Dave's website

This is the mix I played yesterday at the Aurora. You can download it here.

Tracklist:

• 16 Bit Lolitas – Passing Lights
• Plus49 – Rock On (Pole Folder Unfaithful Remix)
• Gabriel & Dresden – Dust In The Wind (Album Version)
• Ashtrax – Freeload (Freelove)
• D. Ramirez – La Discotek
• Jackson Q – Our Melody
• Jorgensen – Untitled (Deadmau5 Remix)
• John Dahlback – Don’t Speak (Album Version)
• Audiofly Paul Harris – Miscalate
• D Ramirez & Mark Knight – Colombian Soul (Gabriel & Dresden Tuscan Soul Mix)
• Robot Needs Oil – Defected (Olivier Giacomotto remix)
• Booka Shade – Tickle
• Ida Engberg – Disco Volante (Sebastien Leger Remix)

On the Linux Desktop there are at least 2 ongoing efforts to try to bring indexing support to the platform. That is, a way to quickly search for files spread around the user’s home directory. One is Beagle and the other is tracker.

But both projects have a major flaw: they can’t properly track file changes. To do that, they use Linux’ inotify feature which allows to watch directories and files. Although you can watch the content of a directory, notifications do not recurse, which means that you have to watch every single directory of your home.

So what happens? Upon startup watches have to be put on every directory and that requires quite a significant filesystem activity. Beagle seems to defer this when the system is in an idle state so it is less noticeable.

The proper solution would be that the Linux kernel provides an inotify that does recurse. This shouldn’t be a performance problem as indexing softwares would only need one watch then.

I no longer work for Fluendo. My job there is done and they don’t really need me anymore. It was great and interesting though and I wish them luck for their next projects.

Funny how instead of trying to solve problems, Gnome apps are actually creating new ones, all by themselves, without any outside factor. They must be really bored or something.

All modern desktops have an area called a systray which is a small area where apps that keep running in the background but still provide an interface that is accessed from time to time can be found, usually by displaying their icon here. Such apps are usually music players, instant messaging software, news aggregator, mail clients, etc.. This is useful because the app doesn’t get in the way by being too intrusive. For example you don’t need an instant messenger to take unecessary space when no one is messaging you. Same for a music player, you don’t need it to display anything once you did your music selection and it’s playing.

For these apps, when you press the close button, they go to the systray.. or so you’d think. Because some people think that the close button should be used to close apps, and that for minimizing to systray you should use some obscure keyboard shortcut (ctrl + w, the ‘w’ stands for ‘wankers’) or press the icon in the systray again. Of course, the former behaviour is still available in other apps.

So what happens is that when pressing the close button, some apps will go to the systray and other will just exit. A good example is Rhythmbox which exits when you press the close button. How many users are really running Rhythmbox to play a few seconds then actually quit the app? Probably very very few. How many users said “oh shit” when pressing the same close button? Probably many.

But as usual I bet they’ll spend years and years on that “problem”..

I finally moved my DJing setup to my current place. There are now 4 speakers “surround sound” and lights to make my neighbourood happy.

You can download a Trance/Progressive mix I did last week here. If you use Windows I recommend Winamp to play it (AAC+ format). Let me know what you think about it. Yes, I know I fucked up a bit at the end, this is the wonders of realtime mixing

Sonar 2007

So there was I at the Sonar. Actually it reminded me a lot of Energy 2006, Sonic 7 or Infinity 2006 except it was even bigger and there was an open air area, which is great. The organization was good except you had to take silly tickets instead of being able to pay directly to bars.. well perhaps it’s quicker that way, I don’t know but it seems lot of events are doing it that way now.

