jonobacon@home

Archive for November 20th, 2006


Posted on November 20, 2006 - by jono

Phone gone

Just a quick note, my phone has been lost. My faithful companion has provided hours of entertainment, but it is now lost somewhere in San Francisco airport. So, if you try to call me, you will either get my answer machine message, or some guy who will try to sell you it for $6.

For the next week or so, email is your friend.

UPDATE: My new phone arrives on 21st Nov with the same number.


Posted on November 20, 2006 - by jono

Jokosher 0.2 Released

Yes people it has finally happened. I have just written up the announcement:

The Jokosher team are proud to announce the second pre-release of their simple yet powerful audio studio for the GNOME desktop. The new 0.2 version of the software has been in active development since July, and has packed Jokosher with the core features to perform full audio recording and production on the Linux desktop.

Jokosher sports the following features:

  • Intuitive, usability focused interface – Jokosher has been designed from the ground-up and every detail has been scrutinised for ease of use and flexibility. This has resulted in a simple and intuitive environment.
  • Full multi-track recording – record from your sound card on a number of instrument tracks, and rename, mute and solo those tracks. Jokosher also supports multi-channel sound cards.
  • Full mixing – instruments can be mixed, soloed, muted, panned and more, as well as controlling the master volume.
  • Volume Curve Mixing – with an intuitive selection system, you can easily draw volume curves that occur in realtime to produce an unlimited number of fades and volume control.
  • Non destructive editing tools – Jokosher includes a range of editing tools including splitting, trimming, moving and volume control point snapping. All editing operations are entirely non-destructive
  • Effects Support – support for LADSPA effects can open up your projects to all kinds of creative opportunities. Multiple effects can be layered together, and each effect can be fine tuned to get just the right setting.
  • Effects Presets – in addition to LADSPA support, you can load and save effects presets, making it easier to find and reuse of those all important effects combinations.
  • Extensions – Jokosher includes support for installable extensions. This allows third party developers to make their own extensions with our extensions API. Jokosher also includes an Extensions Manager to track which extensions are installed.
  • Metronome – a configurable metronome click track is included to keep you perfectly in time when recording.
  • Intuitive instrument management – Jokosher provides a unique method of minimising instruments for specific mixing requirements.
  • Extensive documentation and community – the Jokosher team have worked to create manuals, tutorials, FAQs and other documentation, as well as growing the Jokosher community on the forums (http://www.jokosher.org/forums/).

In addition to these features, the Jokosher community have worked to make the application available in a number of languages, including Chinese (China), Danish, Dutch, English (Philippines), English (United Kingdom), Esperanto, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Latvian, Norwegian Bokmål, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Welsh.

Want to give it a shot? This is still a pre-release, and it demands a very GStreamer which most distros right now do not ship, but we have made things easier. Head over to the Download page and grab the run script. This script automates the process of checking out GStreamer CVS alongside your current GStreamer, grabbing Jokosher and making everything run fine. This is a great way to give Jokosher a run.

We still have some docs to merge, but check out the Jokosher 0.2 User Guide. We have also opened up a community documentation wiki for our users to write their own HOWTOs and guides for using Jokosher in different ways.

Also, do get involved in the Jokosher Forums. The forums are a great source of help, and a great place to post links to the music and podcasts that you have created in Jokosher.

Finally, I want to thank the awesome Jokosher development team and testers, the translators, the docs team, and our friends in the GStreamer team for fixing our bugs. This is sure to make this version of Jokosher rock hard.

Now the road to 1.0 begins…


Posted on November 20, 2006 - by jono

Practical PHP and MySQL, boo yah

Well, my new book will be published any time now:

This is my third book, but the first that I have written entirely myself. I am pretty pleased with it. A sample copy was here when I got back from San Francisco, and it looks schaweeeet.

The book takes a different approach to PHP/MySQL development, and instead of teaching a bunch of unrelated, un-connected, disparate concepts, it guides the reader through writing eight web applications that are actually useful. It is a much more hands-on approach to learning the technology, and importantly, applying that technology to real-world use cases.

What is also cool is that there is a Live CD included with the book that provides a bootable Ubuntu system where you can run the applications from. This provides an excellent opportunity to run, modify and play with the applications without affecting your existing system.

From the back of the book:

Leading open source author Jono Bacon teaches the core skills you’ll need to build virtually any application. You’ll discover how to connect with databases, upload content, perform cascading deletes, edit records, validate registrations, specify user security, create reusable components, use PEAR extensions, and even build Ajax applications.

So, check it out, and post your reviews on Amazon. :)


Posted on November 20, 2006 - by jono

Video report of UDS

While at the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) the week before last, I took part in an interview with Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier about the UDS, community and Jokosher. He has written up a report, complete with video interviews with myself, Matt Zimmerman, Murray Cumming and Mark Shuttleworth.

Check it out here.