Technology, Innovation & Telecomm

Not me…(if only!)

It’s the number of simultaneous analog channels that I can record with my system.

I just purchased a Motu 828 MkII. It’s a sweet firewire interface that works in conjunction with my Motu 896 to give me that total. It’s a lower-cost device than the 896, primarily due to the fact that it only has two mic preamps built in. If you want to use more microphone-level signals with it, you need to first run them through outboard preamps. There can be a number of very good reasons to do so anyhow. Probably most important is the signal quality. While the Motu pre’s are good, there are many, many excellent quality outboard models. Some folks like tube-based preamps, some like classic models, some like using hardware simulations of classics, etc.

I also purchased a Behringer BCF2000 control surface. It’s a nicely-priced model with 100mm motorized faders, infinte turn rotary encoders, bank selections, assignable buttons, etc. I’m really getting to hate using the mouse to control faders, pans, etc. My hope is that this will help to make computer-based recording feel more like the analog version…

So, my studio is improving slowly. And, as I said before I’d like to get involved in some recording projects. I’m a drummer with some decent background (been playing for near 30 years off an on) having played live and on recordings. I’ve played with university orchestras, churches, bands, etc. So, if you’re interested 1) see my previous post on the subject 2) contact me!

I’ve been playing drums and diddling with other instruments (very little) for years. In fairness, I’m really just a drummer who is a wanna-be musician.

What do you call someone who hangs out with musicians? A drummer…sigh.

Anyhow, I love playing and don’t really get to do as much as I’d like. Sometime, I’d like to collaborate with someone on a distance (or local) recording project. I’m into jazz, contemporary Christian, pop, big band, etc. Steely Dan, Michael McDonald, Jeff Lorber, Pat Metheny, Dave Koz, etc. are some of my favorites.

I have a pretty decent recording capability at home here. I use Motu Digital Perfomer, Apple Logic Express 7, Garageband and other smaller apps like Audacity, etc. And, I can record 24-bit, 96 Khz in up to 8 channels at a time with a Motu 896 firewire interface (unlimited total channels). With luck, my channel count will increase to 16 in the next two weeks or so. I also have a small collection of mics (growing slowly), hardware effects, etc. I use Yorkville studio nearfield monitors. My system is computer-based, using a Macintosh G5 Dual 2.5 Ghz and a Macintosh dual G4 450 Mhz machine and a 466 Mhz iBook for mobile recording.

So, if someone wants to perhaps collaborate on a project, I’d love to hear from you! I want to expand my recording and playing horizons and perhaps this is a good place to get the word out!

How are the most successful products and services conceived? I’m sure there’s no hard-and-fast method, but to me there appears to be two very prevalent paths (and many more no doubt):

1. “Scratching an Itch” (thus the title of this post…) - This seems to be the polar opposite of the solutions-in-search of a problem approach that I’ve read some about. In this model, someone identifies a problem that either has no solution at present or the one(s) that exist are somehow inadequate. So, an individual or group of individuals create the solution that they want and for some reason, lots of others agree. Seems like a pretty pure way to go about it.

2. “Create a market” - To me, this is often the result of considering where the future lies and providing a technology, service or other product that deals in that future before it exists. Also pretty pure. This is often where the “disruptive technolgies” emerge but not by any means is it the only place that it happens. Not by a long shot.

The reason I bring it up is that I’ve been involved in some exercises that have led me to think about how to free myself from thinking about things like I always have and with any luck, come up with something useful.

Sometimes, these exercises seem to have taken the path of “let’s inject a solution to a problem that we haven’t yet identified and in the process, create a need”. Confusing? It is to me. To me, a successful idea is one that adds value to the intended target. That can be through means such as:

1. Helping someone do what they already do, but faster, cheaper, better, or all of the above.
2. Helping someone transition to something that they don’t currently do from their present activity.
3. Helping someone do something completely new, regardless of what they do now.
4. Helping someone protect the investment they have already made. Similar to #1, but it’s more of a means of continuing what they do in the face of newer methods.
5. And the list goes on…

I do know that trying to constantly incrementally improve what we already have will most likely lead to failure.

“The light bulb was not invented by the candle industry looking to improve output.”

