I just turned on my computer and a new icon in systray drew my attention. Browser Highlighter, whatever that is, also appeared next to my search input in Firefox. As there was some easy way how to tell them (probably eBay) what I think of them, I did it on the home page of this software:

I’m extremely UNsatisfied to see this unexpected piece of SW on my computer after restart (in systray). I’m no user who just clicks OK on everything and I’m pretty sure this thingy appeared on my computer without any question (maybe Skype? I don’t know). While I had quite neutral position towards eBay until now, it changed instantly. I don’t know who is the sinner application – but you had to want to use this way how to come to users. That makes you/eBay/whatever one of those ugly companies that smuggle annoying widgets on one’s computer. Good work to let me spend some time just to uninstall it and completely dislike you on the way.

Best regards

Richard Richter

Now I feel better. Some people report that Skype installed it silently – I don’t know. Maybe I actually hit OK on some dialog I confirm often – maybe it was in Firefox and their extension list after update. That would make Firefox another software I should stop trust. (Not that it’s good to trust any software – said a software developer. ) But one thing is clear – I did nothing intentional to add it there – and that’s the only proper way how to get customers fairly.

It happens here and there that I want to register somewhere and I just give up after I find out their password policy. Thing is, I use generally 8 characters long password that are not easy to guess. I used much simpler passwords for web sites, but I reconsidered later. But on IBM’s dev-site (I don’t even want to search for URL ) I had to include number and omit some punctuation mark or even include some other. When something forces me to use number… OK, but why the hell they then tell me not to use different character? So it’s demanding and limiting at the same time. And no, I don’t use characters beyond 7bit ASCII as it is not usable in many cases.

Whatever… said I and I simply didn’t register on that site. It was too… IBMish anyway. I could find most of the downloads I needed elsewhere or – on one occasion – a friend of mine with existing account downloaded it for me. Where I didn’t give up yet I was more than disappointed with their policy it was community site for JBoss Seam. When you register or reset password there you have to enter 10 characters which is NOT indicated anywhere. When you enter password like “AtIny,yg.” (without quotes) it will tell you that your password is easy! It doesn’t tell you that the password is short. I reported this on their forums more than a year ago. Also if you’re lucky, the CAPTCHA you get to solve is pretty uneasy. On any site CAPTCHA could be easier if it states if casing is important, if there may be numbers, etc. When you see 5 random characters often in many font shapes it is pretty unclear if something is lowercase “g” or 9 (because there is no baseline in many cases).

But to stay on passwords and keep this article short. I have now very primitive password on JBoss Seam, yet when I return there once in a year I mostly have to reset it. Today I hoped they reconsidered – but no. My complex password was easy. But “0123456789″ is cool. Congratulations. As a final rant towards the page: They use their own Seam based forums, but there is no clear way how to search for two words so that results always contain both of them. Searching for “gwt upload” was pretty much the same like searching for “gwt” only. But maybe… maybe I’ll get at least direct answer for my question, which would mean that dealing with stupid password policies may be worth from time to time.

Už sa blíži čas, kedy skoncujem s RadioLANom, ktorým som nahradil SWAN s tým, že “tučnejšia” anténa (1Mbit len pre náš byt namiesto 512kbit pre celý vchod) bude lepšia aj za trochu vyššiu cenu (800 Sk, ak nemáte optiku v dome, nezabijete sa). O tom, že tento Internet absolútne nesplnil moje očakávania, čo sa týka hrania, a ak som si chcel niečo stiahnúť torrentom, bolo to skôr utrpenie ako funkčné – o tom som už písal. Medzičasom ich ponuka klesla z 800Sk na 20€, čo je príjemné (ak teda nemáte inú možnosť ) – to sa ale samozrejme mňa netýka, lebo som za 24-mesačnú viazanosť mal montáž zadarmo. Pri 24-krát 200Sk by som ale došiel približne k tomu istému výsledku. S jedinou výnimkou – okamžite po príchode Orange do baráku by som to zrušil. Samozrejme, Internet ide – to, že nespĺňa moje predstavy je jedna vec, to, že cez víkendy a niektoré večery zjavne nestíha asi samotný RadioLAN, je ťažko obhájiteľný dôvod na odstúpenie a 10 tisíc starých slovenských peňazí sa mi platiť naozaj neoplatilo.

Každopádne od 5.2.2008 sú dva roky za rohom, a keďže som čítal aj strašidelné príbehy o automatickom predĺžení zmluvy o dobu viazanosti od iných bratislavských poskytovateľov, bol čas zaujímať sa o výpoveď. Povedal som si… k 5.2. to nepôjde, ale tak k 28.2.2010 by sa to malo dať načasovať, prinajhoršom koniec marca, to prežijem. Na moju otázku, či to je OK, mi prišla dosť prekvapivá odpoveď. Ono vlastne 24 mesiacov je v skutočnosti vyše 26 mesiacov – lebo…

Počas doby akcie (áno, viazanosť za montáž je akcia, viď ponuka) nesmie klient podať výpoveď (áno, ani takú, ktorá by celý vzťah ukončila po práve 24 mesiacoch) – najskôr je možné podať výpoveď až v mesiaci po tom mesiaci, ktorým končí viazanosť. V mojom prípade je to samozrejme nie február (ani po 5.2.), ale až marec. Potom už je jedno, či výpoveď dostanú 1. marca alebo 31. marca, nakoľko bude plynúť do konca nasledujúceho kalendárneho mesiaca. Úžasné. Nechápem, prečo sú vo všeobecných podmienkach slušných firiem takéto body, ale jasne… už keď klienta máme, prečo ho neošklbať aj o ďalšie dva mesiace. V tomto prípade predsa dobre vieme, že už sa k nám nevráti. A tým, čo budú u nás dlhšie, tým to nevadí. Nemám ilúzie, že to je nejaká špecialita RadioLANu, asi to bude bežná prax všetkých poskytovateľov a operátorov. Ale prečo sa hovorí o 24 mesačnej viazanosti, keď sa to pod 26 mesiacov vlastne nedá stihnúť – to naozaj nechápem.

