music

Oxegen was a bit expensive but awesome. Irish people rock.

update: Wilmer has details.

The London bzr sprint is over again for this year. It was really good to meet everybody in person again and also to meet some of the folks who hadn't been to a sprint before.

Last years sprint was mainly about improving performance; this year, we discussed adoption blockers and how to remove them. A short summary of the brainstorming is on the wiki.

Martin's blog has some pictures.

The Mars Volta concert we went to last night in Tilburg was absolutely brilliant. Very energetic and definitely one of the best acts I've ever seen live. We were standing in the back of a completely packed venue for 3 hours, but it was very much worth it.

cp: Soft Machine - Teeth

At the moment, I have two Guitar amplifiers: a simple Behringer Modelling Amplifier and an Aria Pro II (my first amplifier). The input socket of the Aria broke a couple of weeks ago and since it has also gotten a bit noisy I don't feel like paying a lot of money to get it fixed.

In a bad attack of Gear Acquisition Syndrome, I ordered a Line 6 XT POD yesterday, as well as a new Marshall Amplifier. The XT Pod should be usable without PC and there are at least some experimental Linux drivers for it. The Linux support is one of the reasons for picking the Line 6, since I'd like to give Linux (maybe UbuntuStudio?) another try in favor of good old Cubase. I'm interested to hear if there are any apps in particular I should give a try.

cp: Coheed and Cambria - No World For Tomorrow

Porcupine Tree live in the Heineken Music Hall last night was brilliant. It ranks very high among my list of favorite concerts.

Also looking forward to Radiohead in Dublin in June...

Velvet Revolver has a new album out, /Libertad/. It's really good and I think it even tops their previous record, which was a bit raw and underproduced (if that's a proper English word...). Nothing too fancy - just very good plain-and-simple hardrock.

Two of my favorite prog bands also have new albums out. Dream Theaters' "Systematic Chaos" is pretty good - maybe not one of their killer albums like Images or 6 Degrees of Inner Turbulence but a decent one nonetheless. Porcupine Tree's new release is called "Fear of a Blank Planet" and I'm not sure what to think of yet. Other people have been lauding it as one of their best albums yet but I haven't discovered the beauty of it yet.

After a loooong time, the Smashing Pumpkins (actually, just half of the original band) have reformed and released a new record. I instantly liked "Zeitgeist": it still sounds like the Smashing Pumpkins, but their sound has evolved for the better.

Not all my recent buys were happy ones though. A while back I bought "One Man Revolution", Tom Morello (of Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave fame)'s solo record. He's released it under the artist name "The Nightwatchman", his folk rock alter ego. It's really a back to basics compared to his other, heavier, work since there's just him singing and playing an acoustic guitar. While the music is ok, the lyrics and his voice ruin it for me. Maybe it's really something you have to see live to enjoy.

Last weekend, I took a short break of the busy last weeks of university and went to Werchter with some friends. Metallica rocked, although it was unfortunate they were scheduled to perform during the same time slot as the Australian Pink Floyd Show :-( Other highlights were the Muse, Pearl Jam, the Killers, Peter Gabriel and the Beastie Boys. The Chemical Brothers were a bit dissapointing this year, both the music and visual effects were weak compared to their performance three (or was it two?) years ago.

My holidays are finally approaching; last exam is tomorrow, and then it's off to LUGRadio Live and Europython and working hard to at last get my Samba branches into mainline.

So, I finally got around to buying a new guitar. My current guitar, a cheap strat clone, is starting to fall apart. The output socket is coming loose, the bridge is starting to bend and it's very noisy. So I figured it was time to buy something new and I ended up buying a Gibson Les Paul clone from Epiphone.

If you see my activity in FOSS decrease for some time, this should explain it.

I've spent some more time working on bzr-svn early this year. It now works correctly with pretty much any Subversion repository I can find and most of the open bugs have been fixed. The ~450 unit tests cover around 90% of the code now. I've started doing test driven development in pretty much every project I'm involved in in the past year and it has radically changed the way I work.

Now that bzr-svn is fixed, I hope I can start merging my experimental Bazaar branches of Samba.