For a solid example, take the iPod or other music players. Prior to their introduction, portable music was possible through things like MP3s on CD, regular audio CD, and tapes. The issue wasn’t so much that you couldn’t take your music with you. You could certainly keep many CDs in a carry case and the same for cassette tapes. The issues were mainly twofold:

* You could only carry so many of either tapes or CDs. The problem got harder if you were actually planning to do something like take a walk. Size and weight were really limiting.

* Storage of your portable library could be difficult.

So, the iPod and it’s bretheren came along and solved both of the problems I listed. You could now carry and play large quantities of songs from your collection and you could do it discreetly and without threatening your back. As a bonus, by ripping your music to digital formats like MP3, and AAC, etc., you could centralize your home music collection and select from any song when you wanted. Before that, there were CD carosels but they were again limited in the number of discs they could hold, the space they took, etc.

So you have this technology that didn’t offer you any basic ability you didn’t already have. What it did was to make it *much* easier to take your music along with you and to access it any way you want. It made doing what you already could do easier, more flexible and thus more enjoyable. But what was also birthed out of this technology were things like audio-blogs, PodCasts, and other time-shifted program materials. It truly disrupted (and continues to disrupt) traditional concepts of media distribution.

Dave Winer (along with Netscape and a cast of characters) saw the future need for a means to “syndicate” Web content and be able to effectively summarize data in near-realtime. There wasn’t a lot of need for it at the time it was conceived, but Dave and others realized that there was a future for such a thing. RSS (in all its various flavors) was the result. To me that’s a case where someone anticipated the future and built for it. RSS along with Bogs, PodCasts, etc. again disrupted the status-quo and have created all new industries that empower a wider range of individuals to do things that used to be reserved for big media.

What I’m struggling with is finding something new for my company to pursue. Of course, it has its core competencies and we’re always focused there. So, how to get outside of the box just enough to see a new service or product that will fit some problem that already exists or will likely exist? It feels like it’s just outside of my reach and I want to break through it…

Protect an existing investment? Transition to a new “thing”? Create a market? Disrupt the status quo for our marketplace?

What to do…?

Turth be told, I’m glad the Embedded Systems Conference has ended. I’m worn out and I miss my wife. Still, there’s a little bit of wistful sense of loss. Perhaps it has something to do with the 70+ degrees and Sunny weather that we’ve had out here all week long! Hah!!!

Anyhow, the last day proved to be pretty interesting. Not so much in a direct technical way. We attended (I keep saying “we”. That’s ’cause I’m out here with Tim, a co-worker and friend) a session this morning on the so-called “Triple Play” and the challenges associated with it…technical and otherwise. For those who may not know, the “Triple Play” refers to the delivery of voice, video and data in a converged package of network services. It’s what the providers are drooling over as the technologies are starting to coalesce. The truth of the matter is that there are a *ton* of challenges that need dealing with and it’s no small matter to get it all plahying together nicely. Not that it can’t be…it’s just a large set of challenges.

The other session of significance was the discussion of WiMax. That subject plays nicely with the other session, ’cause being able to deliver ubiquitous broadband has become quite a holy grail. I’m glad I attended because I was most certainly influenced by the media in what I thought it was capable of versus what the truth is.

What’s become ever more clear as the week has progressed is that there won’t likely be a truly dominant delivery vehicle for consumer broadband. Cable, copper-based DSL, wireless and fiber will all have their place and there will very likely be overlaps for a long time to come. Getting 25-20 Mbps to your residence will be a challenge for many folks. That’s about the data rate that appears to be required (today) for the kinds of services that people are shooting for today. Notice that though the phrase “triple play” seems only to refer to those three items, in reality there are many more applications that will be in the mix as this stuff moves forward. Managing it all and getting satisfactory performance amongst them is going to provide some nice business opportunities.

“The future’s so bright, you’ll need sunglasses!” — ok, that’s overstating it. But the kinds of things that these companies are dreaming up are gonna be pretty cool…if un-necessary. That remains to be seen. The “killer app” still ain’t been dreamt up yet!

