Katapult source is public

The source for Katapult, in an early, but working state is now up on Google Code. Check out the Katapult page for more details.

Katapult update

Update: All the source, plus an absolutely-alpha-beta-alpha build will be put up on Google Code very soon, but please be patient, since I have a lot of work right now. I’m trying to squeeze in work on this wherever i can, so I can get it out there

So, here is a few more details on Katapult. I’ve been adding a lot of stuff today, and getting close to something that is release-worthy. The current features include:

Fully customizable layouts can be mapped to the entire grid of the Launchpad

Multipart layouts are supported and can be toggled using buttons on the Launchpad

The layouts are loaded into Katapult from a simple easy-to-write text-file (line example: yfader 0 7 8). This is kinda like mrmr-style layout files.

LED-colors of the controls can be set to any of the supported colors of the Launchpad

Katapult supports bi-directional control-messages. This means that changing a fader in for example Traktor, will also update the corresponding fader on the Launchpad surface. Me thinks this is cool.

Controls currently implemented are:

• Hold button
• Toggle button
• Horizontal fader
• Vertical fader
• Horizontal slider-zone
• Vertical slider-zone

Okay, might have forgotten something, but it does give a good overview of the current state of the thing. I’m going to implement support for 2D-pad controls, as well as an “indicator” control, that doesn’t send output, but can be used as an indicator light, before releasing it. I think that will make it out for a pretty suitable start. And after that? More advanced visualizers (beat-grid style, etc), timed functions, triggered after x beats, controller-chaining (altering one control can influence others), macros(!). A visual layout-editor would be nice but definitely won’t be first priority, since the layouts really are very easy to write by hand. Here’s a new video. It doesn’t show any of the bi-directional stuff, but it does make it clear how multi-page layouts are handled.

The more technical stuff: It’s all written in Processing. I’m writing and using it on OS X 10.6, but should work fine on other platforms as well. I found Processings MIDI support a bit annoying to work with (for output), so I took the easy route and offloaded the MIDI output handling to PureData through OSC. When I get the motivation, I’ll probably move the MIDI output back into the actual program, but I couldn’t find any MIDI-framework that did what I wanted to do, so PD is a fine solution right now. The patch is very simple and looks like this:

So, that’ll be it for now Hopefully a release soon!

Katapult, I say

Yes, I say Katapult. What is it you say?

Well, I recently, after much struggle, got my hands on Novations Launchpad controller, hooray. It’s pretty cool, and very functional for controlling Ableton Live. Unfortunately my plan was never to use it with live, but instead with Traktor. In this regard, it is utterly lacking and uncool. Mostly because Novations Automap software is absolutely featureless in terms of what i wanted to do.

So when the software to make your dreams come true doesn’t exist, you just have to write it yourself. Hence I started writing Katapult. It’s intended to be a dynamic, totally customizable mapping solution for the Launchpad, that allows for much more functionality than the pretty mediocre hold-button scheme of Automap. So what does it do?

It allows you to create various controls on the surface of the Launchpad such as faders, buttons and “slider zones”. The MIDI output of these indivdual controls can then be mapped to different fuctions in Traktor, for example.

I have a lot of interesting ideas planned for this thing, but basics first. When I feel I’ve gotten all the basics down and tidied up the code a bit, I’ll release a preview and move on to some of the more interesting stuff

Okay, it’s late and I’m brainsmashed, so this might not be a very informative and detailed post. Intsead, I give you ZE VIDEO!

Here’s a rather uninspired and boring “mix” using the thing. It definitely won’t give you eargasms, but it’ll give you a general idea of how it works. Promise to post the technical nitty-gritty later

We’re All The Pirate Bay

from http://thepiratebay.org/special/2009mmtpb.php

The Swedish artist Montt Mardié thought The Pirate Bay needed an theme song, an anthem. So he created one!

We like it a lot and hope you like it too. You can download the torrent here, and watch the video as well.

