When I first started IT Consulting in August 1999 I preached the importance of dynamic content on websites. When I decided to launch of website of my own, I made a point to practice what I preached by writing daily journal entries. I managed to write every day without missing until 2002. Nowadays, this practice of streaming dynamic content is commonly called "blogging".
Wednesday, 16th of July, 2008
With the conclusion of the Xcelsius 4.5 course that I presented today, it's time to start gearing up for Xcelsius 2008. The differences are significant, and they have fixed many things that were not completely logical and required extra explaining to my students. The first, most obvious change is the user interface. Not only do the windows play better with what you're trying to do on the canvas, but you get to look at the Excel file at the same time too. Some other changes I notice already:
- Single value component increment has moved to the behavior tab, and is no longer together with the scale, even though those two fields are often changed together.
- Image components now accept png, gif, and bmp in addition to jpg and swf.
- New components:
Other minor enhancements seem to abound - such as built-in gradient/color schemes if you have many thresholds for your alerts.
The best news is that, unlike Crystal Reports 2008, which is not backwards compatible with the XI R2 platform, you probably don't have to wait for your organization to go to XI 3.0 to start using Xcelsius 2008, especially if you aren't using Xcelsius with data connectivity yet. All you have to have is Windows XP+, Office XP+, Acrobat, and Flash player to get started with all this. I will have to experiment to see if there is anything that prevents the XI R2 Infoview from playing an Xcelsius 2008 swf file - that would be even cooler if you could still distribute the dashboard on XI R2.
Sunday, 13th of July, 2008
The BMW Ultimate Drive was back in town again this weekend - this time with more exciting cars than ever. Age requirement is 30 to drive the new M3 or the Alpina B7 - but even with that I was given access to a 760iL with a 438 hp V12 engine. I'm glad you can still hear the exhaust note on this big luxury machine - because the V12 motor sings a song that I've never heard out of a BMW before: It's much like the great sound a Nissan VQ35/37 makes (which is the best V6 I've ever heard), but twice as good.
There's surprisingly little else to mention about this $127,000 car. The handling was sporty as I'd expect. The cold-vented seats were nice, and now all passengers get to play with iDrive, as there was one for the rear passenger DVD and entertainment. BMW continues to do a good job of making the driving experience exclusive. Yes that turn signal continues to lack positional feedback, and gosh I never remembered there being a cruise control stalk over there either. Took me a couple turns to figure out I was hitting cruise control instead of the turn signal. I like the iDrive - I was able to get in, set the temperature, find the Classical station on the Sirius radio and I was ready to go. Haley spent the entire drive figuring out how to change the radio channel, and we didn't even see any of the other iDrive features. I like how Navigation displays the next turn in the tachometer - that should definitely be something they should bring down to other cars!
It seems to me of all the sedans for sale in the $100-120k price range, this is the car to get if you want to blend in. The BMW plate doesn't shout the same way a Maserati Quattroporte does, AMG badges tell you something special, and it seems like even the Lexus LS600h and Audi S8 come with some exclusivity that the 760iL doesn't get. Perhaps what the Alpina B7 is for.
The 650i, on the other hand, is a car that comes with quite a bit of exclusivity. The car from the outside declares luxury grand tourer to me. But perhaps that is only to a car nut, because even the people working the event were having a hard time identifying a 6-series from a 3-series coupe/convertible. Once you take into account that the rear seat is no more useful in this vehicle than in a 3-series coupe, one does find fewer and fewer reasons to pay the huge premium for a 6-series. The brushed aluminum on the one I drove only made things worse. Perhaps that is why I rarely see them on the road - and they have been around since 2004.
The truth is, the 6-series cannot be appreciated on paper, or even in photographs. I had to go through 4 pages of Google image results to find one that even came close to the way I perceive the car. It's the subtle things on this car that make it the best BMW experience I've had. The seats felt great, it came with a very functional heads-up display, and the 360 hp 4.8L V8 came with a nice fat powerband. The apogee would be when I had it was passing slow traffic under a large overpass - sunroof cracked and at full throttle - that car produces an exotic sound that you don't experience unless you're watching BBC Top Gear.
