field marshall hrádek

Bleh, MySpace bought the non debt parts of Imeem and basically broke it all. It was bad enough that Imeem reduced clip lengths to 30 seconds. Now they're out of the picture. So please, forgive the horrid AT&T and other stupid ads in their stay.

This song has been running through my head for months. This song, while we're talking about music, has been in my head for months:

What it means to me is that it's harder for me to share music with you all. For now I am relegated to Youtube which is fine but I'm not always interested in sharing the video part.

I've just got gripes with the whole system, fair use, and DRM. I will gladly buy music that's worthwhile. Money is not the issue. The problem is all the suckers that have bought into iTunes and other controlled media and what it all means. Control and profit.

Now I am not on any soap box here evangelizing one way or another. I am simply sharing how sick I feel when I think about all this and how pervasive the idea of remotely controlling everything. I feel like there is a full on assault on freedom and expected fair usage. I get pretty depressed about it all. Sometimes I feel like moving to the country and raising cattle for a living.

But alas running away from things isn't an answer for me either.

We're making some great progress on our side project. I can't wait to announce it.

This is a rough morning requiring a quick jaunt to Top Pot across the street to grab a donut and coffee. I felt the oncoming headache and my tiredness was overwhelming. I had very sad ride replaying and processing the things that had transpired the night before. I miss my kids very deeply. Helen asked me to lay down with her and gave me her goofy smile. It was very cute. I obliged her for a few moments before getting up and leaving for work. I patted Henry on the head and drew the heavier comforter over him. He was sound asleep.

We watched a movie last night called Zwartboek (Black Book) which is a Dutch film about German occupied Holland; a story of Jews, the resistance, and everyone's effort to survive. I found it to be in the same spirit as other European attempts to share snapshots of respective experiences in the war and it was quite good. I would assign this 4 out of 5 or 8 out of 10.

Let me say that I had high hopes for Repo: The Genetic Opera. I am not afraid of musicals, I love gothic themes, and it seemed to be right on track for instant cult classic. Unfortunately, the seemingly endless bad writing is only sparsely sprinkled with some memorable gems. And although the graphic goriness isn't my cup of tea, I stomached it hoping for some sense of story that wasn't as shallow as the Saw series who shares in having the same producer.

One of the few memorable scenes involved the movie's narrator/grave robber (Terrance Zdunich), Paris Hilton's character Amber Sweet, and the innocent Shilo Wallace played by Alexa Vega in which the grave robber was sharing his recently acquired drugs that he extracted from the dead.

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Probably the only German auto maker whose products I'd ever consider owning by enslaving myself to a monthly payment:

I like Zzounds more with every purchase I make. They've got free shipping on most orders over a certain amount and they price match. I found AKG 271 MkII headphones used for recording and mixing by the pros for a much better price on Amazon from some unknown retailer. Also, I found the headphone amp for about $10 less. Anyway, Zzounds matched the prices so I didn't have to gripe about buying it from some potentially shady seller or paying more to have piece of mind.

I'd like to be able to start recording with Crystal so this is the first part of that goal. Soon will be a new microphone (I think I'll do the RØDE NT2-A), pop filter, and shock mount.

The music in the following video is fairly formulaic for trance but it's a fantastic find since it, well, combines trance music and a rubber clad performer calling herself Rubberdoll. The song is Markus Schulz - Do You Dream.

Anyway, I might want to slow down with my posting! I have 2 hours a day of commuting on a train with wi-fi, whaddaya expect?!

I will hold back on the new mic until we get some tracks down. In the mean time I can use my Behringer B2-Pro. I'd rather fill out some more hard ware to get inspired by.

Man, this is awesome. At first I was a bit worried there wouldn't be anything memorable in 2009. Mr. Tarantino has proved me wrong.

I've had some good exposure to the factory design pattern lately thanks to a co-worker who came by, looked over a block of if-else statements, and threw my mind for a loop. The end result is much cleaner and clearer code. I've also been reading a couple design pattern books.

Today I've done a quiet launch of the Guild Wars (GW) Ladder API as a beta. Below is the usage comment generated by the class that, well, is the API.

