Spanspek

That got your attention, didn't it? As some of you may know, Digidesign announced the end of support for PPC systems. This causes a problem for PPC owners who still want to use their HD systems. Unless you bought the very last G5s, you have PCI slots in your machine. And if you bought earlier, and bought a great big HD system, you probably bought an expansion chassis to hold all the PCI cards your computer wouldn't (since it has only three slots). Your new Mac Pro will have PCIe slots. So now, if you want to get future version of Pro Tools (from 8.0.3) you need a Mac Pro, or maybe a Macbook Pro with an ExpressCard slot and a cardbus interface to your expansion chassis. Problem is, a lot of users bought the Digidesign 64-bit 7-slot chassis. This was actually made by Magma and is otherwise known as the PR7464. We have one at work, though it doesn't have the model ID anywhere on it, so it took a while to figure out whether that was what we had. Now it turns out that most, if not all, of those chassis do not work with a Mac Pro. What you need is a chassis with the Pericom bridge chip. So I took a look inside ours. Lo and behold, there's a great big Pericom chip. It's not the one shown here, but I was hopeful. Whoops! Turns out that's a clock chip. I haven't been able to find the (incompatible) Intel or DEC chips. So now we have to buy another expansion chassis. And those things are not cheap. Actually we need two. The studio computer has two HD cards inside it, so we need a new chassis for those cards anyway. But the HD3 system (three cards) is in the existing chassis. It is possible to replace the boardset inside the chassis. That's about US$1450 instead of $2500. But that's not a big saving after having to spend $2500 on a new chassis and also get two computers. All this took more than a week. The person from Magma turned out to be helpful, but I could have figured it out sooner if she'd read my first couple of emails properly. I thought what we wanted to do was pretty plain at the start. Still, while Magma is the only game in town for PCI expansion (since SBS disappeared and one wouldn't trust those cheap things now appearing on ebay), they probably do way more business with server farms and the military. As usual, audio is marginal. Goodbye $15000. (If we can afford it, that is.)

A while ago, I installed Vmware on my laptop so I could run Windows. This has proved to be very useful, as I also bought (and rather like) Office 2007. But I also used it at the Music Festival held at my institution last year. We had the use of two Digidesign digital mixing consoles, a Profile and an SC48. I was able to take the basic patch and program each show using the stand-alone DShow software. Just recently, Vmware stopped working. The web interface works fine, but when I tried to open a console to see and work with the Windows virtual machine, there'd be no response. Well, thanks to a lot of clever people whose posts had been indexed by Google, I found out that the Vmware Firefox plug-in doesn't work with Firefox 3.6. Moving back to 3.5.8 fixed the problem. But this is a pain, as I like 3.6. Once again, the boffins came to the rescue. You can take that plug-in and use it to launch a stand-alone console without the browser. It presents you with a login screen as well. Now, logging into the Web UI on "localhost" requires the URL http://127.0.0.1:8222 for an insecure connection and https://127.0.0.1:8333 for a secure connection. When typing the URL into the stand-alone console's login dialog, no http is required, presumably because http is not being used. But only port 8333 works, for reasons that aren't apparent. Still, it's a minor inconvenience. I have Firefox 3.6 and a Windows VM working again. I just wish the login dialog would save the URL so I didn't have to type it every time. Perhaps if I could write a shell script, I could figure out a way of doing that.

By now, most Pro Tools users realise that "native" versions will always be limited. Whether it's I/O or track count, you have to spend a lot more money on an HD system to get what you want. There is no middle ground. It's $3000 or $30,000. So when I came across this, I was salivating. That's right... read your way through the first few pages. An M-Audio ProFire Lightbridge with Pro Tools M-Powered 7.3, 7.3.1, 7.3.1cs1 or 7.3.1cs2 will give you 32 channels of simultaneous I/O, not the limited 18 mentioned in the disclaimer on the M-Audio website. Thanks to ebay and willing sellers, I have Pro Tools M-Powered 7.3.1 and a ProFire Lightbridge. I can confirm that this combination will indeed record on 32 tracks simultaneously. Since I have no A/D converters, I haven't tried this with actual audio signals feeding the thing.

We just moved house. I had done everything to ensure services would be connected. I even requested power connection on the previous Friday. Lou and her mum got to the new place about 10am on Monday. At 3pm the power was cut. We had to wait two days for a reconnection. I was cross. I still am, but it is sobering to realise how dependent we are on modern technology, even one as old as the electricity supply. Anyway, here's what happened:

I wish to confirm TRUenergy had ordered and requested a connection for the Friday 05/02/10. However, a day prior to this on the 04/02/10 Citipower were conducting their Advanced Interval Meter (AMI) also known as 'Smart meters' roll out. Citipower are currently replacing their current meters with the new Smart Meters as part of the Government initiative occurring from 2010 - 2013. On 04/02/10 when Citipower were changing over your meter they had found a defect at the point of attachment which was therefore deemed unsafe to complete the change of meters. As a result, Citipower sent through a cancellation notification to TRUenergy on the same day 04/02/10 in the morning. As this was not followed up at our end, there was no second request to reconnect until you had contacted us. My apologies this has occurred and I will be following up as why this was overlooked as it could have been avoided.

I still have a few questions, though. During my first call to TruEnergy on the afternoon of the power cut, the operator got me to hold and then told me that the "electricity company" (Citipower -- and why would he not disclose that?) had reported a fault and had subsequently fixed it. Now we know from the TruEnergy quote above, that the fault was detected the day before my requested connection. But when was it fixed? On the Monday or earlier? I think it was probably on the Monday opr else why would the power have been cut then? But if it was earlier (Friday?) and if the fault was so easily corrected, why was the power on then cut. Why was it not off and then restored? The problem is that TruEnergy is just a retailer. Citipower does the connections and reconnections. And when one chooses a retailer, all requests are arbitrated by a little-known body called Vencorp. Even the Energy and Water Ombudsman won't tell you about Vencorp (as I discovered in a previous issue with gas supply and billing). So you're actually dealing with at least three different companies. No one cares if it goes well, but if things go wrong, you're hung out to dry. Of course the problem really started in the early 1990s when the provision of essential services was privatised by fucking Jeff Kennett.

My domain registrar is dead. I'm moving house this week so I thought I'd see if I could change the details. Lo and behold. LiveRegistry is dead. Googling them revealed that LiveRegistry and its associated host Solid Internet have gone down. I used to host with Solid, when it was called myacen.com. Not bad, but when PHP5 came along I decided to move. Glad I did, but I saw no reason to change registrars. Now this wouldn't necessarily be a problem, but my domains are locked. So I can't transfer them to another registrar, and my registrar's website is gone so I can't see if it's possible to unlock them. LiveRegistry was a reseller for eNom, so I submitted a ticket. Looks as if I might have to go with them. They're fully exploiting the situation because LiveRegistry never charged me more than $15 a year per domain. eNom wants about $35 a year. (How does that work? LiveRegistry, as a reseller, charged less than the provider of its service?) So in a few months' time, this site might disappear.