Happy Christmas

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7 years ago
by Greg in

I swear I posted this yesterday. Either I dreamed I did, or I hallucinated it as it isn’t here. Perhaps LJ ate it. Anyway, I hope everyone had a great Christmas. I was only half awake all day because Zidane picked Christmas Eve to decide he wasn’t going to use that old broken RAM anymore. So Brian and I scrambled and fought to get it replaced, and just before midnight we succeeded. And then I slept late, but poorly. Then I woke in a truly foul mood, which I think I successfully hid as nobody mentioned it. ;) Today I’m off to eat with my folks and then I might pick up World of Warcraft. Have a great day!

Potter!

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7 years ago
by Greg in

So we’ve a release date now. But July seems so far away…

Graduation

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7 years ago
by Greg in

So Molly is now a College graduate. WOO HOO!

XMLHTTP

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7 years ago
by Greg in

Wow! I didn’t know that the XMLHttp object I’ve wrote a fairly involved HTML based, data enabled grid with client side data updates and all sorts of nifty things. As the day job is IE specific, I made use of Microsoft’s powerful and well designed XMLHTTP Active X control to make calls to server side code to do the data accesses. (as an aside, I did it in a pretty secure and very generic way, and I’m rather proud of it) Recently I saw Google’s new “beta” feature, Google Suggest and said to myself “Self, how the hell are they doing that. It feels like they are making server side data calls of some kind, and the only way I know to do that is with XMLHTTP. But, self, I’m using Safari right now and it is working fine.” This morning, as I’m trying to wake up and get ready for Molly’s graduation (CONGRATUALTIONS!! WOO!!) I saw an article on Slashdot where some helpful and ingenious soul dissected the Javascript for Google Suggest. I raced to click on the link and read with delight. (yes clever code is delightful to me) At the bottom, I saw a function that brought much intrigue:

function getXMLHTTP(){
  var A=null;
  try{
    A=new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP")
  }catch(e){
    try{
      A=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP")
    } catch(oc){
      A=null
    }
  }
  if(!A && typeof XMLHttpRequest != "undefined") {
    A=new XMLHttpRequest()
  }
  return A
}

So I said to myself “Self, lookie, they are making a call to XMLHttpRequest(). What is THAT? Is that a browser independent XMLHTTP? Could it be?” I opened a new Google window and searched on it. I found this. Thanks Apple for a clean and well written bit of documentation. And for Xcode. And for OS X. Oops, sorry. I guess I lost my train of thought. I’m pleased that the Safari and Mozilla developers opted to duplicate the interface exactly, even though it was Microsoft’s. It is clean and it works. At least I think so anyway. I can’t wait to play with this! It will be fun to tweak my grid to be browser independent.

yeesh

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7 years ago
by Greg in

Well it’s been a while. Sorry about that. Things have been busy. Despite that, little of interest has happened. Yes, I live an exciting life.

 

Over the weekend we made the first step at migrating one of our in house apps to a customized 3rd party replacement. That 3rd party replacement is soon to be fully developed in house, meaning we’ve migrated from one custom system to another. The system that will slowly be replaced is a cobbled together c++ application that, honestly, I’m surprised has worked as long as it has.

 

It was developed long before we had database naming and design standards by a group of people who were learning as they went along. Because of this, there are some particularly frightening flaws in the database design. The most annoying is the horrendous naming standards.

 

For example, a company is a row in the company table, so far so good. Anything that relates to the company is in a comp# table. That is comp1, comp2, comp3 and so on. So contacts are in comp4. Accounts are in comp7. I can’t even imagine what they were thinking.

 

Anyway, we’ve taken the first step to burying this app, but it is going to be a long process, because it has grown into quite a monster over the years. To make matters worse, there are so many other applications that use data from its database, and they will all need to be modified to use the new program’s data as well. And getting at the data in the new program is difficult because they have taken encapsulation and security to the extreme. But that’s a story for another day.

