. It can be used by pirates to share large video files and software quickly and efficiently without the bandwidth issues that arise from serving them up with HTTP or FTP from a single host. The Induce Act, however, aims to correct this very "problem," but many people say the act is far more reaching than its proposers will have you believe.

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Gearing Up

Although I haven’t mentioned anything about it yet, I’ve been experimenting with Propellerheads Reason 2.5. While I’ve only produced a couple of short and pretty simple tracks, I am in the process of becoming more serious with it. Up until now, I’ve only been using my sub-par 700MHz laptop with no proper midi controller. In the next day or two, I will clear up enough space so I can partition off something like 10 Gb for windoze and get to work with an Evolution MK-425C that is due to arrive on Thursday. But for now, I have to go write a paper. Oh, and you can click that picture for a (much) larger one.