the media and musings of jOE dEVINE

Justin Strackany  (shown here) came over last night to see if we could work together (which we do in real life) on recording some demo tracks for his approaching foray into “playing out” again for the first time in years.  The result, “Glen Tipton” is a catchy, Nick Drake-ish tune that I find myself listening to multiple times.  We did it in about two takes (way to go Justin) and there will be more Justin to follow.  If you’re wondering who “K K Venton” is (I certainly was), I believe Justin really meant K K Downing, one of the guitar players for Judas Priest.  But the song doesn’t flow as well with that lyric, so we kept the former.

Oh, and yeah , we celebrated with four Cuban cigars, three bottles of wine, and one broken Waterford Lisemore large goblet.  Guess who broke it?  I’ll never tell…

Tech specs on the recording:

• Justin’s Yamaha guitar
• Justin’s voice
• Apogee Duet FW audio interface
• Shure KSM32 on guitar
• Rode NTK tube mic on vocals
• Recorded into Logic Pro 8

Glen Tipton.mp3

I was at my college homecoming game this weekend (I was asked to present to the computer science students there, and even though it was only 17 years since I graduated, I decide to attend homecoming with the wife and kid).  Not sure if we won the homecoming game or not, but as we were driving down to Dallas to see some family I did listen to the first half of the UT / OSU game, and got to watch the second half.  Man, both teams played very well.  

But alas, Pokes, the Longhorns won.   You put up a good fight. 

Is it significant that I didn’t know the final score of my alma mater’s homecoming game?  I’ll let you decide – we’re the Fighting ROOS.  Yes, the Ausin College Kangaroos.

Gulp.

This weekend my wife and I met up with ten of our friends in Kansas City to ultimately go see #17 ranked OSU play #3 ranked Missouri.  We were all hopeful for an upset, but knew it would be tough.

This pretty much sums it up:

Despite one of the worst (possible) calls I’ve ever seen – OSU going for it on their own 20 with a 4th and 18 by way of fake punt – missing by two yards, we had a great time made all the merrier (we are from Texas after all) by the fact that Texas beat #1 OU while we were driving to the game – to take over the #1 ranking no less!

The boys:

Kirk, Jeff, Dave, Joe (me), Tim and Matt

The ladies:

Teri, Jenn, Sean, Mel, Brooke, Heather and Elizabeth (my wife)

 There were several great things about the trip, besides all the great football, comraderie, and getting to see old friends:

1. To my knowledge, we kept our adult dignity intact, and no one puked
2. Jen and Tim Miller, our hosts, put on one HELLUVA tailgating party and the BBQ the next day was world class (too bad the Dallas Cowboys lost, but heck, ribs are ribs!)
3. Somehow or another, we ended up with ROCKSTAR parking – the likes of which I’ve only ever seen when travelling with Kirk Reynolds – we accidentally made it into the major donor lot at the Missouri stadium and for some reason were allowed to stay – hence the tiger in all the pictures!

It was a blast seeing everyone and special thanks to Jen and Tim for hosting us in their lovely house in Kansas City!  We gotta do this again sometime soon.

Ok, so the new hard drives arrived.  Two gloriously bubble wrapped 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM drives from NewEgg.com.  Now, I have heard some complaints about their shipping, and about these drives – so I upgraded to FedEx shipping and both my drives seem to working flawlessly.  Installing a new hard drive in a MacBook pro is perhaps the easiest drive install I’ve ever done.  Just four screws for the caddy, and the rest was without tools and painless.

I have decided (since I already did a Logic install) that I will leave the “vanilla” logic install, including Jam Packs and all that jazz, on the 320Gb system drive.  After all it’s on the same SATA controller as the other drives anyway.  Henceforth, however, all samples, content, instruments, etc. will go on the Media Library drive – the new Barracuda.

All my project data goes on the other Barracuda.

It’s taking about three hours to copy over my 200gb+ of samples and instruments, but I am sure this is primarily because of the speed of the USB 2.0 external drive I am copying from.

Oh, as an aside, my MacMini is now my “main” computer – dunno what I am going to do with all those PCs I’ve accumulated.  I went ahead and purchased the elgato Turbo.264 and have to say that I LOVE it.  Whereas before if I was encoding a DVD to AppleTV, I could basically do nothing on my mini, now I can read email, even watch another video, while encoding.  And the quality is great.  I highly recommend this product.

