Now for something completely different, Tori Amos, Helsinki 28.09.2011

Amazing! Tori Amos released her new album, Night of Hunters, a couple of weeks ago. I had mine pre-ordered from play.com for some time and it dropped in the next day of release. It's very different from her previous work, released on a classical label and all songs are inspired from classical works by classical masters. Listening to it needs complete focus, it can not be in the background, imho.

The Night of Hunters tour started here in Finland at the old Helsinki Ice-hall on the 28.09.2011. The show was absolutely amazing, she played most songs with a quartet and some solo. I tried to tweet (@oniongarlic) as much of the set list, but my song title memory is not the best, also I didn't recognize all the new songs.
From the new album, my favorite is Star Whisperer (and Carry), especially after the live performance, it's just amazing.


Set list:

1. Shattering Sea
2. Graveyard
3. Suede
4. Baker Baker
5. Fearlessness
6. Mrs. Jesus (solo)
7. Marianne (solo)
8. Girl Disappearing
9. Cloud On My Tongue
10. Star Whisperer
11. Running To Stand Still (solo) [U2]
12. Sister Janet (solo)
13. Caught A Lite Sneeze (solo)
14. Cruel
15. Nautical Twilight
16. Snow Cherries From France
17. Winter

Encore

1. A Multitude of Shades [Apollon Musagete Quartet piece]
2. Your Ghost

Second encore

1. Mr. Zebra (solo)
2. Tear In Your Hand (solo)
3. Silent All These Years (solo)
4. Carry

(Shameless copy from undented)

A very good recording is available on toritraders.com but to not completely go no-computer-geek with this post, I took this as a nice opportunity to test the N950 microphone quality and recorded the whole thing. Absolutely amazing quality for a phone, check out a sample here. And to be more geeky, I had to do the recording using gstreamer from the CLI as the currently available recording app on Ovi store records in a silly 32-bit, 22Khz, mono format, how strange is that ?
Anyway, this did the trick nicely:

gst-launch-0.10 pulsesrc ! audioconvert ! 
 audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,width=16,channels=2 ! 
 queue ! wavenc ! filesink location=rec.wav

Qt SDK install problems

I've installed the Qt SDK many months ago, kept it updated and so on but never really got motivated enough to start trying out anything more than looking at the examples and tutorials.

Finally got motivated to trying out some QML and everything was broken. Missing files, simulator didn't do anything just got stuck.

For example this (and I'm not alone with this, see comments here):

module “Qt.labs.components” is not installed 

Re-installed using off-line installer, that didn't work, even after installing everything for Harmattan available in the maintenance tool the simulator didn't have an entry for the N9. So after a rm -rf ~/QtSDK and re-install using the on-line installer I finally got it working.

The strange thing was that everything works perfectly on my home computer, 64-bit and using own linux distro. All problems was on my work Ubuntu laptop.

Anyway, now I'm able to do my first proper QML app, more on that later, stay tuned.

N950 module playback packages

And if you would like to test module playback on your N950 or N9, then you can install the armel packages available at http://ftp.tal.org/pub/maemo/testing/harmattan/

You need these two:

• modplug library
• gstreamer modplug element

Just install with dpkg and that should be it.

(Let me know if it works, especially if you have a N9 with the rumored to have more up-to-date firmware than the one on the N950. Thanks.)

N950 module playback

Preliminary testing of adding module playback support to the N950 (and N9). Getting playback didn't require as much work as for the N900, tracker already marks modules as audio and the media player picks them up, but can't play them as it's missing the required gstreamer element (modplug).

A proper tracker miner would be a plus, as right now all modules get dumped in the "Unknown artist"/"Unknown album" categories and the filename is used as the title. Not nice.

Anyway, my first talkie:

Something about a date and the N9

I was lucky to see a calendar with something written about the Nokia N9. Let's see if it is correct :)
And don't ask, I ain't telling.

Something nice in the mail

I was on holiday in Greece when the N9 and N950 was announced so I missed the opportunity to get a developer device, as I didn't spend much time on-line. Fortunately I was able to get on the next 50 devices and a couple of weeks ago something nice came in the mail.
Thank you Nokia.

Vacation is fun, but not when your systems decide to go on one too

Typical. I was on a 4 week vacation, the first two weeks in Greece and the last 2 weeks around Finland. I was semi on-line only, checking my mail, twitter and facebook from time to time, but kept myself away from anything work related or coding, including my various maemo projects. So I never checked my web sites...

My database virtual Xen machine had decided to go off-line, or to be more specific the virtual network from the database server to the rest had died for some odd reason. Other virtual machines in the same host and network where just fine. And the database server was also running.

Anyway, everything is up and running again now. Enjoy, maemo.tal.org, mapper.tal.org and talinux.tal.org.