Another next big thing

OK, admitting defeat.

nospam@example.com (David Preece) — Tue, 17 May 2011 21:31:39 +1200

I haven't blogged for five months so I think it's time to officially draw a line under this and say so long, and thanks for all the fish.

It was (much) better when the planet.nztech.org aggregator was around. It fell over briefly for a month or so then came back online but now appears to have disappeared permanently. Blogging, now, is just too much like hard work - especially with Serendipity being such an utter and consistent pain in the arse, but mostly the site never really got any long term subscribers and I lack the time and 'voom' to breathe life back into it. Just too much like one had clapping but without the Zen.

If you've just arrived! I've now got a real, proper 'day' job with Weta Digital who absolutely rule; and the MixTape music software through Atomic Droplet is still going strong - more than I thought it would to be honest. I'm currently working on organising a revamp of the website, making the MixTape user community (because there actually is one) be much more visible and interconnected and as part of this I'll be running blog posts from myself and others ... so it's not like I'm off blogging forever, and I have an actual reason to be sending traffic that way.

Oh, you can catch up on twitter too - even I am on that now - grumpy curmudgeon that I am.

My favourite moments from blogging!

My first post was December 2006

Motorcycle adventures including my first track day, first measured quarter mile, first crash and the Bikoi.

Fixing the sunburst and again....culminating in WBBC trashing my boat, generally behaving like bastards and persuading me out of sailing forever.

Apple blatantly ripping off my UI.

My still strong feelings on beating children.

Becoming the #1 hit on Google for a mobile phone sold by Telecom - starting the review with the words "It's crap" and inadvertently becoming the support network for the phone in New Zealand as a result

Django hints and tips including 'creating a development https server' (3,500 pageviews) and iterating over a dictionary in django templates (26,000 pageviews and my most viewed blog post).

Directions on mounting Linux disks from OSX still get me "thank you" emails.

Correctly calling the end of the war for internet video - who would have thought Google would be attempting to restart it? BTW, I claim dibs on ARM based macs.

Going to Burning Man and the resultant life changing "OMFG".

Uniqlock which is still running OMG, what an incredible piece of work - see how the seconds and the beats of the music are sync'ed exactly?

Saying good bye to "Advertising" Atomic Droplet, a very dark period of my life ... and saying hello to "Music" Atomic Droplet and much happier times leading to MixTape's first release in June 2010.

The beat matching algorithm starting to come to life properly - little did I know I'd still be being tortured by the bloody thing ... months later

Clare and a seriously over-optimistic view of what was actually wrong with me and subsequent recovery period.

Hatsune Miko

And then nothing, for five months. So please, if you're here, check out some of what I did instead of spending time with my family (hehehe, sob sob sob) ... see Atomic Droplet still rocking along on the web, twitter or facebook ... or my personal account on twitter. But for now, that's it.

EOF

Oh ... my god. I wish I'd thought of this.

nospam@example.com (David Preece) — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 00:16:02 +1300

More proper technology. Words fail me.

Resignation letter of the week - Jane Diplock of the Securities Commission

nospam@example.com (David Preece) — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 21:02:08 +1300

Oh FFS.

Fundamentally, it's the directors who failed here.

Yes, we know. We have regulators to ensure that someone keeps an eye on them.

Ms Diplock also noted there had been a failure of the regulatory structures, and lessons had been learned from that.

The regulatory structures that you, Ms Diplock, were in charge of. What, exactly, are you paid for again?

Wow. That worked.

nospam@example.com (David Preece) — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 17:52:39 +1300

OK, so Google are getting really good at this. I wanted the number of the Thai takeaway in Kilbirnie so, rather optimistically, I typed "thai kilbirnie" into google and got....

It's real name, a map, their phone number and opening times all in the first hit. That's it, we're living in the future, it's official.

Pretty much in love with Pete's Acoustic Guitars in Petone

nospam@example.com (David Preece) — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 16:14:26 +1300

As per the title, Pete from Pete's Acoustic Guitars is a god who walks amongst us. I bought Zuni a guitar about 3-4 months back along with a pickup so we could record her aural awesomeness. However, I could never get it to work right with any of the three interfaces I tried and finally decided there must be a pre-amp problem of some description in there.

Along I go. We change the strings on two guitars and plug the pickup into his "desk" amp, it sounds fine. We plug it into my AudioFire, it sounds like arse. He fetches an active pickup and hooks it in, retunes the guitar, we spin up the interface and try again. No problem. Some slight debate over what I should pay and a number is proposed that I'm, actually, really happy with - especially considering I've tied the poor guy up for half the afternoon.

