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Me and Sini had an awesome and relaxing 23 day vacation in the USA. We spent about a week in New York City and spent the rest of the time driving around the East coast, staying in motels and camping. Some pictures!

waiting for the airtrain to Manhattan at JFK			WalMart, where everything is big and everything has sugar
Where are you, you spongy, yellow, delicious bastards?		St. Andrews spider. Big motherfucker, and it bites, but the internet said you won't die from it so then it must be true.	Philly
	attempt to find the closest Starbucks on our PGS
		Our hostel in NYC. Cheap in many ways except the price.	West 106th, NYC
Sini went running in Central Park.	All buildings higher than 5 stories need to have their own water supply tank on the roof.	Central Park	Central Park
Central Park	Central Park	Central Park	That's gotta be at least 2 dollars worth of cans.
	Breakfast at the Jazz on the Park hostel.	There's a big market in NYC for rubber bumper mats. People put these things on their bumpers to prevent damage from other morons hitting them.	A nice iced Cappuccino for Evro. I've gone by many names in this country, such as Evro, Yovo, and Yankee Boters.
It's got Electrolytes!		This is Dana's apartment in Ghostbusters
Yes, an M&M store. An enormous shop full of expensive crap you will never, ever, need. And M&Ms, ok.	Times Square, NYC	Times Square, NYC	Times Square, NYC
Bryant Park, NYC	Bryant Park, NYC	NYC public library
Fifth Avenue!	A one-gallon 5300 calories milkshake.	NYC	Please don't photograph the merchandise
Awesome tapdancing, NYC	A The Big Lebowski store, called "Little Lebowski"
		Rockefeller Center, NYC	Rockefeller Center, NYC
Rockefeller Center, NYC	Rockefeller Center, NYC	Rockefeller Center, NYC	Rockefeller Center, NYC
Rockefeller Center, NYC	Radio City Hall, NYC	Radio City Hall, NYC	Radio City Hall, NYC
Radio City Hall, NYC	Radio City Hall, NYC	Radio City Hall, NYC	Sailing to the Statue of Liberty
Sailing to the Statue of Liberty	Sailing to the Statue of Liberty, Brooklyn Bridge in the background	Sailing to the Statue of Liberty	Manhattan
Sailing to the Statue of Liberty	Sailing to the Statue of Liberty	Sailing to the Statue of Liberty	Statue of Liberty
Statue of Liberty	Statue of Liberty		Manhattan
Statue of Liberty	Manhattan	NYC subway, West 103rd	Financial District, NYC
Financial District, NYC	Financial District, NYC	Wall Street	Grimaldis Pizza, Brooklyn NYC
Grimaldis Pizza, Brooklyn NYC			A visit to the White House
Chillin' out with Madonna	Ran into Britney Spears	met this green dude
foto voor Gideon		Empire State Building	Empire State Building
Empire State Building		our car	Belmar Beach
Belmar Beach	Belmar Beach	Farmingdale 8 bit retro awesome	Farmingdale laundry service
	Camping in Allaire State Park	breakfast	Washington DC, Jefferson memorial
Washington DC, Jefferson memorial	Washington DC, Jefferson memorial	Washington DC, Jefferson memorial
Washington DC, Washington Monument		Henry Park and the Capitol	Henry Park and the Capitol
Washington DC, Washington Monument	squirrels, there were many of these
White House guards	The White House	Couldn't get in because the president was home.
	WWII memorial	Lincoln memorial	Lincoln memorial
Lincoln memorial and Washington DC, Washington Monument	hurting feet	Lincoln memorial	Doedelgast
Koren war veterans memorial	Virginia Beach		Virginia Beach
Virginia Beach	Virginia Beach	Virginia Beach	Virginia Beach
Virginia Beach	Virginia Beach	Virginia Beach	Virginia Beach, wild dolphins!
Farmville	Farmville	Farmville	Farmville
pumping gas in Farmville	Farmville water tower, 200 coins I believe.	gas in Farmville	Guns in Farmville
		Lake Gaston, North Carolina	Lake Gaston, North Carolina
Plants vs. Zombies	Wine tasting at Rosemont Winery, North Carolina	Wine tasting at Rosemont Winery, North Carolina	Wine tasting at Rosemont Winery, North Carolina
Wine tasting at Rosemont Winery, North Carolina	Lake Gaston, North Carolina
Civil War battery monument		Civil War battery monument
Richmond, Virginia	Richmond, Virginia		Cherrystone Park, Cape Charles, Virginia
Cherrystone Park, Cape Charles, Virginia	Cherrystone Park, Cape Charles, Virginia	Cherrystone Park, Cape Charles, Virginia	Cherrystone Park, Cape Charles, Virginia
squirrel attack at Pine Cone Park,Freehold, New Jersey	NYC	Times Square, NYC	Times Square, NYC
Times Square, NYC
Amsterdam's not that bad after all…	Bryant Park, NYC

