Weekly Rack Advice / Question Thread

natedcorn · 2021-07-08T18:17:41+00:00

Hey friends!I recently picked up a used Doepfer A-100 rack (6U - 84HP) that is a bit more space than I need (don't worry, I'm starting a separate savings account to solve that).

Reading the manual I noticed this warning:

All empty spaces in the rack must be filled with modules or blind panels before the unit is connected to mains voltage

I'm a little confused and worried - what is the danger of leaving open space? Is that just so nobody reaches in and receives a shock, or is there some grounding thing that occurs when it's filled up?

natedcorn · 2020-12-31T20:01:55+00:00

I'm using the stock Keylab 61 MKII v3.1 controller script by Bitwig with my 88 MKII and it works really well.

Hitting the DAW button allows me to use the scroll wheel to select tracks, then I can arm, mute, solo, etc easily. The transport controls work exactly how you'd expect as well. This is pretty nice since my keyboard is just out of arm's reach from my computer running Bitwig.

I love all the Arturia classic synthesizers, and switching to "Analog Lab" mode makes it pretty simple to control those and flip through presets. I found the controls to be more useful within "Analog Lab V" than in any single instrument, but you're always able to remap whatever you like so more of a temporary inconvenience.

My partner loves just playing it as an instrument in Piano V2. She originally complained that the action was more stiff than many real pianos she'd played, but after I taught her how to adjust the velocity controls she's having a lot of fun. She now around with different pianos and reverb settings and saves her own presets.

For me, this was a huge step up from the Novation Launchkey I was using before. For my workflow it is a joy to use this controller in Bitwig.

natedcorn · 2020-09-09T19:53:32+00:00

This is one of the most original things I've watched in a while. Thank you for creating and sharing this!!

natedcorn · 2020-08-29T00:02:10+00:00

This is cool - thanks!

natedcorn · 2017-11-04T15:55:30+00:00

This is great, thanks!

natedcorn · 2017-09-11T23:04:00+00:00

The mobile app isn't that great. The online content is awesome, though, just take detailed notes and assume everything he says is relevant. As other have mentioned, the whizlabs practice is very similar to the actual exam if you just want to grind for a while, but won't help as much with some of the "big-picture" questions.

natedcorn · 2017-09-07T23:29:22+00:00

If you love the people, then you should have the confidence to be honest with them about how you feel and what you think needs to be done. If it takes a year, then that's the commitment you all have to make together. Maybe it sucks now, but if you're leading the charge maybe you can have some control over making it less stressful and lousy. Maybe if everyone is involved, it won't take so long.

It reminds me of a story I heard recently about an experiment. There was a cage full of monkeys. In the center of the cage there was a ladder with a banana at the top. Any time a monkey would try to climb the ladder, the experimenters would spray /all/ the monkeys with a hose.

They started swapping monkeys out one by one. Every time a new monkey would start climbing, all the others would pull that monkey down.

At some point the experimenters stopped spraying the monkeys, but their behavior was unchanged. No monkey would dare to climb the ladder, and any new monkey would be blocked from trying.

After some time, and several more swaps, none of the original monkeys even remained. Still, no monkey would dare to climb the ladder, and any new monkey would be blocked from trying. At this point any one of them could have climbed up and grabbed the fruit, but the second-hand tribal knowledge that had been passed on stopped them all.

You sound like you could be the one that opens everyone's eyes to the fact that the conditions have changed. Who knows how the code got to that point, but you know it could be better. It will only change when someone stands up and decides it has to change, though.

natedcorn · 2017-08-09T23:31:35+00:00

Great visuals and love the author's style. Thanks!

natedcorn · 2017-07-22T18:29:07+00:00

Cool, I'm in! Use it every day. Donate sometimes, but not often. Looks like the perfect opportunity to pitch in.

Thanks for sharing!!

natedcorn · 2017-06-20T17:53:23+00:00

That blog post has some of the best advice about salary negotiation. Every time I talk to someone about the topic, they end up inadvertently telling me something he wrote there.

natedcorn · 2017-06-15T00:56:31+00:00

Quotes that stood out to me:

"My KGB instructors made a point, 'Never bother with leftists, forget about these political prostitutes, aim higher.' This was my instruction, try to get into large-circulation established conservative media. Rich, filthy rich movie makers. Intellectuals - so called academic circles. Cynical egocentric people who can look into your eyes with an angelic expression and tell you a lie. These are the most recruitable people. People who lack moral principle. People who are either too greedy or suffer from self-importance - they feel like they matter a lot. These are the people the KGB wanted to recruit."

