Ignored By Dinosaurs 🦕

Quick bio – The difference between As in, the difference between your brain and your computers CPU. The difference between how you think and speak and interact, and how your computer does. The difference between languages, be they interpreted or compiled, object oriented or procedural. This first chapter will hopefully assist in the process of the first few days after the moment where it first occurs to you that you want to learn how to develop software, be they games or business or iPhone apps. The real difference for me was the the one between what I thought the process was going to be and what it's actually turned out to be.

The moment occurred for me in a car. I had bought an iPhone a few months after it first came out. It was the first such early adopter move that I'd made, technologically speaking. I knew as soon as I started screwing around with it that this was a tool that could really help you get your life organized, something that I'd managed to get around doing for the previous 30 years. All of the built in applications that Apple provided for their first tier of users were most helpful in that task – email everywhere, calendar, internet, maps, oh yeah, and a phone. The real fun didn't begin for me until they (Apple) released the 2.0 software update. This was the update that heralded the opening of the AppStore, where there were now hundreds of apps available from 3rd party developers that could extend the usefulness of your phone. Anyway, to make a long story no less long, the first long car ride I took after updating my phone was the one where the real potential of mobile computing dawned on me.

I came home that weekend determined to figure out what it would take to learn the art and craft of building my own applications, as this was clearly a vast and uncharted territory for creative people to make things that could affect the lives of huge numbers of people (and maybe even make a living doing it).

I got home that week and started Googling. A search on Computer Programming turned up a mountain of information that was so staggeringly huge as to be almost useless. I did learn a few things – Wikipedia can be your best friend; there are many different ways to program computers; there are endless amounts of information on programming computers, most of it written by computer programmers with no conversational or literary ability whatsoever.

I was able to discern a few important pieces, however. One was something called “compilation”. I wasn't sure what this was or why it was important, but hey. Another was that if you're going to develop software, and you're used to working in a more or less standard Windows environment, you're in for a ride. Another was that there was something called Object Oriented programming, that supposedly is some kind of elevated way to program. iPhone apps are written in an OO manner. Oh, and if you really want to develop apps for the iPhone, you have to buy a Mac. That's some clever marketing, and the push over the cliff that I'd been waiting for for years. The bonus was that once you bought the Mac, all of the tools to develop apps, as well as an enormous user community was there to help, for free. Step 1.

#the-idea

Oh, yeah... The Holy frickin Grail. The MVC framework that's sweeping the land fell under my text editor yesterday.

I hacked my way into Ruby on Rails.

I built a website yesterday in two hours that does more than anything I've done in the last nine months. Granted, it doesn't look that great, but it's functional. Also granted, it took me nine months to put the conceptual pieces together, and to find the technical resources to do something with the RoR framework that I downloaded 6 weeks ago, and to figure out how to install all manner of seriously deep Unix command line shit, but so help me, it's an exhilarating feeling.

Okay, so RoR isn't the Holy Grail, iPhone apps are, for me. iPhone apps are written in a language that's not Ruby, but the MVC architecture is the same. What I'm hoping that this means is that all this cool stuff that I'm learning about building Ruby stuff will translate nicely to building Obj-C stuff. The work that I've done over the past 2 weeks with PHP was heavily informed by the one class I took on straight C, so I'm optimistic.

I'm in Davenport IA right now. It's cold, but the sun is shining. Sorry I've been out of touch, but touring really does kinda wear you out. I'm not saying it's hard, but it does wear you out.

Peace...

Sitting here in the surprisingly nice Richmond VA airport, so I thought I'd check in. Cool cabby on the ride here. He saw my big PHP book and started asking me about what I was doing, so that pretty much filled up the 20 minute cab ride.

Last night's show was kinda just alright for me, personally. It's funny because Phil and Stacy both thought it was the best show of the weekend. It's just goes to show, you never know. I've learned through the years (you never let me down..) that I have absolutely the most subjective opinion about the quality of any given show of anyone in the listening world. It's the double edge sword that keeps us from putting out more LiveDownloads. Typically for me, the quality of the experience that I have on any given night is directly proportional to the frequency distribution between 40 and 150 Hz in the location on the stage at which I'm standing. That's a pretty specific requirement, but last night it just wasn't that happening. The theater we were playing in last night was Very Big. Very Big means a lot of air that you have to get moving before the entire room starts to feel right, which is what makes it sound good between 40-150 Hz wherever I am on stage.

I suppose that we probably wouldn't be as subject to the peculiarities of a given rooms acoustics if we were a more electric band. Let's just take my bass for example. My bass is a giant wood box that's designed to resonate. I stand next to a drum set. If you were to solo up the signal from my DI during a show and listen to what is making my bass resonate, you'd hear the notes I'm playing, but also the kick drum loud and clear. You hear a good bit of fiddle, or God forbid the electric guitar, and the rest of the stage, muffled. This makes my bass essentially the biggest microphone on the stage, with a frequency response that tapers off at about 100 Hz.

