Had an annoying day not too long ago where our firewall crapped out.. so I put IPCop on an old P3 server.. IPCop is a very small linux based firewall. It works pretty well, though there are a few annoying things-- the big thing is that there's a lot of things you'd want to do, that just aren't exposed via the web interface.. so you end up having to dig through the man pages for iptables, and so forth.. if they just let you do a lot of that, then it would be outstanding.. we'll see how it fares..

REAPER got some big performance upgrades in the last month. In all of the work I had done in the past, there was a lot of code that was focused on being correct, rather than fast. There were lists that were stored in random or worse order, that were searched linearly.. oops. Keeping the list sorted such that the most used items are at the beginning, took care of a lot. Also we had some instances where we'd check to see if an item was in the list, when it would usually not be, so we'd scan the whole list... anyway, dumbness, but some simple cleanups, and *bam*, usable at 32 sample latency, lower CPU use.. woot.. Also realized that FFT(a+b) = FFT(a)+FFT(b), which enabled some huge optimizations to ReaVerb (making the impulse length less relevant, just means more complex number multiplications)..

REAPER also got a new plug-in called ReaTune, which acts as a tuner, and a pitch corrector. It's not really done yet, but it's already pretty usable, and has automatic and manual modes, and the ability to send MIDI events on pitch detection, which is badass.

I'll omit my obligitory "I wish other companies would be better about support for software that's other than the total mainstream" rant... I guess that's the whole point of REAPER, anyway.. to help change that.. we'll give it time..

Here are a few songs from new years. The second two were live, the first one not:

• Birds
• Pity Fuck
• Craig the Ripper (long, 3 movements)
• Bonus: Ode to Zach Braff (from a few days before)