After sales service to die for. Nice one, Pete.

The IT industry confuses me.

nospam@example.com (David Preece) — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 10:24:42 +1300

We are living in the dark ages.

So today, a week or two after deciding that maintaining an entire JVM just for the mac was too much like hard work - which it is and I'm staggered that they were doing it - Apple and Oracle have had a kinda kiss and make up thing and Oracle are basically taking Apple's JVM and running things from here on out. Ahhhh, lovely - so an old, clunky language whose main application is in making clunky but reliable things for banks can continue to be developed on macs. Or something. Not that I want this to be taken as a Java rant - I actually think that for what it does it's pretty damn good. But then I don't have to use it.

Trademe is down because their hosting provider can't run a UPS. For god's sake.

And the mac press are all getting excited over an IMAP client that looks like a twitter one.

Meanwhile the Japanese are doing this:

And suddenly it looks like the western IT industry is full of people who have patented the act of weaving yarn so that those evil bastards making factories have no legal right to put their cottage industry out of work; that some of us work in windmills; that I tend a cart and horse ... and that 20,000 Japanese go to a holographic pop concert before teleporting home.

What is WRONG with us? HOW has such a brave industry become so bloody boring? Does nobody have any belief in anything any more? It's just madness.

ProTools 9 works with any hardware. Really.

nospam@example.com (David Preece) — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 14:39:01 +1300

It seems digi/avid/whatever have come down to earth (with a bump) and you can now buy ProTools that works on any hardware. $600, a hundred more than logic studio. They must be hurting over there...

Another retarded law

nospam@example.com (David Preece) — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 14:25:42 +1300

Oh look, it's Section 92A wearing a wig and fake moustache. And we get proper, international, several million hits per day level of coverage for having retarded laws, too.

For those sitting in MED - happily eating your muffins and having very jolly meetings - I would like to propose a legal principle: how about we have the burden of proof be on the accuser, hmmm?

Rumble in the Jungle

nospam@example.com (David Preece) — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 20:43:30 +1300

Props to Tommo from Bassdrop who has been running the Rumble in the Jungle drum and bass DJ competition for quite a while. I've had a couple of reasonably deafening nights out at this and now, with help from the 90 seconds crew we have ourselves a kinda micro-documentary of the event. No earplugs needed :)

AdWords is damn complicated

nospam@example.com (David Preece) — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 11:15:54 +1300

...but I think I get it now. tl;dr - google makes it the advertiser's problem to make their advertising relevant for the search terms in question. Gotcha.

WP7 announcement and "not getting it" as a corporate culture.

nospam@example.com (David Preece) — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 08:14:49 +1300

Today, Microsoft introduced Windows Phone 7 with these words:

Windows Phone 7: A Fresh Start for the Smartphone: The Phone Delivers a New User Experience by Integrating the Things Users Really Want to Do, Creating a Balance Between Getting Work Done and Having Fun

Doesn't it just roll off the tongue? Compare with Apple introducing the iPhone in 2007:

Apple Reinvents the Phone with iPhone

Edit: Lifted from daringfireball.

So, I bought an iMac

nospam@example.com (David Preece) — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 09:18:48 +1300

The (eventual) release of Apple's 27" cinema display led to some serious gadgetlust and a not baseless belief that my productivity would benefit from being able to keep lots more stuff on the screen at once. However, when push came to shove it became apparent that it wasn't going to be possible to hook it into my now clearly ancient MacBook Pro (which, actually, I was really very happy with - despite it being nearly four years old) and there was much bitching and whining. However, a quick look at the prices of iMacs and it becomes apparent that it's only another $1200 to have one that has a computer built in - and that computer would be heaps faster than my MBP. A little staring at benchmarks (an even more ridiculous one) was done and I found myself shelling out damn nearly four grand for a quad core i7. Good god, these guys can market.

Do I love it? Do I ever. The screen is huge, perhaps very slightly too large given that I wear glasses. It's bright and, being an IPS display, keeps it's colour at differing angles. It also does a reasonably good job of that "close to the surface of the glass" thing that the retina display does so well. Resolution at 2560x1440 is completely outrageous. BTW, I chose to not have the wireless keyboard instead choosing the "with keypad" keyboard for zero additional dollars (but none back, either).

