Live, learn, leave
I’ve been busy moving into my new computer, and so far it’s not too bad, although it’s dragging on, and Apple is just as bad as Microsoft in their own little ways. It’s amazing the little gaps in my software that I need to replace now. Audio, video and network utilities, not to mention syncing and organizing all my old data. In any event, the new version of PhotoBooth make movies, and Lizzy and Michelle were happy to give it a go.
It’s been awhile since I last wrote. The deep cold, long dark nights and bleak days continue without interruption. Five weeks now with only one or two afternoons barely breaking freezing. Snow still on the ground from December has crusted up to ice and is covered over by newer layers like a fossil record. I’ve been trying to keep busy by working on music and origami lest the season work its way thru my bones and into my soul. Making progress on that stuff, albeit slowly. A new version of my origami Lizard is basically finished. But all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
I have been reading Martin’s blog about his new music recoding efforts. I have some stuff to say, partially in response, about song writing and recoding from my own POV, particularly in regards to the guitar and the bass. But it’s been hard pulling all that together and I realize it’s probably more than one topic, so hopefully I can get to that some time soon.
I’ve also been really busy at work getting up to speed with the Platform Group. A bunch of new people have joined, so the lot of have been going thru three weeks of twice daily meetings to learn about the whole platform architecture, application stack from soup to nuts. As well current state and future plans of the project. It’s valuable stuff but alot to absorb in a short amount of time. Basically like school. And on top of this I’ve been getting into the code base and working on fixing bugs and adding new features from day one.
Tuesday into Wednesday a storm of snow and freezing rain descended on us. I worked from home on Wednesday because the kids’ school was cancelled. That morning my old laptop finally gave up the ghost for good. It went to sleep and wouldn’t wake up. My best guess is the power manager is fried and thinks the battery is dead and can’t tell that it’s plugged in. At least I successfully migrated my music production off that machine, and I have a recent full backup, and most of my most recent work is on a thumb drive, so the timing of it was not too bad. Unable to face the prospect of another week or more of downtime trying, probably in vain, to fix the machine yet again, I went out and got a new computer.
Fortunately there’s an Apple Store right near my office, so I swung by the next morning and picked up a new MacBook Pro. So that’s the end of Microsoft OS for me for the foreseeable future (BootCamp and Parallels notwithstanding), and good riddance. Now instead of trying to recover and old dead machine, I have the slightly less dreary task of installing all the software and my data on the new machine. I feel like I’ve done this so many times that I’ve stacked up the carcasses of old computers like so many cloned conjurors a la The Prestige. Ah well, hopefully this one will last me a few years and it’ll be a good long while before I have to go thru this again.
You might recall I bought a new computer, an iMac, about a year ago. The plan was to use is as the centerpiece of my recording studio. But ProTools didn’t run on 10.5 so that led to a big OS reinstall. I finally got ProTools, my Box and my MOTU MIDI interface all working together on the Mac under 10.4, only find out that SampleTank, which is my main onboard sampler, wasn’t compatible with Intel Macs and I’d have to get a whole new (as opposed to an upgrade) version of SampleTank. So that kind of bottomed out here. I did manage to install Boot Camp and Windows XP, but by the time I was done with all that I just wanted to get on with making music, so I went back to using my laptop again.
Well that laptop has been acting funny, and I don’t know why, and I went thru all kinds of pain to replace the hard drive last month. So over xmas vacation I finally got around to installing ProTools, SampleTank and all my samples, and the MIDI software on the XP partition of my Mac, and doing all the authorization rigamarole.
All was looking good, until I went to work on some actual music. Then to my dismay I discovered that after a few seconds the thing came to screeching halt. I tried again and it was the same thing. It was completely unusable. So I googled “protools xp bootcamp” and found lots of other people experiencing similar problems. Well misery loves company I guess. I learned that I probably needed something called the “microsoft dual core hotfix” so I googled that and it led me to this link:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896256
Shawnuff I installed the patch and now everything is working splendidly and completely copasetic. The one caveat is I have to turn off wifi on the mac, which is something I never had to do on my laptop. The good news is that mac is a way more powerful machine. Mixes that would max out my old machine are only using about 40 percent of the CPU. Also, with the big monitor, I can display a full 24 tracks worth of faders without having to scroll! So a longstanding goal has been realized and I’m back in business in the recording front.
