Ritchie Swann

I've waxed lyrical about the Mellotron before, but if you're wondering how it can be really put through it's paces, check this out :

http://www.mikedickson.org.uk/mellotronworks/

Several orchestral classics played on overdubbed mellotrons. Brillant. This is music to scare small children with. And to you, it's free.

Have you ever tried playing Dazed And Confused (or at least the more famous version) on the bass? Specifically the riff that keeps going at the rate of knots underneath the guitar solo.

I can do it for about two minutes tops. Then my hand hurts. Lord only knows how they managed to keep going for nearer ten....

Recently I have been converting a lot of, ummm, legacy code to use the "safe" string functions that Visual Studio likes to whine about.. This is the sort of thing where you pass in the size of a destination buffer so the library function guarantees never to write beyond that point.

Of course, "safe" doesn't mean "reads your mind". You can still tell out and out porkie pies to it, as I did this morning :

wchar_t buf[ 100 ];
wcscpy_s( buf, sizeof( buf ), "Hello, world!" );

What's wrong with that? Well, the "safe" versions require you to pass in the number of characters, not the number of bytes (which is what sizeof will give you). So I've told wcscpy_s it can fiddle with twice as much memory as it really can. Try this at home folks, and see what crash you get!

Moral of this story? Mind your memory allocation. Or switch to a language that doesn't involve fiddling with if throwing gobs of memory around with wild abandon isn't important.

I was fiddling around with acoustic guitars yesterday and came up with this tune. I remember it from an album my dad used to have. There's four acoustic guitars except for the middle section where I went a bit trigger happy on the overdubbing....

I thought about putting it on a nospace account just because they've got an integrated player and I haven't, but it seems I created the wrong type of account, and when I tried to delete it and recreate it with the right type, I was locked out. Maybe I should have turned JavaScript on and had my mouse cursor freeze up even more.

Or maybe I should write my own player on here. Yeah, that'll be it.

I finally got round to looking at Stack Overflow this morning.

My initial thoughts - it's too busy. I went on three times yesterday afternoon and every time there were different questions, with updates less than a minute old, and thousands of views. There's no way on earth I can sift through that sort of information meaningfully.

Maybe it'll take off when popular pages on it float onto Google.