What this means to me is that if the room is shaped just so, and you never know until you start playing, there's the possibility of a 'standing wave' on certain notes. A standing wave is one that has a wavelength that's some multiple of the dimensions of the stage we're playing. Suppose I play an open D. Suppose that D vibrates at a frequency of 65 Hz. That means that 65 times every second that string is going to return to more or less the same place in space on my bass (nice). While that string is vibrating it's sending a signal to my amp and to Mikey out in front. That string is going to cause air to be pushed out of the speakers 65 times a second. The air being pushed out of those speakers is going to travel at the speed of sound and bounce off of hard surfaces and dancing bodies alike. The hard surfaces reflect the sound much better, and those soundwaves bounce off and travel back toward me. Meanwhile, other soundwaves have been continuing to come out of my amp and the PA. If the note that I'm playing at the time lines up in a certain reinforcing way with the note that's bouncing back toward me from the wall and the PA, you get a standing wave. That's when feedback begins, and my night starts to go downhill.

Other nights it's the exact opposite, and the note that's bouncing off the wall is totally out of sync with the note that I'm playing at the time. That's when you get 'phase cancellation', which means that the soundwaves are canceling each other out. That's even worse than a standing wave for me, because then there's really no balls to the sound. Phase cancellation is what makes outdoor concerts sound weird when the wind is blowing and you're about 100 yards away from the stage and the sound kinda shifts around and sounds, well, phasey..

And then some nights, the PA and the amp and my bass are all playing nice with each other and you get that nice even low end. A nice even low end means ceasing to consider the sound and actually listening to what my bandmates are playing. That's a good night.

And then some nights, the PA and the amp and my bass are all playing nice with each other, but we still can't get it sounding right. That was last night. It usually happens in a Big Room because the Big Room swallows sound waves and doesn't let them come back to you in time to be useful. It sends them back to you much later so that it sounds like a delay on your entire band being blasted back at you.

And then some nights the sound is so God awful that you just say fuck it, and those are usually really great nights. Blacksburg was one of those. It was in a tiny little basement of a club, my bass was acting up all night, but the crowd was blazing. You can't possibly have a bad time in that situation.

Now boarding. Later...

#music

I pulled the trigger. I am now an official iPhone developer. I can put apps on the app store, just as soon as I figure out how to write one. Had to tell somebody...

Alright! I finally have some time here. I apologize for the dearth of interesting verbiage from this blog over the last week or so. I'm still getting the hang of this whole thing, of course.

One thing that I've realized on reflecting over the past week is that the whole method that I have of getting all fired to write and then putting out four things at a time is probably not the most effective means of running this blog. I guess that's why none of the blogs that I've been reading do it that way. So, I'm going to try and keep this to a more or less daily occurrence. We'll all see how well that works out.

So to catch up -

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I've picked up a second job here that has been working for me very well. I more or less started last fall and it started as a one-off consulting gig that snowballed into more or less a full time thing. The consulting gig was to help this marketing company/call center up in NJ get set up with a computer recording system. They wanted to be able to do hold music or messaging for their clients for whom they provide an answering service. It went well. Spending other peoples money on recording gear and computers is the perfect job for me, but alas, they only needed one system to get the job done. That led into another freelance gig rebuilding some old crappy computers that they had laying around into Citrix clients, which led into some more involved networking and pretty much whatever they need, which is alot. The head of IT at this place is a friend and fan of the band who keeps throwing me random jobs that I either already know how to do or can figure out with less babysitting than expected. Their network guy is completely swamped at this place, so I've been learning a lot from him about Windows networking. This is what has kept me away from the computer for 2 weeks now. I've been pulling the 6am-3pm shift, and on my feet basically the whole time, so it hasn't left much time for writing, even if I did have something interesting to say. I haven't though.

In the few in between times that I have had time to screw around, I've been doing some tinkering around with RRE's web presence. Check out our Facebook Page, specifically the Boxes page, as that's the place where I've found the first foothold on the mountain that I've been sizing up for the last 9 months as far as this whole software/web development journey goes.

I also got the codes to RRE's web page and promptly learned why you don't do direct work on a live web page! That was fun! I got the site back up, fortunately, but there are a few broken links that I'll be fixing, on the local copy of the website, of course. Stay tuned for those as well. Now that I have the access, I intend to see what I can do with the RRE site as it is before I launch into my wet dream of a band website.

Got a good Dummies book on a website framework called Joomla, which seems very, very interesting. It's what's known as a Content Management System, or CMS for short. Joomla is an open source framework which is supposed to make it really easy to do exactly what I had the big idea about a few months ago. It's a modular system for building, updating, and maintaining your web site with new content, new features, etc. It's a cool idea, but also pretty mature and full featured. This is good because it means that many of the bugs have been worked out for several years now. This is bad because it means learning a LOT of stuff that I probably don't really need in the context of doing what I want to do. I guess it's not so bad, since I like learning new stuff.