 

I hope you all have had a great week so far. Thanks for reading, and be well!

Cat Haikus

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7 years ago
by Greg in

Start the morning off right with some delightful cat haikus. Molly got these from one of her teachers.

Blur of motion, then - Silence, me, a paper bag. What is so funny? You’re always typing. Well, let’s see you ignore my Sitting on your hands. My small cardboard box. You cannot see me if I Can hide my head. Terrible battle. I fought for hours.  Come and see! What’s a “term paper”? Small brave carnivores Kill pine cones and mosquitoes, Fear vacuum cleaner. Want to trim my claws? Don’t even think about it! My cries will wake dead. I want to be close To you. Can I fit my head inside your armpit? Wanna go outside. Oh no! Help! I got outside! Let me back inside! Oh no! Big One has been trapped by newspaper! Cat to the rescue! Humans are so strange. Mine lies still in bed, then screams! My claws aren’t that sharp. . . .

POMG

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7 years ago
by Greg in

There’s a NEW Michael Crichton book! How did I miss learning this until today? Well, I know what I’ll be doing during every moment of free time today!

new icon

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7 years ago
by Greg in

Look, I got a new icon. Yay, me.

OFIM

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7 years ago
by Greg in

My boss just told us he’s leaving. This was a shock to all of us. He’s a wonderful boss, the best I’ve ever had in fact.

We’ll have to temporarily report to his boss, who is a very unpleasant person. I hope he is replaced soon, and with someone who is decent.

Wow, is it ever time to scream OFIM.

 

music ramblings

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7 years ago
by Greg in

A couple days back I picked up the Phantom of the Opera movie soundtrack. I did this after watching the newest trailer, which is one of the better trailers I’ve seen recently. Alas, some aspects of this soundtrack are pretty disappointing.

I’m a big fan of musicals, although as a general rule I prefer the Lloyd Webber “operatic” musical over the older style that is sort of a play with songs. As I love the sound of a big orchestra, I look forward to movie versions of musicals because they almost always use big, excellent orchestras instead of the smaller pit orchestras that most often play the “Original Broadway/London Cast” recordings of musicals.

There are some exceptions (the 1982 movie version of Annie, which is just terrible, for example) but for the most part, movie soundtrack versions of musicals are my favorite. They have excellent performances, and orchestras and other instruments that just wouldn’t work if they had to hide in front of the stage.

This new Phantom soundtrack definitely features a comparatively large orchestra, but it is marred by strange arrangement decisions and some very bad mixing, particularly in the early tracks, like the extended Overture. (I imagine to accommodate opening credits) The bits of the overture that they extended are particularly problematic. I found the orchestrations weird and boring.

Another example is Christine’s “vocalizations” at the end of  “The Phantom of the Opera” (the song). There’s this really annoying rambling electric guitar in the background, and Christine’s wailing is very soft. I think it might be so soft to prevent you from noticing that it is synthesized. I can’t be sure, but it just doesn’t sound real to me.

The performances of most of the cast, overall, are pretty solid. Christine is probably the best of the group, particularly in “Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again,” which is one of the highlights of the disk. In fact, once you get to this song, the quality of everything seems to improve. The phantom is the weakest performer of the group, in my opinion. He just doesn’t sell his anger or feel anywhere near as menacing as Michael Crawford. When I let Molly listen to a track, I used the word “pansy” to describe how he sounded in his rant in ”The Mirror.”

Ultimately, they don’t ever reach the level of quality that soundtracks such as The Music Man and Evita did. Evita is probably the best example of how to record and mix orchestra that I can think of. Evita is just so amazingly excellent sounding quality wise, and has some excellent vocal performances too.

My final verdict is that this is a pretty good soundtrack, but I don’t think it is better than the cast recordings in any way. They just didn’t seem to put much effort into putting together a big, well balanced sound. And their casting choices seem to have been made based on looks rather than singing talent. That is always a mistake with a musical.

Disclaimer:This is, of course, my opinion. YMMV.

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