Addictophobia

I'm 31 years old, and have been drinking a bottle of wine daily for four years. I have been in constant fear of becoming an alcoholic. Now I realized that what bothered me the most wasn't the need to drink my first glass of wine in the evening, but that I thought I was going to be an alcoholic. I have a strong fear of becoming an addict, which is actually worse than it would be to become an addict. I call that addictophobia.

I like to drink, and if I think about my liver getting damaged through the years it's like thinking about four tyres that get worn while driving. If you want your tyres to stay intact, don't drive. If you like driving, then accept that your tyres get worn.

The only thing is that it's a lot easier to get four new tyres than getting a new liver.

And BTW, don't forget: don't drink and drive!

First steps towards live-coding

As you might know (e. g. hearing the notes the player on the left-hand side plays), I make music. I mainly use ChucK for this purpose, which is a quite simple but functional and well-designed programming language. However, there has been a big limitation in efficiency: I actually had to write down every single note and volume change, filter frequency sweep by my own hands as nasty old numbers in Java-like code. I hope that time has finally ended.

Today I succeeded to connect a very simple Java UI to ChucK via OSC messages (thanks to this post). Now I plan to write my own UI's ("instruments") in Java, generate OSC events with them and record them using the accurate timing built into ChucK. Then I'll use Ruby to generate ChucK code again from the events I recorded. So there goes feedback, too. I'll feel like a real pro... and it all cost nothing, only a little coding experience...

How to win a war

Look which side the Hungarians are on, and stand on the other side.

ReverbNation song statistics revealed

OK, I have some songs at ReverbNation. You might as well listen to them using the player on the left. ReverbNation offers me the possibility to see how many people listened to my songs and what percent of each song they heard. Knowing this and the length of my songs, I can provide a "hall of fame" of Hillaby's songs:

1. Let Me Live - 8,63 points
2. Dubbancha - 8,43
3. Seven Lives - 7,16
4. Aka Cat - 6,85
   
5. Moonshine Reggae - 6,81
6. Xmas Dux Ska - 6,55
7. At The Edge Of Hope - 5,52
8. Skwabisk - 5,5

It's quite interesting that the most popular song title is 'Skwabisk', which means that's the title which attracted the most people, however, it couldn't grab people's attention: they switched away quite early.

The list above shows that my guitar solos were quite attractive: the first three have solos in them, while the other five haven't. I should practice more...

On programming languages

I read some articles about the dangers that C++ can have for an average programmer, and that we'd better go on and get Java or C# for our projects. Well, I can only agree that it's easier to write code in Java than in C++. But the quality of the product we have to release does not always depend on how easy it was to produce it.

I am the maintainer and team leader for a 300k+ loc. C++ project. If it works it's not because of the language, it's because of the tests we run. If it fails, it's not because of the language either, it's because of the tests we haven't run.

I don't believe that a software product will be more reliable just because it's written in a "higher-level" language. It's reliable and stable because almost all of its functionality has been tried or even stress-tested.

tic tac toe

Menthol-flavoured foot finger.

alcoholism

An illness that goes away when you drink alcohol.

Logical

"How do you know that Punks Not Dead?"
"Because Dead Can Dance."