Každopádne – oplatí sa viackrát sa informovať, či sa do vašej lokality nechystá v blízkej dobe niečo rozumné (optika od ľubovoľného poskytovateľa), skôr ako sa pustíte do antény. Lebo anténa v Bratislave, nechcem generalizovať, cez to sa zatiaľ podľa mojich skúseností nedá poriadne hrať ani MMORPG (nemálokrát sme zomreli v dugeone len pre lag, pričom ostatní v skupine mali pripojenie v pohode), nieto ešte FPS, ktoré som zabalil krátko po prvých skúsenostiach. Úprimne ľutujem tých, čo potrebujú antény. Je to drahé, relatívne pomalé, kvalita je veľmi diskutabilná – a ak máte nejaké problémy, tak zväčša sa pravidelne opakujú. Pravda, v poslednom čase sa technici RadioLANu ozvali často rýchlejšie ako bola ich povinnosť, ale zase za 800Sk mesačne by som celý víkendový deň bez internetu ostať naozaj nechcel.

A nie, ani vyššia cena nehovorí o kvalite nič, pokiaľ sa pohybujeme v cenníkoch pre normálne domácnosti. Takže ešte osem mesiacov…

You have a company and you send newsletters to your customers, subsribers, whatever? I offer you easy way how to turn them into spam! Oh… you don’t want that!

It has been some time I’ve heard about Acclaim and their free-to-play MMORPG 9Dragons. I tried it, I didn’t like it so much so I quite playing the game. Long time before PWI – more than a year, maybe even two. I never received any emails from them – except maybe some registration that is deleted already – as I clean up my mails here and there.

I don’t mind, I was surprised (“what the hell is that?”) but then I recalled about the game and I consider it OK. I scrolled down… “unsubscribe, unsubs… there is no unsubscribe!” I don’t know what happens if you report the mail as a spam and you’re alone – it’s probably no big deal. I don’t know what happens when many people on Gmail do that. I guess that at least on Gmail future recipients wouldn’t see that mail in their Inboxes at all. Is that what you want?

I deleted it for now, next time forgotten service with their newsletter without unsubscribe option goes to Spam.

BTW: Please… don’t make me login (like some other service wanted me to) just to confirm that process. It means I have to request forgotten password first!

While my Steam client is turned on most of the time, I have also Impulse client that is mostly turned off. Last time I need is to have billions of game/SW delivery clients running at the same time. I run Impulse only when I play Sins Of a Solar Empire. I check up on weekend deals on both stores – for instance http://store.steampowered.com/ offers 66% off of all Half-Life titles this weekend! Too bad I have them already. Back to Impulse. I’m still in search for video editing software. My needs are simple and I currently evaluate Sony Vegas 9.1, but the time is running out. What I don’t like is that Sony is somewhat slow on my computer – I don’t know why. Otherwise I can do what I want with it, so far so good. I’m just not sure yet.

Impulse came with Corel products on sale – one of them Ulead Video Studio 11.5 Plus for 42,24€. “Hm, I never heard of this one.” So I googled reviews, they were generally positive although users reported crashes – now what do you do? I downloaded the demo to find out by myself. What I don’t like is when I can’t try exactly what I want – demo was Corel VideoStudio Pro X2 (version 12). Now how do I know what I get in 11.5 PLUS? There is some comparison chart on Corel’s site – during this process I found out that Corel itself offers the sale until August 30th – and that the Pro X2 version is available for $60. That is still very good price, let’s just check out if I can order it – you never know if they are willing to deliver it (even online only) to your country. This screen changed my decision in seconds:

Instantly I recalled my experience with EA Store. It has been two years I’ve registered on Steam and bought Orange Box and I still can imagine I want to install some part of it – why to keep it on disk all the time? Or install it on another computer. I didn’t even check what’s the default time frame for download in case of Corel – EA offered half-a-year. That’s ridiculous. I’m going to delete the downloaded demo of this video software right away and I say it loud and clear:

You know what, Corel? Fuck off… I’m finished with you for years at least. Doesn’t matter that I haven’t even started.

I can hardly believe that it’s almost a year I started to use Google Chrome browser! While I still use it at home I decided to switch back to Firefox at work – for a simple reason. Chrome is very stubborn when accessing https sites without proper certificate. We have a few on our corporate intranet and while I can simply accept any certificate forever with Firefox, it’s not so easy with Chrome. I’ve found some blog posts how to import certificate permanently in Windows, but somehow I failed to do so (maybe I messed up, maybe something else is wrong). I like to tweak things, but sometimes I’m just lazy to fix things that should be easy. That are easy somewhere else with something else. Like Firefox in this case.

I still use Google Chrome at home though, but I’m closer and closer to abandon it there as well. Do you use Google Docs? I do. When I open the document (I write now), I click on its title, little dialog box appears with the label “Enter new document name:” and the input box with the title of the document. It seems to be selected, so CTRL+C, go somewhere else, CTRL+V and guess what appears: “Enter new document name:” Hm, strange… I go there again, I select few characters from the title, copy/paste… again, the same result. I found out when I wanted to copy title to the WordPress. But I clearly remember it to work! But yeh, wait… in which browser? In Firefox it works like a charm. Well not a charm actually, it simply works like it SHOULD in the first place.