The manual-shift mode on the gearbox also did exactly what you told it to do - the car just begs to be taken to a track. And really, that's the only place you'll need it in manual mode. I soon discovered "Sport" mode in Drive, and it shifts so quickly based on your throttle input that it almost made me not ever want to drive stick again. Sport mode also utilizes engine braking when slowing down, and the shifting is distinct, predictable, and logical.
By the time the drive was over, I thought I had mastered the BMW controls, and I reached up for the top-right stalk to put the car in reverse, which is where the gear selection lever is on the 7-series. This wound up turning the wipers on instead. More random pushing on that level sent a blast of washer fluid everywhere. Finally I gave up and backed the car into the parking spot with the wipers on full speed while Haley flipped some more switches on the stalk that control the intermittent interval. In the end I discovered that the wiper stalk, just like the turn signal stalk, has no positional feedback. I hope nobody hops in the 7-series after owning a 6-series and shifts the car into reverse on the highway trying to shut off the wipers. Finally I spotted a familiar control - at least the 650i has a mechanical hand brake. A satisfying yank on that before shutting off the engine made everything better again.
Thursday, 10th of July, 2008
Since I come from the Business Objects side of the XI Business Intelligence platform, it was easy for me to jump straight into Crystal XI R2 and point out some of the limitations, especially with regard to delivery and presentation, that a user might experience when working with a Crystal Report versus a WebIntelligence or DesktopIntelligence report. The back and forth trade offs between the two tools have even led many to adopt both as part of a report strategy - which can be a bit of a headache since reports do not convert between the two tools and require thinking and planning that takes very different paths in development.
At a quick glance, Crystal Reports 2008 now has a few features that can cause you not to have to think about using a different tool anymore:
Saturday, 5th of July, 2008
I discovered today that one of the benefits of long weekends is that I actually finish my music recording projects. I finished at 11AM this morning what I started yesterday:
Carry On My Wayward Son - Kansas (2.9MB MP3) - 4 tracks of 5-string violin plus drums. I don't know the song well enough to play the Kansas guitar solos, so I improvised all the solos. This can be a bit more fun than Guitar Hero. I'll just open up the file on the MRS-8 if I ever decide to play the song again - mute or record a new take of one of the tracks. If you play a real instrument too, we can even play two-player - the MRS-8 has two inputs!
Friday, 4th of July, 2008
One of my favourite songs on Guitar Hero II is Carry On My Wayward Son, by Kansas. It's relatively easy to play on a toy guitar controller , so I figure it's time to see how hard it is to play the song on real instruments. I came up with the first 2 minutes today - the first guitar solo is a bit complicated so I just improvised something on the fly.
I recorded it with the MRS-8 on the 5-string violin of course. I kept the effects off for the vocal tracks, used distortion patch 24 crunch to simulate electric guitar, and bass simulator patch 6. I replicated some acoustic guitar work by playing staccato on a 5th track, and it turned into a bit of a viola part as I kept going. Looking forward to getting the rest of it recorded now, since I have the song mapped out and there are more exciting riffs later.
I know very little about rock music so I looked up Kansas to see if by chance they were still together. Up to this point all I knew about Kansas was this one song from Guitar Hero, and what they looked like in 1976 from the Youtube video I found. I discover that not only are they still touring, but also that Robby Steinhardt (who seems to only play the tambourine in the video) is a violinst and the violin/viola sound has been a big part of the band's sound since it started.
Tuesday, 1st of July, 2008
Saturday, 28th of June, 2008
Pixar's demonstrates superior creativity again with this year's movie - Wall-E. I should know better by now and just trust that Pixar movies will always be good, but when I watched it tonight I started out skeptical again. How are they going to make an interesting movie about one or two robots rummaging through what is left of the world in 2700, absent of humans? Again, I should know better - it was not the talking that made toys, bugs, monsters, and fish come alive. It was the computer animation - and this time they conquered the challenge of giving robots life and emotion.
Of course, there is more to the story than just two robots - humans come into the plot later, and the way that works makes this one of my favourite Pixar movies.
Incidentally, the Pixar short before the movie was excellent - there was one part in particular that made me laugh out loud. You can probably figure out what shot it is too.