==============================================================================
GW LADDER API BETA

Example:
http://www.guildwars.com/competitive/ladder/?format=xml&ladder=guild

Argument/Options:
format		- xml, json, php-serial
ladder		- guild, hero
limit   	- 1-1000 (guild ladder), 1-1080 (hero ladder)
offset		- 0-1000 ", 0-1080 "
name		- string 1-50 chars
column		- column name (see example output for names)
order     	- asc or desc
callback	- string 1-40 chars (JSON only)

Errors will return in requested format output. Ladders update HOURLY: please
limit your calls accordingly.

NOTE: API is subject to change without notice. Currently available as BETA. 
For questions, issues, etc. please contact support regarding "GW LADDER API".
==============================================================================

It's not a very complex piece of code but I wanted to make sure that it complied with best practices in API design, flexibility, security, scalability, and RESTfulness. I think as people discover it and start using it I'll get a better feel for how its being used. Right now folks scrape our ladders parsing HTML from our ladder pages. Yuck! I'm using distributed caching (memcached) to store results and some throttling to ease the load in case load gets out of hand.

Another couple changes I've been making while working on new or refactoring old code is to avoid nesting 'if' blocks, avoid 'else' blocks, limiting myself to one evaluation per 'if', and put 'return' or 'break' code near the top of what I am doing. It has been interesting getting used to it.

PHP:

I'd prefer to use something like a function and then multiple returns but the theory is essentially the same. This makes code block easier to decipher. Couple some logging into this and debugging just got easier.

Recently I fell in the middle of a religious debate surrounding stored procedures (SP) and parameterized queries. I find that although there are a lot of textbook reasonings behind using stored procedures I find no compelling reason to add another layer of code maintenance in the development stack. All the seemingly overwhelming benefits of doing SPs dematerialize once you realize you can accomplish the same with parameterized queries.

However, I see clear benefits to using SPs to encapsulate components used cross stack like web and application development. Or perhaps between multiple web applications. At that point, however, wouldn't one rather employ the benefits of a service? And if you go the service route you are back at point one: why add another layer to maintain. I am by no means an expert on this topic but I have been very curious to find the facts. I just find that using SPs is a pain in the rear.

After cancelling my DI.FM subscription I've been actually able to locate a few great streaming radio stations. M2 and FG Underground out of Paris to name a couple. I'm diggin' the Electro-House sound. Here's After Hours (Original Mix) by Mellefresh & Deadmau5:

Crystal and I have been enjoying playing Aion an upcoming game from NCSoft that's already made a huge splash in Asia. It's a fun MMO that looks sexy and is interesting to play. We haven't gotten very far but its fantastic to finally play characters in a game I'd want to be.

Other then that, I'm playing EVE but as I'm shifting to music production again so I'm sort of not all that interested in spending my limited free time playing. But dudes, I am totally having an AMAZING amount of fun playing Metal Gear Solid 4. What a great title. There are a bunch of cut scenes and sometimes it is noticeable but it doesn't matter. It hasn't been since Ace Combat a few months ago that I've been excited to continue playing a game.

So yeah, the water from last weeks potential flood receded and nothing much to talk about there. My folks left for Antarctica so I will be swinging by their place to check on the cats and stuff. I hope they have a good time for its probably the first vacation where I question their sanity during the time when they decided to go there. I can definitely see the appeal especially during their "tour the whole world and see everything" kick as of late. I get to pick them up when they get back so I am sure I'll get to hear all about it. I went to Costco with my parents, before they left, and helped them pick out a digital SLR so they don't have to keep borrowing mine. The Nikon D60 will be quite adequate for their purpose. I also helped pick out a laptop for my sister. She really needed to connect to the digital world so hopefully she'll be online more often. We'll see.

Nate's son was born this last week. Check out his post about it. He and his wife are both very tired. We congratulate and wish them the best. Every kid is different. We mean well when we try and bestow our knowledge and advice to them but its all hard to gauge if it helps folks. The little guy will grow fast. Helen started crawling and pulling herself up on New Year's Eve. Now she'll crawl around the house. The smiles I get when she sees me break my heart. I love my family!

