In my quest for a scriptable mixing system I tried csound (the syntax does my head in, and it won't read flac without having to convert it manually first), supercollider (doesn't work on 64 bit boxes), and ecasound (simpler than csound but requires too much base 60 arithmetic, and pitch/speed shifting for some reason sounds absolutely horrendously awful). Some time on Sunday I had the idea to write a bit of Perl that'd take a tracklist with specification of fades, pitch changes etc and turn it into an ecasound command line for me, and then I found Audio::FLAC::Decoder and decided to see if I could do it all in-house, so to speak.

From http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=501250 :

From: Daniel Barlow 
To: Debian Bug Tracking System 
Subject: libaudio-flac-decoder-perl: Does not produce same output as flac -d: data
 interleaved in weird way
Date: Sun, 05 Oct 2008 23:49:53 +0100

Package: libaudio-flac-decoder-perl
Version: 0.2-2.2+b1
Severity: important

I have rated this "important" because its effect is to make the output
sound absolutely awful.  On inspection of the decoded output and visual
comparison with that from flac -d, it appears that each correct 16 bit word 
in the Audio::FLAC::Decoder output is followed by another word from elsewhere
in the file.

Having hacked it back together (there's a patch in that bug report for anyone else similarly afflicted) I find that playing two tracks at once in a no-attention-paid-to-efficiency-at-all fashion eats about 20% cpu, but there are some really stupid format conversions going on there (libflac produces 16 bit samples in the msb of 32 bit words, then A::F::D converts into 16 bit packed samples and makes it a perl string, then my perl code unpacks it into an int array again to add the values one by one to the other stream) so I think it'll be fine for more complex stuff too if we can make it a bit less stupid first. If not, we get to play linking-ECL-with-libflac just to see what happens, but that involves writing glue for the callback system and for the moment I'm just as happy using someone else's that already works. Or at least, would be if it did.

In related news, still only halfway through ripping my CD collection - the process sort of ran down as 50% of the disks I try now don't rip cleanly. I am hoping I haven't toasted my CDROM drive ...

From http://www.anothercyclingforum.com/index.php?topic=50989.msg726177;topicseen#new :

The FNRttC, like all real magic, is about transitions and boundaries.

We start out at the boundary between one day and the next, and ride to the boundary between land and sea, and between those points we see the transitions from city to 'burb, from 'burb to countryside and from dark to dawn to daylight - and all of them change so subtly, like the humming of a fan you don't notice until it switches off, that it's only afterwards you realise what's happened.

It's genius. G K Chesterton would have reviewed it favourably.

Elevator pitch: the Friday Night Ride to the Coast is a bike ride from London to the coast which happens on a Friday night (usually the closest Friday to the full moon). For more info see the basics on the blog

The other week:

anticlockwise f-b: start by setting the right foot down pointing leftwards so that it crosses the direction of forward motion. Not sure why this helps, but it does.

Anyway, while I've been in a skate technique frame of mind I've been playing with the transitions again - and can answer the question I raised above: it's not about which way the foot is pointing per se, it's about weight distribution. Steering the right foot under the body is not actually required, it's just one way to get my weight properly on the right foot when I pivot the left foot, therefore the left foot doesn't drag in a messy and aurally displeasing fashion.

Lunge turns at near-ground level are fun.

• Saturday was week three of Turns and Stops: slalom turns, which I find harder when broken down into stages than to do all at once, snowploughs, and stepping stops. Easier than last week.

• also spent some time monkeying with f-b transitions, which now feel nearly OK on both sides.

• was intending to join the Emitremmus ride yesterday, but weather was looking miserable and I decided to spend the extra hour in bed.

• So went ice skating instead, for the first time since (it would appear) Feb 2007 (Tax the rat farms). Took less time this time to get used to the rocker and rediscover my edges, spent some time trying and mostly failing to skate backwards. And I found my Sealskinz gloves, which were stuffed in one of my ice skates and presumably have been since Feb 2007 ...

• While looking for cable ties the other day I found the rubber cap required to fit my pullup bar to the doorframe. Which is ideal, because my on-off flirtation with improving upper body strength (next time I land on my arms I would like to not break my teeth or dislocate my shoulder again) has reached the point where I am doing too many reps and need to add intensity. Fitted it and spent far more time dangling off it than I should have, to the point where I have DOMS two days later. Oh well, at least it's working then ...