I've been a user of Native Instruments Reaktor since day 1 (it only stopped crashing at version 3). Recently, version 5 was released (i snagged an upgrade), and it looks pretty good:

[you can build audio circuits and programs visually]

It's a software modular synthesizer, like the beloved Plogue Bidule. Plogue Bidule is faster and more fun for freaky things though. Both support Open Sound Control, which is a better protocol than MIDI for controlling synths and such.

Incidentally, I just ordered a Continuum Fingerboard from Lippold Haken of Haken Audio. It's a fantastic continuous controller I've wanted now (dreamed of, lusted over, etc...) for a few years. It looks like this:

[Fantastic continuuous fretless xyz controller for expressive musical performance]

I have mine being done in a custom colour, so it'll be ready in about 8-10 weeks, and I'll be picking it up in Illinois, and embark on a small tour of a few electronic music venues over the next few weeks. Lippold has been kind enough to invite me to give a guest lecture to his students at the University of Illinois.

I've been making some nice new peices which I'll post soon in the 'Songs by me' section of the site.

I've been learning Japanese on and off for the last year or so (Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone are very good), and recently have been renting a lot of Anime from Gemini Jetpack, a super-cool store I endorse. Last night's rental had the dubious honour of having one of the highest EPM (exploisions per minute) rates I've ever witnessed. It's called Dead Leaves.

[a charming still from dead leaves]

Even though I don't like Tom Cruise (I kept yelling 'clear' at the screen during the movie), I just had to see the movie because its treatment of deathrays.

In a particular order, here are some other great deathrays:

War of the Worlds (2005) (great bass, tight control, smooth styling)
Death Star (first firing)
Forbidden Planet (Their ray guns are super awesome)
Barbarella (Duran Duran's death ray)
Howard the Duck (Dark Overlord of the Universe)

A few months ago I bought a 'pre-fab' computer from HP (instead of building it from parts myself). I've been very impressed with the box (3.2 Ghz P4, 1MB L2, 800Mhz FSB, 1GB RAM (now 3), 250 GB SATA)... It also has all the HP Printer Drivers pre-installed, so I just plugged a printer in, and it all worked. I stuck an extra 800 Gigs in the box (since I'm doing video work), and again everything is perfect. Windows is 100% stable on this box.

It's got about a thousand USB ports, firewire on front and bck, card-reader, fast CDROM and a +/- writer all configured properly, good mobo 7 channel sound, etc...

In contrast, I recently got an AMD box, which was custom made. The people who built it screwed up the power supply, didn't use anti-static mats or straps when handling components, didn't hook up all the USB ports, etc... etc... (okay, it was a cheap-o-cheap-o place to get a PC, but that's what most dyi places are like these days). Overall, it just wasted my time. Maybe it's okay for a goofy kid with lots of time and little money to mess with building their own boxes, or perhaps gamers with all their casemods, etc... but I just want a well integrated non-buggy fast box that's quiet, and it seems buying an HP did all that and more.

The funny thing is that the HP box I bought (at best buy too! I know! I'm crazy!) was and still is cheaper than buying the components for the same spec from any of these smaller shops. If I really tried, I might be able to save 100 bucks, but what I'd end up with would certainly not be as painless.

This company (HP) has never let me down!

Operating System Battle: Since Solaris 10 now is free, and is indeed a mighty operating system [A $500-million investment produced the most advanced operating system ever built—now offered FREE to you.], I decided I'm gonna try it out. I even bought a new box for it. It's going to compete for 'favorite child status' against a fresh Gentoo uber minimalist install.

Network Uncertainty: I feel I need to rationalize my home network, as it's grown kind of large and its complexity is worrying me and I've kind of forgotten what services are running on my machine (but unfortunately, Nessus hasn't).

Security: From a security perspective, things are not so bad, but Nessus shows a few things I've relaxed in order to make life easier: a few music share exports, some insecure X Windows, DCE distributed computing environment services, etc... Gotta patch those holes. Also, the Mandrake server that runs this web site has a broken package update manager, so that's also worrysome, so it's hard to update the puppy with the new 'Mandriva' that Mandrake has become. A new WinXP box Nessus scan shows an odd guest account issue, even though all the baseline scans pass, all patches applied, and Guest is off on the PC. Lots of stuff to patch and figure. I should get a buddy to 'audit' my network once I'm done.

On the storage front: I've converted most all of my CD and DVD (and VHS, and Audio Tape) collection to raw data files on my SAN -- most, for I've only got about 500 GB free now, and I need to buy more space. I'm very saddened at the DVDDecrypter news (it was taken down by the man). I originally wanted to store all the WAVE files and raw DVD's on my SAN with no quality loss, but wow it eats up space. I'm wondering if I should encode at least some of DVD's with DivX or something that can at least keep the menu structure working. It's against my philosophy, but it's cheaper than buying another SAN chassis.

I was looking at Coraid, which was written up in LinuxJournal recently. They make products which let you put drives directly on the LAN. Instead of iSCSI, one has ATAoE, and it's pretty simple to set up. I'm looking at the fiesability two 7.5TB racks. Problem is there's no hierarchal file system, snap shots, gui utilities for volume management, etc... It's just a Linux 2.6 kernel and a bunch of disks. Performance would be 'fine' I think. Another issue is that even though CORAID's solution is cheaper, I originally went to a SAN so I could have a unified storage management model for the house, and the optics of two storage models are less than pleasing (except on the wallet?).

Single Sign-on: Another goal I want to achieve is to implement a single sign-on solution with some biometric controls. I've been messing around with a few solutions, but they all take a lot of time to install and get working on all the different platforms. It seems if one can't install Single Sign-on at home, then how the heck can a big company do it? I think I need to hire a competent sysadmin (anyone want the job?) to get it all up while I hot tub and drink margaritas. Overall, I am looking for a sysadmin, so drop me a line if you're a superstar.