And it’s a good thing too. I’m in the middle of a new song called “Earthbound”. Or maybe it will be called “Perihelion”. After a month of downtime I can finally get back to it./p>The next problem is that if the machine sleeps while XP it kinda crashes when it wakes up, and then reboots in the MacOS. I think Microsoft has a fix for that too.
So my computer repair project took a turn to the strange. When we last checked in with the little adventure, I had recovered and backed up all my data and bought a replacement 160 BG hard drive. Well, then I formatted the drive using an external drive bay, on my Mac running Windows. I made 2 partitions, one at 40GB for the system and another at 120 for my data. I opened my laptop, which is a big pain, and pulled the old drive and put in the new one. I ran Ghost to recover the system partition, but I failed with a mysterious “disk geometry error”. We tried a few things, but ultimately we reformatted the drive in the laptop using an XP install CD. From there were able to restore the C drive from Ghost and the data on the D drive from the recovered files. The weird thing was, the size of the D partition somehow changed from 120 GB to 90 GB and the total size of the drive to 128 GB. Some part of the drive had become orphaned.
Throughout all this, Jeannie was helping me figure out how to proceed, with extraordinary patience. It was slow going, so we’ve been working our way thru HBO’s “Rome” while the computer was doing its thing. So, knowing at least we could recover the system, we wiped the drive clean and started over, but the same problem persisted. We figured there was a problem with the replacement drive, so I bought yet another replacement drive, this time a 250 GB one. We followed the same path. Formatted it from the Mac via a sled with a 40 and (this time) 210 GB partition, took apart the laptop to swap the drives, restored the C drive from Ghost, and watched it fail with that geometry error. We reformatted the drive in the laptop and again the size of the drive dropped down to 128 GB. Yeesh!
So we have determined that the problem is not with the drive but probably with the machine itself, maybe something to do with the drive controller. I’ve never encountered anything like this before and I don’t really know. So I’m giving up. I sunk a huge amount of time into it and at this point I have a working, if old and creaky, computer so that’s will have to do. Come the new year I will probably look to getting a new laptop. It is mostly likely to be a Mac, so this means I will be leaving Window behind, hopefully for a long time.
Astute readers of this blog may have noticed a longer than usual interval since my last update, and concerned readers may be wondering why. Well I’ll tell you. The last few weeks have been pretty tumultuous. I’ve finished work of a bunch of projects, including home improvement, an update to my web site and a music flash app fro my friend Erik. (More on that later.) In completely other events, my company is undergoing a major restructuring, having laid off a whole bunch of people a week ago Thursday and moved a bunch of others, including yours truly, into new and different groups, which makes for fun and exciting time at the office these days. (More on that too later as the situation unfolds.) And lastly, as a concession to it being dark and cold out all the time, we’ve been playing Super Mario Galaxy and watching HBO’s “Rome” on DVD.
Last weekend was the first in months that we’ve had basically free with no major commitments or work to do. It was very nice and relaxing. Caught up on my rest, hung out with the kids and played legos, that sort of thing. I finally got back to my origami book and made good progress on diagramming my elephant. I updated my todo list with random tasks for the holiday break. One of them was to backup my computer, since I haven’t done that since the start of the semester.
And then, Sunday night I was settling down to work on music (I have a new song I’m working on called Earthbound – more on that later too.) and I rebooted my computer, and guess what, it wouldn’t boot. Turns out my hard drive chose that moment to turn bad.
So it’s taken me three days of downtime to recover all my work and order a replacement hard drive. Tonight I’ll be formatting the drive, putting it in my computer and restoring all my data. Fun fun fun. So that’s why it’s been almost two weeks!
I just completed a major revision to my Origami web site at www.zingorigami.com (also www.zingman.com/origami). Attentive readers of this blog will recall that I started on this endeavor way back in September. I had to get around to a bunch of other projects first, but I’m happy to have completed phase one of the operation.
