Software – Page 2 – Zing Blog 2

Super Blue

Lest all y’all think life these days is all going to see bands and fun trips to beaches and mountains, I’ve actually been busy with the software thing this whole time too. A couple of big project milestones in my day job. Firstly one of my projects, the Data Rights Protocol, has reached version 0.9 and we’re entering the initial deployment phase, which involves passing live data end-to-end among consortium members to implement actionable consumer data rights requests. Meanwhile, we also put up a new web site where you can learn all about it at:

https://datarightsprotocol.org

Second, another project of mine, Permission Slip, is going live with version 2.0 of our this week, including an all-new android version of the app. And there’s a new web site for this one too:

https://permissionslipcr.com

Finally, we’re getting very close to releasing version 3.0 of the Global Jukebox. This is a major rev I’ve been working on for months with Martin. One big new features is an all-new map visualization that starts with a spinning globe, and is much more powerful, flexible and performant than the old one. The other big thing is the app now has routes to express the app state as a unique url. Each of these was a big lift, and we’re now in the final phases of QA and tweaking the styles and messaging on the landing page. So watch this space for an announcement sometime soon. But for now you can get a sneak peak on our staging site at:

https://stage.theglobaljukebox.org

In the world outside of work, it’s been one of the rainiest Septembers I’ve ever experienced. Three out of the last four weeks it’s rained some or most or even all of the weekend, were’ talking epic, heavy, ark-building rains here, to the point where I’ve only gotten out on my bike one Sunday the whole month for a big ride, and not at all for a weekday evening in the last two weeks. The days are getting shorter faster, so soon the opportunity for a ride after work will be gone.

As luck would have it, we did go out to see another concert last weekend. It was Superblue, a funk-fueled collaboration between Kurt Elling and Charlie Hunter, at Poisson Rouge in Greenwich Village. Poisson Rouge turned out to be a pretty nice club, although the waiters were kinda disorganized and incredibly slow. The band itself was great. The opening act was the horn section from the main group, backed by a different rhythm section. They were really fun, funky and entertaining. At one point the trumpet player switched to tuba and the trombone player to beatboxing, leaving just the sax player. They did a Stevie Wonder medley which was just mind blowing.

The main act was most excellent too. Charlie Hunter plays a guitar with extra strings and an octave effect so it functions as both the bass and the guitar for the group. Needless to say his technique is innovative and incredible, but he spent most of his time in the pocket, just groovin’ and grinnin’. Kurt himself was great, picking diverse source material such as “Naughty Number Nine” from Schoolhouse Rock, delivering them with powerful, soulful phrasing, and interjecting philosophical soliloquies a la Elwood Blues.

Just yesterday we were supposed to see yet another shoe, Tuck and Patti at the Irridium, but it got cancelled due to the weather. There were such heavy rains and flooding in New York City that the seals in the Central Park Zoo escaped their enclosure and were were freely swimming/sliding around the whole zoo. I guess they went back on their own without having to be rounded up.

Permission Slip by Consumer Reports Nominated for a Webby Award

For the second time in my career, my project has been nominated for a Webby Award. The first time was back in 2008, when the internet was still cool, and I worked at Nick.com, where I helped build groundbreaking apps such as Nicktropolis and Turbonick. Our main competition that year was canihazacheezeburger.com, and believe it or not we won.

This year the project is Permission Slip (https://permissionslipcr.com), a mobile app to help people take back control of their personal data online, inspired by California’s Consumer Privacy Protection Act (CCPA) which defines compliance measures a company must undertake when a consumer requests the exercise of their privacy rights.

As lead engineer on the project and of the Innovation Lab at Consumer Reports, I’m especially gratified that we’re nominated in the category of Technical Achievement. Of course I’m part of a pretty large, and very intelligent, creative, knowledgeable and otherwise awesome team. And sometimes it feels like a large part of my job is just going to meetings and telling everyone my opinions. But I guess that actually is an important job.

