DavidCraddock.net

Now that I am midway through the year, I thought I’d revisit the goals I set myself at the start of the year , to see what has changed.

This requires you to have a subscription to Apple Music and a 3G/4G/wireless data connection, but it is so useful!

My Eurorack modular has been progressing.

If you have two soundcards - maybe a normal soundcard for your speakers and maybe a headset with its own audio interface - you will want some way of switching all audio between the two.

Not that I particularly look at anything weird, but when I’m showing someone my computer I don’t want to have my ‘most visited sites’ pop up when I fire up Chrome.

Two Ruby gems that I contributed to from my days in the BBC’s TITAN (Test Tools and Infrastructure) team, have been open-sourced.

I have a lot of different instruments, both hardware and software, for making music, but here is what I use the most at the moment: Piano I have an actual electric piano but I don’t use the onboard sound engine, preferring to use it as a midi controller f…

‘Snowflakes’.

Specs I have finished filling the top half of my Eurorack case, see above.

I am putting together a small modular synthesiser setup.

NOTE: I have an update on my progress as of 9/1/2015 here Motivated by my good friend CheerUpLove.com ’s reflective style of blogging, and Ian Forrester ’s many interesting posts, I thought it would be interesting to post something a bit more personal and…

I picked up a rather ugly (but very cheap!)

I decided to buy the DDJ-SR controller because it was cheaper than even the cheapest pair of Pioneer CDJs.

I bought some new synths.

Lately I’ve had the idea of creating a text-based Roguelike in C++.

I like to dabble in making and playing music.

I wanted to get a Kindlefire HDX running under Ubuntu 12.04 with adb.

Updated: Reorganised, replaced Tiamat headset for KAVE.

A good ergonomic chair is a wise investment if you’re going to spend a lot of time at your computer.

2015 Update: The “Device Hive” project has now been changed to be called ‘Hive CI’ and it is being maintained by a team of developers at the BBC, which I am no longer a part of.

I’ve been working on a project at the BBC where we are using the Android command-line tools from the Android Developer Tools , to spin up and terminate series of emulators.

I found this awesome cut-up poetry generator , which takes the text of famous poets and builds structured poetry out of it.

To get 256 colors working within terminator in Crunchbang Waldorf, I had to do the following: Add to ~/.bashrc export TERM=xterm-256color Install a 256 color VIM colorcheme, see desert256 for example .

I use the excellent http://www.smartsvn.com/ client from WANdisco.

iTerm is much better than the standard OSX terminal client, not least because it has compatiablity with xterm256-color terminal emulation. xterm256-color emulation will give your terminal access to 256 colours instead of the usual 16.

A quick tip this, but a useful one.

I am currently on holiday in Tenerife, and although I really like it here, one thing I do not like is the internet connection we have in our resort.

Recently, myself and two colleagues from the BBC, ran a session on Test Driven Development at the Manchester University ‘Ultimate Programming’ society.

I needed to view a single frame of a m2v file that had been encoded by our designers for playing out on TV.

After I wrote a Java application in JDK 1.6, I was stuck for a while when I realised that the target deployment machine was Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.

Nagios can be seen as a automated test tool for systems, just as you would have automated tests for software projects.

I’m currently in the process of writing a web scraper for the forums on Gaia Online .

At work, I still have to use Windows XP and Outlook 2003.

There is a problem I frequently encouter on Redhat/Fedora/CentOS systems with the output of the ls command.

I am moving to Manchester soon, and so I thought I’d get an idea of the housing market there by scraping all the Manchester Gumtree property adverts into a MySQL database.

REST (Representational State Transfer) is a way of delivering web services.

The BBC provide 3 day weather RSS feeds for most locations in the UK.

To quickly find large files to delete if you have filled your startup disk, enter this command on the OSX terminal: sudo find / -size +500000 -print This will find and print out file paths to files over 500MB.

You use the ’touch’ command to create two blank files, with a last modified date that you specify - one with a date of the start of the range you want to specify, and the second with a date at the end of the range you want to specify.

I wrote an email alerter that sends me an email whenever the upcoming temperature may dip below freezing.

If you’ve committed some code into to CVS, and made a mistake on that commit, you will want to know how to revert to a previously saved version.

I’ve been writing some simple Java GUI applications using the Netbeans IDE.

Here is some python code I adapted from this stackoverflow post to get the first day of a week specificed by a week number.

Quite cool little app that allows you to listen to different BBC Radio programmes from within a standalone application, instead of iPlayer: http://whomwah.github.com/radioaunty/

MediaMonkey is a popular free media player for Windows.

Software I use on my macbook & PC: DVDRipper Pro for Mac - DVD ripping, can also rip to ISO Handbrake for Mac - Transcoding from DVD rip to iPhone-playable file iMovie for Mac - Video editing BabasChess for Windows - Best chess client for internet play Hy…

This is just a quick note to remind myself how I did this.

I read this remarkable post on a public mailing list I subscribe to.

I installed Windows 7 after I had installed Ubuntu 10.4.

I have a 2006/2007 Core 2 Duo 2.6ghz white macbook, that I use regularly for internet, music, watching films, itunes and integration with my iPhone.