The new Blackfield album, titled Blackfield II, is being released in a couple of days. I can't wait to hear if it is as good as the first one...

Currently playing: Aimee Mann - Lost in Space

The Bazaar PQM has just merged my first Bazaar commits. Hopefully there are more to follow in the near future. I also managed to fixed some more annoying bzr-svn bugs today, 0.2 is nearer than ever now.

Currently playing: Transatlantic - Bridges Across Forever - Duel With The Devil

I discovered Last.fm's Recommended Events feature a few days ago. It lists all events of artists you've listened to, within a specified range from where you live. No more searching through long lists of concerts or being late for tickets. The only remaining thing I'd like to see is an iCal feed.

Thanks Wilmer for introducing me to a great Dutch space-rock band called 35007. Their sound is quite unique and reminds me of Porcupine Tree or even Mogwai. Unfortunately, it seems they've already split up so it's unlikely I'll ever be able to ever see them live :-(

Currently Playing: /Riverside - Second Life Syndrome - Conceiving You/

The more I listen to Riverside (the Polish progrockers, /not/ the Dutch cover band), the more I regret having missed their performance at Arrow Rock this year. The vocals match the instruments nicely and unlike a lot of other small progrock bands, you can hear they have a capable producer.

Muse in Den Bosch tomorrow ought to be good as well!

This week I've tried out last.fm's "Neighborhoud Radio" feature and discovered a bunch of interesting bands; in particular "Anekdoten", "Chroma Key" were among the nicest ones.

I've also decided to give my blog a more original title title than "Jelmer's blog", so I've renamed it "Stationary Traveller" after the song by Camel and because of my continuous presence on IRC, no matter where on the world I am :-)

Most of this week I've spent working on the unit testing framework in Samba 4, in particular getting it to talk and understand the subunit protocol.

It's been a fun week. I visited the Bazaar sprint in London with LarstIQ and enjoyed meeting up with the core developers. Especially the pair-programming and test driven development was very interesting; the number of lines of code I wrote was fewer than usual, but I never spent so little time on debugging. Among the things I worked on were Commit Builder with Robert and some more work on bzr-svn.

The Arrow Rock festival yesterday was great. I was a little skeptical about Porcupine Tree's live performance, but I was very pleasantly surprised. Roger Waters' show was shorter than announced (3 hours) but very good nonetheless. Queensryche was the only disappointment - they played only a few old songs and their sound was noisy (at least from where I was standing).

Unfortunately, David Gilmours' concert in Amsterdam was sold out before I could get any ticket but I'm now going to the Arrow Rock Festival on June 10 where Roger Waters will be performing. It's not Pink Floyd, but it's probably as close as I can get :-) The rest of the lineup is pretty good as well. Queensryche (not the original lineup, but still) and Porcupine Tree will be there as well.

I'm also going to Pinkpop on the 3rd, to enjoy Tool, Danko Jones and Hooverphonic. The names announced for Lowlands have been very good so far: Opeth, Massive Attack, Anouk, Spinvis, Urban Dance Squad amongst others. Promises to be a very good festival season this year.

It's been a while since I've blogged, and also a few days since I've worked on any Free Software projects. In the last few days, I've been working on an assignment for uni, implementing genetic algorithms in C.

Other then that, I'm picking up some random things again: mbas bugs, SVN support in bzr, CtrlProxy and some Samba stuff.

I can't wait for the festival season to start again. Werchter has a nice lineup but is unfortunately already sold out, but no doubt Lowlands will be as much fun as always.

My taste in music, next to some of the mainstream music, includes progressive rock, metal and early blues and rock. I don't usually listen to the radio for the music, but rather for the chatting, because the playlists tend to be a bit boring.

A few weeks ago, I accidently stumbled across KXRadio, which is a web-radio-station started by Rob Stenders, a DJ on national radio here in the Netherlands. The music played they cover is very diverse and includes a lot of different genres.

The good things about this station are also that it doesn't air any commercials or hourly news (which is mandatory for stations that broadcast on FM), and there are no silly contests or games.

Also nice: it's just a shoutcast stream, so it works in mpd.