Lone in the night

This is time to review the last keyboard I purchased, the Alesis Fusion 8 HD. Well, the beast has a big pro, and a major cons. It sounds very great, the sonic palette is wide -- I haven't reviewed all the sounds so far --, ranging from mellow synth pads to agressive leads, tons of drum kits and basses, playable sampled instruments and very well crafted keyboards. Ok, you would say a good sampler would do the same, and you're right. However, take a good sampler, add a 88-lested-keys keyboard and disks of samples, and you probably already reach the three-zeroed bill. I paid the Fusion $ 1,000, and it comes with a sequencer (more on it below), a multi-track recorder and sound mixes (Alesis word for sound kits and arpeggio), all funny stuffs you won't find on a sampler. Now, the cons. The sequencer is almost unusable because of terribly poorly designed user interface (UI). I've read somewhere sequencing on the Fusion is like crafting a boat in a bottle; the image could not ...

A picture found on my disk; my friend Fabrice in my studio. Could be seen: ARP Odyssey, Yamaha DX7, Roland A30, Atari STe, Fostex DMT8vl, Behringer Modulizer Pro, Boss RRV10 & RBF10, Kawai K1m and Roland SC55. Not shown: Akai S5000, Alesis Fusion 8 HD, Yamaha CS01, and few other funny stuffs.

Kid A by Radiohead Wormwood by The Residents PodCast: a review of Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku. Heard at CBC's "Quirks & Quarks", a scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel . Wow! Haven't bought the book so far, but dying to...

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I have decided to end our 14 years of collaboration. No more love, but no hate. Simply diverging paths. Better that way.

On one of my machines, I run an out-of-the-box Fedora Core 3. One of the issues I had was a continuous hiss (white noise) on the speakers. Found on the net, here the solution: - go to Applications => Sound & Video => Volume Control - File => Change Device. If you have several devices, you should check on all. For my part, the noisy source came from "Ensoniq AudioPCI". - Edit => Preference. It opens "Volume Control Preferences". - Check-on "Capture"; the new source appears on the "Capture" tab. - You get the fellow; mute it and the noise instantaneously ceases.

This year, Mr. Winter has a pretty strange behavior, here in Quebec. We had a lot of snow, and no warm periods that usually let the snow melt down and provide our so delightfull winter mud. No, all the fallen snowflakes are still here. Consequently, all the city snow repositories are full and Montreal has to open new ones. But also, a couple of houses were crunched by the weight of the snow on their roofs. That's a total mystery to me. When I was young, at primary school, I remember clearly the teacher saying that on countrysides having a lot of snow, the roofs were sharp to let snowflakes slipping alongside. But here in Montreal, most of the roofs are flat. If someone has an explanation, please let me know.

This bug seems to be here from a long time. Even if a patch exists, the bug is still here in the most recent version. Here is the resolution (I assume gcc is installed): Stop your vsftpd daemon: service vsftpd stop Download the lastest source package (vsftpd-2.0.5 so far) from http://vsftpd.beasts.org . gunzip and untar # gunzip vsftpd-2.0.5.tar.gz # tar xf vsftpd-2.0.5.tar # cd vsftpd-2.0.5 A couple of files must be changed postlogin.c , line 1831 Replace ... if (p_sess->is_anonymous && tunable_chown_uploads) { vsf_sysutil_fchmod(new_file_fd, 0600); if (tunable_one_process_model) { ... by ... if (p_sess->is_anonymous && tunable_chown_uploads) { vsf_sysutil_fchmod(new_file_fd, (0666 & ~tunable_anon_umask)); if (tunable_one_process_model) { ... tunable.c , line 129,130 Replace /* -rw-rw-rw- */ unsigned int tunable_file_open_mode = 0666; by /* -rw------- */ unsigned int tunable_file_open_mode = 0600; builddefs.c , line 9 Replace ...