So the week was both good and bad. I had some very useful sessions and some total losers. Was it worth it? Overall, yes. However, the next time I attend I should have a better notion of how to select what I want to learn about and what to expect when I choose. Overall, I’d say that what I learned most was how much I have to learn…

And yes, it was still cool to have met Steve Ciarcia…

So yesterday was a mixed bag. The morning looked very hopeful, with the topic of two classes seeming to be right up our ally. The first one seemed to be introductory by its description and the second one seemed to be more in-depth…wrong. Both were introductory and not very helpful. So, that shot the morning…

The afternoon was another story for me!

The first class of the afternoon was a panel discussion about XML accelleration via hardware. I have long wondered whether something like this would make its way to the surface…it has. There are now dedicated XML processing chips (ASICs and FPGAs as well as dedicated processors) and these things can reduce the parse and search aspect of certain XML messages up to 400%. That said, it appears that they focus on:

a) Rapid parsing
b) Fast tag location
c) Hardware Schema validation
d) Compression/Decompression
e) Encryption/decryption
f) Starting to do transformation

There was also a discussion about “Binary XML” — which to me seems to make XML *not* XML but what I know about all that is absolutely minimal and so I need to learn more before I begin critique too much.

The last class was a very good description of the SIP signalling stack and protocol. Very cool stuff. I’m glad I took it because it helps to explain a lot. Gotta be looking more into it!

So it was the best day of the conference so far… Spent more time on the show floor and got more very helpful contacts.

Today’s the last day of the conference. I’m a little bummed but I’m also ready to be home.

he Embedded Systems Conference started yesterday at 9:00 am. This year (and perhaps in other years, but I think this may be the first), there were a series of about 8 different all-day tutorials. We selected the “Embedded Linux Jump Start” one. The thinking was that we’d end up with a good foundation for starting to bring Linux into our products. It wasn’t so much…

Mind you, I don’t think the presenter did a bad job. But I guess I was looking for more of a series of steps that one needs to take generically in order to get started with the process. Instead, this seemed to be targeted at a specific SBC and glossed over a large number of items that I would like to have known about.

I suppose that in a 6+ hour class, it’s fairly hard to get that kind of data into folks hands so the presenter has their hands tied in a manner of speaking.

Today was again another all-day tutorial. We chose the embedded TCP/IP class. Our mistake on that account was selecting a class that was introductory. I’ve done a fair number of TCP/IP-based products that support everything from Telnet, to FTP, DNS, HTTP, etc. The presenter was good and he got into a good amount of detail. That said, I didn’t get a whole lot out of the class…my fault.

So, tomorrow begins the primary short-form sessions and the exhibits. I’ll be moving around a lot and with any luck it’ll be a productive day. I’ll let y’all know.

That’s right. You heard it here first! I’ll be in San Francisco all next week at the Embedded Systems Conference.

So, presuming that my hotel has some kind of method of connecting to the Internet, I’ll be updating daily from there, with observations about what I’ve learned (or not!) and perhaps about anything that I inspires me from the conference.

So, stay tuned for another exciting week of blog-topia from the the left coast!

I’ve moved my blog from blogger to WordPress. I was sorta tired of relying on Google for my blog and I wanted something that was Open-Source, configurable and hosted on my site. This is the result.

I’ve tried replicating some of the most recent posts. Not all of the links survived and I didn’t go too far back. But it’s good enough (hopefully) that folks get a flavor of my most recent stuff.

Let me know how you like it. I’ll be changing the look here and there and adding features as I become more familiar with how WordPress works.

Enjoy!

We had a really well-attended church service for Easter yesterday. Since we want to compile an album of our music to give to visitors, etc. I was asked to record the service. Here’s how it went:

We have a 32-channel Mackie board for the church. I’d guess that in total we use about 20 channels. For the music side of things, we have the following inputs:

a) ~7 vocal mics - There’s the worship leader, 5 vocalists and the pastor who also sings.
b) Percussion mic - used to mic up things like congas and assorted other percussive elements.
c) An electric bass.
d) An acoustic guitar.
e) An electric guitar.
f) An electric piano that we send two channels from in order to layer sounds to stereo mains.

If you add that up, it’s 13 channels of stuff. What I haven’t mentioned are the drums. Ordinarily we don’t mic the drum set (which I play) because they’re plenty loud for the room. However, we wanted to record all the music, so it meant mic’ing them up. To my mind, for a 5-piece kit, you want no less than 5 mics:

1. Overhead for cymbals and ambient drum pick-up.
2. Kick drum mic.
3. Floor tom mic.
4. Snare mic.
5. A mic for both mounted toms. I prefer one for each but we’re talking minmums here.