I invented about ten new origami models this year, so the update was long overdue. Major features include reorganizing the collection of models into a series of pages according to a set of major categories. The index page now links into these pages and presents a comprehensive index of thumbnails. I also created a page of Adirondack Origami, to highlight the feature I did for Adirondack Life magazine earlier this year. Additionally I created a page for info about Origami commissions if you’re interested in having you own origami handmade by me the artist, and a page about my forthcoming book, mostly a placeholder for now.
The next step will be a new round of photographs. For many of the recent models I simply put up snapshots, but sometime over the winter I plan on folding exhibit level versions of all my models and doing a proper photo shoot of them. This will also be useful for the book.
Then phase three will be to make the pages served dynamically. I need to research some kind of lightweight CMS and template engine, or maybe make my own. That will be a pretty good project.
And in related news, my friend John has a new web site to showcase his origami: www.johnmontroll.com
Over the weekend we went to Washington to visit my friend John, who is an accomplished origami artist. It was a really fun trip.
But first the part about danger and adventure. About a month ago, after all our summer travels were over, I took my car into the shop for an oil change, tire rotation and new front brakes. Since that time, I’ve only driven to the train station and back, and have not taken the car about 30 mph (48 km/h). The kids had a half day of school on Friday, so we lit out for DC about 2 in the afternoon. The trip was great, the traffic smooth and light, and the weather turned from cool and cloudy to mild and sunny. But I after I got on the highway I started to notice a vibration in the front end, and as the trip went on it got worse. By the time we got off the Beltway it was pretty bad, and soon the front brakes were smoking! Luckily we made it to John’s house and there was a garage just a couple blocks away.
It turned out one of the tires was seriously worn along the outside edge, to the point where it was ready to blow out! I think the garage last month must have screwed up with the tire rotation, cuz this was not normal wear. On top of that the rear brakes were shot. So I got new back breaks and ended up getting four new tires, cuz one other tire was pretty badly worn and all of them were more than five years old in any event. Ah well, it was an expensive hassle, but I would have had to get this work done at some point, and all in all we were pretty lucky.
And it didn’t even slow us down very much. There are a lot of good restaurants in John’s neighborhood and Friday night we got Mongolian food. Saturday I got up early to deal with the car, and then we all took the train into downtown D.C. We went down the Mall to the Washington Monument, the Reflecting Pool and the Lincoln Memorial. I haven’t been there since high school, so it was interesting to see how the place had changed. For on thing they put up a slightly incongruous World War Two memorial right near the Washington Monument.
It’s also interesting how some thing haven’t changed. It’s a long walk (4 miles from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial and back), and you’d think they’d have trams or bicycles or something for the tourists in this day and age of fat America. It would also come in handy for people with kids or a bad ankle, or people who don’t want to walk the whole length of the Mall twice. Also the food selection is pretty meager, just a single concession stand with bad pizza and hot dogs and soda. You’d think there’d be row of places to get lunch.
The highlight of the day was the Smithsonian Air and Space museum. This is a fantastic place and I’ve been to it every time I’ve been to Washington. It’s full of spaceships, including such legendary craft as the Apollo 11 Command Module, and of a more recent vintage Spaceship One, and storied airplanes including the original 1903 Wright Flyer plus hundreds of later models from every era of experimental, military and commercial aviation. There used to be a Space Shuttle but that’s now gone. I understand they moved it to a new museum hall out near the airport.
The kids really loved it (as Jeannie I both did at that age), and I don’t think they ever really thought to spaceships as something real before, only an idea out of movies. I grew up in the 70’s and I remember the waning days of the Apollo program, Skylab, Viking and Voyager, and the development and debut of the Space Shuttle. All that stuff was really cutting edge back then; now it seems almost nostalgic. I mean, my 41-year old classic muscle car is built of the same technology that took humanity to the moon! I read in the paper today that the US will not have manned space light capability for the next five years and will have to pay Russia to send up our astronauts like dotcom zillionares do. Sigh, yet another failure of our government.
