2026-03-30 What happened I got tired of clicking around in Ableton to build up song arrangements, so I built a way to describe a full multi-track song in a plain JSON file and push it into Live with a Python script. The format has a clip library (define a MIDI loop once, reuse it anywhere), tracks with instrument URIs, and…

2026-03-30 What happened The AbletonMCP remote script is great for session view work but had no arrangement support at all. I forked it and added the commands I needed: copy_clip_to_arrangement , get_arrangement_clips , set_clip_loop , and a few others. The tricky part wasn't the commands themselves — it was a sequencing constraint in the Live API: duplicate_clip_to_arrangement() uses the session…

2026-03-30 What happened The push side worked well, but to make this genuinely useful I needed to be able to read a session back out too — so you can pull what's in Ableton, edit the JSON (manually or with an LLM), and push changes back. The first version of pull_song.py read from the session view using scene names and…

AI Answers Every once in a while I ask myself a pretty general overview question. Normally I poke around the programming subreddit or maybe look on Stack Overflow. AI has been kind of useful for not making any real decision but just summarizing the internet zeitgeist the same way I would doing initial discovery. I still read what AI gives…

The old WordPress install had served its purpose, but it was time to move on. This site is now a static build — markdown in, HTML out, no database, no PHP runtime, no plugins to keep patched. Why static The appeal is straightforward: no attack surface, no hosting complexity, version-controlled content, fast as hell. A static site is just files.…

On AI I’ve had a bit of time to reflect on where my career has taken me over the years and one thing that comes up consistently is machine learning and expert systems. No one was calling it AI back then and there was still a sense of the past AI winter looming. I was working on a government contract…

Modern HTML I was looking around recently to see what the state of HTML5 was. I don’t even know if HTML5 is a buzzword anymore. I remember back in the day when we were trying to “fix” html and make the Web ok again. We always championed the idea of semantic markup and clean CSS. These were reactions to the…

Modern CSS I’m writing a little UI and I was looking around at CSS frameworks. I know that Tailwind is pretty much what everyone uses now. I used to be on a team at Yahoo that developed the concept of Atomic CSS and Tachyons. These were minimal CSS-only frameworks that didn’t rely on React or anything. I’m looking into modern…

Sagemaker I’m looking into AWS Sagemaker now in order to run some machine learning models. I’m working with a team of Data Scientists who are developing models and I need to get my head around how this works from an Engineering standpoint. I’m doing some basic investigation on all of the different types of hosting and environments. It’s clear to…

Learn and Burn I’m deep in the throes of machine learning right now. Not in the LLM sense but in the traditional classifier model sense. Not generative AI but decisioning and clustering. Old school. I have done some of this in the past but it’s been a few years. I’m working with some Data Scientists that know the math and…