Indeed

Things that seemed important enough at the time

Monday, November 29, 2004

Programming poll #1: Archiving

I spent a good portion of the extended weekend coding up some stuff that I haven't had much time for recently, and it was pretty fun (and frustrating... as usual). I was working on the saving code for a project, and it took me a while to come up with a solution that worked well - so I'm interested in hearing what other people do...

My old program saved my document to disk via the 'archivedDataWithRootObject:' method from NSKeyedArchiver - where I would take all of the objects I cared about, add them into an array, and pass that array as the root object. That was ok originally, since it was just me dealing with the documents, but I'm trying to be a little more 'future-proof' with this. I realized that I wasn't getting any of the keyedarchiver benefits, so I set about trying to make my document archiving better.

It should be noted that I've done a whole bunch of little programming side projects to learn parts of Cocoa, but very few of them dealt with saving or opening archived data that I created... so this is all a little unfamiliar.

My initial thought was to add the usual 'encodeWithCoder:' and 'initWithCoder:' methods to my NSDocument subclass, but I didn't really get that to work well. I ended up creating my own NSKeyedArchiver/Unarchiver objects within my 'dataRepresentationOfType:'/'loadDataRepresentation:ofType:' methods, which is working so far. It just seemed weird to actually allocate the NSKeyed objects, since the class methods usually do the trick.

Any thoughts from other people that have done this? I didn't find anything useful in the developer examples (Sketch seemed a little overly complex), and usually I'd check my Hillegass book, but Ethan has it at the moment.

Thanksgiving weekend

Hooray for the extended Thanksgiving weekend! Travis was back in town, and we had our share of traditional and non-traditional Thanksgiving meals. It was also a good chance for me to do some programming (more on that in another post). Now it's all behind us, and we're left with a bunch of dirty dishes in the dishwasher and the realization that we need to get back on a work schedule again... we've been staying up until 2am, and we seem to be on track for that again tonight... :)

Wednesday, November 24, 2004

Some time off

Marching band finished last weekend - we ended up getting 10th place out of the 34 bands that were there. We have this week off, and then start up with auditions for winter percussion next week. It'll be nice to have a weekend off, especially since we get two extra days. Mmmmm, turkey.

Friday, November 19, 2004

You know a t-shirt is ugly...

...when they give them to a bunch of engineers, but none of them wear it.

Wednesday, November 17, 2004

Marching band winds down

We're almost to the end of the 2004 marching band season, and it's been an interesting one. When we were talking about show ideas back in the day, I wasn't too thrilled with the idea of playing jazz. I got over it, figuring it would be a good learning experience to write an instrumental jazz show. Then I found out it was going to be Frank Sinatra music, and it took a while to come to terms with that :) It ended up being some really great music - I haven't tired of it like last year's... although I expected it to get old after the first month. Unfortunately jazz is really difficult to play, so it's taken us a while to teach the style to the kids.

We started out with 14 percussionists, then lost two, gained two, and lost one (of course each of those was a longer story than that), but we've ended up with a great group of kids. I figured that I had written too difficult of a show for most of the season, but it has all come together pretty well here at the end, and I didn't need to simplify too many parts (I wrote things that were too hard for my section in ISU drumline back in the day too, so these kids shouldn't feel too bad).

I've mentioned before that it's good to get positive feedback about the percussion writing and the teaching that you do for the kids - but this show hasn't been as kind to us. Learning jazz is difficult in a standard jazz band - just because the music is challenging. Learning jazz in marching band is crazy. Triplets are a little bit unusual for your typical high school freshman, and the feel of swing just isn't in their blood. In a regular jazz band you have a bass that plays all the time, the drumset and piano (and maybe guitar) that play almost all the time, and the other instruments that play as needed. In a marching band you have to split all of this between 30 or so different instruments, and the hardest part from my point of view - splitting up the one drummer into a dozen or so percussionists.

Jazz and rock&roll shows are difficult things to pull off on the marching field (in my opinion, which is why I wasn't excited about playing jazz), because the non-marching version of the music has a repetitive beat that one person can perform. When you split that between multiple players you either end up with a complex beat that may be difficult (or impossible) for the players to perform, or you have a beat that is very simple and/or boring. The snare drum on 2&4 is essential to most music these days, but it's only interesting because the player is also playing other things (bass, cymbals..) - if you have a marching snare drummer play 2&4 through the whole show, they would get extremely bored. The other challenge is keeping things together. A single person playing a drumset isn't going to have too much trouble keeping the bass drum in time with the ride cymbal - sure, they may play a part out of time, but there is always one idea of where the beat is. With multiple players, each person has their own idea of the beat, and it's even harder when the players are spread out in different places around the field.

Well the judges this year have marked us down because we don't have a drumset sound throughout the show. Well, as far as I'm concerned, we do. We have drumset swing beats split between all of our different sections, we just don't have the same boring ride pattern going the entire time. I guess I'm just venting because the kids have worked hard and are probably learning more than they would from the simpler parts, but they don't get the credit for it. Aside from the judging part of it, the kids seem to like their show, so things are going pretty well overall.

Ahhh, that's some good blogging therapy :)

Thursday, November 11, 2004

Virtual Drumline 2

Holy crap - this looks awesome: Virtual Drumline 2

Audion goes to Florida

Steven blogs about Audion's retirement and Cabel writes about Audion's history. Maybe it's my headcold talking, or the massive amounts of OJ in my system, but the article really got to me. It's been a while since they've posted anything like their big essays that I read and enjoyed back in college.

I'm really happy that Panic continues to do well, and it's cool to hear the story behind all of this. All of the links above are good reads, even if you're not a coding nerd (it helps to be a mac nerd though :)

Sick Day

I was home sick today with the cold that everybody seems to have these days (no, not Halo2-itis, as one of my coworkers joked - I have no Xbox). I've been busy with work, teaching, and my parents being in town last weekend - and my body can't seem to keep up.

Hopefully the extra sleep will keep me healthy for a while, since we have two more weeks of marching band out there in the "cold". Yes, California has made me soft.

Sunday, November 07, 2004

Hail and flickr

As Daisie mentioned - it hailed a few days ago, so I'm pointing you at my pictures of it. I heard it while at work, but I didn't see any accumulation - but as you can see, there was quite a bit around the house.

The nicer photo is from my regular camera, on the day it hailed. The other two are from the morning after, with my camera phone. I've been using flickr to post my cameraphone pictures, since it's pretty easy to post single photos quickly. I still plan to use my .mac account for larger sets of photos, but I don't seem to take as many these days. Now that I have a phone in my camera I don't take my full size camera around as much, and so I end up taking fewer photos. Not quite what I intended when I got the phone :)

 
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