In any event the museum was a blast and it was a great day. When we got back to John’s neighborhood the garage was still open and I picked up the car. We get Peruvian food for dinner and played Settlers of Catan after. (It seems John always wins.)
John has a grand piano. It’s been a few years since I’ve played a grand. I used to play one a lot when I lived in California and hung out at my friend David’s house. My own piano is an upright, and it’s good for what it is, but a grand has a faster, better action and much more definition in the sound, especially in the bass registers and the very high end. So it was very enjoyable to play on that.
And of course we spent a lot of time talking origami. I folded some models out of his forthcoming book, a magnum opus of polyhedra and geometric origami. He has a chapter on polygons, including a regular pentagon and a golden rectangle. His pentagon is (folded from a square) is a very accurate approximation, but the golden rectangle is mathematically exact, which is very interesting because it’s only a few steps; the golden rectangle is latent in the square. I have been searching for year for a method to fold a regular pentagon (or a 36 degree angle), and his is the best I’ve seen. But it doesn’t beat the method I’ve come to prefer, which is basically to eyeball it, because I’ve gotten good at it with practice. In any event, since the golden ratio is expressed everywhere in pentagonal symmetry, I feel intuitively that there must be a way to develop a mathematically perfect pentagon from a golden rectangle. I plan on investigating this.
We spent some time considering the Archimedean Solids and their duals. I developed and folded a Truncated Octahedron from a square sheet of paper. This a really interesting shape, composed of eight hexagons and six squares and has the property of being able to tile space. To my surprise and delight, my design mainly worked, right up until I got closing the model and locking the last face in place with it’s neighbors. This ending stuff can be tricky but is essential to a nice model. My current design wants to spring apart, but it looks like I can get make it with stiffer paper and a slight adjustment of the layout of the faces on the paper.
Back in the office today I got a demo to Flash 10 from an Adobe evangelist. It has a lot of cool new API for doing 3D. My friend Veronique turned to me and said this would be cool for my origami software. She’s totally right, but this had the effect of making me sad because I’d love to have the time to work on that project again. I started it back in the dotcom bust when I was out of work and got a lot of design work done and start on a demo, but it would take months of full time work to get to the next level with it. Ah well, with the economy going the way it is maybe I’ll get my chance. Heh!
More works in progress:
I’ve started work on a new song, “Who Can Fool Me?” Sort of an angry and defiant song, inspired as a response to how people in authority use lies and manipulation to maintain their power: the government, corporations, the media, etc. It’s basically a jazz blues in C minor, played in a stride style. But it’s dressed up by a 7/8 time and lots of chromatic harmonic movement for a sort of tense, edgy feeling. It’s coming together relatively quickly, which is nice. Got the arrangement worked out, got rhythm section down, and a MIDI sketch of a horns and strings, and did first pass at the vocals last night. I will do one more pass at that as I am still finalizing the lyrics.
Work on my origami book continues. I’m close to being done with diagramming my moose. This is a long one, over 60 steps so far. It’ll probably end up just a few short of 70. This one will present some new challenges when I do the page layout, since the size and shape of the individual step drawing very greatly, I’ll need to expand my palette of layout templates. I’m folding a moose as I do the diagrams. I had folded my previous mooses out of Wyndstone Marble paper, but that is no longer available in the United States. So I’ve been searching for some new and different kinds of origami paper recently. For this one I ended up using a piece of paper called Tant that I ordered from Nicolas Terry in France. It’s working out very nicely. Very strong and reasonably thin, very workable, and it comes in largish (35cm) sheets. I would love to be able to get the stuff even larger (like 50cm). Anyway, you check out Nicolas’s origami shop and order the stuff here.
Another project I’ve decided to start on this fall is to redesign the origami section of my web site. I’ve been wanting to do this since the summer. I had a big burst of creativity last May and June, and came up with eight new models in that period, and since then of course I’ve decided to so a book. The big problem with this is my web site is really old. Parts of it date back to 1995, which is truly ancient in internet time. I’ve added on it over the years, but the core is flat html. So the origami galleries don’t scale well, and every time I add a new model it’s a fair amount of hand coding. I want to completely redo it, with a more modern looking, CMS-backed, Javacript-driven front end. Maybe something like this. BTW, Giang Dihn is my favorite origami artist out there right now. His stuff is so lyrical and flowing, so beautiful.
