I was watching last Saturday's Headbanger's Ball last night and started wondering just how metal in general has really gone down the tubes. Hell, Headbanger's Ball alone pretty much is teh suck, but I think the main problem is there's just too many metal bands and they all sound absolutely identical. I can't even believe I'd ever be saying this, given that I've listened to metal for years and years, starting with my very first Iron Maiden tape (Seventh Son of a Seventh Son), moving on to Slayer and Sepultura and so on...

I especially wanted to throw up all over myself while watching yet another DragonForce video, and I was going to go on a long winded rant but luckily someone already has for me.

And before I forget, here's another example of epic fail, Wykked Wytch.

I finally found Encyclopedia Dramatica and I love it.

So the biggie is that my company just announced that we're being acquired by Progress Software. The transaction is expected to close sometime in September. For me it could really be good, as Progress has an office in Nashua, NH and Bedford, MA, which would really help out my commute. Lately the drive down to Waltham has been more atrocious than normal for some reason. But anyway, Progress looks like it's a nice company to work for, so fingers crossed the transaction goes well and they decide to keep the customer service and engineering departments on (it's expected that they will).

Kristen and the baby so far are doing just great. What's really neat is that you can feel him once in awhile, it's really exciting. I just came from an afternoon of holding babies at a friend's birthday party, so I feel all babied up.

Finally, I settled on getting this device to make my music collection available all around the house. I first decided that my webserver machine was just not powerful enough to handle running mpd as well as the website, every time someone hit the website mpd would skip. So I decided to re-enable the onboard sound on my desktop machine and configured mpd to use the onboard sound. I also still configured icecast, 'cause even though I've got the FM transmitter I still want the option to stream audio for when I'm at work or wherever. And I've also configured mpdscribble, so regardless of where I listen to my music from it'll get submitted to last.fm. Again, it's odd that I care about it, must be some deep rooted narcissism or something. I then also thought I'd add some javascript to the page here to query the icecast server and print out what I'm listening to at any given moment.

Anyway, the transmitter so far works really well, I've only done a little bit of cursory testing with it and a couple different radios, one in the bedroom right next to the office and the other in the living room. Once I fastened the antenna to the ceiling with a thumbtack and tried a few different FM frequencies I've got a pretty good low-static broadcast that sounds great. The real test will be to see if the signal can make it out to the screen house as is.

I hope the poor kid isn't gonna be scarred for life when he finds out later on that there's been vids of him posted on teh intarwebs from before he was born.

Anyway, the level 2 ultrasound folks let you bring up a DVD and they'll burn the whole session to disc for ya.

Here's part 1:

And here's part 2:

There's a fullscreen button in the lower-right corner of the player's toolbar. The flash video player by the way is MC Media Player

Lately I've been really into listening to music, or at least just having it playing while I work or clean or whatever. Up until recently I've been using the excellent Jinzora streaming media server, which is a PHP-based web app that can either stream files via HTTP or control mpd. I've mostly been using the streaming feature, either I'd stream tunes to my desktop in the office and just turn up my computer speakers, or I'd set up my laptop somewhere (like out in the screenhouse) and hook it up to some random stereo that otherwise is sitting and collecting dust.

A couple weeks ago though I wanted to have music playing both in the house and out in the screen house. I wound up blasting music from the office and had the laptop out in the screenhouse, however they were of course not in sync at all, so as you came inside you'd be hearing a completely different song. It was mainly a problem if you stood in just the right spot in the backyard, where you could hear two different songs playing at any given time. Pretty awful I thought.

Since then I've been looking for a better setup. I've tried:

• slim server - which worked pretty good, but the Java WebStart program that behaves like a slim server client refused to run on my 64-bit Linux desktop. I also really didn't want to shell out any cash for the hardware devices, though they're a nice-to-have.
• VLC - I wanted to try and get multicast working so I could sync several VLC clients together, but streaming over multicast seemed to completely suck, regardless of how I configured the server I couldn't get anything but a choppy stream. Also I didn't really find a good way to automate the server, or have it behave like a constant stream that I could just connect clients to.
• Jinzora controlling mpd - Problem here is that Jinzora's controls for MPD are pretty basic, and I've been finding that my little server has been getting more and more sluggish with more recent Jinzora releases.

I finally settled on mpd using gmpc to control it. The music server outputs to both the soundcard on my server and to icecast2. And gmpc lets you toggle which output to use, either the stream, soundcard or both. This means I can still stream music from home to work (or wherever else I can get a wifi connection), and from the basement out to the screen house, but I can also have multiple clients connected to icecast2 streaming the same playlist relatively in sync. Or, I can have music playing out of the server (connected to a receiver currently in the basement hooked up to speakers pointing up at the basement ceiling) and streamed to my laptop in the screenhouse, though there's some latency between what comes through the soundcard and what comes through the stream.

I'm also using mpdscribble to submit track info to last.fm. I'm not sure why I care about submitting tracks, but it's kinda cool to see trends in what kind of music you're listening to.

The only downside is that my wife's Windows Vista laptop so far absolutely refuses to play the stream, and I haven't bothered getting an mpd client downloaded onto it, but who cares about that anyway?

We had to go up to Portland, ME to get a level 2 ultrasound since the machine apparently wasn't that good at our normal place. Here's a teaser, click on it to get to the whole album.

And he's definitely a boy! In this pic he's either yawning or giving his primal scream...

At work I was asked to look into any potential open source web conferencing tools that we can use as part of our new support system which will maybe get deployed sometime this year. I recall looking into this a little bit a couple years ago and really didn't find anything, so I wasn't to hopeful I'd find anything this time either.

