…patience…

building new Boost libraries gives you this lovely piece of advice.

Been working on an issue at work that doesn’t happen in development builds, only in executables built on the build server. Which means no catching it in the debugger, and very slow iterations where I make a code change, add a crapton of log messages, save it in source control, start a test build, wait about 46 minutes, install it on my secondary development machine, run it, and then look for the log messages. This has been going on for 4 days now — four very long, boring days. I identified exactly which function call is locking up, but not at all why; I attempted multiple workarounds and updates to third-party libraries and no luck. Today I at least figured out which code change from two weeks ago caused it to happen, but still not why. There’s a huge pile of stuff to finish for this release (including planning for the next one) and a couple of things I have to do on a side project contract and ugh, this is the worst time for this sort of thing.


I have 38 minutes of music ready for the next album, after thinking things were going slow in that department. And there’s some decent ambient bass noodling in it. So that’s okay then.

The back pain has been gradually relenting. The realization that it’s easing off came shortly after I realized that some portion of it is probably arthritis, due to the occasional weird feeling of “wrong” rather than pain per se, that reminded me of when I had it in my left wrist, like those body parts are just not going to bear a load anymore. So, hmmm. The body and mind are complex and don’t really understand each other very well sometimes, I think.

Behringer (may they rot in corporate hell) today made about the 49th new product announcement/teaser of the year: the Enigma, a clone of the Buchla 208, the main part of the famous Music Easel, with an estimated price about 1/8 of the real thing. At first I was thinking if there’s anything they could clone that could possibly tempt me to give them another penny, it’d be a 208. But their mockup of it looks like they’ve made some ill-advised design changes, and when I think about what the Minibrute 2S offers, and how relatively decent the Arturia emulation of the Easel is… nah.