Only the first bounce, so will still work on mix, compression et cetera, but the basic idea is here and it sounds awesome! Vocals by Cissi, awesome bass track by Steve

I decided to start using Soundcloud for sharing some tracks. And as it turns out I can nicely embed tracks in WordPress thanks to this nice plugin. Here’s a first short snippet that I’m working on.

Last weekend me and a few friends went camping on the island of Üto. We rented kayaks, grilled and went swimming in the nice Swedish Archipelago. It was very relaxing, so thanks everyone for a wonderful weekend!

Today Sini, Jens and Thomas successfully completed the Göteborgsvarvet! Steve and I cheered for them along the track as many times as we could. I think we raced through every street in Göteborg at least eight times in our awesome BMW rental car The weather was great, around 24 degrees in the blazing sun, so our friends reached a pretty impressive goal!

I’m taking my first steps into the world of JavaSound programming. The first thing I learned is that the Snow Leopard default javax.sound.midi.spi implementation is buggy when it comes to SysEx message transmission. For the time being I’m sticking with the MMJ library instead.

As an example, I’ve been trying to send a “SID Skip Patch” command to my SID station. The SysEx message for this command is F0 00 20 3C 01 00 03 F7.

The following code shows how to construct this message in Java (example based on SendSysex.java at jsresources.org):


String s = "F000203C010003F7";
int n = s.length() / 2;
byte[] msg = new byte[n];
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) {
    msg[i] = (byte) Integer.parseInt(
    s.substring(i * 2, i * 2 + 2), 16);
}


The next step is to send the resulting byte array to a MIDI output. The following code works fine (tested with MIDI monitor and on a real SID station through an ESI MIDI Mate):

String[] outputs = de.humatic.mmj.MidiSystem.getOutputs();
int index = 0;
 
// insert code to set correct index here...
 
de.humatic.mmj.MidiOutput mo =     de.humatic.mmj.MidiSystem.openMidiOutput(index);
mo.sendMidi(msg);

I’ve left out the code to determine the correct index as it is irrelevant. This could be a dropdown list in a GUI or some substring search or whatever. The following code tries to do the same thing using Snow Leopard libraries, but sends nothing at all:

javax.sound.midi.SysexMessage sysexMsg;
javax.sound.midi.Receiver receiver;
javax.sound.midi.MidiDevice.Info[] dev;
int index;
javax.sound.midi.MidiDevice myOutPort;
 
sysexMsg = new SysexMessage();
sysexMsg.setMessage(msg, msg.length);
dev = javax.sound.midi.MidiSystem.getMidiDeviceInfo();
 
// insert code to set correct index here...
 
myOutPort =
    javax.sound.midi.MidiSystem.getMidiDevice(dev[index]);
myOutPort.open();
receiver = myOutPort.getReceiver();
receiver.send(sysexMessage, -1);

If you have succeeded in making this work, please let me know. MMJ development seems to have stopped so I’d kind of want to start using OSXs own stuff…