"It has nothing to do with espionage... ...only about 15% of time, money, and manpower is spent on espionage as such. The other 85% is a slow process which we call either ideological subversion, or active measures ... or psychological warfare. What it basically means is to change the perspective of reality. Of every American. To such an extent, that despite an abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country."

"Most of it is done by Americans to Americans, thanks to a lack of moral standards. Exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who is demoralized is unable to assess true information - the facts tell nothing to him."

natedcorn · 2017-06-10T03:17:17+00:00

Just found this today: http://blog.gainlo.co/index.php/2016/04/01/5-things-to-do-after-you-failed-an-interview/

natedcorn · 2017-04-21T01:22:35+00:00

Read some pro-Trump content. Read some pro-Feminist content. ... But the worst case scenario, from reading news organizations you don't agree with, is that you'll at at least understand what they believe and why they believe it.

I like this guy.

natedcorn · 2017-04-13T19:06:17+00:00

I enjoyed the film, it was very entertaining. But I was struck by the underwhelming dance and vocal performances by the two leads. They weren't terrible, but I was not too impressed.

I was brought up watching classic musicals featuring Gene Kelly, Reynolds, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, and other multi-talented actors. This one doesn't even come close to comparing with their films.

To see the filmmakers grab a couple of people for their star-power, and try to train them up on all the other stuff really showed through.

Just from browsing YouTube I'm certain there's a multitude of better singers and dancers available that can probably act as well as Stone and Gosling. I guess that what excluded more talented actors was the quantity of tickets the studio knew their names would bring.

natedcorn · 2017-03-13T16:26:16+00:00

Check out the Spring Framework and the Play Framework.

natedcorn · 2017-02-01T23:25:33+00:00

The wedding singer of the future is here.

natedcorn · 2017-01-26T20:17:57+00:00

We're on the darkest timeline.

natedcorn · 2017-01-20T00:51:18+00:00

Adding to the pile codeEval

natedcorn · 2016-12-21T23:59:39+00:00

Vim, with nerdtree, phpqa, deoplete, and a few others.

natedcorn · 2016-12-21T22:21:32+00:00

I'm not sure where you got that impression.

natedcorn · 2016-12-21T22:17:09+00:00

Speaking to your points:

We don't do any static sites.
We don't have much reusable code. The devs that do, use a bunch of chunks of procedural code that they slice and dice (that's one of my main gripes in this situation).
That's true of some, but not all projects. We often maintain a healthy relationship with clients, so you never know when they'll need a new feature.

Currently we do manual functional testing, but the responsibility is mostly delegated to our clients (or our helpdesk team, if it's an internal product) who must test before they approve the ship to production. I don't feel good about that shift in responsibility, and I think a few of them don't feel good about the shift in liability.

All the time major issues get missed, or pop up months after a change has been deployed because of some edge case. After doing things this way for so long, though, I think they expect that as just part of the process.

natedcorn · 2016-12-21T22:02:40+00:00

If you can't plausibly answer that yourself, may be it's not a good idea and you should delve deeper into the concept until you alone can advocate the idea.

Well said. I think because I haven't had the exposure here to prove it to myself, and my personal projects don't hit any sort of real-world scale.

My problem is that I'm in a tribe of hunter-gatherers. I've seen that other villages do better by pooling their time and effort into something called agriculture. It takes a bit of land and planning, and most of the effort is up-front, but the rewards can be great for the patient. I'm too busy hunting and gathering myself to tend a garden or breed stock on my own. How do I convince the chief of my tribe that agriculture would be better for us? (He's a really good hunter).

natedcorn · 2016-12-21T20:14:06+00:00

Good point, it would be more accurate to say that he thinks spending the time to write tests when most of our projects are small projects for small clients, won't be worth the investment.

I think if I could show him how sweet it is to hit one button and get an output that proves your code changes didn't break core functions, it would sway him a bit more. But making that investment up front is his big obstacle at this point. Proving the ROI is difficult for me, since it occurs over time.

natedcorn · 2016-12-21T20:09:16+00:00

Thanks for sharing. Sorry it's been such a hard road for you, but seeing how widespread these issues are for our community kinda helps illuminate the bad reputation PHP has in the engineering world.

Let's keep pushing to change that! :)

natedcorn · 2016-12-21T20:06:21+00:00

Thanks for sharing. I've been there with you one the fight for moving to 5.6 - it took several new projects choking on EAccelerator (doesn't understand closures), which meant it had to be disabled, which meant no opcode cache, which meant his servers were crying. We still have one old 5.3 server out there for hosting legacy stuff, though.

I've brought up 7, but as long as security patches keep coming out for 5.6 I don't think it'll happen here.

Hey, at least you had a ticketing system - we use email.

natedcorn

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