I don't believe in ghosts.

I read Project Hail Mary a few weeks ago, and I enjoyed it at the time, and since then it's aged well in my brain.

Some months ago I read some article about how life could be defined as any system of patterns that reproduced itself, or something. The point of that article was about how life could exist anywhere there was energy, e.g. in the sun. If anybody knows what I'm talking about, post a link here...

I suppose that's the premise of Conway's Game of Life.

Anyway -- taking that reproducing pattern thing in mind. Could a house be haunted, with a chill? Maybe if it had the right combination of air currents, you could have a pattern where some cold breeze periodically exists, and creates cycles that would be unexplainable, could that be life? Maybe ghosts are these effective lifeforms that we don't comprehend. Nothing supernatural about them, just not water and carbon etc. And probably not self-aware...

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Oh hi there, I guess it's been a while! REAPER v7 has launched. Right on.

I've spent some time on and off occasionally getting REAPER to run natively on Windows/arm64. There's practically no demand for such a thing, but the platform exists so it's worth thinking about. I read various reviews of some arm laptops that ran Windows and the real issue seemed to be lack of native software.

Anyway, in trying to finish these builds, I learned about something new in Windows 11/arm: the "arm64ec" ABI. This allows emulating x86_64 on native arm64 processes, with the ability for arm64 code to load/call x86_64 code without having to do any process bridging or anything like that. It's pretty much designed for DAWs, which need to load plug-ins in process for performance.

I posted a build of REAPER to our pre-release site which uses this. What cool is that there are a few libraries we ship with which we don't have ARM versions, but REAPER happily loads the x86_64 versions and they work! (one is libmp3lame.dll, haven't gotten around to making a native build of that.

The only real hiccups were porting the dynamic code generation of EEL2: symbols get a # prefix, there are a few registers you can't use, and you have to use VirtualAlloc2() to allocate code memory and tag it as being arm code rather than x86_64.

Not sure if this stuff will ever be worth releasing, but it's fun, and if you're interested you can play with it.

P.S. the new code signing requirement that the key needs to be stored in a hardware security module (e.g. Yubikey) is completely misguided. The Yubikey always wants you to enter the PIN, too. SMH. Additionally, if you remote desktop into a Windows 10 computer, you can't use the locally-installed HSM! So alas, I've installed TightVNC for the first time in more than a decade (not sure if that's a security win...).

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Wanted to check my assumptions on C++ and the ability of modern compilers to optimize RAII (side note: I can never remember that abbreviation, always have to google it), so this morning I had a few moments of fun with godbolt:

extern int gv, bar();

template<class T> class saver {
  public:
  T save, *ptr;
  saver(T *p) : ptr(p) { save = *p; }
  ~saver() { *ptr = save; }
};

void foo_c() {
  int save = gv;
  gv = 1;
  bar();
  gv = save;
}

void foo_cxx() {
  saver<int> s(&gv);
  gv = 1;
  bar();
}

foo_c():
        push    rbx
        mov     ebx, DWORD PTR gv[rip]
        mov     DWORD PTR gv[rip], 1
        call    bar()
        mov     DWORD PTR gv[rip], ebx
        pop     rbx
        ret
foo_cxx():
        push    rbx
        mov     ebx, DWORD PTR gv[rip]
        mov     DWORD PTR gv[rip], 1
        call    bar()
        mov     DWORD PTR gv[rip], ebx
        pop     rbx
        ret

So yeah, the optimizer does perfectly.

Recordings:

Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 1 -- [8:53]
Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 2 - Private Life -- [7:20]
Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 3 - Watch Your Step -- [2:46]
Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 4 - Watch Your Step (II) -- [2:05]
Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 5 - Self Imposed -- [4:39]
Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 6 - Dogs Will Rule the World -- [3:04]
Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 7 - Virgins Again -- [2:53]
Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 8 - Virgins Again (Again) -- [3:14]
Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 9 - The River -- [4:31]
Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 10 - Cosmic Background -- [3:32]
Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 11 -- [5:20]
Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 12 - Hindenburg -- [6:42]
Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 13 - Chosen by the Few -- [3:48]
Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 14 - Las Vegas -- [4:04]
Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 15 - No Big Benefactor -- [4:06]
Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 16 - Now We Understand -- [4:14]
Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 17 - Cast Iron Candy Bandit -- [3:10]
Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 18 - Dogs Will Rule the World (reprise) -- [3:37]
Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 19 - Find Me -- [5:01]
Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 20 - Old as Coal -- [4:33]
Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 21 -- [11:36]
Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 22 - Charlie (feat Cory Choy) -- [4:35]