More to come when the memory arrives, I load up a lot of instruments, and we try this rig out.

Well, I just ruined my Christmas and birthday for the next two years!  I had to agree that I wouldn’t buy another computer until after 2010 to get it, but I finally broke down and bought a new MacPro – and holy cow does it rock!

I bought the base  (if you can call an eight Xeon system base) entry-level 8-way MacPro – upgrading to better CPUs, etc. just didnt’ seem worth the expense.

However, I went ahead and purchased a few extras to configure this machine as a truly “one stop shop” for all my music production needs – I’ll discuss my final configuration in a bit.

Out of the box, this thing looks and performs awesome!  I did a couple of tests with it, one a DVD to H264 conversion, the other a Logic project performance test.  Both were somewhat subjective, but here’s what I found:

• The DVD conversion process was about 10x faster than on my MacBook (my MacBook is a Core Duo, not Core 2 – but 10x is pretty amazing) – took about 12 minutes!
• The music test was much more subjective – however, anyone that’s done any Logic’ing on an older MacBook probably gets this.  On my MacBook, I had a 24 track project with a few plug-ins, using an Apogee Duet, A Powercore Firewire, and a Focusrite LiquidMix.  Sometimes, starting up a project I would get system overload errors, disk speed errors, etc. and couldn’t get it to play.  Usually, playing it over and over it would eventually cache (I think) enough info that I could mix the session.  With the MacPro?  Let’s just say that even running most of my audio data off a USB2.0 drive (leaving the Firewire bus for audio I/O and the Powercore and LiquidMix), I was able to launch my test project flawlessly, it never burped at all and the CPU monitors (yes, all EIGHT of them) didn’t even register that anything was going on!

My current config is that I have a 320Gb OS drive, and all my music files are stored on two external USB2.0 drives – one for my project files, and one for audio files and virtual instruments.  I found that even on the MacPro, it’s better not to do disk I/O on the same bus as audio I/O – I always seem to get noise of some kind at some point.  Separating out the disk I/O from the audio I/O and plug-in processing seems to fix any problems.  I am runnin 2Gb of memory.

However, here’s how it will look soon:

• - (8) 2.8Ghz Xeon CPU
• 10Gb memory
• 320Gb system / OS drive
• 1.5TB project drive
• 1.5TB virtual instrument / sample drive

The drives are all 3GB/s SATA drives hosted right in the computer – NewEgg had a screaming deal on 1.5TB Seagates ($189!) that I couldn’t pass up.  Now, I won’t need to use ANY USB2.0 while doing music production.  I will use my existing external drives as backup drives for the internal drives – so nothing’s wasted.  I don’t need RAID – it’s probably overkill – but at some point if I needed even more performance I would trick it out with a SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) option – but I doubt I will need to.  This still leaves me with an empty internal bay as well.

Can’t wait to get it all configured this way, I expect I will be able to run virtually unlimited tracks / plug-ins, etc.  Plus, if I run out of CPU room, I can always use my MacBook as a LogicNode!

Like many folks with a software background, I’ve developed a few frameworks in my day.  My most recent framework, which I developed for LAMP sites, was the basis for Motosport’s current platform and several of eBags’ marketing websites (though not the main site).  Called iSkins, it was lean, mean and effective.  And I could whip up a marketing site in a day and a commerce site in a few days using it.

But like any other person whose day job is NOT developing frameworks, who has a small child at home and a lake house to take care of on the weekends, it was time to look elsewhere when asked to evaluate frameworks for a new in-house application we are developing here at Enexity.

Enter symfony!  Wow, what a great platform.  Every time I look for a feature that I had in iSkins, it’s there.  But it’s usually better thought out, more extensible, has a way better OO model and generally kicks the crud out of what I developed.

Symfony (from their website) is:

“…a full-stack framework, a library of cohesive classes written in PHP5.

