The ride until the airport, the check in, security checks and flight have gone all smoothly. We got asleep for pretty much all the time and woke up with some marks in our faces and pin and needles in the arms, then we were waved goodbye by the supersmiling cabin crew (I have never seen people so happy and kind in a plane before, I think, without seeming stupid, that is).

Ohhh and there was another cool detail, the screens which usually are used for showing the average speed and temperature were used for showing the view from a camera placed in front of the plane, so you could see more or less what you could see if you were in the cockpit. Not a very impressive technological achievement but nonetheless cooler than just one schematic map of where we came from and where did we headed to.

As soon as we left the bags and all that in the hotel (which is also very good), we went to the party place. The Areena is surprisingly close to the hotel, but it is smaller than what we thought. I don’t know the numbers exactly but I’m pretty sure there are more people in Euskal party than in Assembly.

That said, these Finnish know how to make things impressive. There’s lot of equipment and decoration in the party, and just beginning with the simple fact that the inside is darker already helps to get into that underground feeling that any decent party needs.

Additionally, the Assembly TV not only is broadcasting live by internet but there’s also some TVs placed in the corridors surrounding the main area, showing whatever is currently being played on the AsmTV. That means there’s a lot of demos being played for people which probably won’t see them otherwise, and that’s always good. Even though there was no sound but I understand they don’t want to pollute more the sound environment, which is already quite filled in with stuff, with all the sponsor stands etc.

But the funnier part are the rules. There are lots of rules. I spent yesterday hours trying to read all of them, and I expected them to be followed, so when I came and found lots of big stereo systems in the party place I wondered what happened to the rules! It looks like little mini-raves or mini-environments are created by the people which bring even their own disco-ball. I haven’t taken any picture because I was deeply impressed but I’ll probably do it tomorrow. Or you can imagine it. Add some 1.5m tall speakers with 75cm wide subwoofers to the descriptions so it is richer.

When we came back this evening after meeting blackpawn which had just arrived, I had my bag searched. I knew that was going to happen (because I had read the rules!). So that was more rule-compliant, and I agreed with that. It seems I agreed so much that the guy inspecting my bag had to assure me it was everybody been looked for, not only me. Ahhh I collaborate too much!

It seems there is also a rule which prevents people from drinking and/or bringing alcohol inside the party. As it’s not something which really worries me I inadvertently forgot that I had read about that, and asked Leia: where’s your beer!? when I met her. And she said: but you haven’t been here before, have you!!!??

Ha! Of course not!

But it seems that I was kind of assuming that in a place which has lots of ads for Lapin Kulta all around (which happens to be a famous Finnish beer) they would serve beers to adults only. But they don’t trust the adults neither the teenagers in the party so what do they do? Ban all the alcohol!

I don’t have anything against that; somehow is a way of slashing the probability of incidents due to alcohol down to a minimum, so if I was an organiser I would try to cut down incidents to a minimum, always! But it doesn’t prevent it to look funny.

Then we’ve also found Sir Garbage Truck and all the rest of people: Gargaj, Zania, and people whom I know their faces but not their names :-D

Truck was very proud of his creation: scenebooth which happened to be a place to which newcomers can go and meet sceners and enjoy demos and learn about the scene and great things to come! So he managed to move all of us from the oldskool area and bring us to the physical representation of the Scene Booth. I’ll probably hang around there tomorrow when I am done with having a little walk around Helsinki (while trace and blackpawn finish their demo).

They also did a Demoscene outreach panel, featuring Gloom, Truck, Waffle and Gargaj, and although it was funny for people which knew what was the demoscene about, I can’t but presume that all the newcomers left the seminar area in a very confused state of mind. If you have to talk about demoscene to someone which doesn’t know anything, golden rule: Show them a demo!

But it is a good beginning. There should be more demoscene outreach * wherever possible. The Scene Booth itself looks promising. We need more of these initiatives, and I hope some people gets interested into all of that, specially young people which as it was commented, just consider a computer as a household resource and don’t think of it as a creative medium.

And basically that has been today. Now if you don’t mind I’m going to sleep a bit :-)

PD I finally managed to finish and upload my song into the Party management system. It took ages to upload and I had to ask for help because the form is quite confusing to understand but at the end it worked. Oh well, I should say our song because -trace- r08028 also did some work on it when he saw me creatively stuck. In BCN party style, place your bets. Will it pass preselection?

