Arc v' July 2002

A new page of SuperSampler pics is growing at euc.cx on the sampsampsampsamp page.

I started a couple of writings in Radio's Outliner a couple of months back when "Radio" was still nice and new to me, and put them in a different folder than normal Stories. I had a really weak script written for listing the outlines too. But I never got it to be as nice as the Stories page.

So now I'm wondering - how can I write a Radio Story in the Outliner, while taking advantage of the rendering rules?

I know that to some, it's a sin to mix anything with Scotch, and normally I would agree. But now, from EUCCI, cocktails, we have the following drink:

Cybele's Reverie Dark
1/2 Shot of Creme De Cacao (Dark)
1 Shot Scotch - preferably Macallan or Highland Park*
Poured Straight - Neat or On The Rocks.

* This drink works best with one of the darker Scotches. Your bar should have at least one of them. If not - why do you go there?

An alternate version is Cybele's Reverie, Light. This was the original we discovered. You can optionally use a lighter flavored scotch with this one, including Glenmorangie or a blend like Johnnie Walker Red. In place of the dark Creme de Cacao, light is used.

It's a powerful nightcap - but on my first night using it as such, I woke up the next morning at 6:39 (am), thinking it was 6:39 (pm). This has happened on rare occasions in the past, and is always entertaining. First thought "man, 6:40 Sunday. I missed Futurama!... No, wait, I went out again last night to a movie... It's 6:40 pm on Monday! I missed work!". Then I started noticing the finer details, such as the light coming in from the east and the AM/PM light on the alarm clock being in the "AM" position. I chuckled, and crawled back into bed.

It may or may not be related to this stunning new drink.

I found this Issue Tracker yesterday while looking at ZWiki.org for ZWiki updates.

My quest for a good issue tracker is still frustrating. Tracker still comes closest to what I seem to want - something with detail and workflow for team use, but not too difficult for a non-tech person to submit an issue.

But I also like the simplicity of this bug tracker by Brent Simmons. I wonder if I might just end up writing my own that's closer to this.

Personally, I didn't mind "Roundup" as a bug tracker. It was fast, and the other developer and I that used it during the transition phase of 24Tix 1.0 were pretty succesful with it. But there were some things that I ultimately had too much issue with:

1. No indication that a post-install schema change was possible. I wanted to add in a couple of fields, such as Expected Version and References, to an already running database. I know now that this is in fact doable.
2. Configuration and setup of new instances too difficult. Actually, they've done a decent job of this, but really getting Roundup installed requires better Unix familiarity than I have - particularly things like setting up a dedicated Roundup user/group. I'm primarily a developer, not an administrator, and the guy who runs the administrator duties never had time to help me here. This could be a significant issue if I needed to go through him every time I needed to set up a new instance. In Zope, one just adds a new Tracker (Or CMF Collector, or IssueTracker, or what have you). It's a domain I'm personally more familiar with, so I'm going to stay there for the time being.
3. Difficult to integrate with other Project artifacts. With "Roundup", the issue tracking database was off in its own area, even when using ZRoundup (which is basically a small gateway between Zope and the normal Roundup CGI application). Thus, a few structural and navigational elements I was using in the look and feel of our very basic Projects site would get lost.

Basically, I've come to the conclusion that I'm too steeped in "Zope" for anything else to be useful on the time tables that I have. Tracker is nice now that it's running, but there are still small gotchas and rough areas.

Right now, our Project Management site is a loose collection of folders, letting the person responsible for a certain project to decide how they want to track artifacts. Most of my projects use a combination of ZWiki and Tracker, to some degree of success. It's lightweight and easy to get up and running for a new project, and I've had success with this combination before.

As things grow, however, real content management might be needed. Perhaps when CMF hits 1.3 and Plone hits 1.0, I'll reconsider CMF + CMFCollector. But the solution we have now works decently.

There's plenty to read about today (and almost every day) on Tom Tomorrow's excellent This Modern World weblog, too much to even effectively sum-up here.

But of the days events, the proposed bill to give the MPAA and RIAA "full immunization from all state and federal laws if they disable, block or otherwise impair a "publicly accessible peer-to-peer network." is among the more interesting and potentially alarming if it indeed does go anywhere. Mmmm, full immunization from state and federal laws. Yes, this country needs MORE institutions backed with those abilities right now.

So, the mysterious core dumps seem to be over, thanks to this patch on SourceForge.net regarding pthreads and stack sizes on BSD. I reverted back from the Tracker changes I made last night, and nothing crashed.

I did have to make one small patch to Tracker though, introducing a fun filled positive lookahead assertion to a regular expression used to generate HREF's.