Very good set by Damian Schwartz vs Tadeo, which are DJs I didn’t know. But afterwards the music style completely changed in all rooms. Instead of separating the rooms by music style it seems artists are randomly showing up in all of them. Well, so no music I liked during 1.5 hour. Later on, started Jeff Mills in the biggest room, which unfortunatly had no lasers! There must be something wrong in Spain regarding lasers and is one of the few reason I might go back to Switzerland a few times. They add so much to the visual effects, I’ll probably get one for my flat

Then there was Dave Clarke and.. wow. His set was perfect technically. There was no single glitch or anything, wonderful. That made me last until the end where he left quite abruptly.

There was a bus service to reach the center of the city. Very useful and pretty fast too. All in all a pretty good event but it misses some more music style separation between rooms, and lasers !

On the 1st of June, Armin van Buuren was announced at the She Discoteca so I thought it would be a good idea to go there.

The She Discoteca is located in Vilassar de Mar, which is about 30 km away from the Barcelona city. The only way to go there, other than using a car, is by train, which is an awfully painful process. Not only it’s a mess to find which one is the proper train (basically you have to ask around) but they also have some silly schedules (where you also have to ask around). The trip takes about 30 minutes as the train stops every 3 minutes.

I met some people in the train who were going to the same place and asked around where the club was. Turns out we still had to walk a little bit more. Finally, there I was and I took an entry ticket (18 € including a drink). The club wasn’t too crowded yet and a DJ was trying to warm up the room with an average set, quite boring.

The She Discoteca, despite its silly name, is a good place and reminds me a lot of the clubs in Ibiza. The lights were good but unfortunately no lasers to be seen. Dammit! There was a VIP area above which was empty. When will they understand that such area is not needed for trance events?

Armin arrived at 3:00 and started to warm up the room with some progressive sets. I found it a bit slow.. took about one hour to really become trancy. The area was pretty crowded by then. While going to the bathroom I noticed an “hip hop” room with about 10 people in it, funny.

The party ended at 6:00. All in all, it was good. Damn, and the train again on the way back.

By popular demand, here’s some recommendation about clubs in Barcelona.

Located near the Ramblas, it’s actually okish with a few dancefloor with different styles and one chill out area. The club isn’t too big though so expect it to get crowded during busy hours. You can get in for free before 2:00 if you find the proper flyers.

This one is in Poble Nou, take the L1 line, exit at Marina and follow the people around I think this is the biggest club I ever saw, because unlike some (like Ibiza’s Privilege), they actually open most rooms. There’s the main hall with most concerts taking place here, a chill out area, a terrace, 2 electro rooms, and probably more. Definitely worth checking out.

This is the kind of club to go to if you like Ibiza-style dancefloors. There’s only 2 rooms but they’re big enough. The price is a little bit higher though but most of the time there’s famous DJs mixing there. Recommended if you like house sessions. Lot of tourists too.

This club is located near the Ramblas. The entry is quite cheap (€ 8.-) but you don’t get a drink. The place is small and there’s 2 rooms. This is not the place to go if you don’t like crowded areas.

Located in parallel. This club is great. There are 2 rooms but you can’t change once you get in so chose carefully. I recommend the ‘A’ room which has electro music. There are 2 floors so you can always chill out upstairs. There’s no place to sit down though. Entry is 13 € with a drink included.

Ok, that was just a small sample of what’s available. Have fun!

Ok, the old website is gone. It was all custom and I don’t have time for this anymore. The new one is running wordpress which allows to concentrate more on the content. Let’s see if I update that blog more often as a result

On an Ubuntu system:

• cd /usr/share/i18n/locales
• sudo cp en_US en_INTL
• sudo vi en_INTL
• change the d_fmt line to: “<U0025><U0059><U002D><U0025><U006d><U002D><U0025><U0064>”
• sudo vi /var/lib/locales/supported.d/local
• add the following line: en_INTL.UTF-8 UTF-8
• sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales
• sudo vi /etc/environment
• add the following line: LC_TIME=”en_INTL.UTF-8″

Reboot/relogin. Now you should have dates displayed like this: 2007-01-18.

Who says Linux is not ready for the desktop? Er.. right.