Pwop Studios hosted its first unofficial recording session last night with a new band project I've started called Carl Nivris (a take-off on the word carnivorous). While it's a purely original band, we do have a few cover tunes we like to play. This is Herbie Hancock's awesome funk groove, Chameleon. It's not exactly true to the original, but then again Herbie never plays it the same way twice either.

Click here for the 256kbps wma file

Matt Covey is playing drums. This is my kit, a Yamaha Custom Maple kit with Evans heads. Dave Anderson is playing bass. He's playing an old Fender Precision bass through a GK amp direct. You'll have to put up with the overly-compressed bass as we were still messing with the input settings when we recorded this. Jed Johnson is playing his 1957 Hammond B3 organ. That's right.. 1957!  The Leslie speaker was miked at the top and bottom. Jay Franklin, my brother, is playing a Kurzweil PC88 digital piano, and I'm playing my 1983 les paul through an effects unit and into a Mesa Boogie dual rectifier on the left, and a Lab Series L5 amp on the right.

It was one take, but recorded on separate tracks. Just a little EQ on the individual drums, a touch of reverb on the snare and toms, a 2K notch cut on the guitar, and that's about it.

The band will be recording an album of all original funk tunes this fall.

 Don Demsak on LINQ to XML Part 2

Don XML concludes his two part series on using LINQ to XML in .NET 3.5. This week Don shows us how to create XML and HTML using XLinq and wonders at some possible new features.

http://dnrtv.com/default.aspx?showID=81

Codestacy [kohd-stah-see] noun

The euphoric feeling that you get from successfully forging and implementing a simple and elegant software solution to a real problem.

As developers, sometimes we forget that we can perform magic. We can use our IDEs, languages, databases, and compilers to solve real problems. With all this talk of dynamic languages, LINQ, and all this other nascent stuff, its good to know that even without tomorrow's technology we can do incredible things with basic (sic.) code.

Today I successfully tested a new publishing system for Pwop Productions. The original system was a windows app that ran on the server with lots of hard coded meta information about the shows we do. You'd see code that expressed things like "If the show we're publishing is dnrTV, it's a zip file, so don't convert it to mp3."

The second phase of development of the publisher was to move all the meta information out of the app and into a database. That was a great leap forward, but there was still a lot of UI tweaking necessary in order to get the show done. You had to manually upload a WAV file via FTP to the file server where the final files are hosted. You had to make sure the title and description for the show being published was on the screen. The publishing started after an audio file showed up in the incoming FTP folder, but in order to know the file was complete, you had to paste the size of the file into a text box. It worked, but there were still lots of places where mistakes could be made, and most of the problems were caught mid-process.

The last phase, which I just completed, combines a client-side Windows Forms application with a publisher on the server. You start the process off by dragging and dropping a file onto the client. At this point a whole bunch of checks are peformed to make sure that the filename is valid (our file names contain the show name, the episode number, and sometimes the guest or topic). The show has to exist in the database. Also, there are flags in the db that tell us whether the show always has a guest and/or a sponsor. If any of these conditions aren't met, the user is asked to fix it.

If it's a WAV file, it gets compressed with FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec). It is then uploaded to the server with an FTP script. But first, a text file with the same name as the audio file is uploaded, containing the size on one line, and the split point (the point at which we split the audio into two files) on another.

The server-side publisher app (which is now a console application) sees the text file, reads the info, and waits for the entire file to be uploaded. It decodes the FLAC file, creates the required file formats (which it knows from reading the meta information out of the db), creates the torrent files (thanks to David Smith's BTSharp), copies the files to the appropriate directories for web and bittorrent hosting, adds the file information to the database (so the website can display the links), enables the show for the website, and publishes a blog post from a template. The RSS feeds and the website are driven completely by the database.

So, long story short.... you drop a WAV file on a form and 10 minutes later (barring a network or file system error) the show is published.

Yes, I am definitely codestatic today.

<LINQ to XML/>

Scott's been poking around with LINQ to XML and reports his findings to Carl about life with XDocuments and XElements. They also talk about the bridge classes that link (no pun intended) System.Xml and System.Xml.Linq.

http://hanselminutes.com/default.aspx?showID=97

Vishwas Lele talks about thinking of Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server as an application platform for .NET development. With all of the power and flexibility of MOSS, it can no longer be categorized simply as a web portal.

http://dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showID=273

 Don Demsak on LINQ to XML Part 1

Don XML is back on dnrTV to give us our first sneak peek at Visual Studio Team System 2008 and one of it's most outstanding new features: LINQ to XML. In this first of a two part series Don shows how to query xml in VB and C#, both the old way and using XLinq.

http://dnrtv.com/default.aspx?showID=80

While mastering today's .NET Rocks! show I noticed an annoying whine in the guest's phone track. You might not be able to hear it at first but if you turn up the volume and listen to it, you can definitely hear it, and it is annoying.