So finally, I have "Tracker" working with "Zope" 2.5.1 and "Python" 2.1.3 on FreeBSD 4.5. It seems that the restricted Python engine (which I presume is new/revamped in 2.5?) has a problem with expressions that are heavy with parenthesis. So, after crawling through a lot of DTML code (some of it quite old - some of it predating the 'let' tag!) by slowly moving a 'dtml-raise' statement around, I was able to find all (or at least most) of my problems.

I just couldn't take "Roundup" any more. Actually, as a single developer or with another geek, it was alright. But it's still young, and doesn't have a lot of the great user/security/collaboration issues that Tracker has (and which CMF Collector partly has). And it doesn't have the workflow. And it's still too much tweak-work to configure ones own instance of "Roundup" beyond the two templates they have. I am going to try to stay active with it though, but it really feels like the goals of "Roundup" and "Tracker" are very different.

Tracker is an old unwieldy beast, however, and it seems to take a fair bit of grunt work to get it to work every time Zope has a new revision. Ugh.

I'd guess there's some degree of irony in that all of the CD's I've purchased recently have been related to finding music on AudioGalaxy. There were a lot of things it did right, besides being a sharing center. Primarily, it had good information on many artists. And even for ones that it didn't have good information on, it did have pretty decent links between most artists. Audio Galaxy also did right by having a fairly constant (and long) list of song titles. Due to this last item, I started finding a lot of Pizzicato Five (a terrific Japanese combo with five U.S. full-length releases, and lots and lots of imports) that I hadn't heard by just clicking through the pages.

But Pizzicato Five do something right - they make really good releases. Ultimately, a release just has to be owned. Part of it is to get the translations from Japanese to English. But a lot of it is that the releases have a nice feel to them. All of their U.S. full length releases have been in some form of digipack, a format that I personally like better than Jewel Box. Inside the digipack is a nice booklet with lyrics, some production notes, and (usually) many photos of the two stars, Yasuharu Konishi and Maki Nomiya, always very fashionable. The music, words, packaging, and images have gone towards making this cosmopolitan brand for a universe one would love to be in all the time - full of jetsetting, nightclubs, wandering. It's a sort of "Breakfast at Tiffany's" come to life.

The point I'm getting to is that there is a growing rift between volumes of DVD purchases and Music purchases. One hypothesis is that this is due to perception of value - the DVD typically costs only a few dollars more than the increasingly overpriced CD's, and come packed with special features and (in some cases), special packaging. A typical mass-market CD on the other hand has that tacky jewel case, the booklet that's hard to get out, and usually one or two hits that will be listened to. It's understandable why there's the shift. Yet, the music industry continues to blame file sharing for its woes, not the fact that it's too cheap to either lower prices or improve the perception of quality of its own material.

This leads back to the stories of AudioGalaxy and Pizzicato Five. I've already bought a couple of $40 imports because of music I heard on AudioGalaxy, and I have my eyes on more - including an expensive and rare vinyl box set. There was even one domestic P5 release that I got entirely on line (one that I had avoided getting for years) that I recently replaced with an actual CD. I wanted that book, that packaging, and crisp clear copies of that music. I was paying for a quality release, with no bad songs and nice extras.

And it was still pithy to the packaging of Sa E Ra Japon. This Japanese release, which finally showed up today, has so many wonderful bonus features. On top of a phenomenal suite of music, the box and its contents are things of their own beauty. The CD is in a DVD sized paperboard tri-fold box, with clear color photos inside. Inside the box, along with the CD (in its own cardboard/cloth sleeve) is a big full color booklet in Japanese and some English, and many photos. But on top of all that was a little package containing a sticker, a book marker (with a track listing, again all in Japanese), and two postcards. In small type on the back of each, one mentions the birthdays of Yasuharu and Miss Maki, the other mentions sharing writing with other Pizzicatomaniacs around the globe.

Quality release? You bet. But I never would have even thought of pursuing it had it not been for three tracks downloaded from AudioGalaxy.

I don't think any major-label solution is going to yield results like this. There are so many music lovers out there that are sick of radio, and smarter than advertising, and just want to find their own next big thing. Where are they going to hear it? Where would I have gone to realize that there are some other Japanese artists like Yukari Fresh and Takeko Minekawa worth checking into, and other similar ones to avoid?

Well, there are some answers. A nearby Barnes and Noble book/music store has started using a system (which I'm sure other stores use too) where you can listen to any CD in the store. It does this by streaming out a portion of each track. What's nice about the system is that it has many more CD's in its database than the store itself has. I've actually been using this in lieu of Audio Galaxy to check out some new artists. The trouble is, I can't download it.