I just had a couple awesome break throughs on my music production. One example is watching music videos or listening to cuts and trying to reproduce the sounds and rhythms. I was listening to Armin van Buuren's "In and Out of Love", for example, and worked out most of the beats and sounds. Sure, some of this more pop techno or trance has some elementary writing but its definitely an ok place to start. I really like the vocal work on that track. Sharon den Adel's voice is marvelous.

Another break through is figuring out how to make direct monitoring work. Basically, when you record singing the singer needs to hear their own voice. It's really hard to record your own voice with a pair of headphones on while recording. So you directly monitor the voice as you are recording it. That way the singer can adjust their voice while they are singing. I was really struggling to get that to work because routing all the signals through mixers, sound cards, software; there are a lot of places that might be set.

Another cool thing I figured out was setting my brother-in-law's MIDI controller, the Axiom 25, to also control his DAW. I have the 61 so it wasn't hard to transfer some knowledge to his unit's configuration. However, once plugged in, you can set the keyboard up to control various functionality from buttons on the unit like rewind, fast forward, stop, loop, play, and record. Like I mentioned, I got the Faderport to do this and more for me but it was cool to have another bit of expertise under my belt.

I'm man enough to admit I like some musicals. Recently I enjoyed Moulin Rouge! and Phantom of the Opera. I just found an interesting concept for a rock opera in Repo. I haven't seen it; only reviews and trailers... but I am intrigued. It could be complete garbage. It's headlining Sarah Brightman so perhaps it has hope. Basically the premise is that in the future folks are indebted to a company which does plastic surgery and transplants because of some cataclysmic event. Very dark.

We finally opened an account with Sound Credit Union and have steadily been changing over our mailing address with our various creditors and utilities. We still have a couple stacks of boxes in our office room but the rest of the house is pretty much settled in. We definitely need to get some shelving or get rid of a few extras but nothing crazy. My biggest hurdle is coming home and after playing with the kids and eating, plopping in front of the computer.

Something now from the hard dance genre, How Hard Do You Fuck? (Original Mix) by Dr. Willis:

Speaking of computers... I have been playing a wee bit of Navy Field and have finally gotten to a place where I could buy the Heavy Cruiser Moltke. It has been difficult to play. Up until now the reload speeds of my guns have been fairly fast. Now there is a considerable gap in between shots. This means that I have to stay back, choose my shots carefully, and keep moving away.

I finally went and worked out last night. That was amazing. I used the elliptical machine for 20 minutes and then I did some weights for 10 minutes. I know it's not a lot but I am trying to take some baby steps. Another thing is that I started to work on my music too. I've been waiting to do this kind of stuff until after the kids go to bed which gives me about an hour every night to myself and/or with Crystal.

At work I've been working on consolidating several virtual machines into one running VMWare's ESXi. To accomplish this I had to use virtual hosts and some nifty Apache prepending of some PHP code to change the includes directory path. With that the web development server box will become a preview machine, a host for various company wide projects, and a web database server. Next I created a VMWare Player instance to run on my local box with a Samba share enabled to which I will sync my Perforce repository to. The next step will be to integrate a deployment scheme using something like Capistrano. I created a pretty neat deployment script at my previous employer so it is good to move in a direction that employs rollbacks and a build type deployment.

I'm also checking out Symfony and PEAR since it's clear to me now that I need to use things like that (frameworks/libraries) rather than trying to reinvent the wheel with every new thing I write. It's a total duh moment for me but I think developers need to get to this place where key concepts are solidly understood before using things like this. The biggest complaint I have is that here we are doing all this bad ass shit only to eventually (90% sure) be using C#/ASP.NET. Not that those aren't completely awesome and I am unstoppably willing to learn something new but I hesitate on whether or not they are the best choice given the popularity of LAMP based system for lots of major projects. In our interviews I have gathered that C#/ASP.NET developers seem to lack a broader understanding of underlying architecture and have a general lack of desire to develop independent projects both for web and otherwise. This isn't a generalization but an observation I have made with the small sampling of people we've interviewed.