Does anybody here remember… Live Wire?

Live Wire were a British band from the late seventies. As far as I know they released three albums: Pick it Up, No Fright and Changes Made. Theirs was an original style which combined a rather nocturnal, essential approach to rock music with a decidedly jazz rock oriented bass. The atmosphere was different in each album, possibly a little convoluted and wordy in the first two, more easy going in the last one.

Here in Italy they were likened to Dire Straits, but the two bands had little in common except for the fact of being non Punk/New Wave bands in the height of the Punk/New Wave era. Live Wire were less immediate and pleasant than Dire Straits, but certainly not less interesting.

They toured Italy at least twice and I managed to attend the second tour’s first and last gigs. I have a pleasant memory of the band’s involvement with the audience: they appeared to enjoy playing for us and they seemed to be truly moved by our response. Their “In my Child’s Eye” is still one of my favourite songs.

Italy appears to have played a role in their career, both before and after they split. As a band they worked with some local artist; after the break-up guitar player Simon Boswell went on to write film scores for, among others, master of suspense Dario Argento, while bass player Jeremy Meek played with Pino Daniele on different occasions. A friend of mine happened to attend a gig where lead singer Mike Green was among a performer a few years later in Milan.

All in all a band that deserved better fortune than they got; all the more so considering that it’s highly unlikely that their records will ever be reissued in digital form.

Per i nostalgici di Rasputin Dischi

Ora c’è un gruppo di Facebook tutto per noi! Dal momento che ogni volta che controllo qualcun altro è capitato sul mio post a proposito di Rasputin, ho pensato che sarebbe stato divertente vedere chi siamo e quanti siamo.

Test results for Boost 1.37.0 and CodeGear compilers…

… may be found here!

I ran the tests both before and after applying Update 1 and the results are exactly the same.

Boost 1.37 is out

As you probably know Boost 1.37 was released yesterday. I expect it to be well received by CodeGear users, as it includes many specific patches for both C++Builder 2009 and C++Builder 2007. The good news are that many of these patches actually disable workarounds that are not needed any more and none is specific to the latest compiler version, so apparently there are no new regressions.

Among the involved libraries there are some of the fundamental ones, as Config, CallTraits, Exception, Iterator, MPL and TypeTraits. Asio, Foreach, Filesystem, Function, Functional and Serialization also received patches. Unfortunately there were quite a few patches that I didn’t manage to submit in time; these will have to wait for 1.38, I’m afraid.

I hope to be able to post test results for both CB2009 and CB2007 on the bcbboost site by tomorrow evening. Originally I didn’t plan to issue a new bcbboost release, but CodeGear released Update 1 for CB2009 too late for explicit support to be included in 1.37. In the next few days I’ll check what needs to be done.