But, looking at my habits, if I'm not going to buy it, I'm really just not going to buy it. If I listen to a segment at the record store and think "hmm, they really do sound nice" but am not compelled to buy, I'm not. It's the same way with a lot of downloaded music - it's nice to listen to, but not really worth that much to me. The upside of the downloadable is that it has a much stronger chance to grow on me if it's in my iPod and in the right playlist. Seriously - this is my version of commercial radio. With the ability to do this easily being pinched upon on all sides, I'm now less likely to hear something worth buying. And thus, I'm much more likely to get something out of the DVD section of the store instead of the CD section. To the music industry: you're not giving me enough perception of quality to buy on a whim, and you're not giving me enough channels to discover and enjoy new music in. And you're not going to get that much money out of me because you're just giving me less and less reasons to give it to you. And your so-called copy protection plans give me even less reasons. I'm still steaming from the extra fifty dollars I had to spend to get extra equipment to hook my DVD Player (playstation 2) up to my classic TV because I couldn't use the nicely available ports on my VCR (which was, at that time, the only way to get an outside signal into the television).

And I'm not looking forward to the day when I find an import of a Pizzicato Five DVD only to find that I can't play it on my Region 1 equipment. If CD's behaved like DVD's in regards to this "Region Encoding" crap, I'd have significantly less CD's on my shelves. And again, Music Industry, you'd have even less money from me and those like me.

So, you can keep going down the road you're going down, but stop your damn whining. It's your own fault that people are spending less on Music (well, you could blame the flooding of bad music into ALL markets, enough so that there's no perception of quality there either, and again - no good channels for people to discover new music any more. Which leads to further disbelief in your industries ability to make quality product that's worth paying for).

• The first rolls from the "LC-A" have been processed. Not all shots turned out - I kept forgetting about the focus switch - but most did. Sadly, Pictureline isn't expecting their shipment of Epson 2450 scanners in until Friday.
• Regarding the programming optimization thoughts - it doesn't look like I'll get to address this particular problem for some time as there are more other, more critical issues to deal with. And a new project has landed in my lap. I had hoped to share some results here, but it will be a couple of weeks at least.
• I'm still of mixed feelings about "Roundup", but my alternatives (Tracker, and an in-house project management system that's on indefinite hold dubbed cuejecture) both cause Python to dump core, and I don't have time to figure out why.

My new cameras arrived today, and already I've gone through two rolls (the seemingly prerequisite trial rolls). And I'm halfway through the roll of 120 film.

The Holga 120SF came in very bare packaging - a box that says camera, and a small instruction booklet, and this giant heap of plastic (since 120 film is medium format. 35mm is small, I suppose).I hope I got it loaded up right. I've got some black and white 120 film in there right now. It's very very easy to shoot over a picture (which can be nice in some instances).

The LC-A 35mm came in beautiful packaging - including two rolls of ASA100 film (apparently the LC-A gets its best colors on 100 film), and a small square hardbound book full of photos and austrian words (an accompanying book all in newsprint has translations, I believe). The camera was in a beautifully wrapped brick. The wrapping was just white paper with black string, and two stickers - one in the center with heavily inked serif letters stating the cameras name and operating temperatures with a purple-inked packaging date; and a small red sticker in the lower left corner stating made in russia. Underneath the wrapping paper, the plastic brick had another layer of wrapping - this time blue with red and yellow stamp art. Inside of that, was the plastic brick containing the camera. The bottom half was black, the top half clear, with half-stickers on the side with red-on-bronze text with the word "Lomo". The camera, batteries, and wristband were all inside wrapped nicely and tightly in tissue paper.

The Supersampler came in some pretty cool packaging as well - not as nice as the LC-A, but still nice.

And now there's the Pop 9 to get - a camera that takes nine identical pictures on a single 35mm frame. And Lomo's started offering the Loreo, a camera that takes 3D (Stereoscopic) pictures on normal 35mm film. I'm thinking, however, that the Loreo and the Holga are not Lomo products, but rather cameras that fit The Lomography Way. And these cameras seem to have some history of their own - many people I spoke to at local film shops/labs recognized the name Holga more than Lomo. What appears to be a new article calling the Loreo the Camera of the Month has no mention of Lomo anywhere in the article.

Still, these two cameras are on my wish list. Film rules.

I'm facing a nice little Python/Zope programmers dilemma. I have a critical "Zope" "Python" Script - Python code objects in Zope that are editable through the web, and are subject to being run in a "restricted mode" interpreter that enforces Zope security policies. It's quite long for a single script, weighing in at approximately 170 lines. But it does its job well, and is written with maintainability in mind (there's only one variable in there that I find non-obvious, and whose usage I might change).