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Someone asked if I would post something about programming. I wish I had something interesting to offer. The best I can do is describe an area in our current work where there's a considerable productivity drain ("technical debt", I suppose).

We're still using Windows .rc files for dialog boxes. VC6 is my preferred dialog editor, but it has a limit of something like 32k or 64k controls in total for the entire .rc file, if you exceed that it crashes. We've long exceeded that, so now we pretty much edit .rc files by hand with lots of trial and error (I don't seem to be getting any better of adding/subtracting fixed values to the Nth column of a bunch of lines). We could temporarily trim the file, do the edits, then restore the rest, but meh. Or we could write a .rc file editor lol. At any rate it's completely inefficient.

On a more specific points related to that, adding options to REAPER's preferences takes far too much work. There's the manual .rc file editing, the juggling around of options in a fixed amount of space, moving things to other tabs, etc. It's stupid and a time suck. But there's no reasonable alternative without a ton of extra work. Some day, maybe.

So anyway, it's often the case where we want to add something simple, and a good half of the work is spent with UI nonsense. Yes yes we could move all of our preferences to a list of attributes and make it all generated from data and that would be great but that would be a huge project.

bonus:

People ask about making a mobile sequencer. The underlying core of a DAW would be the same, but doing the UI would require basically a separate implementation to be useable. I don't really want to maintain two DAWs. Also phones bleh (x 1000 -- the ecosystem, the lockeddownness, the lack of keyboard, the mercy of the OS, etc). :/

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Working on a fun REAPER branch relating to keyboard shortcuts. I will allow some pretty sweet things, but it will also give people a lot of rope to hang themselves with. You can have a bunch of alternate main keyboard mapping sections (which also affect mousewheel mappings), so you can switch sections by action/toolbar/menu/whatever.

You can also engage a section momentarily by action, so you could: make Ctrl+F be "momentarily use the main section named "FX", then that section could just have a ton of mappings to particular FX: Ctrl+F followed by E for ReaEQ, Ctrl+F followed by C for ReaComp, etc.

What's also fun is that when they are momentarily engaged, they act globally... so if you are in a text field and do Ctrl+F, then the following E or C still work, or if you have the Ctrl+F as a global hotkey, then that momentary switch makes the E or C effectively global too, but only when following the Ctrl+F.

But -- if you accidentally run an action perma-switching to a section that has no keyboard mappings... well nothing will work until you switch back via the correct action in the actions window, or you restart reaper. Which is where the rope to hang yourself is.

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(I posted this to Mastodon but really why not put it here too?)

In one of our REAPER development branches (and thus the latest +dev builds), there's now support for generating EEL2 code on the fly (for EEL reascripts, JSFX, video processors), using EEL2. I find this immensely pleasing.

To use this functionality, you can create an embedded script, using <? script code ?>, and that script has a separate variable/memory space, and can generate code using printf().

EEL2 often requires a lot of repetitive code to produce fast DSP code.

So for example, our loudness meter has a sinc filter that gets coefficients generated. Here's a before and after:

 function sinc_gen_slice(cs, o*) instance(sinc_gen_val slice_pos) global() (
   slice_pos = cs;
-  o.v00 = sinc_gen_val(); o.v01 = sinc_gen_val(); o.v02 = sinc_gen_val(); o.v03 = sinc_gen_val();
-  o.v04 = sinc_gen_val(); o.v05 = sinc_gen_val(); o.v06 = sinc_gen_val(); o.v07 = sinc_gen_val();
-  o.v08 = sinc_gen_val(); o.v09 = sinc_gen_val(); o.v10 = sinc_gen_val(); o.v11 = sinc_gen_val();
-  o.v12 = sinc_gen_val(); o.v13 = sinc_gen_val(); o.v14 = sinc_gen_val(); o.v15 = sinc_gen_val();
+  <? loop(x=0;sinc_sz, printf("o.v%02d = sinc_gen_val();%s",x,(x&3)==3?"\n": " "); x += 1) ?>
 );

There's some extra logic in there to produce identical output (including newlines) which isn't necessary, but added so I could test the output to make sure it didn't differ. The nice thing is, not only is this more readable and smaller, if you want to increase the filter size, you can without a ton of tedious and error-prone copy/paste.

