Category: Software

South Side of the Sky

Good news: my project for work is going live this week, which means no more working nights and weeks to meet the deadline. I worked basically continually from Thursday morning thru last night. At least it’s a good time of year to be sitting inside in front of the computer. I feel like I’ve made it through the worst of the winter, and the days are getting longer. On the other hand, I’ve been not devoting as much time to music and origami as would have liked this winter, not to mention playing Super Mario Galaxy, and need to make that up. Oh yeah and finishing tiling my 2nd bathroom.

At least I got out on my bike a few times when there was a break in the weather. I find I can tolerate 40 degrees or higher pretty comfortably. And I got my bike fixed up just recently. I originally bought my bike when I moved to California, and Jeannie and I were sharing a car, and my commute was shorter, so I did it on bike. I bought it at Palo Alto Bicycles, which at the time had a little neon sign that said “Google” in the window in the floor above the bike shop, the home of a tiny internet startup. Jeannie and I had a conversation something like this:

I though it was spelled Googol. I wonder what they do.”

“I think they do search or something like that.”

“Sounds interesting, I wonder if I should apply for a job there.”

“Nah, most startups tank. And Alta Vista already owns search.   I’m sure they’ll be gone in a year.   Stick with the job you’re at.”

It was a basic but well made mountain bike (a Trek if you’re curious), that has held up well over the years. No shock on the front, cuz in those days it was a pretty high-end feature. Palo Alto has lots of bike paths and I used to pass over a cute little bridge and by a kind-of farm with donkeys, so it was very pleasant.

So I switched to biking in the evenings after work when it got too dark to skate, and kept it up into November, and here and there in December, January and February. But then I got a flat tire, and not only my tubes but my tires were shot, so into the shop it went. This time it was Pelham Bicycles, with no internet startup on the floor above. They put on new tires, trued the wheels and replaced the brakes and cables. Now it rides as good as new. Of course as soon as I got it back from the shop, I rode it once and it was back to the cold and snow again that very evening. Ah well spring is getting closer. I’m looking forward to taking a few days off to catch up on things, and hopefully getting a day of skiing in before it’s too late, and get a bit of a spring break.

Sour Apple Blues

So around Christmastime I got a new computer, a shiny iMac. I think I’ve mentioned that I haven’t had a new Mac in over 10 years, since back in the says of System 7. But I was seduced by the image of hipsters on white backgrounds poking fun at hapless corporate types, and repulsed by the prospect of running Vista, so there you go. The plan was to make the Mac the new center of my home recording studio. I’ll bet you’re wondering how that’s been going, moving into the new machine and all. Well, let me tell you.

First of all, I’ve been really busy lately, working 60+ hour weeks for a product launch at work, plus a couple trips. So it’s been taking a while. I didn’t really have time to do much over the Holidays other than plug the computer in and tour some of the built-in apps. I don’t even have email on it yet! And then I was in the middle of a song (The Nine) which I wanted to finish before I switched my rig.

But a couple of weeks ago I finally got around to it. I successfully downloaded, authorized and installed PT 7.1 on the Mac. I use an MBox for audio I/O, and the ProTools upgrade was free, and worked just great, and the DigiDesign website was about as painless as you can expect that sort of thing to be. To give it a test drive, I recorded 2-track demo of She Came in Thru the Bathroom Window. Voice and piano, recorded live, which was kinda cool cuz I’d never tried singing and playing at once before; I usually overdub the vocal. I had the Rhodes in one input and the mic in the other, and it worked fine. With the wireless Mac keyboard I can start and stop the music sitting at the piano. Only problem is I have to turn around to see the screen, but for pressing play it’s great.

Now the current version of PT is 7.4, and I have no idea what’s new in last .3 revs. I’m told there’s a lot better MIDI support for things like time stretching. I wonder to what extent I can move files back and forth between my 2 machines now. Also, PT is officially not supported for OS 10.5, but it seems to work just fine.

