Reviving a Roland VS880 with an SD card
Published:
This is more of a reminder to myself than a blog post, but it might prove useful to others.
Blog posts
2023
2017
Compiling packages from source on Heroku using buildpacks
Published:
(Warning: whilst I work for Heroku, this isn’t official supported - it’s just something I discovered in my spare time. Hopefully this helps someone but leave me any feedback on Twitter @xavriley)
Using OpenVPN from a Heroku dyno
Published:
(Warning: whilst I work for Heroku, this isn’t official supported - it’s just something I discovered in my spare time. Hopefully this helps someone but leave me any feedback on Twitter @xavriley)
10,000 hours - as told by jazz musicians
Published:
In a 1993 paper by Anders Ericsson, he was one of the first to make the claim that mastery of a skill took around 10 years (about 10,000 hours) of deliberate practice.
2016
Writing a C extension for Ruby in 2016
Published:
Now that Ruby has crested the hype cycle, settled down and taken out a mortgage, you’d expect the posts around the community to be more about big business concerns. Whilst that might be true, I’d like to row against the tide by telling you about the fun I had figuring out how to write my first C extension - fast_osc - and how I made Sonic Pi 10x faster in the process.
Installing Boost C++ libraries (libboost) on Heroku
Published:
A quick note for anyone else who runs into this.
2015
Neutron Accelerators and Drum Machines with Sonic Pi
Published:
Working with Sonic Pi one of the exciting things about being able to code music is the potential for using algorithms. For the non-technical reader, I like to think of algorithms like following a recipe. You might start with the same ingredients but the order in which you do things can affect to outcome.
2014
Getting data from PDFs with JRuby
Published:
There are many solutions for getting data from pdfs. I’m going to describe how to use the excellent Java library PDFTextStream by Chas Emerick (of Clojure fame) to get data out of tricky pdfs.