Category: Software

‘Tis The Season

Been doing lots of holiday stuff the last couple weeks. A trip to the museum, two family holiday parties, three kid’s performing arts shows, and four work-related parties, town halls and similar functions. Whew.

I took the kids to the AMNH a couple weeks ago, and we had a great time. Spent a long time with the dinosaurs and the frogs, and in the hall of minerals. The Origami Tree is in the south hall this year, since they’re doing renovations in the lower hall on the Central Park side. My elephants were featured in the “folding the museum” display at the base of the tree, and they saved a number of my models from years past, which are in the tree.

I also folded some models – a dragon and a moose – as ornaments for the tree at the kids’ school.

Yesterday was the big family xmas party for Jeannie’s dad’s side of the family. A good time and great to catch up with all for Long Island cousins. Today was a party for her mom’s side. Had to skip that one to get some things done.

Our kids a in this after school theatre program, in which they do singing and dancing and acting. They had two different shows last week, one for the younger kids and one for the bigger ones, and it’s pretty impressive the level of the performance. Later this week there’s some kind of holiday play. Lizzy is an angel and gets to say some lines.

There’s been a lot of end-of year holiday parties, for my immediate team, for the platform group, and for the whole company. Our corporate parties tend to be rather boozy affairs, but I survived alright. I’ve been there long enough that I have friends in all different divisions, so it was good to catch up. Then there was a town hall in which our corporate overlords are telling us out of one side of their mouth how the company had a great year and made tons of money, and out of the other how internet piracy is destroying our business and killing innocent people and must be stopped. Umm, yeah.

All this has been great fun, but it’s really hard to get stuff done. Looking forward to taking a few days off this week and getting caught up.

Any Jobber Got the Sack

The recent death of Steve Jobs has put me in a surprisingly contemplative mood, thinking about how Apple has affected my life and career since 1982 or ’83 when I first programmed on an Apple II. In particular I’ve been thinking about the fall of 1996, when I first arrived in Silicon Valley, just as Mr. Jobs was engineering his prodigal return to Apple. Here’s an article I read last week, an interview from Playboy magazine back in 1985. Might’ve been the Madonna issue. I feel like I read it back in the day, because some parts ring familiar. It’s amazing how on he was about the future of the industry, and also how much everything has changed.

http://www.txtpost.com/playboy-interview-steven-jobs/

The Adventure Continues

This was the first weekend I’ve been home in a month. So here’s a quick post to bring you up to date. After our big vacation in mid July, we spent last weekend camping with Martin’s and Nick’s. It was a great time, and great weather. Just a bit of rain as we were setting up camp, but then it cleared up. We were lucky; they were predicting a major storm. The whole thing was nice and mellow. Did some hikin, swimming’, barbecuein’, storytellin’, and just hangin’ out. Charlie is bright, well tempered and energetic, and getting big fast. Martin is moving on building his new house, so it’s only a matter of time until asks for his guitars back.

When I’ve been home I’ve been crazy busy at work the last two weeks, staying late and going back to work after the kids were in bed. Friday was our big demo. It was a tree browser for related records in our content management system, with all kinds of complex functionality for auto-expanding the tree and including related records, and managing duplicate records, circular dependencies and other kinds of relationships. I was pair programming with a colleague much of that time, and it was an interesting experience trying to build a huge, complex feature set under time pressure. We didn’t always see eye to eye on the approach, but in the end what we came up with was probably better than what either of us would have done on our own, and certainly faster. Olga is clever at using hash tables to speed things up, and good at low level implementation. On the other hand, her communication skills aren’t great, and I had a better understanding of the feature requirements. So I was focused on the architecture, the classes and methods, and how to keep it forward-maintainable, which often gets sacrificed in these situations. A well-written application should read like a good story. I ended up rewriting a substantial portion of here work to put all the business logic in one place so it could be easily read and (if necessary) modified down the line. Anyhow, we made our deadline and the application looked great and performed fast, so it was a big success and things will hopefully get back to normal.

Next up: I need a new lawmower.

OUSA ’11 Recap

With the 4th of July weekend right on the heels of the origami convention, it’s been a busy few weeks. So here’s a bit of catching up. I had a good time at the convention, and caught up a bunch of friends. I also to a very positive response to the release of my new eBook. I taught my Walrus, which turned out to be a big hit, as well as my Narwhal. I also taught my Stellated Octahedron with Color Change, which turned out to be very challenging to fold. I came up with several new models including my two interlocking cubes (I’ve been working out how to do it with a color change from a single sheet), and some new tessellations including a Quadrose tiling and a Penrose tiling. I bought some nice paper from a vendor from Ohio, Origamido-style but thicker. The plan is to fold a few of my complex models out them, including the Zeppelin, Dragon and War Elephant. I also got an idea to extend my origami-from-space series to include a Space Shuttle. Photos of all this coming whenever I get around to it.