Last problem I have with Google Chrome is more technical and is related to Google Web Toolkit we started to use. Biggest trouble here is that I probably have to tackle this one but so far I’m stuck without any idea. If you’re not a programmer, stop reading and consider the article finished. If you are…

GWT compiles Java code to JavaScript which means you can write an application in Java (Google’s special libs) and then run it in the browser as a nice rich application with AJAX support and much more. You can load the resulting JavaScript on the HTML page and it works somehow. Now I wanted to generate HTML page with JSF/Facelets and power the server-side with JBoss Seam. Resulting HTML page is exactly the same, HTTP response headers are a bit different, but nothing serious. The application works fine in Firefox, IE, anything… except Google Chrome where it throws funny exception:

Uncaught TypeError: Object #<a Document> has no method 'write'

The script with the problem is generated and this particular part is some service stuff – not the result of my Java code. Problem is on the third line here:

function computeScriptBase(){
var thisScript, markerId = $intern_8, markerScript;
$doc.write($intern_9 + markerId + $intern_10);

Now how can anyone starting with GWT probably resolve this? Honestly I have no idea what is happening there and why it works fine in anything but Google Chrome. Now I hosted the SAME script in plain HTML, I ran telnet to my application server and this is how it looks (uff, now I had a problem to copy/paste this as well as it removed all my new lines from a plain text – in Chrome, so I’m now finishing it in Firefox ):

$ telnet xxx 8080
Trying xxx...
Connected to xxx.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET /comasutra/main.seam?cms HTTP/1.1
Host: xxx:8080

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
X-Powered-By: Servlet 2.5; JBoss-5.0/JBossWeb-2.1
Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=8727F8532EA49A8FAB7E967245D5F27C; Path=/comasutra
X-Powered-By: JSF/1.2
Content-Type: text/html;charset=UTF-8
Content-Length: 823
Date: Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:39:07 GMT

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd" >
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
 <head>
 <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
 <meta name="gwt:property" content="locale=sk" />
 <title>Comasutra</title>
 <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css" media="screen" />
 <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="cms/cms.nocache.js"></script>
 </head>
 <body>
 <iframe src="javascript:''" id="__gwt_historyFrame" tabIndex="-1" style="position:absolute;width:0;height:0;border:0"></iframe>
 <div>
 </div>
 <div>
 <h1>Main page</h1>
 <div>
 <h2>Articles</h2>
 <div id="cms-c1"></div>
 </div>
 </div>
 </body>
</html>

GET /comasutra/bubu.html?cms HTTP/1.1
Host: xxx:8080

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
X-Powered-By: Servlet 2.5; JBoss-5.0/JBossWeb-2.1
Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=650F5FDDED9EC66D0C810B6C2D69B1CC; Path=/comasutra
Accept-Ranges: bytes
ETag: W/"823-1249478709000"
Last-Modified: Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:25:09 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 823
Date: Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:48:29 GMT

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd" >
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
 <head>
 <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
 <meta name="gwt:property" content="locale=en" />
 <title>Comasutra</title>
 <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css" media="screen" />
 <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="cms/cms.nocache.js"></script>
 </head>
 <body>
 <iframe src="javascript:''" id="__gwt_historyFrame" tabIndex="-1" style="position:absolute;width:0;height:0;border:0"></iframe>
 <div>
 </div>
 <div>
 <h1>Main page</h1>
 <div>
 <h2>Articles</h2>
 <div id="cms-c1"></div>
 </div>
 </div>
 </body>
</html>
Connection to xxx closed by foreign host.

Just to be complete: We use JBoss Seam 2.2.0.CR1, JBoss AS 5.1.0.GA, GWT 1.7, Windows XP SP 3, Google Chrome 2.0.172.39.

Obviously, the first GET request is JSF/Seam one, the other one uses plain HTML. HTMLs are exactly the same, headers are different. I don’t know if subsequent request for “cms/cms.nocache.js” is different, but the whole thing blows out in the JS execution after all. I really don’t know where is the problem. And I’m quite sick to even have a problem like this. Maybe it’s not the Chrome only, maybe it’s the JS engine. Will I have the same trouble with Safari on Mac? I don’t know because I can’t try it any time soon. But in the end there are more little usability problems with Chrome than I expected. I’ll probably give it a try again after some update, but for now I’m switching my default browser back to Firefox. And I’ll probably have to add a note that “this application is not supported in Google Chrome”. I’d be ashamed, but I’m rather pissed off really.

Time for a post about movies again! When I played one online game I talked a lot with a clever girl that taught me a lot about the game. And we discussed the life too and so we got to the fact that she liked girls. Not that it is important but it made sense that she recommended me two movies – Bound and But I’m a Cheerleader. Both are about lesbian girls and while in Bound it’s not really the most important part of the plot in Cheerleader movie it’s all about it. I saw Bound some time ago and I watched the latter just the other night. Maybe I wouldn’t have gotten to this post if I hadn’t cried at the very end of it. The fact itself amused me – I’m not one of those hard men who never cry, I cried lately even hearing one beautiful song (and not even for the first time). I cry at the end of the movie here and there, Hollywood is good at it after all, and there are topics I simply can’t resist. Mostly naive, romantics, but it’s not that often. Kate and Leopold for instance didn’t drive me to tears although I like it and the happy end was definitely nice. I can’t explain when and why it happens, it simply happens sometimes.