The standard noise reduction techniques didn't seem to work on this, mostly because the telephone audio interface we use has a gate that kills this noise when the talent isn't speaking. Since to remove noise, you have to have a nice clean sample of it, obtaining this sample is pretty hard.

So to take out the noise I went into Spectral View in Adobe Audition, a feature leftover from when the software was Cool Edit Pro. Spectral view shows you the frequency range vertically, with the lowest (bassiest) frequencies at the bottom and the highest (trebliest) frequencies at the top. Color shows the intensity of the frequencies over time, which is on the horizontal axis. Take a look at this clip from the phone track in regular edit mode. You can listen to it by clicking here.

Click on the image to enlarge it

Did you hear the whine? No? Turn up your headphones and listen again. You can really hear it toward the end of the clip.

Here's the same section of audio in Spectral View:

Again, click to enlarge.

Look closely. Do you see a horizontal band in the 1.1K to 1.2K range? That's the whine!!!

Now, here's the cool part. I can select this band like I'm selecting an area of a picture in a paint program and delete it!

Here's a picture of the frequency range selected:

Hit the delete key and it's gone! Now, it only removed that frequency range. Think of this like an equalizer with a different user interface. Here's what it looks like with the band removed:

And of course, click here to listen to the clean version.

All in a day's work.

Michael Dunn tells Carl and Richard about Office Communication Server (OCS) 2007 which has incorporated Live Communication Server with Speech Server. Speech Server is one of the key development elements of OCS, providing the ability for .NET developers to build applications that can both speak and understand speech with minimal coding.

http://dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showID=272

I had to pick the day that my ISPs DNS server crashed to move all my email accounts to Google Apps. Currently the only domain working is pwop.com. You can email me at carl@pwop.com, but the franklins.net email domain is temporarily down.

So, about the move... Since I started franklins.net in 1996 I've been using MDaemon as an email server. About two months ago I decided to install the latest update, after which I discovered that updates weren't free. In fact it will cost me about $2800 to purchase one year's worth of "upgrade protection" which gives me free updates for a year. After that it's another couple grand for another year, etc.  I definitely wanted the latest version with the latest features and security devices, but I'm not willing to spend that kind of money for a mail server that serves about 40 email addresses in total, all SMTP/POP3, no AD, etc.

I thought about Exchange, but that's really overkill, and it requires a Windows domain, which I don't have or need. Just then Scott Hanselman and I were talking about Google Apps and Windows Live Domains in this week's Hanselminutes episode. Since he had moved his whole family and circle of friends up to Google, I decided to try and do it with Live Domains.

Transferring the DNS records and setting up the account was a snap. It really was easy to do, and went really smoothly. The Hotmail web client is also extremely pleasant to use. However, there are several real features missing that are preventing me from using it. The dealbreaker is that you can't forward email outside of hotmail/msn. I got an email from the team at MS who said that this feature was coming soon, but my mail server's temporary license expires in 5 days.

So I've spent the last 16 hours or so moving all my domains to Google Apps. While I didn't find the setup process nearly as easy as the Live Domains process, it seems there is UI for every kind of tweak you can do to a mail account, and that makes me extremely happy.

HOWEVER... the fine folks at my ISP had a DNS server crash and had to rebuild their servers from scratch. You may have noticed several of our websites being up and down today. The sites are mostly fixed, but the MX records are still very much screwed up. I'm hoping it will be resolved tomorrow.

So, I don't really have much to report on using Google Apps becuase carl@pwop.com is the only email I have right now that works, and I haven't had time to use it. I'm too busy trying to fix everything else.

It's been a few days since I started my experiment in triphasic sleep, and I thought I'd give you an update. For the most part I have kept the 6.5 hours up/1.5 hours down schedule with almost perfect accuracy, except for one session that started 15 minutes late, and one that started 15 early.

For the most part I am completely functional, just a little groggy, but never to the point of falling asleep. I am drinking one to two cups of coffee upon waking, and I'm taking about 1 to 1.5 mg of melatonin before falling asleep. I'm hoping that once my body adapts I wont need either.

It's getting better, though. Waking up is getting easier and easier, although I am still groggy. Feels like taking percoset or something. I can function just fine, and I yawn once in a while, but my mind is sharp.

So far my family and friends have been pretty understanding about scheduling things around my naps. I don't think that's going to be a problem.

The hardest cycle to wake up from is the 2:30 AM cycle, for obvious reasons. That's right in the middle of my normal cycle. I am trying to resist the urge to sleep more. For now, coffee seems to help.

Again, having a friend to do the experiment with, who's also up in the middle of the night helps a LOT.

Stay tuned.

<2007 Ultimate Tool List/>

Scott and Carl talk about Scott's 2007 Ultimate devoloper and power users tool list.

http://hanselminutes.com/default.aspx?showID=96