Anyway, you can vote here, until the end of the week:

Vote now for: Apps & Software – Technical Achievement (https://vote.webbyawards.com/PublicVoting#/2023/apps-dapps-and-software/app-features/technical-achievement)

Vote now for: Apps & Software – Public Service & Activism (https://vote.webbyawards.com/PublicVoting#/2023/apps-dapps-and-software/general-apps/public-service-activism)

Good Day Sunshine

Early spring continues to get springier. Last Friday I finished up raking the yard, filling up three more big bags of leaves and debris. This morning the town came and picked it all up, so it’s on to the next task.

Sunday morning I took my ’67 Mustang out for the first drive of the season. I’m happy to say it started right up, and sounded and felt good on the highway. Woo-hoo!

Then Sunday afternoon Jeannie and I went for a bike ride. Last summer we started doing bike rides on local trails around the area, but we only did a few. This year, I figured since we had such a good ski season, I want to do something athletic the rest of the year too. So we’re starting early in the spring (just two weeks ago we were still on our skis) and hope to get a regular pattern going. This one was just over ten kilometers, in about an hour. Nothing too huge, but not bad for the first time out.

I also finished a longstanding software development project, adding some sort functionality to the class scheduling tool for conventions on the Origami USA web site. This was a rather drawn out endeavor because it’s built in PHP on an old version of Drupal, and the whole dev environment is an enormous pain in the neck. The overhead of keeping the site running locally is non trivial: updates from the git repo, managing the dependencies, updating the scripts to sync the database and media assets, it’s all a major headache and time suck, and there are breaking changes from time to time. All this is before one can even start writing code. So I’m pretty happy it’s done with. Well, maybe one more tiny change. Robert Lang, who is OUSA’s web master and the only person who really understands how the site works, helped me drag it over the finish line, so thanks to him for that.

Meanwhile, my origami stellated icosahedron is coming along. I’ve finished pre-creasing on the smaller one, and on the larger on I collapsed it halfway, then unfolded to reinforce the valance of all the existing creases to make it hold its shape better, and refolded it. All that’s left is to fold the lock. I’m thinking I’m going to wetfold this one when it’s done, since it’s folded from Elephant Hide and it will hold its shape amazingly after that.

In other news Nicolas Terry has started selling Elephant Hide paper in large sheets of previously unavailable colors on his web site, so I ordered a whole bunch.

Finally, my new song, In the Purple Circus is almost finished. It’s basically a prog metal song, so naturally I added a tenor sax part. It came out totally wailing, channeling some Michael Brecker energy, screeching and growling in the high altissimo rang, up to the fourth C#. The next day I added a bari sax way down low to reinforce the tenor, and blend with the overtones of the subsonic bass synthesizer. Now it’s pretty much down to the final mix, which I hope to share soon.

First There is a Mountain

We’re back home again and busy with work and other things. Seems like everything is happening all at once.

First it’s finally ski season. A week ago we went skiing again up at Catamount. They have night skiing, which is perfect for us. It starts at 3pm so you don’t have to get up super early to get there, instead we can get all our chores done Saturday morning and then go. When we arrive alot of the day skiers are leaving, so it’s easy to get a good parking spot and the lifts and slope get less and less crowded the longer you stay. You have a few hours of daylight to ski in – now the days are getting longer faster – then you can go in and take a break with a cup of cocoa and come out again for the night session.

A week ago the conditions were warm and icy, but we figured we might not get another shot so we went for it. After a while found that Mountain View was a pretty good trail and we stayed on that. We quit after ten runs and met our fried Seth for dinner.

This last weekend it started to snow Saturday morning, just a dusting, but it made us feel hopeful, so we figured we’d go up again and try our luck. At first it was pretty icy, but snow started falling until there was fresh powder everywhere. There was a magical moment where suddenly everything was beautiful and the skis felt great and you could really get a good groove going and the mountain was comin’ ’round. So we stayed out there almost until they closed, a total of eighteen runs. Walter’s Way was the favorite run.

This was three times skiing this season, tying our record last year. We’re still hoping to do an overnight trip a bit further north in two weeks, with bigger mountains and more snow.

