The purpose of this exercise was to make sure that my minimalist approach was going to work for simple guitar/bass/drums. I haven’t plugged in the midi controller yet, or the USB mixer I have. It doesn’t sound good, these were probably the third or fourth take on each instrument (except the bass – I’m a perfectionist there even when I’m just screwing around, and even now I want to go back and re-record the thing over a few more times).

The riff:

This is part of a song I’m working on. I came up with the harmonized guitar bit on the spot, and I like it enough I’m going to keep it.

The stats:

Everything was recorded into what I was shocked and ashamed to see was Garage Band 3. I guess I need to grab a copy of iLife 09 for this iMac. Oh yeah, this was recorded on an iMac. I used some Shure SRH440 headphones to monitor and mix down, as much as you can say I actually did either of those things.

The drums are EZ Drummer Drumkit From Hell, some sort of double bass with a custom-picked spock on the beat, then a chinese/crash combo leading into the fill that covers the bit where I go over 6/8.

The guitar is my ESP LTD FX-260 through a POD Studio UX2, one go with a fuzzy distorted with a nice bit of gateing panned a bit to the right, and one with a bit crunchier tone also gated equal bits to the left.

The bass is my plain-as-shit Fender P-Bass going right into the POD Studio UX2, a nice Eden head with the high-mids punched through a bit, a tiny bit of distortion and then a fun little reverb module to space it out a bit and blur the lines between my shitty out-of-practice playing.

I’ve been thinking a bit off and on about ratings I’ve seen in places like the iTunes app store. These are customer ratings – user ratings – and I’ve noticed a trend. When an application is free, the ratings on that application are typically lower than a similar application that costs money. The conclusion that I currently draw from this is that if someone has to pay for something, they are more inclined to favor it because the act of paying for it gives the object an inherent worth. I don’t know if this worth is related at all to the amount that a person pays for the given object, and if that amount alters the perceived worth, but it seems clear that any out of pocket expense immediately increases the worthiness and non-monetary value of the object.

Free objects on the other hand are not imparted with extra worth at the point of purchase because they didn’t cost anything. They are throwaway commodities, which is odd then that someone would go to the trouble of rating it lower than a non-throwaway object. It almost implies an increased willingness to rate (and rate lower) an object that you didn’t have to pay for than a willingness to rate an object that cost money.

I recently downloaded a 6 track EP from Trent Reznor’s new music project. It’s good, but it was free, and I have only listened to it once. Another album I just purchased from Amazon.com’s MP3 store for $5 (gotta love that $5 album deal) I’ve listened to several times already. It’s similar in style to the Trent Reznor album, and I couldn’t say which one was actually better, but I am using the cost object more than the free object. Why is that? I had the option to pay $2 or some other small sum and get higher quality ‘lossless’ copies of the same Trent Reznor album, and I chose not to. Would I have been more inclined to listen to it repeatedly if I had shelled out the money for it? Were my listening habits this scattered when I went through my ‘piracy’ phase a decade ago? I guess I need to think on this more.

Diptic for iPhone and iPad

My company just released our first iPhone and iPad app. It’s available at the iTunes App Store now. You can see more information at http://www.dipticapp.com. It’s compatible with iOS 4 so everyone upgrading and getting their new iPhone 4s this week should grab a copy.

I wish I could say I was involved with the production of the app, but project scheduling conflicts kept me out of it. It turned out great.

I’ve always been fascinated by the bow tie and wanted to learn to tie one. It’s intimidating but this is the result of a few tries last night and a successful run this morning. Found a few good tutorials online and I think I have it down.

Bring on the mint juleps!

We started researching this project we’d had kicking around in maintenance mode for the past few years. It was an older ColdFusion application living in ColdFusion 5 land, working against an Access 2000 database (two of them, actually). We were hired just to keep it running, but now it was looking like we’d be given the opportunity for a rewrite. The client company didn’t want any more databases living in Access, so we’d need to migrate everything into SQL Server 2005 and get the code working against it. For the past 10 years the application owners have been able to just go into Access and twiddle with things until it all works the way it should, since they won’t be able to do this anymore we needed to rebuild everything. So ColdFusion 9, CF Wheels 1.0.3, SQL Server 2005 – everything is going to be great.

We’re examining some reports that they have for monitoring performance on their project managers. There are four templates total that run queries, loop, run formulas, etc. I start to see something come up over and over again:

  SELECT dummy AS ProjectCount FROM Dummy

So what the hell was dummy? I took a look in Access and found a table called Dummy, with a single column named dummy, with a single row – the value in that row was ‘0′. What was going on here? The value it was trying to replace in the query was ProjectCount – what was that SUPPOSED to be?

SELECT Count(ProjectID) AS ProjectCount FROM Projects
 WHERE Projects.ProjectID IN (#ValueList(qGetEOCDIProjects.ProjectID)#)

That would return a zero if there were no projects found from that value list. Except the value list was derived from another query. And if that query had no values for that field, then it would pull a zero from this Dummy table.

Did they even realize how awful that sounds? Pull from dummy? Why not just check to see if there are any values in the first query and set a variable to zero? Why go back to the database to find the value you already know you have? As a matter of fact, your first query to get the list of project IDs would tell you how many you have. BOTH of these queries are pointless.

So did this happen once? Twice? A handful of times? Across 5,000 lines of code (one distinct block copy/pasted three times to add looping for hierarchies – that’s another story), this query is called 170 times. There are 170 different instances of this code pulling from dummy.

I wish I was making this up. So here I suggest we now add a new phrase into common usage: “Pulling from dummy.” This is essentially the same thing as a Rube Goldberg device, but it’s not even that complex. It’s just stupid, and subconsciously the developer is aware that they’re being stupid, otherwise why label it the way they did? Unnecessary, foolish, alarm bells should have been ringing, peer review could have helped avoid this, patently silly code.

Pulling from dummy.

Pistachio- and Chocolate-covered Bacon Skewers

Just what it says. And it was delicious.

Thanks to co-worker Rhia (a vegetarian) for making these and bringing them in. Sadly, they did not win at the bacon party she made them for that took place this past weekend.