Let’s discuss Bound first – no crying part here. You can read the plot on IMDB, so I’ll not focus on it. There are two girls that happened to be neighbors. They are quite different and their common ground is obviously their mutual attraction and later their plan to gull a mafioso – partner of one of them. There is a cool erotic scene with two girls that doesn’t involve any stupid covers up to their necks. But otherwise it’s semi-thrilling story that reminded me The Sting with the idea – but you may find it different entirely. Doesn’t really matter. What’s interesting about the movie is that it’s made by Wachovski brothers – three years before their Matrix. I’d say you can see it on the visual style too – but it’s easy to see what you want when you already know who made it. Plus I’m rather unaware of the artistic style unless it’s really striking. The atmosphere of the movie sucks me in if the movie is OK or better but I don’t notice there is a different filter on the camera for instance. To wrap it up – Bound is cool movie and I recommend it to general audience, it has fine plot with a scam that doesn’t go exactly as planned but you can expect happy end. Nothing about meaning of life though. Who wants to watch the philosophical and difficult stuff all the time after all?

But I’m a Cheerleader is different kind of movie. It’s a bit bizarre and surrealistic – mainly on the artistic style that is intentionally full of synthetic colours and scene sometime looks more like for a fairytale. Edward Scissorhands came to my mind. It definitely wasn’t so pink and blue though. So the cheerleader girl is suspected to be a lesbian by her boy, friends and parents and sent to a homosexual deprogramming camp called “True Directions”. The whole story is half-half funny and romantic – although the topic is quite a serious one. I like the construction of those ex-ex-gays and the idea of the whole lying game in order to get out of the camp – but after graduation. Mostly for the sake of their parents, but sometimes even themselves were convinced they have to change. Again – our main hero, cheerleader, is attracted to other girl that is completely different, attraction is mutual and there is happy end, although there is no scam this time. What made me cry was the final kinda desperate attempt of our cheerleader to convince the girl of her choice – and of course the result too. But I’m a Cheerleader is movie I find hard to generally recommend because it’s so over-played, over-coloured and exaggerated – probably for the idea of “healing gays”. But if you are open minded give it a try. It’s not even long after all.

“5-6-7-8 God is good, God is straight!”

So that’s me crying for two lesbians in the movie. Doesn’t really matter that I’m straight like the aforementioned God in the song the Cheerleader has to write in order to fight her direction. The story is about two people who fight the odds, it’s naive – and man, if something is naive, I simply love it. Not naive as stupid, but naive as nice. And if I hadn’t met one nice girl I probably wouldn’t have seen these movies. Whatever direction she had. Maaan… I didn’t wanna by philosophical by no means.

This is not a real review, it’s rather personal experience and it’s based on some very specific needs and starting points. We needed sorta Content Management System for our customer, nothing big, nothing complicated, just some articles, personal blogs, 4 authors total I guess. And then there are those parts that are not from the CMS world. Some kind of online auction. Simply put – there is also something like custom application. Not big, not difficult, but it should be integrated into the site and – in the best case – users of this application should be the same as CMS users – just with some other roles. Is it extended CMS? Is it custom site with CMS features? Whatever… I had to search for a solution from the CMS world that is easy to grasp, extensible… bla bla. That sort of things. FAST evaluation. You can imagine.

I’ve read some reviews and than I started with Alfresco. Installation (bundled with appserver/webserver) was OK, but I somehow didn’t get it. It’s also more than CMS so it seems, which made it too complex for our needs.

Magnolia, installation OK, seems OK, admin is nice – but after another restart it was not working, admin showed login screen on the main part of the screen, I could recursively enter Admin tool stacking menus on the left. Maybe bad luck, but I left the Magnolia right away. I really didn’t mess with it. It worked, I turned off the computer, returned after the weekend and after application server launch – it went bad. Maybe the Magnolia was sad to be alone during the weekend, I don’t know. I also wasn’t able to find out how I can access the public site. I want some public site, something the guest can see, and I can edit (in-situ or via admin section, whatever). I quickly went through manuals, but either I searched wrong or what… never mind, next.

InfoGlue, installation OK, admin is kinda from early 2000, don’t know how to get to the public page (again!). I felt dumb. I know I don’t understand CMS, but why I can’t get to page my visitor will see in a quick manner?

Next two candidates were OpenCms and dotCMS. On a first run I skipped these because of not exactly trivial installation (no unzip-run bundle). I remembered I kissed a girl and I wasn’t sure if I liked it – but I didn’t listen to that warning. And then the sex wasn’t any better. For that I’m willing to bother with complicated installations as a last resort unless someone recommended the solution (personally). First kiss (installation experience) must be smooth!

Next… Jahia, installation OK, after that I can finally see some public page! After logout it’s more difficult though. Trouble here was the pricing. It really is quite serious for commercial usage, starting at roughly 2k EUR. That would be too much for our little site and customer’s budget. Too bad, Jahia seemed really cool! For non-commercial usage I’ll probably return to it.

This was the time when I risked a little PHP detour with Joomla! (exclamation is part of the name) – it was OK, but than I went through the idea of mixing Java application into PHP – with the same user base… hardly possible (only on DB access base, hard to cache, too many problems!). Otherwise it’s cool and definitely refreshing after previous Java experiences. Again – I could quickly see how visitors see my page. Somehow this became my favourite requirement. For any simple site (personal for instance) I want to edit without messing with HTML (I can write HTML code – of course!) I’d go for Joomla!! (Remember, first exclamation mark is part of the name. )

Running out of options I installed dotCMS after all… and maybe I’ll try to go beyond not-so-perfect kissing with girls the next time as well. It felt better than previous products, but when I wanted to add blog post without proper relation, error message was really confusing. Also the switch to edit mode was unintuitive because ordinary access to the page always opened the edit sidebar and I wasn’t able to get rid off it (no, logout is not the answer I’m looking for). Documentation would probably help, but… I guess easy things should be easy and content should be editable on place like in Joomla – of course not only, but optionally. Still one of those better CMS for someone who is not CMS expert. Maybe.

