New job

Working at home during the Intelligent Lockdown got me thinking about a lot of stuff, including my job at Cyso. I started weighing the many positive aspects against the negative ones and unfortunately the balance tilted too much towards the negative side. So when I got contacted by Evidos I decided to bite the bullet because their offer just ticked so many boxes. Started there in August and I’m now at the point where things are starting to roll. I’m hired as a cloud engineer but as a jack of all trades I already find myself meddling with all kinds of things. Besides maintaining the current cloud platforms, which are mainly used for testing purposes, I’m also heavily involved in the upcoming migration of the current setup into the cloud. And I offer a fresh outlook on a wide variety of subjects that could be done better in my opinion. Think of monitoring, automation and security but also how operational work could be organized better, how existing processes could be improved and I’ve made a start with setting a proper standard for documenting all the things we do.

Evidos itself is a company that does digital signing. Think of all kinds of contracts, deeds or other official documents that need a signature. So no need to go to a notary office, estate agent or your new employer physically, just add your signature in a digital way to the official documents and end up with documents that have been fully signed by all involved parties with a solid judiciary basis. This just saves a lot of time, paper and physical encounters that should be avoided as much as possible these days.

For me this means improving my skills when it comes to encryption standards and methods, security awareness and compliancy. And a great opportunity to make good use of the knowledge I’ve amassed over the years. So far I’m happy about the decision I’ve made, it’s quite a step to change jobs, especially when you already work for a great company with a permanent contract and also given the current circumstances. But sometimes you’re just forced to step back and reconsider. I’m glad that happened, I’m regaining my enthusiasm to work with Linux and open source software in general which is a good sign and I’m starting to find more focus and peace in my current job. A good thing, not just on a professional level but also on a personal level.

New job

The wait is almost over

For years users have been asking for a ZynAddSubFX or Yoshimi plug-in with a GUI for Linux. It seems the wait is almost over thanks to the great work of Filipe Coelho aka falkTX.

ZynAddSubFX-LV2 Test #1 (Qtractor)

According to falkTX work on the plug-in is almost 90% done. Parameters can be restored too as the following video shows.

ZynAddSubFX-LV2 Test #2 (Ardour)

Apparently the developer of ZynAddSubFX is working on exposing all parameters so in the future it should also be possible to automate Zyn’s most relevant parameters. Needless to say this stuff is still highly experimental so use at your own risk. I’ve done quite some tests and the plug-in keeps up well, also if you use many of them within a project (I’ve tested with a project with about 15 ZynAddSubFX-LV2 instances). But this doesn’t mean the plug-in doesn’t have any flaws, closing its GUI could crash your DAW for instance. Further tests should reveal all the obvious bugs so everyone, get that code and test it! Build instructions can be found in the aforementioned forum thread.

Many, many thanks to falkTX for making this possible!

The wait is almost over

TYOQA is aangebroken!

The Year Of Qtractor Automation is aangebroken, oftewel Rui, de ontwikkelaar van Qtractor, is begonnen met het implementeren van automatisering in Qtractor. En het ziet er goed uit, het werkt goed en het voelt goed. Dat laatste klinkt misschien vreemd maar zulke ingrijpende veranderingen aan een applicatie die je bijna dagelijks gebruikt kunnen je ook tegenvallen of je zelfs tegen gaan staan.


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Qtractor hoofdscherm met MIDI track en automatiseringscurve

En op de een of andere manier voelt de manier waarop Rui dit implementeert bijna als vanzelfsprekend. Ik kan er gelijk mee overweg, begrijp hoe het werkt en zie van allerlei mogelijkheden die deze functionaliteit biedt voorbij trekken in m’n hoofd.

Gebruik je net zoals ik Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04 dan heb ik goed nieuws, heb een Qtractor-SVN PPA opgezet waarnaar ik m.b.v. een script nieuwe bronpakketten upload zodra er aanpassingen zijn in de SVN trunk:

#!/bin/bash

MAINDIR=$HOME/PPA/qtractor/daily-builds

SVNREV=$(svn info https://qtractor.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/qtractor/trunk
| grep Revision | cut -d " " -f 2)

CURRENTREV=$(cat $MAINDIR/current.rev)

if [ $SVNREV = $CURRENTREV ]
 then echo "Current build is up to date."
 exit
else
 echo $SVNREV | tee $MAINDIR/current.rev

 VERSION=$(svn cat
https://qtractor.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/qtractor/trunk/configure.ac
| grep AC_INIT | cut -d " " -f 2 | cut -c 1-8)

 SVNDIR=$MAINDIR/qtractor-$VERSION+svn$SVNREV

 svn co https://qtractor.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/qtractor/trunk $SVNDIR

 rm -rf `find $SVNDIR -type d -name .svn && find $SVNDIR -type d -name debian`

 cp -a $MAINDIR/debian $SVNDIR

 cd $SVNDIR

 dch -v "$VERSION+svn$SVNREV-0lucid0~autostatic0"
 "Daily build, Qtractor SVN trunk checkout $SVNREV"

 rsync -av $SVNDIR/debian/changelog $MAINDIR/debian/changelog

 debuild -S -sa -k12345678

 dput ppa:autostatic/qtractor-svn
 $MAINDIR/qtractor_$VERSION+svn$SVNREV-0lucid0~autostatic0_source.changes

fi

TYOQA is aangebroken!