Outbound Load Balancing: Finally, I want to get real outbound load balancing working. I've got a DSL and Cable connection at the house, and occasionally one or the other does go down. I had a kind of flakey solution running some time ago using Linux, but the configuration was very complicated, and one afternoon I leaned on my keyboard in 'Vi' and apparently deleted something critical and that was about it for outbound load balancing.

Cables everywhere: Then there's the problem of Gigabit upstairs.... I have this long cable running from upstairs to downstairs right through the house. It's silly. People trip on it while they use the stairs. My mother yells at me about it when she visits. There's so much to do!

So I'm proud I'm running more. More in terms of distance, and less in terms of pauses within the distance. In the course of running I have:

- Defied Zeno's paradox
- Lost pounds and pounds
- Run for miles and miles like that song
- Ran while it rained
- Created depictions of my courses:

I used to make such fun of joggers, but now i know they're cool, and I used to be lame.

So I just sat the CISM exam. Had to get up at 5:30 and drive to Toronto. The drive was really pretty with all sorts of tree fog in the lower planes. Quite beautiful actually. And the Coffee Time coffee was also above-par.

One thing which did tick me off is I wasn't the first one to leave the exam hall. About 400 people were in the exam hall (around 30 or so for the CISM, all the rest for the CISA). I was #4 to finish. Rock on PAULSOP.COM! There was one ultra-dork-dork that stood out during the exam. Not only did he ask a dumb question ("can I write notes in my question book"), but DURING THE EXAM, he stood up and asked the entire room of 400+ people if they could 'stop coughing' so he could concentrate. I laughed out 'boo hoo' and was getting ready to PAULSOP.COM thump him, but instead I just whipped an eraser at him and everyone laughed. I certainly didn't need an eraser, as I was not making any mistakes. If I didn't have better things to do after the test (saw some street-artist friends on Queen Street) then I'd have stuck around and given him a wedgie afterwards all east-coast style... er. I mean grade-school style.

Hot Tip: The key to studying for exams is to do it from inside a Hot Tub. Yes, the study materials get disheveled, and your head can get sun-burned (hot tubs are best in the day, yes it's true), but the power of the chemicals combined with the heat (i futzed with the eeprom on my hot tub to increase the tempeature to crazy levels), bubbles, and the radioactive sun really magnify your brains capacity. Perhaps about a billion times. (pinkie in my mouth Dr. Evil style).

Another key to studying is to not over-do it. Study for 20 minutes, and then read Linux Journal for 1/2 an hour, have an ice cream, and clean up the Kitchen. Then you can possibly handle another 10 minutes. After that, you should sleep, reflect, and try to invent the entire cosmology of the next chapter -- i.e. anticipate what the writers will try to hit you with next. If you're reading differentiation, invent integration while you dream.

Finally, studying is always enhanced by driving to the lake (without your study materials). This is known in scholarly circles as the 'lake effect': Scholarly article from National Institute of Health.

I went up to Conestogo Lake with my best friend Gus, who brought with him book on Group Theory (and a Linux Journal, and a Nuts and Volts), and was always mumbling something about Abelian groups, how awfully big the Monster Group is. BTW, the monster group is also called the friendly giant group. It was constructed in 1982 by Robert Griess as a group of rotations in 196,833-dimensional space (way more than 3D). Here is a picture of the monster group, projected on Cthulhu space:

We also had an argument about standard notation, and then we suddenly realized we were in agreement.

So that's how to study. Get on it!

My feelings are that Google searches have been missing the mark lately. "when is fathers day" shows this page as one of the best links:

 One must boggle at the algorithms that would pick this page. I mean:

1) The graphics are really gross.
2) The afformentioned -37792 days until fathers day. Perhaps on Pluto, but not here.
3) Yes, I want to order a TRAILER HITCH off of *THIS PAGE* for Fathers Day. This page really inspires confidence.
4) Why do they suggest 'unique boquet of candy flowers, chocolate roses and cookies' as a suitable gift? is it either a Trailer Hitch, or Roses?
5) I also need business products, services, and resources -- you got that right: business resources. For fathers day..
6) If you visit the page you'll probably also see 'very scary work from home' ads, and link exchange links to anime soft porn sites. THANKS GOOGLE!

Is it time for INTERNET DESTRUCTION yet? (sad it is, over 10 million hits, that page, received it has)

People on the street often walk up to me and ask me, "PAULSOP.COM, what do you do when you're not buliding your death ray, or posting on your web site?"

"Fear not", I reassure them, "for I am writing for other peoples sites. ...for if I wrote only for PAULSOP.COM, this site would implode like a black-hole, into a singularity of pure, magnificent, and trancendental coolness..."

(wouldn't you like to live in my world).

BTW, here's a pic of Professor Television's Optical Theremin in the 'Theremin Design' portion of my studio:

You can see the little photo theremin, as well as the two Kaoss pads, Kyma Capybara, MS2000R, Wacom tablets for music, and the CM Motor Mix. Space Time are warped here.

So there are no viruses in any of the 492768 files scanned by the Anti-Virus scanners -- no viruses, no spyware, ... nada ...

These files go back to about 1995, and the last time I had virus scanned them all was about 2 years ago. Even back then, there were no viruses detected (just a few false positive macro virus things in hacking source code). I don't know why I don't have viruses -- just lucky I guess! (please, universe, don't take this post as an invitation to infect me...)

I'm alltogether unconvinced that paying Symantec $24.95 is the right thing to do. It's not the money -- it just doesn't feeeeel right. Instead, i'll try one of those free anti-virus programs (maybe AVG or Panda). Btw -- they don't even say how 'long' a subscription lasts for. they just let you 'renew' it -- spooky.