Time to install OpenCMS as well. The results were quite similar to dotCMS but I didn’t dig deep enough this time because suddenly I had some spare time to do other things as well. And I decided that I have enough of all CMS solutions. I seemed to me that these solutions are meant for companies who need CMS for their own needs, not for companies delivering sites with CMS features. Nor Wiki or pure Blog are good enough either – although the blog idea is quite close.

I’m really lazy to study things so it seems. It’s only half of the truth because when something grabs me I can devote the time to it. But as a CMS outsider I have to say – nothing really grabbed me. If something it was PHP. Is there any good Java-based CMS? I don’t know – probably yes. But I can’t go through them all. I read the blogs, I searched for the stuff, maybe I was unlucky, the result is… well, I’m a programmer. So yes, I’m creating CMS functionality now – half/half for fun and for work. Because I know a few things for sure. When you want to bend a wheel, sometimes it’s easier to do so with the wheel you invented. Life is full of sayings and truths – but no truth is universal after all. I am probably mistaken with my current stand, but it’s hard not to be when you lack the proper experiences. At least I’ll learn some new technologies along the way. And I’ll not fight other’s solutions (however great they are) but I’ll do what I like – software development. That’s also something.

Not that I write continuation of the personal log every time Federer wins a Slam title, but after dramatic final of the Wimbledon it really happened. (Just another instant classic after last year final? ) Fifteen and counting so it seems.

I wanted to confess that I stopped using Linux on my computers. I still have out of date Ubuntu on my desktop, but I can’t remember last time I used it. I went for Windows XP after all those Linux years, because I play more games now than ever. Video and music processing is also better supported on Windows – more software to choose from, VST support, etc. Seriously, why to use Wine just to pretend I’m not using Windows, right? Of course – anytime I have to work in command line in Windows, it’s real pain in the ass. When I changed my old computer at work for Lenovo T500 (with some troubles though) I decided to go for Windows XP only and in order to have some Linux I searched for some virtual machine solution. Friend of mine recommended VirtualBox and I was satisfied! It worked nicely, there was some trick with virtual folder name (try different name then the directory name if you have problem, or something like that ), but after just a few hours I had nice Ubuntu machine for development tasks that required Unix tools, strong command line and all the rest you don’t have in Windows for free. Of course, performance was… virtual. But if you want to try some virtual machine software, I strongly recommend this one. Documentation is OK, not too much to drown in and I found everything important there.

What I can’t understand is SVN Tortoise client. It’s absolutely great tool, looks nice, integrates to contextual menus for files, etc. So far so good. But when you want to check modified files to find out what is not added to repository (and should be) or when you want to commit, the view shows you either only managed files or all files recursively – there is no way that non-managed directory is just reported without the complete sub-tree. Compare this to default CLI functionality of the svn st command. Man I miss that so much! But not that much that I plan to setup my system PATH and run the all-time-looser “cmd” to use it.

There is one more thing I dislike on Windows. I alt-tab a lot, I’m of those erratic guys. And sometimes I alt-shift-tab back too. Sometimes, when I depress these keys in a wrong order, Windows is strongly convinced I wanted to switch the keyboard layout (alt-shift). Trouble is, there is limited amount of options (keyboard shortcuts) to do so, this one is clearly the best. I should probably download some tool just do switch between keyboard layouts. Slovak keyboard is not good for coding really. Enough Windows rant for now.

I bought a new guitar! I have infamous Behringer’s V-Tone pack – because it was cheap and I was young(er) and uninformed when I bought it. The price was good, amplifier is good, guitar is… well, it’s some kind of Strat and it is possible to play on it. Now I know there are better options in the same price tag (not too many though), but what’s done is done. To have at least semi-decent guitar I bought French LAG AM100:

Black beauty!

It looks cool, it’s Superstrat, it is something different than the Strat, so I might actually also learn more about guitars per se. It was priced 356€ but in a massive sale action I acquired it for 156€, why not? I actually didn’t know what to buy as I also wanted some Ovation, but I decided to buy the best value from whatever I wanted. Funny sale strategy when you learn prices only on site. Even before I bought it I had started to learn some scales and other stuff to enhance my play. Chords, rhythm, no problem, but I wanted to go on after a long stagnation – and with better guitar it’s even more fun!

Is the guitar good? More people claim it’s a good value even for the original price, so I guess I wasn’t wrong with my buy. Quality is OK, but I honestly can’t judge guitar when I can’t compare it. Maybe later I’ll write more on the guitar, trouble with LAG is that they have no official English site (as a manufacturer, not as reseller), forums are dominated by French language, no real documentation for newbies like me. So I have to rely on other forums, other people and learn the rest by myself. Of course, when I just play on it, there is no problem, but you know… when you have a new toy, you want to play with it even more. Tune it (later probably, and I don’t mean just strings now), understand it. However, enough for this time – I need to practice!