It’s less than one day (hours!!) for arriving in Helsinki and I’m quite nervous about it! In fact I’m getting more and more stressed the more we approach the party :-)

I have been giving the finishing touches to one song for the freestyle music compo, although I’m 99.9999999999999% sure that I don’t have a single chance to pass the preselection¹, but I can’t go there without even trying! At least someone will listen to the song (the jury! HA!).

The not 100% percentage is motivated by the statistics calculated by last.fm which assure I’m in a way similar to Little Bitchard

So people which like Little Bitchard may have a chance of liking my song too²

In what regards to the travel arrangements and all that, I still haven’t prepared the suitcase and worst of all – still haven’t decided which book will I bring with me to read during the flight. We depart at 7.30 and arrive at 12.25, it sounds superfrightening! Obviously we need to take into account the 2 hours of time difference but nevertheless is a good three hours inside the plane.

Or I could simply try to sleep, but I always find it hard to do, with all those announcements for discounted eau de toilettes, the general noise in a plane, and also the damned air conditioned which they always place in Freeze all passengers so they don’t ask for anything mode.

Trace is also very happy about going to Assembly, as well as Blackpawn (well, he’s more exactly psyched, and will have an angry cat waiting for him when he comes back to the States). Sml will join us there too and I heard Timescratchers (the mighty group which could easily fill in a complete party if all of their members gathered there) were coming there so it’s going to be a fair amount of Spaniards in the Hartwall Areena.

I was curious about who else from UK scene was going there. Tried to connect to irc’s ircnet this morning but all servers simply refused to accept my connection so I couldn’t contact anyone. Yep I could have sent an e-mail but I’m not that curious (yet).

I’ll try to write something while I’m there but I can’t promise anything :-)

¹ With legends like Little Bitchard entering the compo as well, what do you expect!?

² You know I’m just making fun of statistics, don’t you? If you don’t know it you should know it by now.

Remember the cassette days? I usually not! But I was listening to one song which I remembered I had recorded into a cassette tape years ago, and I suddenly realized how pristine the sound was, and how badly did the cassette version sound. But it didn’t really matter!

There was something amazing about cassettes. Maybe it was its ubiquity… you could take one tape with you and wherever you went there was a tape player. Or maybe because they were cheap and resisted quite well to be listened once and once again. Or because they were easy to copy and produce your own little megamixes.

My favourite one was the CD-Ing II model. I always tended to buy the 90 minutes versions, so I had an extra 30 minutes which meant like half a normal 1 hour cassette. People said you shouldn’t buy tapes longer than 60 minutes because the sound quality was terrible, but I personally didn’t care much about that.

And how picky we are now about sound! Demanding 256kbps mp3, or ogg vorbis or even flacs! It’s all about sound quality and the medium but there’s no talk about the music itself, which I find somehow sad.

Oh and I just remembered… I only bought one 120 minutes tape, and it was a complete disaster. It seems it was so thin that it split in two parts. But you know that analogic problems have analogic solutions: I sticked the two parts back together with a piece of cello tape. It just sounded a bit weird when the head was reading the cello tape part, but the rest of the tape could still be listened. You can’t do that with a broken CD!!

I also used to do my own covers of course. I don’t know if I enjoyed more listening to the music, preparing the mixtapes or the covers.

Then there were also the particular tape glitches. Like when you listened to a tape while in a car and the player was doing those hummm ahmmmm because the tape moved slightly with the road bumps. Or when you began recording and it still hadn’t stabilized the head position but was already recording, so there was some strange transition which to me sounded as if the tape was melting in that very point.

At the end it was all a bit annoying also. Rewinding tapes… pressing play and rec at the same time, the loud clicks of some buttons, cleaning the heads periodically… And what about the tapes which became blocked? Endless hours spent unrolling tapes which decided to became a mess, with a ballpen and loads of patience!

An ipod might be less analogic but is way more convenient, definitely :-)

By the way, I uploaded the soundtrack of re:fritos to archive.org. Grab it while it’s hot and place it in your ipod or favourite mp3 player!

PD I did the tape image with the online Cassette Generator

Although I never saw myself releasing anything again in the demoscene I just did a fast demo for euskal party 15, which was held past week end in Barakaldo (Spain). For the first time in their history, they allowed remote entries and although I completely missed the deadline (I thought the party was one week later), ps helped me to deliver the demo to the organizers, so it was all good. I think they even used his shiny macbook pro for playing mac demos so he was very kind. Massive loads of thanks to ps!!!

