Happy hacking

[mdlbear]

It's been a pretty productive couple of days. Most of my time at work was consumed by a day-and-a-half, ten-person hackathon on some experimental hardware. It's a fun little machine, running Debian Linux on ARM. People came up with some fascinating hacks, and I managed to record in stereo through the USB interface. We're going to have a blast with it, and hopefully get in some good research as well.

At home, I've set up the Makefile rules for putting together the "extras" for people who preorder the CD -- it will have the most-recent dumps of all the tracks, in mp3 and ogg, updated as often as I remember.

# Here are the rules to make oggs and mp3's.  Some of the magic is
#   happening in $(TRACKINFO), which expands to 
#   the perl script
#   that looks up things like the song title and songwriter, and tracks
#   the most recent track data file (format=files).

%.ogg: $(shell $(TRACKINFO) format=files %)
	oggenc -Q -o $@ $(shell $(TRACKINFO) --ogg title='$(TITLE)' $*)

%.mp3: $(shell $(TRACKINFO) format=files %)
	lame -b 64 -S $(shell $(TRACKINFO) --mp3 title='$(TITLE)' $*) $@

.PHONY: oggs mp3s
oggs:  $(OGGS)
mp3s:  $(MP3S)

update: that actually doesn't work, because make quite sensibly doesn't expand $(shell... in pattern rules. So the current hack is to generate a custom makefile with the correct dependencies. It's similar to make depend but doesn't require re-running make after you've done it.

OK, that was exciting. If you pre-ordered, you should be getting email in a couple of days -- let's say the first week of February sometime -- pointing you at the list.

I've also, as I mentioned downwhen a couple of posts, been working on tracks; listening to a dump CD in the car and going after some easy fixes.