We also got the audio files so all you TPB fans can make your own version, your own remix!
It would also be cool if you did your own version of the video and post as a video response on youtube. As Montt Mardié put it: “To show the world, that we’re all The Pirate Bay…”

Here’s Monty’s coments about it all:

An artist has got to make a living just like everybody else, there’s no doubt about it. And these are tough times, believe me I know. The thing is though, if I were to go back in time, 10 years or so, and tell the 15-year-old version of myself that over a night, 60 000 people had heard one of my songs, the first question I’d throw back at myself wouldn’t be “how much money did I make?”.
Don’t get me wrong, I love money and I want to make a lot of it. Bathe in it just like Uncle Scrooge. But money isn’t the main reason why I write songs. First and foremost I want people to hear them.
Times are so strange at the moment and a lot of people are angry and upset. Still, for each day that goes by I get more and more convinced that we shouldn’t try to fight the future, we should embrace it. Try to see opportunities instead of catastrophys.

I’ve written a song. I call it “We’re All The Pirate Bay”. It’s free and nobody will ever have to pay for it, though if you incist you are welcome to make a donation!

Take care, Monty

More Montt Mardié at
www.monttmardie.com
www.myspace.com/monttmardie
www.hybrism.com

Donate: paypal account: monttmardie@hybrism.com

Download, re-mix, re-make, re-download!, re-seed, re-edit, re-enjoy!

Download:
Montt Mardie – We’re all The Pirate Bay (single)
Montt Mardie – We’re all The Pirate Bay (Remixkit!)

Kill your television

A little over a week ago, I killed my television. Lately, I have grown tired with all the crap that I am being fed trough the screen. Seriously, why do I have to watch 15 different companies trying to subdue me into becoming their little consumerist puppet? Yes, this is part rant. And yes, as my sister cleverly remarked, part of the reasoning for completely boycotting television is simply that I’m utterly pissed off at traditional media. I am pissed off because of the broadcasters’ inability to overcome the relatively simple obstacle of bringing me just tangentially nuanced reports about current events. As I have witnessed several times now, the bias and lack of insight is utterly ruining the value of the information I am receiving. All it does is making me feel tense, knowing that in addition to processing the information I am getting, I also have to spend a considerable amount of brain-cycles determining what views or ideologies motivated the creation of the material I am viewing.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that bias can or should be avoided, but I find it much more comfortable to know in what general direction the material I am viewing is biased, rather than being force-fed something that pretends to be “truthful”.

Apple and DRM

It’s a well-known fact that Apples iTunes Store sells music crippled with DRM software. This is sad, since the iTunes Store, in my opinion at least, is a great place to discover and purchase music. Agreed, their catalog is not complete, but it is by far the largest and most varied I have found to date. I have bought at least 250 tracks from the iTunes Store, and the first thing I do when my downloads finish is removing the DRM protection. Back in the days, you could do this easily with an application called JHymn. This, unfortunately is not possible anymore, since Apple updated the DRM system, also known as FairPlay. Anyhow, the most obvious method of removing the DRM still works. Just burn the purchased tracks to a CD, and rip them back to your library. In iTunes 7, Apple made this even easier. iTunes now automatically detects that you are importing duplicates, and asks if you want to replace the old files with the one you are importing. One could wonder if the ability to remove DRM this way was left in the software intentionally.

End users who know what DRM is, know that it restricts the fair use of legally purchased content, and I think everyone would rather see it removed altogether. Turns out that Steve Jobs agrees. Such a statement is a powerful open letter to the music industry, but more importantly the end users. If DRM is ever to be abolished, the first step is educating the users about why it is bad. The next step is putting pressure on the music companies, for example through anti-DRM legislation. This can only be done if awareness about DRM is raised in the masses. Hopefully this statement from Jobs will make it to mainstream news, in some form.

If you have no, or little idea about what DRM is, I suggest viewing this humorous introduction to DRM.

PSTN is dead

Or at least dying… Long live SIP!