Next I installed SampleTank, but PT couldn’t see it. I thought maybe it’s because I haven’t loaded any samples yet, or maybe I need to authorize it, I dunno. So then the project veered off to cruising IK Multimedia’s website and getting in touch with their tech support. After a couple weeks of back’n’forth, I learned that my version of SampleTank (LE 2.08) doesn’t work for Intel Macs, although it’s not clear what the issue is. IK want me to pay $300 to upgrade to a new version of SampleTank, and it’s not also clear how compatible it would be — how much work it’d be to import my old songs with the same patches and everything. So getting to the bottom of that and deciding if I want to do the upgrade is a whole research project.

I figured before I went too much further I’d see how the Mac likes my MIDI interface. It’s a MOTU MIDI Express XT, and MOTU’s web site says it’s plug and play for the Mac, and shawnuff I can see it in the list of USB devices. But when I bang on the keys of my synth, PT doesn’t get the events. So now the question is what software do I need to get ProTools to talk to my external MIDI interface? I’m pretty sure there’s no OMS anymore.

I found drivers for the XT for Mac OS on the MOTU web site, so that seem like a good place to start. Then I discovered the Audio and MIDI settings panel in the Mac OS. Unfortunately when I open the midi panel, it said it couldn’t load due to an error. It suggested I uninstall any recent drivers and try again. I did this but got the same error. Debugging this will be a whole nuther research project.

So in light of this I’m now thinking of installing Parallels or VMWare and running my whole music rig in XP, since I know everything works with that and I have all the software, drivers and everything. This kinda make the whole new Mac thing seem like a waste and failure, but I guess I can still cross over in time, once I get the MacOS issues worked out. Still it’s gotten to the point where it’s holding me back from working on new songs, so I just want to get back to making music. So for tonight I’m going back to my old laptop, and maybe I’ll be in XP via BootCamp on my Mac next weekend. At least I’ll be able to look at 24 tracks of faders on the widescreen display.

Origami Site Update

I just finished updating the Origami Page of my website. 2007 Was a pretty good year for new origami designs, and I have pictures and CP’s for a bunch of new models since I last updated the page a year ago. These include a Hot Air Balloon, Armadillo, and Butterfly, as well as several versions of a Stellated Dodecahedron and a series of polyhedra based on sliced icosahedra, with faces consisting of equilateral triangles and regular pentagons. Additionally I added a some new pictures and larger thumbnails of existing models, and reorganized the whole thing so the polyhedra are now on their own page. Of course there are more new ideas in the works, and hopefully I’ll get a bunch of them completed in 2008.

160 The Hard Way (PC HD Upgrade)

Since I’ve been working at home from time to time this fall I needed to install a bunch of software on my machine, and the inevitable finally happened: I ran out of hard drive space. Rather than deal with perpetual offloading stuff to another drive I decided to get a new bigger hard drive and swap the old one out. Since my old computer died I’m down to one computer, which went from being my music studio computer to my everything computer. So I also decided I’m gonna get a new machine for the studio sometime this winter. And it’s gonna be a Mac, my first new one in over 10 years. I was a long time Mac user, practically from the beginning in the 80’s, until Paul Allen personally forced me to switch to Windows when I worked for Interval Research Corporation, his secretive Silicon Valley think thank. But Vista looks like a total dog that jumped the shark, and PC hardware design reminds me more of Soviet-era cars with each year. Meanwhile the Macs keep getting better and better. Not only are they sleek and shiny and integrated and all, but they include Linux and you can run Windows on ’em still. Best of all worlds.

But that’s a few months away. I needed to upgrade the hard drive to my PC now. Never having done this before I did a bit of research and determined Norton Ghost looked like a good way to go. However, since my machine is a laptop and Ghost is designed to run with a workstation, the directions provided didn’t fully work, and the project turned into a bit of an adventure.