Given that I have 16 channels and I was using 13, and I wanted to use 5 mics for the drums…I was out of channels. So, we compromised. I ran all the drum mics into a front-of-house mixer (a Behringer UB1622-FX PRO 8-channel desk) and mixed that to a (sort-of) stereo pair into the recording rig. Not ideal, but workable. I tried to give some sense of space to the placement of the various mics, but the proof will be in the final product. We’ll see.

“So”, you might ask, “What did you use the last input for, since you only used 2 of your remaining 3 channels?”. Thanks for asking. I used that final input for a “house” mic that recorded room ambience. We want the recording to have a live feel to it and I was afraid that it would sound somewhat sterile without having room sound mixed in. I’ve done that in the past for a coffeehouse and it works nicely.

Our Mackie board at the church does NOT have 16 spare sends that we can use to route all these inputs to the recording setup. The answer in this case was to run nearly all of the inputs first to the recording interface and then back out to the board. So, all the mics, instruments, etc. were first run to the inputs of my Motu gear and then sent back to the board via each channel’s associated output. All the inputs went through the Motu gear and Digital Performer routing. It worked out great. Setting it up was a nightmare, since it took us 7+ hours to make it all work. I’m glad we did it and I learned some things in the process.

Now comes the fun part. Mixing, editing, printing. I’m looking forward to it!

I have a lot of respect for Dave Winer. He’s a brilliant, creative individual who has done an enourmous amount of good work on the “personal publishing” front and in other areas. However, I have to take issue with a post he made on his blog “Scripting News”.

The post was entitled “Liberal is a Code Word“. His premise is:

“When someone uses the L-word in conversation, chances are 999 out of 1000 that they’re using it as a code-word to mean: weak, effeminate, misguided, powerless geek without morals.”

I disagree. Not that he isn’t right that sometimes that’s the implication of the use of “liberal” in a conversation. But it’s absurd to suggest that “999 out of 1000″ times it’s true.

What I disagree with even more is the notion that if you consider yourself “not conservative”, then you must naturally be balanced, caring, ecology-wise, tolerant, nuetral on sexual orientation, etc. He suggests that if someone cares about Terri Shiavo and is concerned that her death is a cruelty that we wouldn’t impose on an animal, we must be nut-jobs and louts. Please… Isn’t that the same generalization that he says his dinner-mate made about liberals?

Here are the facts:

1. Dave, with that post, you’ve just joined the ranks of those that you just derided. What an unbelievable, intolerant generalization!

2. The government *does* have a responsibility to protect individuals from cruel and unusual treatment at the hands of those who have fooled themselves into believing that killing someone is reasonable behaviour. There are too many associated facts in her case to simply state that this is a case of someone trying to carry out the wishes of a loved one. Not by a long shot.

3. This country and government *was* founded (like it or not) on religious principals of morality and overall behaviour. These principals permeate the writings of the founding fathers, whose wisdom is ignored when convenient by those that want to systematically remove all remnants of what we built this country on to start with. Worse, the same founding fathers get quoted to somehow justify distancing ourselves from those same principals. Just because an individual or small group of individuals *want* something to be ok doesn’t make it so. The point here is that the people of the USA give the government certain powers and like it or not, there will be decisions made with that power that go counter to what we want to do at times. Believe me, they make decisions that I don’t like every day. Telling families when they can pull the plug *does* come under their rule if the decision violates greater rules of decency and respect for life.

4. Making comparisons of conservatives to someone you don’t like has to be one of the worst forms of disrespect and intolerance I’ve ever seen. It’s a low blow and the last resort of someone who doesn’t respect differing points of view despite assertions to the contrary. I’m always blown away by folks whose premise is: “If you don’t agree with my point of view, you’re an intolerant louse the likes of “. So, if I disgree with you on some point and in fact agree with someone you don’t like, I’m an intolerant idiot. However, if you disagree with me you’re simply being the rational, reasonable humanist you claim to be. Interesting.

I know that I make generalizations all the time. Often it’s wrong. This one by Dave Winer is just way beyond reasonable.