In other news, I’ve been working out some new origami ideas since I’ve gotten back from my trip. I’ve never really explored the icosahedron geometry, even though I mentioned it in my talk. It’s much easier than the dodecahedron; you can use a triangle grid in a hexagon sheet. I have two variations I’m working on. One is a dimpled icosahedron. It looks kinda like a soccer ball with a pattern of hexagons and pentagons, but the pentagons are dented in. The other is a stellated icosahedron, where each triangular face of the base shape is replaced with a pyramid. I did a study of this pattern embedded on a dome back in Bogota, and the design approach causes a set of really cool looking sunken star shapes to emerged between the facets. Now I’m expanding the pattern to a full sheet so I can close the bottom and the full solid shape. I have the crease patterns all worked out. Now it’s just a matter of practicing and perfecting the lock, and then finding some suitable sheets of paper for the final models.

Next, the Global Jukebox project has sprung back to life. Anna made a deal to license a bunch of Alan Lomax’s recordings, and now she has a budget again, which injects lots of new energy. However, I now have a full time day job again, so I can only commit so much time. I brought Martin in as a subcontractor/partner so we can share the workload. So far it’s going great. It’s fun having a collaborator, and new ideas and all. For onboarding I had him go thru the test script and he spotted alot of minor issues in neglected corners. We upgraded all our processes including document sharing, getting full-stack local dev environments spun up, and using branches and pull requests in git. Now we’re all ramped up and the real meat of the work begins. We have a full year’s roadmap ahead, so more on this as we publish new releases.

Lastly, I’ve gotten back to the home studio recording project the last few weeks. I’m tracking the vocals for two songs, In the Purple Circus and A Plague of Frogs. Both have rather challenging parts that use a large range, with big interval jumps, and have some tricky phrasing too, and need to be delivered with some gusto and drama. I didn’t really think about how it would be to sing them when I wrote the lyrics and melodies. So I have to work them up. Also, right now I’m getting over a cold so my voice is not at its strongest. The high notes are a bit thin and scratchy and low notes note always in tune.. Ah well, it’s good to rehearse. Each session I get a little surer and more expressive.

And … it’s snowing here tonight, and it looks like will be the first real snowfall of the season down here. That means mo’ better snow up away from the coast. If there’s no rain the next few days we’ll probably go back to Catamount again this weekend.

Shine a Light

It’s been another busy couple of weeks. A week ago, Buffalo NY, where alot of my family lives, got a once-in-ten-years level snowstorm, with my parents in Orchard Park getting six feet of snow. Up in Amherst they only got a foot or so, but it complicated plans for people coming home for Thanksgiving, especially for my niece and nephew whose trains got cancelled.

In the end, everyone made it home safe and sound, and we had a very enjoyable Thanksgiving. We hosted seventeen people and Jeannie made a most excellent stuffed turkey dinner. Spent the rest of the weekend listening to music, mainly classic live albums, and playing games like Ticket to Ride and Quirkle with Lizzy and Michelle.

I also finished some home improvement projects. The big one was was to replace the light fixture in our kitchen ceiling, which blew out right around the end of the summer. It was an old florescent light in the form of a square wooden box with plexiglas diffuser. It first I I investigated the possibility of replacing just the socket and electric components. Once it became clear that wouldn’t work, the quest for a new lamp became a full-blown research project. We finally settled on one we liked, a broad, shallow frosted glass dome with traditional light sockets that could take modern LED bulbs. We ordered from a local showroom, but it took several weeks to arrive, and by that I was folding like a madman in preparation for our origami conventions.

Back home again a couple weeks later, I pulled off the old fixture. I had planned on having to paint the area that had covered because the new light is smaller. What I didn’t count on was that the old fixture was screwed directly to the ceiling, and there was just a hole where the cup for the wiring and structural support was supposed to be. So I had to cut a hole in the drywall, buy and install the mounting hardware to the framing of the house, put back the drywall pieces, fill in the gaps, and sand and paint it. This added considerable time to the job, especially since the ceiling needed two coats of paint. I ended up finally installing the new lamp Thanksgiving morning, with Jeannie urging me along so we could switch the power back on in the kitchen and she could put the turkey in the oven!