It provides an architecture, components and tools for developers to build complex web applications faster. Choosing symfony allows you to release your applications earlier, host and scale them without problem, and maintain them over time with no surprise…”

 Some of the advantages of symfony, as I see them, include:

• good object model
• MVC separation
• caching
• scaffolding
• Ajax
• ORM
• database abstraction
• a solid plugin architecture
• localization and internationalization
• the admin generator (WOW)
• the routing system
• form development and validation
• debugging

That’s a lot of strengths!

The one big weakness I see is the learning curve – the online symfony book is great, and there are lots of good tutorials floating around, but it’s still one heck of a big framework.

I intend, time willing, to someday write about how I came up to speed on the framework.  Instead of diving in to ORM and CRUD like many of the tutorials want you to do, I started with the site layout so I could understand the DNRY possibilities in the view layer.  In this manner, I was able to really learn about all the parts of the architecture without worry about some of the more esoteric matters – and, when I finally started doing “real” work with it, it looked nice right out of the gate.

Although the project we’re working on won’t be publicly available anytime soon, when I find time I just might upgrade devineville.com, parkeranne.com and a few other sites to symfony.

Ok, so I know they had a well publicized outage last week, but I finally converted my company over to the free version of google apps.  Shared calendar, great email with awesome spam protection, and it’s free.  We’re not an internet company, so having a nice partner like google to “get our back” on a mission critical service (as opposed to paying a ton for it with perhaps not even as much reliability) was a great deal.

 Love it.  Google rocks.

So we’ve been in Austin almost three months now, and every week it seems like I am liking it more.

Yes, it was 106 degrees yesterday.

But other than that, I live close to work, in a great neighborhood, I am loving the job and I am getting in shape.

Part of the reason I am getting in shape is the awesome nature hike right in my neighborhood.  Just walk down the street about ten houses and you’re in a hill country paradise – four plus miles of rocky hills, scrub flats, streams and rivers nestled right up against Lake Austin.

I call the whole loop (about 4.5 miles) the “Death Hike” – the first time I did it I was around 220 pounds, it was 90 degrees, took me pretty much two hours, I had to stop to rest three times and it still almost killed me.  Now I am a little better prepared for what to expect, a little lighter (just under 200 pounds last I checked), and in a little better shape.  A trip around the loop now takes me about eighty five minutes, I don’t have to stop to rest, and I run up most of the hills (the notorious heart rate hill below notwithstanding).

Along the way there are some awesome waterfalls, great hill country views (you can see Mansfield Dam, for example) and lots of sun and shade.

If you look closely, you can spot the heart rate monitor strapped under my shirt – heart rate hill can definitely max out your heart rate if you go fast enough.  For now, I am happy just making it up the hill without stopping.  That picture above is only about 1/3 of the hill, it twists and turns twice more as you make your ascent.  It may not look like much but I assure you it’s a chore.

Come visit and I will take you on the Death Hike in 100 degree weather, and you’ll love Austin!

Ok, so it’s not for kids.  I think there are political, social and moral messages hidden in here somewhere (the not so subtle quote at the end of the movie is a reminder).   And I am not sure that this film portrays America in a great light overall.

But damn was this movie entertaining.   I thought Tom Hanks played his role perfectly, but Philip Seymour Hoffman stole the show.   The scene in which he is arguing with his boss and breaks his window (again) had me laughing out loud.  Later in the film, he again steals the scene from Hanks as he’s ushered in and out of the congressman’s office and ultimately confesses to planting a listening device on the bottle of scotch he brought with him.

The casting overall was excellent – from the girl’s in Wilson’s office, to the other members of congress, to the foreign dignataries – just enough of a real feel while still providing comic sensibility. 

I rarely see movies that I think I probably won’t like and then I do – but this is one of them.  I don’t know why, but this movie never really seemed to interest me.  Perhaps it was the subject matter.  However, after seeing it I can say it will be on my “watch again” list.

4 out of 5 stars.  Check it out.

All of our stuff just got delivered yesterday.  One whole semi-truck full!  This is like my fifth full move, and I hope it is my last.  We got all the boxes inside, but just barely.  Now starts the laborious task of unpacking.

Ever notice that no matter how well you supervise your move, the packers always seem to put that one box you’re looking for somewhere out of sight?

For example, I found ten boxes of wine last night, but not the box with the kitchen gadgets.  No wine without an opener huh?

D’oh!  I hate moving.