Go figure though the second hit on Google was WebHuddle, it's GPL, runs on JBoss and has Linux, Windows and Mac support. I had it up and running in about 10 minutes or so and have done a little bit of testing, and while it's not as fast as WebEx for desktop sharing it's still decent enough, I think the cross-platform support beats that out anyway, as the capturing is done by a pretty small pure Java applet.

So just in case anyone is looking for an open source web conferencing tool that you can deploy in your own network I figured I'd like post something on it or whatever.

Just upgraded some stuff on the server this afternoon including the kernel, so I rebooted the box and wouldn't you know it didn't want to come back up at all. I went down into the basement to check it out and of course it was sitting there waiting for the power button to be pressed (it's a pretty old machine). So I shut it off, turned it back on and of course it promptly turned right back off again. I spent a few minutes trying a few things to get it working again, including unplugging the external HD (I had an older one that for whatever reason would cause the box to refuse to power up if it was plugged in), unplugging the UPS, fiddling with the keyboard and so on.

But no luck. So I changed my desktop upstairs to have a static IP address, slapped together a quick "my site is screwed" page and set my router to point to the desktop. I also had to turn on the router's DHCP server, as the web server was handling all of that.

I figured I'd try and get the server back up and running, I mean it's been on and running without a problem for months now. I finally found that I had to unplug the external HD and UPS, hold in the reset key and flick on the switch on the back of the machine. I then had to continue holding the reset key for a good minute or so and then once I let go after about 10 seconds the machine did it's POST beep and started booting. Which of course means I had to frantically plug in the external HD since it's configured in my /etc/fstab.

Then of course my router decided to go crazy on me...

Well, the holidays are thankfully over and things are getting back to normal around here. And we finally got our Wii back, as it had to be sent in to get serviced. Turns out in some of the older models leaving the Wii in standby mode with WiiConnect24 turned on means that the wifi card will eventually cook the graphic chip, which ultimately means you start seeing small graphic problems as you're playing games or even on the main menu screen. Here's an example (though the guy's camera isn't that great).

Still, it was a pretty easy process. I called the number on the bottom of the Wii, gave them the serial number, they then sent me an e-mail with a link where I could print out a label for FedEx. All I had to do was track down a suitable box and go to a drop off location to get the ball rolling. It took them about 2 or 3 weeks I guess to get it back to me. All of our save games were intact, however we can't edit our existing Miis. Also I had to re-download the Internet channel and the virtual console games I had purchased, but that all was only a slight hassle.

This will mean my 360 can take a break for awhile.

Unfortunately I haven't been doing much music-related stuff, work has been keeping me pretty busy. Kristen and I are on a big health kick though and have been trying to get to the gym as much as possible, as well as change our diet. This show has been the main inspiration. Funny also how many commercials for weight loss pills/plans there are at the beginning of the year, I hadn't noticed that before.

Just a quick update, I've re-done some tracks from Falafel Of Flatulence, namely the tracks that I don't have the original 4-track cassettes (for whatever reason). If you've downloaded any of them or the zip file containing the whole album you may want to head over to the Fart Waffle page and grab the updates.

Well, I managed to hose my Ubuntu Studio installation on the Dell. I wanted to try an upgrade from Feisty to Gutsy as it was released last week. As I've customized this machine a lot over the last few months I figured the upgrade wouldn't go smoothly. Sure enough it didn't.

After getting about 75 to 80 percent through installing all of the packages one of the package install scripts must have unloaded a bunch of modules, then the install script for am-utils hung trying to shut down amd, since there was no network. Then Ubuntu's upgrade installer thingie just kind of bailed on me.

I did manage to complete some of the upgrade, but now my desktop was in a pretty bad state. So I decided to do what I usually do, log into X using the fail-safe x-term, start up metacity manually, then run firefox and grab the install CD for the most recent release of Ubuntu Studio. I got that downloaded and burned to DVD (luckily gnomebaker works just fine without the rest of GNOME running), backed up a bunch of other stuff to DVD (love DVD-R) and rebooted. Certainly it can't be that simple, can it?

Well, no it can't be that simple. Upon reaching the initial installation screen it seems that Ubuntu Studio's installer didn't want to detect my USB keyboard. I went and hunted down a USB-to-PS/2 adapter for my keyboard and then found that my machine (it's the XPS 410) actually doesn't have PS/2 ports. Guess that's why there's like 20 USB ports on this thing. That was kind of a deal-breaker for Ubuntu Studio, I kind of looked around for a second or two to see if there was an easy fix, but didn't honestly spend any time on it.

I rather wanted to try out some of the other audio-focused Linux distributions. I finally settled on 64 Studio. It's Debian based, so it's not all that different from Ubuntu, I've really come to like apt and also just like the way Debian distros are set up. Anyway, 64 Studio installed cleanly out of the box. I naturally enabled the testing repositories to get more recent versions of all of the applications. The only snag I ran into there was with one of the packages related to bootsplash, but I was able to quickly find a fix.

So far I really like it. It comes with the real-time kernel set up out of the box, so I was able to get a good low latency set up right away. I also tried their tutorial on how to get VST stuff running but I found it's still far from perfect, I had to increase jackd's buffer sizes up to the point where the latency was unacceptable. But that's okay, I don't really have any VSTs that I've been dying to use anyway, there's plenty of great native DSSI/LADSPA plugins to use.

My initial impression when logging in is that the desktop environment reminds me of CentOS. Probably because it's the same GNOME version. But the nice thing is they actually bothered to make a menu entry for envy24control, something the Ubuntu Studio folks didn't do (maybe it's got an entry in the Gutsy version though). As I have this card it's an essential app.

Damn Iestyn, he's right on about me changing desktops every couple months.