Luckily, I have an old, old PC that runs Win2K lying around, and also luckily Jeannie wanted to help me with this project. So we thought we’d do an upgrade on that machine first as a test. We have an old external hard drive case for laptops with a PCMCIA adaptor, and Jeanie has a box full of old hard drives she salvaged from somewhere. So we off we went. The process was complicated by the fact that the old HD was on its last legs, and in fact died while we were backing it up. We got the C drive (which was the boot drive) but the D partition was a mess, and it took a bit of time to determine what had happened. The only way to go was forward. We swapped the drives but the machine wouldn’t boot. Instead an alert came up advising us there was a problem with the pageSys file. Over and over in a loop. Norton says to set some jumpers on the new drive in this situation, but that advice is for 2 internal drives on the same bus in a workstation, so it looked like we were out of luck.

The internet to the rescue. It turns out all you need to do is reset the master boot record. (Bet you already knew that!) To do that you need to boot in DOS mode and run the magic command:

fdisk /mbr

and all is right again. The computer doesn’t have a floppy drive, but we were able to put the original Windows Recovery CD in, boot off of that, exit the utility app and we found ourselves in DOS.

On to the main act. We put the new 160 GB into the sled and ran Norton. We tried to boot of the system disk from the old machine, but the new machine wouldn’t let us, because the new machine runs XP. We found a DOS boot disk image on the internet and burned it to a CD. Thanks, Internet! Then we did the hardware swap, which on this particular machine meant taking quite a bit of it apart. Put it all back together with the new drive and booted, and…
Nothing. Hung mid-boot. Not even an alert. Now we were glad we did the experiment in win2K, cuz it was the same problem with the pageSys. So we put in the CD and spun up in DOS and said fdisk /mbr then it came around.

I ran some apps and everything looked cool. After some poking around, a couple of little things seemed off. I ran proTools and for some reason SampleTank was running in trial mode, and I had to go to their web site and get a new authorization code, which is bogus it’s running on the same machine. And I’m gonna need a new code when install it on the Mac.

It reminds me of that movie where the doctor says “technically the procedure is brain damage, but its no worse that say a night of heavy drinking.”

Flex Development and Weekend on Long Island

Work has been — well, programming can be a challenge, especially when learning a new language while trying to write a software application on a deadline. I’ve been deep in the steep part of the Flex learning curve, with its monumental edifice of pre-built components, loaded with design and usage assumptions. I’m trying to forge our designer’s interactive, animated, curvy concept into Flex’s prefab boxes. I’m particularly having difficulty with the HList Component, which does not give the developer the power and flexibility one would want or expect. Seriously, for example you can’t turn off rollover highlighting of a list item without also suppressing the event that the rollover action generates. Oy! Over and over with stuff like that. I feel like I’m trying recreate a wood carving out of Legos, and am running into the same limits as you face in real Legos: either it looks blocky or you have an over-reliance on specialized, one-off pieces.

A couple weeks ago I went to a wedding on Long Island for Jeannie’s cousin. It was on Friday afternoon, so I left work early and we were able to get out of the house on time with the kids. On the trip out it started to rain, and then turned into a severe thunderstorm, and naturally traffic was massively backed up to the point that by the time the wedding was over we were only halfway there. Well, I thought to myself as the wipers swished back and forth energetically but futilely, this is easier than writing code.

We dropped the kids off in Wantagh and proceeded to Babylon. Thanks to Nick & Lisa for watching the kids! They had a great time. Lizzy is now a fan of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers. By the time we got there the rain had pretty much stopped. Got to the hall. Pointless valet parking. The parking lot was right there, but everyone had to wait in line, and the parking guy spilled my CD’s and maps all over the front seat. I can’t understand the format of the Long Island wedding. The meal is stretched out over the whole night, constantly interrupted by dancing, but only a few songs, not a real set. On top of that the music was EQ’d badly, with the mid-bass too loud drowning out conversation. There must be some “club” effect they use. It was a I good time anyway. Got to see lot of Jeannie’s family. Denis and Sarah were in town. Jeannie and I did take a nice walk around the harbor, spotting cabin cruisers. And we did stay ’til the end and danced, which is something we don’t get to do very often. Stayed on long island overnight and spent the next day at Jeannie’s sister’s house, with the whole clan. Like I said easier then writing code.