Unfortunately, it seems to do its job slowly. I think there are a few contributing factors to this:

1. Restricted Python. I think the security overhead is slowing the execution down. In evaluating the script's code, it doesn't really need to go through this.
2. SQL Calls. There are a lot of calls into SQL Methods, both read and write. I'm not sure if this can be helped, or indeed is having any real noticeable effect on the speed.
3. Generating/Sending Emails. I think there might be an issue here. The MailDropHost Product by Jens Vagelpohl could help as it sends mail asynchronously.

With those points in mind, I've started tackling the first bullet by moving the code into an External Method, where it is not victim to the Restricted Python interpreter. As a bonus, the code can be checked into CVS. But now I face a new dilemma - inline or breakout?

Since the code was originally written as a Zope Python Script, it was one big inline piece of execution. Now that it's an External Method, I have the opportunity to refactor, and turn the code into a class/singleton wherein the code is broken out into methods that are executed in a certain order. My newer instincts are pulling me in this direction. But I know that it brings in new overhead to the code whose speed I'm already concerned about. Now, instead of dealing with restricted Python, I'd have to deal with a number of new function calls and name lookups. And, possibly, Thread Safety issues.

The code in question is very central business logic. In order of importance, it needs to be solid, maintainable, and relatively fast. It succeeds on the first two points (very solid, fairly maintainable). The third one is a matter of some debate, most of which is going on inside my head. Future writings in this space will look at the avenues explored and if they yielded any results.

I just purchased two more Lomographic cameras - the 35mm LC-A, descended from soviet spy cams, and the 120 film based Holga 120SF (with flash). These complement by SuperSampler, a cool little camera that takes four panoramic shots over a two second period (or 2/10 second if preferred) onto a single 35mm frame.

I'll be adding to this, most likely, with a decent photo print scanner. For about the same price as a good Digital Elph, I can get the hi-res scanner, and then use all of my growing camera collection. And still be able to use iPhoto to get a cool book of ultra-cool photographs. Digital be damned - there's no way a digital cam can be as fun as a Lomo! (who have just recently produced an underwear line using lomo photos..wow).

I spent some more time working with "Roundup" this morning. When you create a new instance, one of the files it generates is dbinit.py. dbinit.py contains code to initialize the database schema, and also contains an empty IssueClass class, subclassed off of the default roundup.roundupdb.IssueClass. I was able to take advantage of this to customize the emails sent out by "Roundup" to make them look a bit more like the ones sent out by Tracker (as mentioned in the "Python based Issue Trackers" post, Tracker generates the nicest emails of any issue tracking system I've worked with thus far).

I've been on one end or another of three Python based issue trackers lately - Tracker, its descendant, CMFCollector, and it's competition in the Software Carpentry contest, Roundup. And there's always something there to make me unhappy.

Tracker is one of the best issue trackers I have used. It's got a fairly solid user interface, a fairly solid built in Workflow, and hierarchical correspondence/state changing. It's one of the easiest web based issue tracking systems to use to follow the actual history of an item, and it's easy to see at a glance how actively an issue was discussed/reported on in the Tracker from the issue listing page. And Tracker sends out best emails of any bug tracking system I've seen. Sadly, it's pretty much dead (and in fact - it's been core dumping on my when I've attempted to use it with Zope 2.5.1 and Python 2.1.2/2.1.3). You can see it still in full action as the Tracker for the whole CMF project.

CMFCollector is its replacement. I don't like it as much. It suffers from a flat transcript (by default in a non-monospaced font) that is harder to follow than the system used in Tracker. And the UI - by default - just isn't quite as much there, although this may be due to the pretty basic (or just plain weird) default CMF Skins. The pretty-much-default CMF Collector setup can be seen in action at The Zope Issue Tracker. The Plone (a massive skin/layer for the CMF) varation can be seen in action at The Plone Issue Collector.

Roundup is not Zope based at all. It's a pure-python solution with a nice abstraction of layers (frontends/backends). It seems to be the most actively developed, but still feels young. Regardless of age, I've started installing it at work. The user interface is very basic (and kindof hard to read), and it suffers from the same flat-transcript issue that CMFCollector does. But it's fast, simple, and fairly solid. It has a few options for submitting/modifying issues - by email, by command line, and through the web. It can run as a standalone web server, as a CGI script, or through "Zope" via a frontend called ZRoundup. ZRoundup essentially passes and wraps Zope REQUEST data and passes it into Roundup, and returns the resulting HTML -- essentially a CGI-esque gateway for Zope. But it allows Roundup objects to be placed alongside other Zope content, like ZWiki's or just plain documents as part of a simple project management solution.

I miss Tracker. And CMFCollector isn't yet a worthy replacement for it. Roundup is small, fast, and looks to be broken out enough to be easily programmable. I may even look into getting involved with its development.