Status update, 19/11/2022

Audio Developer Conference

I was at ADC 2022 last week – thanks to Codethink as always for covering the cost and allowing me 2 days time off to attend. It was my first time attending in person, and besides the amazing talks (which will appear online here around the end of this month), I had somehow never realized how many players in the music tech world are British. Perhaps because I always hang out in Manchester and further north while all the activity is happening in Cambridge and London.

Indeed the creator of the famous JUCE Framework is a Brit and was busy at the conference announcing a new(ish) language designed for DSP pipelines and plugins, cleverly named Cmajor.

ADC has no lightning talks but instead an “Open mic night”. I naively pictured a concert in a pub somewhere and signed up to play, but in practice it was closer to lightning talks and there were no instruments to play. For better or worse I had the session for Maharajah on a laptop and did an improvised 5 minute version with judicious (or not) or use of timestretching to speed through the slow parts. Even more fun than regular lightning talks.

I highly recommend the event! Despite the surfeit of Mac users!

Microblogging

Every article published during November 2022 must mention the Twitter meltdown and this is no exception! I’ve personally enjoyed using reading Twitter for years, always without Infinite Scroll and with “Latest tweets” instead of “Home” (i.e. content from people I follow, not entertaining clickbait for my monkey-brain). The sites only value was always its enourmous userbase and now there’s a real wave of migration to Mastodon, like, celebrities and all, I’m spending more time as @vladimirchicken@mastodon.art.

I made that account a while back, initially just for half-baked song ideas, and I will try to keep it more playful and positive than my old Twitter account. For work-related content I already have a very serious blog, after all. (That’s this blog!)

Nushell

At work I’m still spending every day deep in JSON and CSV data dumps and using Nushell to make sense of it all.

It’s really good for exploring data, and you can immediately make a guess at what this Nushell pipeline might do:

fetch http://date.jsontest.com/ | get date

I find the syntax a lot easier than jq, where even basic filters quickly start to look like K or Brainfuck.

I wrote my first Nushell scripts, which is is also very nice, shell functions (“custom commands”) can have type annotations for arguments, default values and each script can have a main function where you define the commandline arguments. 400% nicer than Bash scripts.

I don’t have time to get involved enough in the project right now to open useful bug reports, so I’m going to post a list of gripes here instead. Hopefully its useful for other folk evaluating Nushell so you can get an idea of what’s still missing as of version 0.70:

• Writing a long line (one that wraps to the next line) makes cursor movement increasingly slow… at least on WSL
• where can compare a column to a value, e.g. where date < 11-19-2020, but you can’t compare two columns, which is weird, SQL where can do that.
• The CTRL+C behaviour sucks. Run 100 slow python scripts in a loop, and you have to ctrl+c out of every single one.