Update, other tricks. If you want to make this code optional, you can do:

/* <? printf("%s/","*"); 
  printf("code which will only be executed on new jsfx/etc");
  printf("/%s","*");
?> */

/* <? printf("%s/","*");
  _suppress=1; 
  printf("code which will only be executed on new jsfx");
  printf("/%s","*");
?> */
legacy code which will only be executed on old jsfx
/* <? _suppress=0; ?> */

I've set up a mastodon account, @justin@cockos.net. I might try writing about development stuff I find interesting there.

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(retroposted on December 17, 2022)

I took a ton of pictures on this race but I really have no use for them, nobody wants to come over and see my vacation slides, and I don't have a slide projector and also I took them on my phone which means they only exist as bits. I'm always looking for excuses to write about things, but it tends to be too much complaining about programming nonsense. So here are my photos, with explanations:

I flew into LAX on the Thursday. Decided to walk from the terminal to the rental car place. It's about a mile and a half, which if you've packed light is infinitely preferable to walk, especially in 55 degree weather, than to pile onto a rental car bus. Especially these days. I rented a car (brand new Kia sedan ftw), wandered my way around, got some lunch using a gift card I purchased in early 2020, mmm french toast, went for an easy run in Griffith Park to waste some time, it was really tough to not go more than a few miles. Checked into the guest house airbnb, went to bed at 7pm or so.

Friday involved going to Tacos Delta for chilaquiles. I'll leave this here. Kept to myself, worked a bit, went to bed around 7pm again.

Got up at 2:30am, left the airbnb at a little before 4am. Drove the long way to Malibu. Got to see places I occasionally went as a kid. Met Steve and Edward (and their friend Alex) at the start around 5:15am. There are other pictures with less fantastic lighting but really why when you have this one?

Something like 80 people, I guess? We start at 6am.

I should point out that the organizers mention that the course is well marked, but there is one turn that it's very important that the 50-mile runners make (there's also a 50k starting an hour later), and if you don't make the turn you'll end up running a bit over 50k. Why did I mention this?

The first few miles are a singletrack climb, which means the start position is very important. We held back, letting the faster people go ahead. Maybe we let too many. A little running, but a lot of fast hiking. Which was good, the last thing I wanted to do is go out too fast. I never know how these things will go, I mean usually it's fine but things will hurt and there will be suffering so better try to minimize it. And I'm on a low-mileage year. Anyway.

It starts getting light on the climb, 6:19am. Steve wants to go faster, runs a little bit of the climb, I somewhat keep up (catching up on the level bits or when he stops to take pictures).

It levels out a bit, there's some running, 6:40am. The aid station will come in another 20 minutes or so.

After the aid station (which was about 5 miles), some oranges, watermelon, water fillup, maybe some other snacks I forget now, we start a 6 mile loop with a little mud. Steve's in front of me here, at about 7:20am.

Ah the views, 7:28am.

The view ahead from the last shot, I love those shots of the trail ahead (or behind -- and more accurately the experience of seeing them in real life -- at home there's nothing more satisfying than seeing the Brooklyn Bridge ahead of you a mile away, and 1 WTC in the distance behind it, then finding yourself there by your feet). I'll try to point the trail shots out, if we can see with these low quality images I uploaded.

This one I could've left out, but hey 5 minutes passed and I can still see the ocean.

We head inland and it gets really muddy, I'm told this is due to rain. Tons of mud stick to your shoes, you end up tweaking your gait in order to try to shake it off as you go. Activating strange muscles. It gets a bit warm. Only a little bit. 7:49am. Another 10-15 minutes and you're back at the same aid station as before.