Friday, 27th of June, 2008
Wednesday, 25th of June, 2008
Thursday, 19th of June, 2008
Wednesday, 18th of June, 2008
Tuesday, 17th of June, 2008
Left the client site super early today because someone accidentally dropped all the rows from the data warehouse, and the development environment was down for some unrelated maintenance, so there was barely anything for me to do. It's a win-win situation because I got to get some other stuff done and the weather was beautiful today.
I went to my usual place, Bimmers R Us, to try to find some ATE brake fluid since it's time for a brake flush on the Subaru, but they didn't have it. Wound up stopping be a couple Auto Parts stores, and Advance Auto happened to have some Valvoline Synpower brake fluid that "exceeded DOT 3 and 4 specifications" with a 503F dry and 343F wet boiling point. Not quite ATE, but probably good stuff - interestingly enough Valvoline doesn't even list it on their own website. Took it the Autotire in St. Charles on Droste Road and they fantastically squeezed me in at the end of the day.
Monday, 16th of June, 2008
Friday, 13th of June, 2008
Tuesday, 10th of June, 2008
Monday, 9th of June, 2008
RIM, the Blackberry manufacturer, argues that business users prefer a keyboard over the touch screen that you find in the iPhone. This leads to an interesting article on zdnet that quickly went downhill. I have used the iPhone a little, and agree that the iPhone's touch-screen input seems to slow me down. However, if I recall correctly, the iPhone's touch-screen input is also a "qwerty keyboard." This is where the article becomes useless - isn't the topic at hand more about "Keys vs. Touchscreen" than it is about "Qwerty vs. Touchscreen", since the touch screen is also in Qwerty?? I have seen better high school journalism than this.
While we do bring up the somewhat comical point again that the Qwerty keyboard was invented "to slow typists down in the days when the print hammers could get tangled", the iPhone does not make a departure from it - it just makes it even worse by removing the tactile feedback of a real keyboard. If you really want to advance to something better, the Dvorak keyboard layout was invented 72 years ago.
For a pocket device, I have eliminated the keyboard altogether. Again, we have had the technology for a long time now - 1996 with the Palm Pilot, and even earlier if you count the less successful efforts by Apple to implement handwriting input. Going back to the old qwerty keyboard is almost the only reason why I have not moved over to a Blackberry device - it has been Palm devices for me now since May 2000.
If Apple goes back to their roots and implements good handwriting input on the iPhone, that may be what pushes me over to the Apple side over Blackberry. But what we have now is a picture of a Qwerty keyboard on a touch screen. How is this progress?!
Sunday, 8th of June, 2008
I did a bit more recording and playing with the MRS-8 on vacation last week. I'm sticking with the 5-string violin since it seems versatile enough for what I want so far:
Telemann Concerto in C Major for 4 Violins (130-kbps MP3) - 1st, 3rd, and 4th movements. Next part of the project is doing one more take of the Allegro 2nd movement.
Blessed Be Your Name - Redman (2.2MB MP3) (130-kbps MP3) - Tried a lot of new things in this recording. I started out playing a bass line in the C and G strings and discovered the octaver. I ended up keeping the first take of each track - I played my usual accompaniment and anything other than 2 octaves of melody ended up sounding too busy as I tried to enhance it.
Tuesday, 3rd of June, 2008
Monday, 2nd of June, 2008
The good news is my stomach discharge was interrupted with the boat's first catch of the day! I caught a beautiful Atlantic Sharpnose shark. That area turned out to be slow so we moved on to an area near an oil rig, and things got very busy quickly. We were catching sharks of a different variety left and right, keeping the crew very busy. I had gotten one myself, but only one person had one that was close to the 54" minimum size regulation.
The big keepers ended up being King Mackerels, as you can see from the display of catches from today. We only had about 15 people on this fishing trip, so we all got on one side and everyone had a pretty successful day.
The big one in the middle of the picture that won the fish pool was Haley's big catch. My shark, the only one that we kept from this trip, is two fish over to the right of the big one. Between the 7 of us, we had over 80 pounds of fish - Haley's big catch was 32 pounds by itself.
Fortunately, I was feeling a lot better once we were back inside the jetty again, and by the time we were looking at the fish hanging up I was ready to have some shark for lunch. I think by the end of the week, we'll all have eaten so much fish we'll be geniuses.