I didn’t quite match the ceiling paint, but it’s pretty close. Lizzy, who works for Sherwin Williams, was very helpful in recommending a mini roller and pan kit; I din’t know they made such a thing. She also gave me a deck of all their color chips, so hopefully I can do a better job matching next time.

Oh, and, the week before Thanksgiving was a big one for milestones at the Innovation Lab at Consumer Reports. Here are a couple of press releases about two projects of mine.

https://digital-lab.consumerreports.org/2022/11/16/introducing-permission-slip/

https://digital-lab.consumerreports.org/2022/11/15/osiraa-release-announcement/

Global Jukebox Plos One Article

Over at my other project as lead software developer on The Global Jukebox, I’m happy to announce our article in the peer reviewed journal Plos One has been published:

The Global Jukebox: A public database of performing arts and culture
Anna Wood, Patrick Savage, et. al.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0275469

Abstract
Standardized cross-cultural databases of the arts are critical to a balanced scientific understanding of the performing arts, and their role in other domains of human society. This paper introduces the Global Jukebox as a resource for comparative and cross-cultural study of the performing arts and culture. The Global Jukebox adds an extensive and detailed global database of the performing arts that enlarges our understanding of human cultural diversity. …

In the Spaceship, the Silver Spaceship the Lion Takes Control

It’s been a busy few weeks. The weather has been alternating between mild and sunny and cold and rainy, so I’ve been getting in a few bike rides a week here and there. Every time I do I think it might be the last nice day. It’s rainy again this week, and of course it’s getting dark earlier and earlier. A week ago Jeannie and I went for for a hike up a mountain called Anthony’s Nose, which looks down on the Bear Mountain Bridge from the summit. That’s right folks, there are alot of great hikes in the area, but we picked the nose.

I transitioned in my job from consultant to full time lead staff engineer at the Innovation Lab. Last week was heavy on onboarding and strategic planning and roadmapping meetings, as well as tactical planning for the upcoming release of our mobile app in November. Also got a new computer and been moving into that. One night after work last week there was a dinner event hosted by one of our partners in the consortium, and I met some of their engineers and some of their customers, as well as an attorney named Havona who was “raised by hippies” and is now living in Spain so her daughters can train to be future tennis pros. It’s the first time I’ve been to an event like this since before the pandemic, and it turned out to be alot of fun.

And, I’m looking to hire software engineers with a combination of full-stack and R&D prototyping skills. Ping me if you fit the bill.

Been folding tons of origami for some upcoming exhibitions. More on that as it, uh, unfolds.

Also Jeannie got me a lego spaceship recently and I’ve been trying to find the time to build it. More on that as it, uh, comes together.

Lastly, been working on music. I have two I’m working writing/arranging/tracking: In the Purple Circus, and A Plague of Frogs. Additionally, I have six tracks basically done, but the guitar sounds were all over the place. Last weekend I went back and worked on putting them into some kind of tonal shape. The main issue is that there’s lots of low end noise muddying up the mix. EQ helps but not enough. When I put it thru an amp simulator it cleans up alot of that but also alters the tone pretty radically into the treble range. I ended up creating a signal chain with 2 buses, one for the raw guitar mix and another for the amp, then mixing the two of them for the right balance. It made a huge differenceI and I applied this to five songs. Further tweaking can occur but they’re all in the zone. Hopefully by the end of this record I’ll have something like “my” guitar sound, or at least a sound I can control.

Back into the Fold

I recently folded a bunch of new origami models for an upcoming exhibition in Chicago. These were well-known designs, but it felt good to get back into folding some exhibit-quality works. As is my practice these days, I folded two of each, so as to have one to keep. Sort of a warm-up for some upcoming conventions I’ll be attending this fall, where I’ll be exhibiting some new work.

Before I put them in the mail, I figured I’d photograph them. This led to a round of experimentation with different cameras. For many years I’ve had a digital snapshot camera with a zoom lens and macro mode. I also have a pretty nice digital SLR with lots of controls, capable of taking amazing pictures.