Everything went more or less smoothly while assembling the code I had here and there and adding some extra layers, more colors (a lot of them!), etc. Occasionally some effect disappeared, because some effect which was executing before forgot to deactivate or to set something back to the state in which it was before, this happened a lot with certain image which I will refer again to in a few lines. It reminded me why I didn’t want to continue extending this notengine after breakpoint 06.

Conceptually the idea is right but the implementation, even if it’s better than what I had done before, is still lacking some things and has too much redundant stuff. But I’m happy to be able to spot that now – that means I’m improving my developing skills and that can’t be anything else than good. The interesting thing is that I hadn’t done any C++ programming for a long while, but even though I was quickly identifying the flaws here and there and thinking of a better way for doing certain stuff which doesn’t feel right, so it looks like learning a bunch of languages ultimately converts you in the Universal Compiler!

This mental agility manifested itself at its most when I tried to execute the demo in my intel mac and found to my horror that it was complaining about the sound not having been initialized. I thought it could be because of having created a universal binary, because that was the only difference between this demo and the previous ones that I tested a couple of months ago when I got the computer.

It seems that some of the latest Mac OS X updates prevent FMOD from being able to create a sound context, and that’s why it didn’t work in the intel machine. So I downloaded the latest version of FMOD, which used CoreAudio instead of the other whatever which was using before, and tried to implement it.

First annoyance: you can’t compile fmod statically into your exe anymore. That’s a pity, since I had began to truly appreciate the fact that the mac version of my demos was just one file with everything inside it and it was the windows version the one which went with an additional dll. But anyway, there we go with that ugly .dylib in the same directory than the exe is.

Then I had to update my audio wrapper so that it could work with the new FMODEx api. While I agree it is more meaningful and intuitive than the previous api, you can’t convince me easily when it’s 1 hour for the deadline! :-)

But anyway, I did it. Don’t know how! I think it’s my ninja coding skillz ;-)

I delivered the demo and had a coffee, relaxed, waited. And took the opportunity for saying sorry to mad, like twenty or thirty times. Why? Because I took a picture of him in an obscene mood and modified it with my wacom tablet to look like someone else, and now I was feeling a bit bad about that.

One image is worth one thousand words, so two images are worth two thousand words:

On monday, I decided to make a windows port, but using mingw instead of visualc for compiling. The first thing I tried was to create a makefile by myself, but given that I have never created one from scratch, it was disastrous. Enter devcpp, it helped me creating the project, setting the libraries and finally creating the makefile.

I tried to use the same makefile as a base for compiling in linux but that was really disastrous. I spent like two hours installing packages and updates in trace’s ubuntu powered laptop (and enjoying all those nice interface effects when dragging a window!), trying to get code::blocks to work, the makefile to work or just creating a simple empty project in Kdevelop, and didn’t manage to do anything! So I finally gave up and left it for the future.

If you want to have a look… just download the demo from here and leave some nice words in here

Oh and some relatively interesting anecdotal facts:

• the name of the demo is kind of slang for rerererererererecycling in Spanish, since most of the effects and stuff here are rererererecycled :D
• the song is a remix of 10 years ago which happens to be an old song of mine. I did this version because xphere (from zona neutra) asked me for a song which he would use in an ifparty05 invitation but it finally never materialized, and I really liked the version. It was a pity to let it languish in a forgotten folder.
• it ended up in 5th position, which is an improvement compared to last time ppg presented something in euskal (where we ended 7th). Although that time it was 14 demos in the compo and now it was 9 so it’s not an improvement – it should have ended 3rd or 4th to be in the middle again, but I really didn’t want it to happen!

I think that’s all, if I happen to remember something else I’ll update this post.

Finally got some time to give a go to Wiitomidi

The project looks fantastic but for some strange reason it simply doesn’t work properly in my computers. I first tried it on my powerbook, and even if it connected the first time, it suddenly disconnected and there was no way of making the Wiimote connect again with the laptop.

Then I thought: maybe it has something to do with this being a power pc computer, let’s try on the intel one. So I tried on my shiny mini (sponsored by mrdoob) and while it connected faster and I even managed to do a couple of movements and see how reason’s knobs were twisting and rotating, it suddenly stopped working, just as it did on the g4.

Trying to completely turn off the wiimote by pressing the power button, for starting again, wasn’t a good idea, since it invited the Wii console itself to turn on — even if it’s like 6 meters away.

This has shown me something that I didn’t expect: the distance which bluetooth devices can reach is far more than what I thought was possible. So if the wiimote can turn on the console which is so far away, then I don’t know why the wiimote is disconnecting from the computer.

I’ll maybe wait for another release of wiitomidi, I suppose…