So, the last few days have been an interesting endeavor into the world of post-christmas shopping crazed people, Nokia firmware flashing and VoIP. To make a long story short, I recently acquired myself a shiny Nokia N80. Unfortunately this wasn’t the Internet Edition, since this, for some strange reason, is impossible to find in Denmark. Ten intense, sweaty, trembling minutes of firmware flashing took care of that. To my luck it left me with a newborn N80 Internet Edition, and not an extremely expensive paper-weight. The instructions for carrying out this feat are here. I won’t give you any warnings. Go ahead, do it. Just don’t blame me if you mess up your phone.

All this stuff lead me to the unexpected discovery that the N80 can act as a SIP phone. So what does all this gabbering about SIP mean? Allow me to explain. SIP in itself is just a set of rules (a “protocol”) for connecting devices over the Internet. So, “what is so tremendously fantastic about this?”, you might ask. I will answer, but first, let’s look at something we all use everyday. The telephone. This intriguing device was invented somewhere around 120 years ago, but still it’s nature of eating your money has not changed the least. Enter SIP telephony. Using SIP, two (or more) devices can connect to each other over the Internet, and exchange data, for example audio. And what do you have, when two devices are exchanging audio? Correct, you have a telephone.

“Jeez”, you might be thinking, “the guy thinks he has re-invented the telephone. Nope dude, SIP was invented by Mark Handley in 1996. “Allright… But what make a SIP phone better than a normal phone, then?”. Again, I will answer, and this is where SIP shines it’s glory. Remember what I told you about SIP being a set of rules that let two devices connect and share data? This means that you can cut out the middle man, generally known as the telephone company. So, what happens when there is no telephone company? There is no-one to charge you. Yes, it makes telephone calls free. “But isn’t this the same as, say, Skype?”. Skype is free, yes, but it depends on you using the Skype application. A SIP phone in itself requires no specific application. SIP is a “open standard” meaning that anyone can make an appliance that acts as a SIP phone, or write an application that acts as a SIP phone. Furthermore, this means that any SIP phone, be that a real piece of hardware or an application can communicate with any other SIP phone.

Piecing all this together means that you can connect and talk freely from any SIP phone to any other, given you have some sort of Internet access. This is truly amazing. SIP is a real alternative to the old PSTN (“Public Switched Telephone Network”), taking away the telephone companies’ monopolies, and enabling free voice communication, from anywhere, to anywhere in the world.

Enabling SIP on the N80 is truly a great step forward from Nokia. I can now call any SIP phone directly from my N80. I can also call any Google Talk account, since they decided to support SIP. And it’s all free. Using, for example, sipphone.com’s service, I can also place calls to old PSTN phones, anywhere in the world at very low rates.

But the most important thing is not the money, it’s the open nature of the SIP network. Anyone can connect, anyone can use it, and anyone can talk to anyone, no matter the distance. It’s what telephony should have been. An open infrastructure, controlled by the individuals using it.

The easiest way to set up your N80 Internet Edition as a working SIP phone is to use the service from Gizmo Project. The service is actually owned and run by sipphone.com, but Gizmo Project is their front-end. You simply go to the Gizmo Project website and set up an account. Then you download the Gizmo VoIP application from the N80’s download/catalouge application. That will set up everything, and you will only have to enter your username and password. Bang! Your N80 is now a fully working SIP phone.

Alternatively you can use any other SIP provider. I tested it with iptel.org, and it works just as perfectly. You will have to enter the settings manually though, which can be a bit confusing. Maybe I’ll do a tutorial on that.

More SIP goodness to come!

When weekends just aren’t weekends

Just watched Steal This Film. I can warmly recommend it. Go on, steal it, I know you want to. The weekend is almost over, but well, I got to enjoy a little of it.