The SLR is very accurate, and lets you control everything, but it’s painstaking. It also has various automatic modes that give you less control but are less fussy. I also have a full lighting kit but, it’s a major effort to set everything up. In fact, I have a big backlog of unphotographed work since the start of the pandemic for this very reason.

Without lots of light, there’s a three-way struggle between exposure time, exposure level, and depth of the focus field. The photos tend to be dark, or require a tripod to keep still while the shutter is open. And there’s some weird auto-color balance feature that makes all the colors strange if you have just a few colors in your view, as is often the case with this kind of subject matter.

What I’m really after is a workflow that’s quick and easy. I want to be able to put a big sheet of paper on my kitchen table, lay down some origami, and be good to go with the available light. So I tried the camera on my cel phone, and on Jeannie’s phone, which is much newer. These cameras are not as accurate, but in fact much better! It’s like have a mic with a nice warm compressor for recording musical instruments. They’re always in focus, and do a really good job with color balance and exposure level under a pretty wide range, and require alot less tweaking in post. Jeannie’s phone in particular seems to bring out textural detail with extra fine-scale contrast, and in addition to a good zoom has a wide-angle mode that lets you get super close to the subject.

In the end, each camera has its pros and cons, and gives a slightly different image in terms of exposure, color balance, focus, sharpness, and contrast. Definitely a worthwhile study. I suppose the digital SLR is still the best if you have the patience. I’ll use it again next time I do a “real” photo shoot. The digital snapshot camera is okay but kind of old and has been surpassed by newer technology. The phones are the clear winner in terms of convenience and picture quality combined. So now I’m thinking of getting a new phone just to use for taking pictures.

While I’m at it, I’m thinking about getting a new computer. Like my phone, my computer is getting pretty old, and won’t run alot of newer apps. OTOH, there are some old apps that are essential to my work, so there needs to be a plan on how to replace those. Critical among these are Adobe creative suite: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and the venerable Flash/Flex. The amount of money Adobe charges for a yearly subscription (you can’t just buy it) is ridiculous. And of course Flash and Flex are long dead.

So I figured I’d check out Affinity Photo, Designer and Publisher, the not-a-total-rip-off alternative. So far so good. Affinity Photo seems to work just as well as Photoshop for what I do, which runs the gamut from cropping and tweaking pictures taken on my phone, to serous, multi-element, mutli-layer, effects-laden, composed image and text graphics for things like album covers or strategy game artwork. I haven’t tried Publisher yet but it seems like a cromulent replacement for InDesign, which I use mainly for page layout for my origami books and diagrams, and the occasional poster for a rock or jazz gig.

The main question is whether Affinity Designer is a reasonable app for doing origami diagrams. I had been using Flash for many years, but Flash is well past the end of its life, and it may be time to move on. People in the origami community have been migrating from Illustrator to Affinity over the last few years, but the consensus seems to be that it’s cumbersome and there’s a steep learning curve. Ah well, better than nothing. Last night I modeled a square sheet of paper with a crease thru the diagonal. It took a little while to figure out all the tools, but there’s enough control over everything that it can be made perfect. So that’s hopeful. Whether one can move quickly thru a series of steps remains to be seen.

I’ll also have to build up a new library of dashed lines, arrows, and other symbols. I guess I’ll reach out to my friends and see where they’re all at with this.

As for the automation stuff that I used to in Flash, the Foldinator project remains a perpetual work-in-progress, and last time I checked in with it, I decided to basically start over using javascript, and build on the libraries of people like Robby Kraft and Jason Ku.

These are Road Games

Summer continues. The weather has been beautiful and I’ve been spending alot of time outside. We’ve been busy. Lots of the usual, including work, practicing music, biking, and taking the mustang out for rides. Lots of yardwork the last few weekends, including trimming the trees and hedges. So far I’ve filled up all my yard waste cans two weeks in a row. Probably one more session to go, but it will be up on the ladder.