Behringer UCA202 (see product page or little video introduction) is a neat little box that’s plugged into your mixer (or whatever else in the analog signal realm) via two pairs of RCA cables and than it has another USB cable to your computer. With ASIO drivers you can see it in your favourite DAW and record sounds going into the UCA202 or send master via the same box out (to monitor via your mixer for instance). Simply put – it’s USB Audio Interface. It has absolutely awesome price – you can probably buy it under $30, I bought it for 34€. Obviously in this price tag you can expect some cons. First are pretty obvious – it’s only USB 1.1 which probably determines the sampling frequency (max 48kHz) and bit resolution (16 bit for every channel). And it’s stereo, no multi-input. But hey, that’s CD quality (48kHz is actually a bit better), it’s low latency device, so what do you want for that price?

Well, there is one twist I’ve discovered after some time. I wanted to practice an electric guitar, so I started REAPER, loaded some jam track in it started a playback. Immediately I noticed some signal on a guitar track (that was armed for recording) – signal that wasn’t there before. Now I thought that my out and in ways are well separated, I suspected that maybe it’s a problem in mixing console (also Behringer and also budget solution). But after some time of connecting and disconnecting various cables I found out the sinner. Even when UCA202 is plugged only to the computer (no RCA cables in or out) it sends part of the output back to the input. I’ve found some measurements for this box here and we discussed the issue with author of the blog where this comparison is linked – see the post and the discussion. Funny thing is that stereo crosstalk on the output is lower than this leakage into input. That probably means that there is some design flaw on the board – or maybe in some chip, I really don’t know.

Does it mean that UCA202 is unusable? Well – no. But you should know how much of the monitored music will go into your recorded track. In my case it’s quite alarming -48dB at 100Hz (which is normal frequency for bass, kicks, etc.). Other man mentioned -50dB and Behringer’s support confirmed -58dB. You can actually fight it pretty easily – just lower your master when you record. The unit has quite strong headphones output, so you can monitor there or further amplify your headphones on a mixing console. In that case you can get another 10-20dB which should be OK. But this fact is clearly the biggest flaw of the unit in my eyes. I can live with the CD quality, but this really affects my recorded track. It’s good to know.

Today I was also informed that UMA25S has the same problem like UCA202. I didn’t know what UMA is so I went to check it out and it’s basically like their former UMX25 (25 midi keyboard with some freely assignable knobs, when your SW can support it) but with USB audio interface actually built-in (UMX has UCA202 in the package). It’s a great idea – probably not their, but I just never thought of that before. So you have one unit with only one USB to your computer and then those RCA connectors on the Midi keyboard plus there is a headset and cool bag. Now I sound like an agent… but hey! Obviously the USB audio unit in the UMA25 has the same problem, which is kinda sad. And it’s still only USB 1.1. Man – imagine M-Audio AXIOM 25 with USB audio device built-in. But then… you still can buy two units – each making what you really want. But UMA25 is a great combo in one peace in case you’re starting with home recording. There is a good video review on this unit.

And the point? I would never expect this kind of problem – however cheap the unit is. It’s probably some design flaw that wasn’t thought of, because it’s crazy if you hear more from let’s say left output on any input than on the right output (that would be stereo crosstalk, right?). It’s unlucky that these Behringer’s units suffer from this (the real values vary piece to piece probably) but you can still use that “lower-your-master” workaround and the price is very interesting. But if you’re willing to pay more, go for something better – and maybe find out information about this kind of crosstalk too. Good luck with your home recording.

This time I wanna reference my double-episode about Reaper. It’s really just a quick introduction because it’s not possible to cover any DAW in under 16 minutes, but I wanted to show how to approach some basic tasks in REAPER. Both videos were made with version 2.5x and it was just a few days before Reaper 3 was released. However all covered topics are still valid. In the first video I talk about multi-track recording, how to arm the track, select input… and similar things that are a bit different from Audacity that was covered in first two episodes. I demonstrate how you can record multiple audio tracks and midi tracks at once – something you can’t do with Audacity. Then I quickly go through MIDI editor (which is overhauled in version 3) and I show how to quantize recorded MIDI events:

Episode 3 – REAPER introduction, device setup, recording multiple tracks

Second video (sounds more sleepy as the night was closing in ) continues with applying VST effects on a track, than I show how to use VSTi (instrument) to synthesize MIDI tracks and then I move on to envelopes. First I edit volume envelope to achieve fade-out on the track and I explain how to edit envelope with mouse during the process. There are other ways how to edit envelope, you can even record the envelope using MIDI CC (continuous controller). Last example shows how to change a tempo of the song. This is very useful if you want for instance slow song with faster intro or the other way around. When you do things like this, you should plan your song before you record audio tracks, because while MIDI tracks respect the tempo, audio tracks are based on real time. This means that when you change the tempo of the song audio tracks go out of sync.

Episode 4 – REAPER and VST, VSTi and some playing with envelopes

I mentioned (in the video) that I use free VST(i)s. That’s obviously because I’m tight on budget – I can buy things, but music is only my hobby, results are still not convincing and there is no point in spending hundreds of bucks on great VSTs. Would they pay off in my case? Certainly not! I mentioned Kore Player in the previous blog post about this topic. This time I’ll mention few of my other favourite VSTs. If you have a hint, or a link to something better – don’t hesitate and post a comment! Blue Cat’s Freeware plugin pack is a nice pack of effects like chorus, flanger or phaser, but there is also spectrum analyzer added in. Another pack of VST effects is provided by mda here – and mda also offers VST instruments – synths and pianos. Not that bad for no money! Finally there are ndc plugs – site with some interesting multi-purpose VST plugins. From them I want to recommend ndcMIDI that can be used to split midi keyboards for instance. With MIDI filter you can allow only some parts of the keyboard to be passed to VSTi synthesizer and when you do so with multiple MIDI tracks you can split your keyboard between various instruments ad lib!

