Yes, yes, it’s been very quiet here lately but as always, it’s because I’ve been insanely busy.

As some of you know, I’ve taken an interest in sound engineering and have been busy teaching myself how to record and mix. Some of my early attempts are here but this week, my first real CD is coming out.

Nok “La Fiesta” is an old friend of mine (I used to play in her band, many years ago) and she’s been playing at The Bear Bar for the past few months. During March, we recorded a couple of sessions and I’ve been locked away in the dungeons these past few weeks, madly mixing everything, and this Thursday, it all comes to a head and we’re having the launch party If you’re in town, come on down and join the party, otherwise you can listen to the tracks here and if you like them, buy them here (it’s the price of a cup of coffee! how could you say no?!).

Videos of the sessions are also up here, and you know the musicians are cringing because I had to leave in all the mistakes that I took out for the CD

Dutch Tilders, the father of the blues in Melbourne, passed away yesterday

Some videos of him playing are here. They’re from quite a few years ago but I recently saw an interview with him on the community TV channel where he played a few songs and they had an amazing depth and subtlety that reflected his decades playing the blues, not just your standard bumpa-bumpa 12-bar.

The link above also has a great story about him

[Dutch] had finished his set and had killed it as usual & we were having a talk side of stage. The DJ from the venue butted in with something about how him & Dutch were “really talented beacuse they were both in the music business” or words to that effect. Dutch just glared at the idiot and said “I’ve spent years learning my craft… you play fuckin’ records. Piss off!”

I’m definitely getting more irascible in my old age but the Dutchman undoubtedly set the gold standard

Translations for Awasu 3.0 are now available which let it run in both German and Russian

If you want to use either of these, you should also re-download Awasu (version 3.0b) since there were a few code changes required.

Many thanks to Kai Klintworth for the German translation (who has been translating Awasu since 2.3! ) and Pavel Klevakin for the Russian.

Wiley is so The Man

The latest general release is now available here and as always, it’s the bestest, most awesomest release since the last one!

If you haven’t been keeping up with the betas, you can find out what’s new in the feature list, tour and online help.

By amazing co-incidence , today is also our eighth birthday and as I said in our traditional retrospective:

Awasu has always been about extensibility, allowing it to be customized to process the information that you’re interested in, in a way that meets your requirements.

I know that the Awasu Monster has a swag of plugins, reports and other extensions abut to be published that will showcase some of Awasu’s extensibility and I’ll be working on a few myself in the coming year.

Until then, I’m off to the pub…

The first 3.0 release candidate ^[?] is now available here.

This is a release candidate so, barring any reports of it causing your PC to spontaneously burst into flames, this will also be the final 3.0 release. In particular, it comes as an installer EXE so all you people still running 2.4, you too can now join in the fun (but be be safe out there and back everything up first! ).

Happy Australia Day!

The 2.4.4 beta release ^[?] is now available here.

This is the final release before the next general release and since most of the hard work has already been done, it shouldn’t be long before the release candidate gets shoved out the door.

Happy New Year to y’all!

The second 2.4.4 alpha release ^[?] is now available here.

Bug fixes and minor changes in this release, which will be the last before the push to the next general release. It took quite a bit longer than I wanted to get this one out the door, because of a pesky bug in synchronization It took forever to figure out what was going on since it only happened if a certain option was turned on (that I, of course, never have turned on ), exacerbated by the fact that it was also a heisenbug i.e. a bug that’s less likely to manifest itself the longer you look for it Then I had to come up with a fix that didn’t bring the machine to its knees while Awasu was synchronizing. Sigh… But it’s all good now and it looks like sync is working well, which is good since it’s an important and valuable feature

I swear, the monks robes are a-beckonin’ me…

The first 2.4.4 alpha release ^[?] is now available here.

The main additions are enhancements to two of Awasu’s most important features.

• Workpads: custom fields can now be defined for each workpad (e.g. Priority, Assigned to, Source) and values set for each by workpad items. These values will then be included in any reports generated from that workpad.
• Awasu API: a new entry point has been added that allows individual feed items to be retrieved from Awasu’s database. And since it works off reports, you also get the extra functionality that they offer e.g. emailing or FTP’ing them off somewhere.

There is also a simple interface for managing the download queue for enclosures. They say necessity is the mother of all invention and I put this feature in since I got stung by a few feeds that I had subscribed to that turned out to have gigabytes of enclosures embedded in them

This beta cycle will be the last before the next general release – not long to go!

When the tumbleweeds start to take over the weblog, it usually means that I’ve been locked away in my cave, working on the next version of Awasu. Well, I’ve been locked away alright, but in my music cave instead.

Many moons ago, I wrote about jazz teddy bears, which started a chain of events that has resulted in my personal music web site being pushed out this week, JazzTeddyBears.com. It has a load of songs that I’ve recorded over the past few months (including a few new ones that haven’t made it out to my SoundCloud page yet) and some tutorial videos as well.

The teddy in the picture used to belong to my sister and I tormented her when we kids by nicking it and playing footy with it around the house. She gave it to me years ago when I was hospitalized after a pretty bad accident (yah, OK, it was a really bad accident), while the cap was one that I wore at my very first gig.

I’m pretty pleased with how it’s all come out, although given the amount of time and effort that’s gone into it, you’d bloody well hope so Check it out, and in the meantime, I’ll creep out of my music cave and turn around and git right back into my Awasu cave