Over Memorial Day weekend we went out to a barbecue at our friend Nick’s house. The presence of a pull-up bar in his backyard inspired me to add some new exercises to my workout to focus on my lats.

We got some new furniture, including an armchair for the living room and a sectional sofa for the downstairs room. A new pair fo end tables arrived today and need to be assembled, and a coffee table is on order. It all looks nice and is comfortable, is a big upgrade from our old stuff, and represents the culmination of a long and tedious research project. Well almost. Now we want to get a new entertainment center, bookshelf and end tables downstairs too.

Of course now we have to deal with getting rid of the old furniture. A friend of mine who just moved into a new apartment may take our futon and gold chairs. Meanwhile we have to store it somewhere, so we cleaned out a whole bunch of old junk and boxes from the garage. Big step forward in project defrag the house.

The other big item is over the weekend I did the class schedule for the Origami USA convention, which is coming up at the end of June. This is our first in-person convention in three years, and around 140 people signed up to teach classes. You’ll recall I wrote the software for the scheduling for last year’s (virtual, online) convention. I made several improvements to it this year. Still not everything can be automated, so the weekend was full of back-and-forth with the teaching committed as we juggled classes around until it met with everyone’s satisfaction. I’ll be teaching two classes, my Five-Banded Armadillo, and Sophie the Cat. I’m also working on some new models for the exhibition.

Lastly, the Global Jukebox 4.2.1 is now live. The cutover to our new, node-based server is complete, and we can now retire the old backend servers.

Stepping Out

It feels like just a few short weeks ago that spring arrived, and now it feels like full-on summertime. It was hot over the weekend, up in the 90’s, and we put in our air conditioners.

We just got back from a road trip to pick Michelle up from college, and Jeannie and I took a mini-vacation along the way. On the way up to Buffalo, we stopped in Ithaca. The motivation was to see Joe Jackson, playing with his band at a theater there in town. The show was great. Joe’s songs are always great and the band was really hot. Joe did a solo spot of four or five songs with him just singing and playing piano. The theater was this really cool old art-deco venue, very ornate, good sound.

The next day we spent pretty much the whole day hiking around lake Cayuga and some waterfalls. Very relaxing, beautiful scenery and a beautiful day for it. Went out to dinner that night at a Mexican place across the street from the place we went the night before. Ithaca is a cute little college town with a downtown district maybe four five blocks long. Our hotel was on the outskirts of town, with a trial to a waterfall right out the door.

Next day we spent to morning at the Corning Museum of Glass. We must have driven past it a hundred times over the years, but the kids were never interested. When I told them we were going to check it out, at first they thought I was joking. In any event, it’s vary cool, with a whole big gallery space, in which the pieces range from pretty cool to totally amazing. Another section is all about glass technology, including things like modern forming and shaping techniques, and applications such as telescope mirrors, space shuttle windows, car windshields and computer touchscreens. A third section is about the history of glass, with artifacts from all over the world, going back to the time of ancient Egypt. There was also an interactive area where you could watch live demos of blowing glass, other sculptural techniques, and breaking glass too. There was even a thing where you could blow your own glass bowl or ornament, but we found out about that too late. Now we’ll have to come back another time.

We arrived in Buffalo in the afternoon and went to visit Lizzy. Unfortunately, on the way there she texted us that she’d just tested positive for covid. I had brought up her bicycle because she wanted to ride it this summer. So we handed it off in her driveway, keeping a safe distance. Her hanging out with us was right out, so that was that. Next day she said she’s feeling better, so that’s good news.

Then we went up to the UB campus to pack a carload of Michelle’s stuff to store at my parent’s house. Next morning we came back to get the rest of her things, then back to my parents for a barbecue. We hit the road home later that afternoon. Now we’re back to three in the house again.

In other news, my blog here has been having repeated outages, and the tech support has been just useless and miserable, so I’m in the process of dropping my web host and moving to a new service provider. You can preview it at:

https://www.zingmanstudios.com/blog/

Right now it’s just a few test posts, and I’m working on customizing the visual theme. Hopefully that won’t take too long, and then I can go ahead and do the migration. So watch this space.