I’ll talk more about interesting free VST(i) plugins also in the following parts, it’s impossible to cover it all – today I named only a few packs with wide range of usage.

I’m not sure if I should add “(1)” into the title or not but let’s deal with the content first – before I decide to write another personal log. I just feel like to write something from my everyday life. Yet not so everyday, because today it finally happened – Roger Federer matched Pete Sampras with his Grand Slam titles + he completed career Grand Slam. In open era only Rod Laver and Andre Agassi did that before – and only Andre (and Roger now) on three different surfaces (on the other hand – Rod did it in one year and so he is the only man with the true Grand Slam in open era).

Funny – I became Roger’s fan when his star seemed to diminish. I didn’t care about tennis that much – mostly because of the lack of TV in my household. In 2005 I somehow accidentally saw him winning the US Open against Agassi (who also handed him Roland Garros trophy today!). Later I started to watch him in 2007 which was his last domination year. In 2008 he left the first place to Nadal who waited for this for a long time (just another statistical record) and barely managed to stay #2 – mostly because the mononucleosis in the start of the year. At least he won US Open (again ). However 2009 doesn’t look so bad at all! Nadal showed hell of a fight in Australian Open and he is now clearly all-around player (after winning Wimbledon 2008 and hard court AO 2009 who can doubt it?). Roland Garros seemed to be ill-fated for Federer, but he managed to win it – while the biggest favourite lost to Robin Söderling who managed to pull it through to the final. And lose against Roger Federer. Who knows how it would end against Nadal. Nadal lost last clay final to Federer though – but it was only best of three and French Open – that’s just completely different motivation. Whatever the Roger’s way to this success was – he is there – between those few who won each of Grand Slam titles. Congratulations.

As a funny addition – here is a vid with some Barca fan entering the court during today’s match

But tennis is not the only thing I live with. To make the post rather shorter I’ll touch other things sort of telegraphically. I mentioned REAPER digital audio workstation (DAW) in my previous posts (and also in my YouTube videos I wanted to wrap-up here). Big thing is that REAPER v3 was released. Actually it’s 3.02 currently – which is a good thing because Cockos (developer of the software) started to fix things quickly. If you’re in music business (especially home recording/computer based recording with strong emphasis on audio+MIDI), you should try Reaper because it’s slick, small, fast yet powerful DAW. I also found incredible VST instrument… more than that actually. Free Kore Player by Native Instruments along with their free Kore Soundpack Compilation Vol.1 is something you simply have to have (yes, I know the registration and activation process is annoying, but it’s worth it). I found some great sounds there, one patch with rock drums (through 6 octaves, 3 full sets!) and another Latino drums – and much more!… man, this is incredible deal for 0 money and I’m happy that NI supports also music fans who can’t afford expansive solutions – or maybe just wanna taste how it is to do some music and not make living of it.

Other than that? Well, business as usual, socialists took the most EU parliament chairs in for our country. I’ll just pay my taxes on, with thieves like our Slovak non-liberal, private-equity-backed socialists I’m pretty sure my money won’t get to poor people anyway (not in the same extent like it did with rightists, which is funny paradox). And maybe people will see one day. I don’t care anymore – although elections are my sacred obligation. World-wide crisis is far from over, well – I rather care about present and little things around. My wife, my son… or my tortoise (see it how it can flip from its back!). Or Roger’s triumph on Roland Garros for that matter.

Well and now I should finally do something about JavaSimon or its second version will never reach final. So see you later.

I’d like to interconnect my YouTube creations with this blog – so this time we’ll be talking about home recording with Audacity. It’s by no means Audacity tutorial – I just want to introduce Audacity and also demonstrate its limitations when you wanna enter the realm where acronyms like VST, MIDI and ASIO rule it all. I have also found out that it’s easier to talk English above beer than to produce the video in English language (don’t forget – I’m a Slovak ). I grew fond of short cuts (or cross-fading cuts of my longer speech that wasn’t that good) and it is generally a lot of trying for me. And I expect the viewer to be a bit tolerant to my faults. I came to the conclusion that I should rather write a script before but I’m just way too lazy to do so. However… back to the Audacity.

WTF is multi-track recording? How to plug the microphone into the computer? Newbie warning! (If you know it all watch it only at your own risk or for fun. )

First video is just the introduction to a very, very raw way how to get your sound into the computer via soundcard with 1/8″ jack (I meant 3.5 mm, but you know… imperial units are still often used in this world) – that is via typical microphone input available virtually on every computer. When you have a better microphone with XLR connector, you might end up with XLR on the other side of the cable or with 6.3 mm jack (1/4″). In any case you need a converter, jack-jack (in both size directions) are pretty common, XLR-jack is also possible but it’s another complication. Now imagine we have a (semi) serious microphone plugged into the computer (without preamp! It’s a Sin!) just to use my few bucks “Skype” microphone for the rest of the show and to introduce the Audacity.

With this setup I made my first songs – and of course the quality was poor. I’m still not too close to optimal home recording quality, but Audacity with microphone via soundcard is really rather just an emergency solution. However – it works, you can experiment and it does not cost you anything. Except the microphone and the computer of course. And whatever instrument you want to play. Later you find out that it’s not easy to record multiple tracks in sync (unless you’re really very lucky). That’s caused by so called latency. And latency is the core of the second video with Audacity as our main hero:

Audacity, latencies and ASIO. And when we’re talking about Steinberg also some VST is mentioned. In theory.