I left the aid station before Steve. As a result I was in front of him. There was a climb. I was not faster.

Oxnard, in the background, I assume! Our friend Fritz was always obsessed with that name. I meant to text him about that but didn't have much cell service. 8:26am.

After that climb, there was a pretty amazing descent, which I had a lot of fun on. Steve seemed to be on a phone call while he was running so I thought I'd give him his space. Near the bottom of the descent was the Valley of the Spiders[tm][cc](Andy). The spiders were considerate in marking their territory and I didn't feel threatened. 8:50am.

Just down the road a 100' from the spider web, it got really cold, this valley trapped that cold air, and the with the humidity there were these clouds forming. It was cool but didn't photograph well, just looks like dust here.

A short 10 minutes later, you pay the price of that descent, with a pretty steep fire road climb. I walked this (I walked all of the climbing really). As I was hiking up this, the leader for the 50k race ran past me. RAN. That did not look easy to do for a 10k let alone a 50k. At the top of that hill was the same aid station again (16 miles, 9:05am or so). Where I filled my water, ate some more, and left as soon as possible. Then about 100' down the road I stopped to clean out the mud from my sock which was messing with my big toe. Oh such stupid timing...

After that there was some nice downhill, then I ended up in a valley which was very warm and humid. This was probably as hot as I was all day, and it was at 9:30am.

On the climb out of the riverbed valley, it got cooler, but my hip was doing something funny, popping with each step that I walked (didn't have the issue running). I stopped to stretch a little, which didn't help, then found that I could adjust my gait slightly in order to avoid the popping. The popping didn't hurt but it also didn't seem like a good thing. The climb was nice, here's the view after crossing a gravel path that people were bicycling on (you can see them barely). It looked like a really nice place to ride. I do get jealous of California this time of year. 10:00am or so, 20 miles in.

I had a 10 minute stop at a NEW aid station, at 10:35-10:45 or so. At this point in addition to the eating and getting water (and watered down coke), I took my socks off, put some ointment and bandaids on my toes, which had been giving me problems (somewhat due to my mismanagement of them 4 weeks before at the NY marathon, another story which will not get documented). I also snugged my shoes slightly to try to keep some of the pressure off my toes (this ended up being an oops that I'm still paying for). Anyway 10-15 minutes after that aid station is this picture, mountains pretty. I like them. I start to climb them.

I go up what I thought was a really big hill (Strava tells me it was about 750'. OK not that big). At the top is this left turn. The one they mentioned at the start. It's a little tempting to just miss the turn and do a 50k. 11:15am, about 26 miles. I take the turn.

Side note: the course was very well marked, especially compared to the races in NJ I've done, but this is sort of the exception. They really should have a sign that says "50 mile runners: if you're not at mile 40 or so, turn around and make the turn!" Maybe missing turns and getting lost is a rite of passage for trail runners...

The climb continues! You can see the trail below... wait, shit, you can't. OK how about I "ENHANCE":

That's a person, I'm 79.3% sure. It could be Steve! I could easily check that in the days of Strava and GPS data but it's better not to know.

More climbing. 45 minutes and 2.5 miles later, nearing the top. This will be fun to go back down (we go out 7 miles or so and back another 7 miles to an aid station).

After that climb, there's still hills, some up, some down. I liked it better when the aid stations were closer together. You occasionally pass groups of tourists, which always feels odd, such differences in current experiences.

Still headed to the aid station, there's a view to the Northeast of some lake. I ponder whether it is artificial. 12:40pm, 31 miles, about to descend to the aid station.





Crow (or as I'm told, Raven), seen from the descent to the aid station.

Soon after, I arrive at the 33-ish mile aid station, and put on the best thing ever -- fresh socks. Long overdue. I try to eat some but it's getting more difficult. Sitting is nice. I arrive at around 12:50pm, leave around 1:05pm.

Out and back not so interesting, same thing in reverse. I see Edward before the big descent. Take a video of him running the other way. Share some ginger candy. He says Steve should be not too far behind him. We go our separate ways.