Every few years it seems someone new arrives on the scene folding amazing stuff. In the last few years it was T.J. Norville and then Dinh Giang. This year it was teh charming Beth Johnson, who has lots of curvy, dimensions models such as a pinecone and sheep that make use of tessellations as a design element. You can see some of her work at http://bethorigami.wordpress.com

My publisher Brian gave a Monday talk about eBook publishing for origami. One topic he covered is the diff between eBooks and apps. After we got to talking, and I realized my Foldinator is almost ready to be an origami app engine (notwithstanding the issue of running a Flash application on iOS). I haven’t worked on it in a while, and when I left off I was getting deep into the heart of the computational problem of mathematically representing and manipulating a folded piece of paper. The whole thing can be greatly simplified by just using pre-rendered graphics for each step. This may be a bit of a cheat, but it’s a good hack, since I’ve had to create images for all the models in me eBook anyway. So soon I’ll be putting together a prototype. Meanwhile, Brain has been dusting off my OrigamiXML spec with an eye toward expanding it for use in ebooks and apps.

Also, now that my ebook is done I’m working on putting together a print book. I’ve been going thru and making page layouts. This well be a superset of the ebook, with 20 – 24 models compared tot eh ebook’s 12. Hopefully when that’s done I can move straight on to a second ebook.

…

For the long weekend of the 4th we had out of town guests, a 70th birthday celebration for my father-in-law, a big ol’ barbecue the next day, plus trying to fit music and origami stuff and work around the house and yard. More on that soon. Back to the office today, which almost feels like a break. Lots more excitement coming in the next few weeks, with travel and adventure, so stay tuned.

May Flowers

Back to the ol’ grind grind. Turmoil at work. Ah, the impersonal slings and arrows of working for a large corporation. I lost my private office recently in yet another reorg, and moved to a new location. Which is fine as far as it goes: I’m in an open area now with my actual colleagues, so the arrangement makes sense and is more social and congenial than it was before when people were scatted all over several floors. And we’re on the sunny side of the building. The thing is, my location has a built-in desktop that was several inches too low (I’m 6’6” tall). Before I left on spring break, the building services people came by and said they’d raise my desk, but when I got back they’d done nothing and closed the work order, declaring the problem solved. So I had to go after these people, which was a drag. When pressed they refused to fix it as a matter of policy. Picking up a screwdriver would cross an uncrossable line it seems. So I moved to another location nearby with an adjustable desk, causing lots of annoyance to my neighbors I’m sure.

Some good news: it was a lovely weekend. The first really warm weekend of the spring, with hint of summer. The girls had their dance recital on Saturday, and both did really well. The studio puts on a really nice show every year with acts and costumes and music. Sunday we did some more yard work, planting and edging, and I went skating and took the Mustang out for a ride, and we made a barbecue.

Also: getting used to the new car. At first I was just relieved to be done with the car shopping ordeal, but now I’ve driven it a few times, mainly to the train station and am starting to get a feel for it. It’s certainly much quieter and less falling-apartish than the old car. Plus the color is really nice. Blue with hints of purple and green when the light strikes it the right way. The stereo is weird. It has subwoofer, so the bass tends to be muddy and indistinct. Also all the bass is coming from the back of the car. It took some time, but I adjusted it to sound better. Next up is figuring out how to set the clock and the radio presets.

I figured out “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” on guitar. Don’t ask me why. The song’s been stuck in my head since the 70’s. Needed to get it out. Lizzy asked my why all songs about disasters are so long (she’s heard me play American Pie too). I figured out the secret for WotEF: it never resoloves. The first and last chord is an A sus, so you never know if it’s in a major or minor key. There’s not a C or C# anywhere in the tune, just a void.

Origami Site Update

I updated my origami site with some of the pictures I took for my book. Also update the blurbs for a bunch of models.

http://zingman.com/origami/
http://zingman.com/origami/adk_ori.php
http://zingman.com/origami/ori_animals.php#loon
http://zingman.com/origami/ori_animals.php#octopi
http://zingman.com/origami/ori_things.php#balloon
http://zingman.com/origami/ori_things.php#canoe
http://zingman.com/origami/ori_things.php#adk_chair

Origami Site Update

I updated my origami site with some of the pictures I took for my book. Also update the blurbs for a bunch of models.

http://zingman.com/origami/
http://zingman.com/origami/adk_ori.php
http://zingman.com/origami/ori_animals.php#loon
http://zingman.com/origami/ori_animals.php#octopi
http://zingman.com/origami/ori_things.php#balloon
http://zingman.com/origami/ori_things.php#canoe
http://zingman.com/origami/ori_things.php#adk_chair

Studio Upgrade

You’ll be happy to know I did get my new mBox 3 Pro. I ordered it from Sam Ash because they claimed they had it in stock but I had a bad vibe about the order. They screwed up the shipping and sent it fedex home instead of fedex ground so I had to cancel the order after they failed to deliver it three times. At least the Sam Ash people told me where to get one at a local music store.

