Ant task for Haxe compiler

For those of us who use Ant to automate builds and other tedious tasks i’ve put together a task so you can now run the Haxe compiler from Ant.

It supports all of the relevant command line arguments, but if it doesnt do something you think would be useful please get in touch and i’ll see what I can do.

You can grab a zip here :

antHaxe.zip

Inside is everything you need, source, jar, samples and documentation.

Learn To Win

Increase your knowledge and shame your friends. No, its not a SPAM email, if you want to learn some new facts, pass a bit of time in a useful way or challenge your friends to show that you know more than they do its worth checking out Factacular.

Im on there as MDK and open to challengers. Bring it on!

New Bidule Tutorial

Part 2 of my Bidule Tutorials is now ready. This one carries on where the first one left off and introduces an LFO, a better Oscillator section, techniques for keeping your work organized and useful utilities that can be re-used in a variety of situations.
You can read it here.

Part 3 will arrive soon which will cover building a new filter section and adding a chorus effect to liven up the sound.

Upgrading To WordPress 2

I’ve just upgraded the site to use the new WordPress 2.

Everything seems to have gone smoothly, although i took a slightly different route to the upgrade than they recommend in their documents.

The only thing i did differently was to upload the new version to its own directory (choronzon2), then I copied the plugins and the theme from the old version into the correct places in the new version.

I did this so that I would have a quick escape route back to the old version should anything go wrong. (Of course, I backed up *everything* first). To backup the database I used MySql admin running locally and connected to the remote database rather than installing PhpMyAdmin just for backing up..although PhpMyAdmin is a great tool if you have more involved database management needs.

I dont have a huge amount of plugins running and I had already tested them with a local installation of V2 on my home computer. (I use broobles simple tags plugin for generating [tag]technorati[/tag] tags and my own del.icio.us link generating plugin)

Once I had uploaded all the necessary files the upgrade process itself was incredibly easy (like installing wordpress, but with even less to do).

All that was left was to rename the original directory to choronzon-old and rename the new directory to put it in the right place.

Easy.

If you are wondering about making the move from an earlier version of wordpress I can definitely recommend it if you want to take advantage of the new features. I decided to upgrade because I much prefer the post / page editor in the new version. Having a window to edit the actual HTML is vital when entering pages with a lot of content so I can avoid the auto-formatting process that wordpress applies to the content.

For a guide to what else is new in version 2 you can head over to asymptomatic.net for the lowdown.

New year, new look, new content

Now that 2006 is well underway I thought it was time for a new look to the ole blog and some new content. The theme is based on ‘Gentle Calm’ by Phu Ly, but I modified it a bit to give more space for the content and other little bits and pieces. Hopefully it will make things easier to read.

Also there is now the first of my tutorials on using Plogue Bidule. Its a beginners guide to using [tag]Bidule[/tag] and takes you through the process of creating a complete polyphonic synthesizer using the vast array of modules they provide. You can read it here.

If you have been interested in [tag]modular audio[/tag] software before but either never got around to trying it or just felt daunted by the whole experience then hopefully this should gently ease you in to the wonders of creating your own instruments and sound mangling tools. At the moment you can try bidule for free, or buy it for a cheap price before the full release hits the virtual shelves (and its cheap at only 70 dollars). So there has never been a better time to get started.

Any comments or ideas for this tutorial and future tutorials are warmly welcomed.

Christmas Hits

The soundtrack to your christmas is here.

Everyone wants to know, what will be the christmas number one? Cliff Richard, Westlife, Some other manufactured rubbish that will make you regurgitate your turkey?

Do your ears a favour and check out the hot hits from some of the people who make no-future the worlds premier electronic music forum. Featuring Cristian Vogel, Pleated Lemon, Rob Acid, Bavin and many more family favourites.

To save you the time and trouble of searching through this thread to find all the seasonal gems therein ive compiled a list right here, just for you.

1. Pleated Lemon – Yuletide Logs
2. Black “E” – Ho Ho Ho
3. Kams – When Im 64
4. Phillie-T – Little Donkey
5. Hektor Ruiez – Console For Christmas
6. ActionJetzon – Get The Rod Again
7. Ultrafoetus – When were you i
8. Komakid – Stikla Vocal
9. Bavin – Jinglebavs
10. Knusbert – Wenn mal der schuh drueckt
11. Crud – Mistletoe and Wine
12. Tec-Ho – Happy Maggie
13. Chelmsford Industries – Bad Tidings
14. MDK – Merry Christmas
15. Oliver Rosemann – Underwearwolve
16. Rob Acid – 4

Download them all, burn em on a cd, give it to your gran. Thats christmas sorted.

MTASC and ANT : error running mtasc compiler

If you are trying to run MTASC from ant and are seeing the message ‘error running mtasc compiler’ this means that ant cant find the mtasc executable. There are 2 ways to remedy this.
The first is to add the folder with MTASC in to your system path. The second is to use the ‘mtasc’ attribute of Simon Wackers mtasc ant task to point it at mtasc.

If your mtasc executable is in D:devtools then you will need to define the task something like this :

<mtasc mtasc=”D:DevToolsmtasc.exe” …./>

I’ve written a more in depth guide to using ASDT and MTASC with ant over at osflash.org