Fun with Flex

Things have been getting interesting at the cartoon factory lately. I spent most of July working random little projects, mainly fixing bugs and filling for colleagues who were out on vacation. But now I have a new project to get into. It’s a mass personalization area for our site. And I get to do it in a whole new development envioronment and platform, Flex. So I’ve been learning Flex, checking out the docs and tutorials, and trying some experiments. For someone like me Flex is pretty cool, cuz it’s basically Flash: The Next Generation. It’s much more developer- (as opposed to animator-) centric, and shows a heavy influences of J2EE. The IDE is the Eclipse platform, and it uses ANT build scripts and all that. Like Flash it’s centered on the ActionScript programming language, and introduces a new markup language MXML, which allows for rapid scripting of UI’s, and some basic but nontrivial behaviors like event mapping and data binding. It has a massive amount of pre-rolled objects and common plumbing built in, too.

So I’m off to a good start, but it doesn’t take long to get to the point where MXML is not sufficient and you have to use good ol’ Actionscript. Still, the level of built in support out of the box is pretty impressive. I know tutorials are generally designed to show off a product’s strength but this one is pretty cool: I built a feed reader for my blog in only an hour or so. You can play with it here:

http://zingman.com/experiments/flex/feed_reader/main.html

And the best thing about it is that the source code for entire application is only half a page long.

So stay tuned, I’ll let you know sometime this fall how the project turns out.

Icthyometry

Summer continues. Getting right into the soft soggy center of it, rainy barbeques and all.

So in lieu of anything new to present, here’s a Flash animation I did a while back featuring hypnotic geometric fishies. I came across it over the weekend while I was culling old material from my hard drive. It’s a simple, non-interactive linear animation, although at one point I had the idea of making some kind of pattern-oriented game using these visuals as a theme. In any event, I still like it and I’d say it stands the test of time.

While your at it, check out my multimedia gallery.

Interim Update: La La La La Life

Well another whole week has gone by without my updating my blog. Ah well, what can I say, it’s summertime. Time to take a break and go play outside. In addition to summertime party fun I’ve been working on my various projects: origami polyhedra galore and recording a new song “Angel Or Alien” trying to fit in an extra hour here or there at night, but both are fairly laborious mentally.  Well last Monday I kind of hit a wall, and spent the next few days feeling tired and burned out. I’ve also been nursing a knee injury which has been taking a long time to feel better. On top of that, my computer died last week.

Things were slow at the cartoon factory with lots of people out on vacation, so Tuesday I worked at home, and ended up sleeping late and going to bed early. Wednesday I woke up early as a big ol’ summer thunderstorm rolled in. I decided to wait at home until the storm calmed down and take a later train into work. I left the house 45 minutes late, and arrived to find the platform crowded with soggy commuters. As luck would have it, my usual train was there within minutes of my arriving at the station, also 45 minutes late.

Heading home on my way to Grand Central Station, I heard a huge rumbling, like thunder or maybe a plane flying overhead, but longer and louder. (Still feeling kind of beat) I didn’t really think about what it might be. I found out on the news that night that a steam pipe had broken underground one block over, and spewed a geyser of steam higher then the Chrysler Building into the sky! I found it a bit odd that they kept saying on the news that it was not the work of terrorists. Sign of the times we live in I guess. They didn’t say, however, that it wasn’t the work of bears!

Thursday work was busy again and I wound up working late to meet a deadline, pinch hitting for a colleague who was out on vacation. Toon dance party online!