While I was there I had a chance to audition a bunch of electric guitars. I liked four of them well enough to write down the model numbers. Two were Epiphones and two were Ibanezes. The first Epiphone was a Gibson SG knockoff. Dual humbuckers, mahogany body, maroon finish. It played nice and sounded nice. But one of the knobs was missing so I wouldn’t buy it. The next was an Epiphone hollow body modeled after another classic Gibson. Dual humbuckers, four knobs, also maroon finish. It didn’t play right cuz the string for the sales tag was wrapped around the two top strings. But the hollow body felt and sounded good, and reminded me of the main guitar John Lennon played in the late 60’s, a cream colored Gretsch. They had what looked to be a reissue of that guitar for about $2500, way out of my range. So I moved on and saw a nice Ibanez. One was a les-paul style but lighter and with a more agile feeling neck. Played really nice, nice cream color. The last was another hollow also in a cream color and looked alot like that John Lennon guitar, and is my current favorite.

I was surprised to find I really like the sound of those hollowbodies. Playing one feels closer to an acoustic. But I’m not sure if that’s the guitar I want because it seems alot less versatile than a regular electric guitar. For one thing the necks tend to be a bit flatter and wider, which can be both good and bad. For another it seems like some styles would be sort of off-limits with an axe like that. OTOH I don’t really see myself playing metal anyway. I’d rather have a guitar that gently weeps than loudly screams. Anyway people like John Lennon (Revolution, e.g.) and Neil Young have been able to get really hard rocking sounds from hollowbodies. Still, I also like bands like Rush and other that have a more modern guitar sound. (My friend John pointed out that Alex Lifeson played a hollowbody on a number of songs.)

Anyway, I got home from the music store and began to set up the mBox. I did the OS upgrade to 10.5.8, installed ProTools8 and hooked up the hardware on xmas eve. It works great! Michelle helped me get things going. Now she wants to be my apprentice engineer, which is awesome, cuz she has a good head for computers already. So I had her just make some noise into the mic and she decided to sing Away in a Manger. The sound is so good. When I went to play it back, I told her to stop singing now so I could hear the playback. I looked up and she wasn’t singing and I *was* hearing the playback! Later Lizzy came down and did aO Come All Ye Faithful. The new MBox has 2 headphone jacks, which makes this sort of thing alot easier.

Starting to learn PT8. There’s alot of new (to me) stuff in there. Project templates with built in click, nice and handy to get started quick. The built in FX have been upgraded. The basic compressor now has a nice little realtime input/output graph. Lots to explore.

I did a little side project for my mother-in-law she had an old 45 r.p.m. EP of girl scout songs from the 1950’s or 60’s that she asked me to make into a CD. (I’m the only one in the family with a working turntable.) The record was in pretty bad shape with lots of scratches and a few skips. I was able to eliminate a lot of the noise thru a combination of EQ (cut out everything over 4k) and compression (hard limiter to reduce the transients because the the pops were louder than the music) and it sound a good deal better. Still todo is edit out the skips, break the sides into tracks and burn the disc.

Studiowise, next step was to re-attach my midi rig. The new mBox has a single midi in and out, so I could get input from a single controller if all else failed. I have an 8×8 MOTU box that’s been an integral part of my. Last time I tried hooking it up to ProTools on the mac was about two years ago when 10.5 was new, and I totally struck out after lots of hassles. This time it plugged right in and totally worked. Woo-hoo! The other thing was to get SampleTank going again. I downloaded and installed sampleTank for mac 10.5 a month or two ago when I was trying to get up and running with Reaper but no dice. This time it opened in ProTools but my trail had expired. I had a bit of headache with the authorization but I finally got there.

So now I’m up and humming. Began work on Rocket to the Moon tonight. Got a click track and scratch MIDI bass part. I thought I’d lay down a scratch guitar part too using direct inject, but I ran into latency problems. There’s a good 8th or more note delay between the time you play a note and when you hear it in the headphones. Completely unworkable for live tracking. I messed around with the various input buffer dialogs, but to no avail. I’m pretty confident this can be solved if I just find the right control, because for years my old mBox was rock solid with no perceptible latency. I’m wndering if I should deactivate some plugins. Anyway, once I figure it out I’ll let you know.

The plan going forward is to upgrade to 10.6 and PT9 although I’ll probably wait until I’ve completed a song or two in the new setup. I’m also considering getting the digidesign expansion bundle that includes an AI drummer and detailed drum synth/sampler, a virtual analog synth, a fender Rhodes simulator, and some other stuff. Lots of fun ahead.