This time I added intro – it was made in REAPER. “Lead guitar” is actually played on MIDI keyboard and heavily edited later (read: corrected ) and I also played a bit with the pan envelope (don’t worry, we might talk about it next time). The rest is mostly about latencies with some conclusion about Audacity in context of ASIO and VST usage. I don’t like the heavy sound of my computer you can hear all the time in the background, but you have to live with that until I buy some other microphone (probably some Koss headphones with microphone on it). I don’t wanna use dynamic microphone shown in the first episode because it’s not that handy. Maybe next time I’ll come up with better setup. Currently I’m not able to get playback from software into the captured video but maybe I’ll overcome it somehow later.

I have also next two videos uploaded already – they are just a short introduction into REAPER and I’ll cover them in some future post. I don’t want to continue in Reaper tutorial, but I wanted to introduce the DAW before I move on to hardware I use. The goal is to cover home recording on extremely tight budget (understand 500-1500 EUR or USD, choice is yours) so don’t expect miracles. But the time is right and it’s really easy now to have a reasonable home recording solution for the price of your choice. To add one more link, there is really awesome and extensive Guide to the Home and Project Studio by Tweak. Funny that I found it after I knew some of those answers (but far from even half of them). Sometimes it’s hard to find a guide when you actually don’t know what to search for. Isn’t it Ironic?

This post is actually immediate continuation of my previous problem – it just took me some time to get to it. After all my troubles with wannabe-freewares I got to the ZAR – or Zero Assumption Recovery software. While the software itself is not a freeware it has a free functionality. Luckily for me it was exactly that one I needed – image recovery from raw filesystem. I installed it on aforementioned Lenovo T500 I recently acquired at work and gave it a try. Many pictures were saved but not the ones I needed. Actually very old images were recovered. Than I discovered that whatever I do ZAR always reads only first 3.55 GB of the flash card. “Hm, wait, that’s strange!” One look to the Total Commander – right it reports 8GB card. I don’t know why I checked Windows format utility – but it wanted to format the drive only to 3.55 GB – so obviously ZAR wasn’t the only one “wrong” here.

Long story short. T500 card reader is either faulty or wrong drivers are installed or I don’t know what. I tried to reinstall drivers from Lenovo site, no luck – card was still only 3.55GB. I tried the card in my colleague’s T400 – it worked just fine! (I mean really worked as 8GB, not as it seemingly worked in my computer only to read garbage.) I couldn’t find help on Lenovo forums (yet, but after a few days the post is too low to anyone care) and I actually found out that many people have surprising amount of various problems with something I wanted for the quality. My T500 actually has also tricky fingerprint reader that sometimes gets stuck and reports “too short” swipe every two seconds or so and it’s close to impossible to enter the password. Not to mention very weak USB (I mean my wife’s Asus can power MIDI keyboard and USB audio interface better) – all three of them within 2-3 cm on one side. The computer is not THAT bad – it has actually pretty cool reviews (that affected me in my choice) – but I expected less problems for the money. Now I have notebook that looks solid (“you have a Thinkpad!”), has a nice display (1680×1050 in my case, love that) and… that’s about it. But I didn’t want to write about my disenchantment of the notebook initially.

I wanted to recommend you ZAR in case you need to recover your data from the filesystem!

And my pictures? I inserted the card into the reader we have on Epson Stylus Photo RX585 and recovered every single image I thought was lost. In addition to this adventure (that ruined one half of my day and made my day afterwards) I found out how pictures are written on the card and that they use all the capacity even when I delete them every time I download them to the computer. I don’t know if it’s FAT feature (never knew about it), I doubt camera can manage it under the filesystem level – and I don’t care really. Important thing is that the card is used nicely considering limited number of write cycles. I know, I know – I wouldn’t reach the limit even if only the first portion of the card was overwritten again and again. I just like it as it is.

I have a bad day today. I pulled SDHC card out of my digital Canon and put it into my Lenovo T500 to move photos on the disk. MOVE. After that I found out that there are some files of various lengths with proper names. But none of them was proper JPEG file. Except one that contained three fourths of some old picture deleted long time ago. In a panic move – those are the worst ones – I copied files back to the card to check them in the camera. No luck. Now I don’t know if they were corrupted before. But my bet is that they had gone wrong somehow before this whole episode happened. I decided to recover any JPEG file on the media on a binary basis. JPEG has its typical header with magic number so maybe, just maybe I’ll find something.

I tried various recovery freeware programs that were simple or lame or whatever. And then I hit Smart Image Recovery – reportedly freeware download. Let’s try it, why not. Uh, the download wants my email to send me the download link (that should be the first warning, I know). Ok, why not, I rely on Gmail spam filter anyway. I downloaded the software and started it. Buy or continue free? What?! How could the word “BUY” find its way into the freeware? Of course I want to continue Free! Ok, paid functions will be disabled. Oh, man, paid functions? You mean you would show me the pictures and I would not be able to recover them, right? (In the end this crappy software found NOTHING on that card although some other free trial found many files – of course, recovery was not for free. )

During the scan of the memory card dialog appears: You have some problems in Windows Registry and some temporary files (what a surprise!). Do you want to download our bla-bla cleaning software? You gotta be kidding!!! (I never use multiple exclamation marks, but I just felt like that in that very moment.) This is not freeware at all! I’ll run away if I see anything from Smart PC Solutions (or smartpctools.com) again. I don’t know what “scamware” really means, but it was the first word instead of freeware that came to my mind. Extremely annoying, not giving promised values and I feel safe only thanks to anti-virus solution I wouldn’t dare to turn off. Because you never know. This time it was only annoying software, but what it will be next time?