In other words, this weekend was one of those that worked out in no accordance whatsoever to what I had in mind. Friday morning was good, albeit tired as usual, it was as it should be. Didn’t last long though. At around 9am, on my way to work (actually I was a little late, should have known something was wrong…), my longboard decided to stop. I think it was a really bad decision, partly because it was traveling at around 35 km/h, and partly because I wasn’t informed about the impeding halt, which sent me flying a few meters, before hitting the street. Okay, really, it was my own stupid navigation that resulted in the painful meeting with the asphalt. After a minute or so of painful and pretty pathetic, rolling in the middle of the street, a nice lady pointed out that it would probably be a good idea to relocate myself to the sidewalk. It really was a good idea, since I was forcing cars to do strange detours onto the sidewalk to get past me. She was kind enough to get a man who had also showed up to call an ambulance, and she waited until it arrived, as did the man who called. Whoever you are, I am very grateful for the kindness you showed me! For me, the seemingly small things they did saved my day, and probably a whole lot more.

They took a look at me at the emergency room, pulled my arm, pressed some muscles, but luckily concluded that I was still intact, gave me a tetanus vaccination for the bruises, and sent me home. The natural painkillers administered to my body by my adrenal gland quickly faded when I got home, and the rest of the day was agony. Luckily my wonderful girlfriend took care of me, and made me the most wonderful meal in the evening. That was the probably the best cure anyone could offer me!

Saturday was better. Most of the pain had passed, which is of course only fair after 12 hours of the deepest sleep I have had for a long time. Being back to a somewhat normal state again, and able to walk, I was soon awakened to the grueling reality. My trusty iBook had been shattered by the crash. I must say though, that I am impressed with the quality of the little thing. I was still able to boot it into firewire slave mode and recover my files. Nothing is so bad that it isn’t good for something, so having a perfect excuse, I set out to get myself a replacement, and soon got my filthy (and bruised) hands on a shiny new MacBook. “Huzzah!”, I thought, but the joy was shortlived. A perfect example of the impermanence inherent in the satisfaction obtained from material acquisitions. It lasted around 2 hours. The oh so shiny thing was sick, and soon dead.

When this image was taken, it should have displayed a fine little Apple logo, communicating that a healthy boot was in progress. But it didn’t. Only strangely colored lines, resembling something created by a depressed and uninspired pop-artist. All kinds of funkyness was tried, but to no avail. Frustration. Closed stores. All forms of actions ruled out. No vectors of attack. No solutions. Hammer was considered. Frustration. Yes, again. Leading up to the total failure was the notorious MacBook battery failures. Well, to be totally fair, the boot-blocking pop-art, could be dispelled by resetting the NVRAM at boot, but as soon as a the machine had been totally powered off, the problem returned.

Which brings us to today, luckily i was able to find an open Apple Store in Copenhagen, which after a little waiting and some phone calls gave me a new one, from which I am posting this. This one seems to be working fine, fingers crossed. So for now, I am happy again. It wasn’t really the anticipated laziness I had planned for this weekend, but it was eventful nonetheless.

An electronic pulse is sent out

“And then it happened… a door opened to a world… rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict’s veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought… a board is found.”

These are the words, as i first read them, quite some time ago. It has probably been eight years. Even though they were originally written half a year before i was born, for me, these words, along with the rest of The Conscience of a Hacker defined the beginning of an era, and the beginning of my explorations in the world of the electron and the switch. Having grown up alongside the rapid raise of this era, and having been able to see the emergence of this technology, from exactly the perspective that is mine, is something I value dearly. Not because my perspective is extraordinary in any way, but simply due to the fact that my perspective was one unclouded of the prejudices all too often anchored in adulthood. It was a perspective of exploration and tinkering, motivated only by a creative interest, never by the prospect of financial gain, fame, self-propagation or other kinds of illusory gems, diffusely reflected from the depths of hitherto uncharted seas. Those of us unconstrained by, or simply unknowing of such incentives, were able to see this technology as it really is: A mesmerizing sea composed of millions upon millions of memetic jewels.

Strangely, though probably every cell in my body has been replaced, and most of what I consider me has changed greatly, The Conscience of a Hacker has stayed with me trough these eight years. Sometimes near the surface, in my conscious, sometimes deeply buried, but still ever present. Amazing, the human ability to absorb largely advanced concepts and distill them to the purest essence, to re-create them from the most miniscule quantums of existence, and to effortlessly balance an immesurable number of these components into the ever-changing symbiosis we know as consciousness.