Performance varies from pretty much what you'd expect (i.e. blocked around the disk) to just incredible under the right circumstances. I XBench'd all three machines on my desk at the moment and got the following results:

PowerMac (10.4) - Dual G4/500, 1GB, Radeon 9000 Pro - score: 21

MacBook Pro (10.6) - Core 2 Duo 2.16, 3GB, Radeon X1600 - score: 126

iMac (10.6) - Core i7 Quad 2.93, 4GB, Radeon 5750 - score: 228

So on the surface it appears nearly twice as fast as the MBP and around 10x as fast as my circa 1998 dual G4 but this is not quite all the story. HDD read performance has gone from 43MB/sec sequential and 21MB/sec random on the G4 (a bloody great result IMHO); pretty much exactly the same on the MBP; to 124/33 on the stock drive for the iMac. Obviously an SSD would bump these numbers significantly but I don't do a lot of HDD blocked work and neither am I going to hand over that kind of money.

Quartz performance went from 6610 alpha'd rects/sec on the G4 to 55100 on the MBP (yes, nearly ten times faster) 109610 on the iMac (twice as fast again). Note that the G4 actually has a newer than stock video card in it - mainly to support quartz extreme so the actual difference in quartz performance from the older to the newer machines is even greater than it looks.

Other "down to the metal" benchmarks show the system memcpy going from 242MB/sec to 2391MB/sec and 12596MB/sec on the i7. Yeah, I had to read that again too, they are right - quite possibly XBench fits entirely in the i7's 8MB level 3 cache. It's still ludicrously fast. Streamed memory copies go from 563MB/sec using Altivec on the G4 to 2391MB/sec on the Core 2 and 8240MB/sec on the i7. So the on-die memory controller in Nehalem was worth it, then?

Best of all is the time taken to actually do some work :) I did a build of MixTape and an incomplete run (I failed to symlink some directories or something) on the G4 took six minutes. The Core 2 got this down to 46 seconds (an actually functioning build, including the installer) and 12 seconds on the i7. Twelve - for both PPC and Intel, including building three frameworks.

So I guess a tl;dr history of the last ten years of mac development would say that the biggest speed bump came with the move to Intel and, in particular, Core 2. It also helped that this coincided with the meatiest bit of development in GPU's. Since then we've pretty much "only" scored a factor of two in the last five years or so although there are rich pickings to be had for applications that can keep their working sets small and make use of all those hardware threads. None of this should be news but it is interesting to see it happening on one's desk.

Oh, and there's a new build of MixTape that uses the display link for refresh and it looks beautiful on the iMac.

Exchange rate web service

nospam@example.com (David Preece) — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 20:37:39 +1200

My lord, that took a while, but an exchange rate service is provided by Bermilabs. All you do is call http://webservices.bermilabs.com/exchange/to/base where "to" is the "destination" currency and "base is the one you are starting in. For example:

curl http://webservices.bermilabs.com/exchange/nzd/usd
1.3364

EDIT: Where "works" means "give or take 25%". Damn.

MySQL vs Postgres

nospam@example.com (David Preece) — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 10:39:08 +1200

Not that I want to get involved in the murky world of database benchmarking, OK? But just as a datapoint I have a (django) unit test suite and I just ran it against an entirely default install of the current MySQL and an also entirely default and somewhat elderly install of Postgres (8.3.7). The MySQL run takes three minutes. Postgres, 21 seconds.

Now this might be because Django's ORM is in some way tuned towards Postgres - correct use of transactions and what have you - but even so.

Installing MySQL-Python under OSX 10.6

nospam@example.com (David Preece) — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 16:45:40 +1200

There is no excuse for using MySQL any more. Postgres is vastly better and the half lifetime I just lost doing this is proof evident of the fact but, right now, some nutbar psycho wants me to deploy onto MySQL and consequently I have to port some stuff to it (because My's date objects have no concept of time zone and so my existing code borks) and this means I need to set up a development environment for it because shoving hot pokers into my eyes was apparently not an option.

Let's say you've installed MySQL from Oracle's official disk image installer. You need to add the installed location to your $PATH manually. I just put this in my ~/.profile

export PATH=/usr/local/mysql-5.1.50-osx10.6-x86/bin/:$PATH

Now you will be able to download and build the MySQL python driver thingy with a traditional "sudo python.py setup.py install". Will further edit this post if it doesn't actually work.

Don't use MySQL.