Learned a little how LiveDownloads runs their operation from a content management standpoint. I'm not gonna say, though, that'd probably be rude.

Found another framework called Drupal, which is actually what led me to Joomla. It's another CMS, with a different paradigm. We'll see which one I figure out first.

Started grasping the concept of web servers and managed to get Apache up and running on my system. I'd suggest if you're a brand newby to web design and aren't working in a Windows VB environment, you might want to check out Xxamp, as it bundles together basically every single open source gadget you're going to need to build and maintain a web site.

Bought a domain, which will be the place I launch the early versions of all of this stuff to submit for your tinkering and inspection. I'll let you know where it is when there's something there to look at.

Sooooo, it's been a busy week. Fortunately I'm back on the road now, in the sense that now I can catch up a bit on everything I have to do. I only wish that I'd had this idea a few years ago. I feel like I have an absurd amount of catching up to do. Last night's show kicked ass, by the way...

So where was I? Oh yeah:

I am not an expert. I will spout endlessly as though I am, and often I will be right in my own mind, but often I will also be full of crap. Never has this made me more uncomfortable than now, since I just followed a link trail over to the website of a UK music website called the Guardian. I'm quoted over there, courtesy of a new buddy named Tim who is apparently in a kindred band to my own. So I felt excited and frightened as one must feel the first time that he realizes people are reading (and propagating) his drivel.

I am a musician. I have had a full and remarkably balanced set of life experiences so far, but everything that I write on this blog is an opinion, unless otherwise stated. Quote me at our mutual peril. If I write about perceived stupidity in the music business, odds are good that I can back it up. If I write about software, I don't have much of an idea what I'm actually talking about. That's the point of this blog for me – the exploration of new methods and ideas. So carry on...

So Eminem's old producers sued Universal over royalties. For those of you who have never been signed to a record contract, they are shadier (pardon the pun) than you probably imagine. The whole point of getting a record deal is to try and make some money off of selling your recording, right? Well, over the last decades, the industry (and by industry, I mean the lawyers and label heads in charge of finding ever more inventive ways of scamming inattentive rock stars (which is generally easier than shooting fish in a barrel)) has come up with some novel ideas about how your royalty rate should be calculated. They subtract the cost of all manner of promotional charges for the posters you see in the window of the record store, and then things like “breakage” (which hasn't been a real issue since records were made of shellac), and then just arbitrarily lop off another 10% for this, and 10% for that, until by the end you're not getting paid for the 1 million records you sold, you're getting paid for maybe 500k of them, if you're very lucky. Then they charge you back for some more (usually bogus) stuff. The whole game is to keep you, the artist, in the hole. It's easy. Oh, the label is sending a limo to pick you up at the airport and take you to the Grammy's! Great! Do I need to tip the driver?

Add into this that their lawyers have seen fit to jump on digital distribution by making your royalty rate 75% (again, if you're lucky) of what it would be if there were a physical medium being sold through a store (and this is in addition to subtracting for “Breakage”, etc.), and the margins for the artist get even lower. It's pathetic, honestly. Even more pathetic is that artists are usually in a big hurry to sign these pieces of shit.

So, when I read things like this, it really makes me wonder. To sum up, Em's old producers sued over the fact that there were so many absurdly non-justifiable, pre-royalty charges added up before they got their cut. They argue, and rightly so in my mind, that since you can't “break” a digital download, and the distribution costs are virtually nil, and that the labels aren't paying for in-store promotional material to market the download, that those charges shouldn't apply to their royalties. They argued that the deals should work more like commercial and movie licensing agreements work. That'd bring their cut up, as producers. It'd also bring down the labels' cut, obviously. The jury found for Universal, unfortunately...

So when I read articles like the one that I posted earlier today, I wonder why music label execs think we're all so stupid. By “we”, I don't just mean artists because there's plenty of empirical evidence that we are in fact, but the entire music listening populace. Why do we want to consume the crap that they sell, ripping off artists in the process, ignoring or suppressing good music along the way?

Time to get back on my musicTech thread...

#music #business

This cannot be allowed. There is a definite whiff of opportunity here...

If not one more good thing happens during Obama's presidency, and I am an eternal optimist, the Data.Gov project sounds like a ball, and a huge step forward pretty much any way that I look at it.

Link.

Here's a band with the resources to do something cooler than they are. Is it just me or is this front page totally overstuffed with info, rendering it almost impossible to glean the useful bits at a glance? Are the links at the top of the page really 2003 looking? Are there an obscene amount of links on the right border that take forever to load?

Or is it just me?

Edit: I count 16 banners of equal size and flashiness (90% of which point to the same merchandise page) on the right margin and 30 or so news items. I'm all about having interesting content on the front page, but this looks like our shoe closet. And we don't wear most of the shoes that we own....

Another edit: I wrote this post the week before the Hampton victory frothing ceremony. They've obviously had a recent injection of motivation capital and have gotten their web game back together a bit.

#theidea