But that’s a rather large endeavor, beginning with researching available code libraries and seeing how they fit in with my design concept. So it will have to wait. Meanwhile I’m overhauling the current set of pages on last time. I swear this is it. The most labor-intensive part of this is I have to photograph all my models and bring them into photoshop to size the images. This is something I’ll need to do anyway for my book. But the more I do it, the higher my standards get, and I’m starting to realize I need a better camera or better lighting setup, or maybe just need to become a better photographer. Ah well another bridge I’ll cross when I get there. For this rev I’ll just use the pictures I have.
Lastly, I spent some time last weekend with the girls on the movie Rollercoaster of Cheese, their little timeline animation project. Created the soundtrack by editing together and layering 3 takes of our the voiceover. Showed them how to use Audacity, a simple but reasonably powerful audio editor for the PC. Brought the soundtrack into Flash. The next and last step is the actually animation, using the library of drawing they built up.
This led to us exploring some old multimedia pieces I have on my web site. So here’s some shockwave stuff from a few years ago. Enjoy!
http://zingman.com/mmedia/index.html
Here’s an little animation from Lizzy and Michelle. I’ve started teaching the girls Flash, with the idea of using it as a way to introduce them to programming. I was about Lizzy’s age when I first started programming computers. Of course back in those days if you wanted to do anything at all with a computer you had to write a program first. These were TRS-80’s and the language was BASIC, and we’d type in the source code for simple games like Lunar Lander out of a manual and then watch it run. Now computers, languages and platforms are about a zillion times more complicated, and it’s hard to know where to start. I figured Flash is good cuz they can start with the drawing and animation tools, and then get into simple frame scripts, and go from there they can take it as afar as they want, up to a full on Object Oriented language and web application development platform. Not that they will necessarily want to grow up to be software developers, but right now they mainly use computers for watching DVD’s, playing games, and surfing the net, so it’d be good for them to have some basic understanding of how things work, as well as developing some logical problem-solving skills.
So we’re up to playing with the drawing and animation tools. Here’s a first effort, called “Squishy Cheese”. The project is actually from a little while ago, but there is renewed interest, and they’re working on a follow-up. The new one will have thematic content and an attempt at narrative. This one is more, stream of consciousness and impressionistic.
While we’re on the topic of amusing office annoyances, here’s another.
I work for a really big company. Big enough that people’s idea of what they think is the right thing do in the corporate context can vary greatly depending on their particular role. This can get rather surreal. My floor alone is well over 100 people, all working on just one small set of applications.
The other day I’m working and I get a last minute and urgent request from a project manager to implement some absolutely boneheaded feature ASAP. This is actually not that uncommon, but more often than not it’s the result of poor communication, so usually the solution is to find the person who made the request and go talk to them, figure out what they really want and implement something sensible instead of their flaky hack.
(The project manager is a neither-fish-nor-fowl role in our organization. They not developers or technical managers, nor or they produces or have anything to do with defining features or product direction. They are basically organizers and mediators and their job is to schedule and track things and make sure people who need to know what’s going on know what’s going on. And to insulate developers from random noise from creative.)
This request came from a producer over in creative, so I go over to ask him about it directly. This particular guy is often more of a “big picture” than a “details” person, but he’s a nice guy and smart and if he can see that his idea doesn’t make sense to a developer he’s usually willing to listen and find a solution that works for everyone.
But not this day. I explain first issue, which is with usability. “You’re right, it makes no sense,” he tells me. ” I know it’s a terrible idea, but we have to do it anyway.” He actually said this. Pressure from the legal department apparently.
I’m sure it seems like a simple request to him but it actually would require some substantial reworking of a nontrivial set of code, and it touches other parts of the code base, so I’d have to get other developers involved. This would make the whole thing run over schedule, and have cascading consequences. So I think it over and tell him, “Actually I think it’s a great idea, but the problem is we can’t do it.”