Friday I was still pretty tired in the morning, but I had the day off and once I got going my energy finally picked up. Jeannie, the girls and I took a day trip to Jones Beach on Long Island with her sister Mary’s family. A perfect day for it too, 82 and sunny. The surf was pretty strong, and the beach itself is as beautiful as any on the East Coast. Afterwards we went back to their house for a barbecue. It was a great time for everyone and some much needed R&R.

So now I’m in the process of moving into my new computer, which is really not new, but up until last week had been only for running proTools, and now it’s for everything. I have a lot of data to migrate, and a lot of configs to setup and setups to config. My old computer didn’t completely die, just the screen, making it *almost* unusable. I was able to turn on remote access and file sharing on the basis of the position of the UI widgets on the screen. Yeesh. Now I can drive my old computer from my new computer, which is pretty cool actually.

My knee is also feeling better, and I literally have a spring in my step again.

I’ve also been making progress on my new song “Angel or Alien”. It”s fairly long (over 7 minutes right now, but I”m thinking of cutting a section), and is sort of a pseudo-prog number with an existential theme and scifi overtones. Structurally there’s a slow jazzy first part, a fast middle part with meter changes and churning, swooping, blazing gonzo synthesizers, and then a recapitulation and elaboration of the first part. The chords are based mainly on stacked 4ths over shifting roots, which is a pretty cool sound.

I’ve been getting the bass and drums together. The bass part involves a lot of two-note chords, and I recorded it twice but was not happy with the sound either time. Then I tried double-tracking the part, which sound much better than either part on its own. It introduces a natural chorus effect and comes out something like Joco Pastorius. Drums for me always involve a lot of editing, building up and pulling down, creating dimension like a chalk drawing, and they’re taking shape. I’m ready to get down to the piano part, which will really give some flesh to the whole song.

GE Music Player Goes Live!

Earlier this year I blogged about my friend Erik and his music production house GE Music. Well the project I did for him — an interactive music library browser/player — is now live and serving Glenn and Erik’s tracks. They have it loaded up with a variety of music, a sampling of the range of their work that includes acoustic, electronic, jazz, easy listening, rock, orchestral and soundtrack styles. It’s well worth a listen. Go to GE’s homepage and click on “Music” in menu on the top. Or if you prefer, here’s a direct link to the player. I particualrly enjoy the tune “Bong Shop”. Rock on dudes!

Fun with PhotoBooth

Happy spring everyone! The weather had finally changed, and winter is gone. Allergy season is right around the corner! Although it feels like winter dragged on far too long this year, even with global warming, it also feels like time has flown by, that it was just the holidays and I just started my new job. But I’ve been there coming on three months now.

The big activity last weekend was getting the yard ready for spring, part one. Or another way of saying it, the start of yardwork season. I had wanted to start the weekend before, but it seemed pointless as there was still piles of melting snow on our lawn. And the weekend before that we spent the whole time shoveling. In any event we made good start. Raked off all the debris, and I filled in some low spots in the back corner which are prone to flooding with dirt. Not particularly creative, but it’s constructive at least. I have a project in the offing to re-level the patio I made 3 years ago, as the stones have begun to heave and settle in one corner. I think when I get around to that I’ll blog about building the patio, since it was a creative project and a major effort.

Meanwhile the main topic for today is fun with PhotoBooth. A few weeks ago Jeannie brought home one of those MacBook Pro computers from work, the ones with a built-in camera and a cute little app called photo booth. You gotta hand it to Apple, they’re good at making computers fun, and this app is a good example of that. Not a lot of depth to it, but easy to use and engaging. Let’s you take pictures of yourself (or whatever else is in front of the computer), with some cool realtime effects. It’s the kind of thing we might have made at Interval Research back in the 90’s.

The girls really got into it, and Lizzy in particular, who likes photography to begin with, explored the creative dimension. She took over 400 pictures. Presented here is a gallery of some of our favorites.