Take this video of running at the start of the big descent -- "Coming down the mountain" (around mile 38, 2:05pm)

I didn't mention it until now, but this whole race I've had songs from The Verve's "A Storm in Heaven" in my head. Butterfly, "The Sun, The Sun", Star Sail. I wondered if "The Sun, The Sea" is a reference to l'etranger. I'm not listening to anything but damn those songs just burn a hole in my ears. Maybe I get sick of them, or just my general starting-to-feel-awfulness projects to them (I still love that album and have happily listened to it since!).

I don't see Steve on the descent. I start to guess he missed the turn. D'oh.

The section of the climb that took 50 minutes to go up takes about 30 minutes to go down. Fun. My weak left calf starts feeling not great with every left step. Still fun though.

After that descent, some new territory. 2:30pm, around 39 miles. Eating ginger candies. So far between aid stations.

Nice trails though.

Ah another canyon, 3:15pm.

I think this was soon after the last one. The photographer was like "you're almost to the last aid station!" But those 3 or so miles took FOREVER. Boring flat jeep trail.

Get to the aid station, eat some stale Chipotle chips (they had water and gels and offered to make some soup but eh). Did some more toe management. This is the part of the race where I usually end up complaining and then after the fact regret the complaining. But anyway only like 4 miles to go, just one small climb and descent then it's done.

That climb went on way too long. The small climb is still 1000'. I talked to another person who was also complaining, though his excuse was that since September he had only run two 7 mile runs. pfft! and then he proceeded to go ahead and beat me by a solid 5-10 minutes. Ah, youth.

The climb kept going. More complaining.

Looking back.

My goal was to finish. Bonus to not finish in the dark. 4:30pm.

Damn, magic hour, 4:38pm. After taking this I enjoyed the descent, passed various hikers taking sunset pictures, we all agreed it was beautiful. Finished at something like 4:52pm. Took a few minutes before I could eat anything, had some quesadillas, chili, couldn't really stomach much. It was getting cold, so I took off. Saw in my text messages that Steve did in fact miss the turn (bummer).

Drove back to LA. Got back to the airbnb, ate some snacks, realized I didn't have enough of them, oops, took a shower, got chills, got in bed, felt really good under the covers. Whenever I'd get up to pee, massive shiver shiver chills.

7am Sunday, return to Tacos Delta. Glorious breakfast burrito made me whole. A few hours later, beer with salt and kebabs at Edward's. That was also amazing.

Thus concludes my story.

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(i try to avoid these)

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I wrote and recorded (though not always in that order) a couple dozen tracks over the last year, and decided it was time to put many of them into an album.

It's now available on my archive, Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, Tidal, etc.

I look forward to continuing this journey, though I'm running out of old artwork to reuse for album covers.

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photo thanks to Oscar @ Hoboken Cove

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Recordings:

Not Vampires - 1 - Find Me? -- [0:51]
Not Vampires - 2 - Find Me. -- [2:06]
Not Vampires - 3 - Find Me! -- [4:21]
Not Vampires - 4 -- [6:32]
Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 1 - Intro to Hindenburg -- [7:22]
Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 2 - Better with Friends -- [6:58]
Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 3 - Still Circling for a Landing -- [9:21]
Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 4 - Dogs Will Rule the World -- [5:39]
Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 5 - Cosmos (Leacho) -- [8:26]
Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 6 - Chosen by the Few -- [4:01]
Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 7 - Self Imposed Egg Salad -- [1:39]
Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 8 - Self Imposed Exile -- [7:04]
Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 9 - Self Imposed -- [4:48]
Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 10 - Find Me (I) -- [1:26]
Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 11 - Find Me (II) -- [3:07]
Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 12 - Find Me (III) -- [2:33]
Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 13 - Find Me (IV) -- [3:00]
Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 14 - Old as Coal -- [3:20]
Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 15 - The River -- [4:48]
Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 16 - How Low -- [5:18]
Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 17 - Now We Understand (I) -- [2:22]
Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 18 - Now We Understand (II) -- [3:24]
Yes, Exactly, Yes! - 19 - May 29 Track 6 -- [10:09]

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