Unanalog

Getting hot in here...

jmt@unanalog.com — 2007-10-16T21:02:05-07:00

I love flying. I hate queues at check-in. I love airports. I hate to take my laptop out of its case for inspection. I love looking at planes moving on the tarmac. I love seeing people from all over the world. I love the takeoff. I hate the minuscule legroom. I love the views, the tiny cars, the tiny houses, the tiny trees.
Recently over the Atlantic, close to Canada, I saw those tiny pieces of styrofoam floating on the water. Wait a second, that's not styrofoam, that's ice! "Cool" I thought, "Icebergs". I turned around and the KLM stewart looked over my shoulder and said with a sigh "Back when I started this job, this was all ice, it was all white".
Sad.

DJ Shadow - Organ Donor

jmt@unanalog.com — 2007-08-01T22:46:26-07:00

I've watched this too much in the last few days not to share...
DJ Shadow Live at Brixton Academy in London, performing Organ Donor

If you didn't bob your head, you're dead...

Netflix Movie Viewer In Parallels

jmt@unanalog.com — 2007-04-16T20:11:05-07:00

I've subscribed to Netflix since february 2001, and I've really enjoyed the service. Great website, great selection, great customer service, what else can you ask for? Well, last year we started hearing rumors about their online streaming service, was this the holy grail for movie enthusiasts, easy (legal) online access to a huge library of movies? It seems the dream is coming true. With this feature recently out of beta, all subscribers should now have the "Watch now" tab on their home page, which lets you access the selection of movies ready for streaming (not all Netflix movies are available online yet). What else can you ask for? The answer is probably "not much", if you happen to run Windows and use Internet Explorer! So of course, that doesn't work too well for me unless I want to watch movies at work. But fortunately I own an Intel Mac, and have Parallels. Setup was a breeze: just say yeah yeah yeah to the ActiveX installation alert boxes, let IE acquire the DRM rights, and you're good to go. Performance seems acceptable, with only a few dropped frames here and there, and with no audio glitches at all. The picture shows an IE window running Parallels in Coherence mode, which doesn't seem to affect performance. Using the full-screen mode of Netflix Movie Viewer made the playback and little choppier, and the refresh didn't seem uniform across the screen, with refresh "bands" appearing, which can probably be attributed to the lack of graphics hardware acceleration in Parallels.
This is the first time in two and a half years I really miss something that's available to Windows users only. I can't use this solution on my Powerbook laptop, but for the moment, I'm quite happy with the fix Parallels offers. I doubt we can expect a Mac version anytime soon as the service is relying on Microsoft DRM. I hope I'm wrong...

The trick behind Parallels Coherence mode

jmt@unanalog.com — 2007-02-26T19:55:59-08:00

Back in the PowerPC days, Mac users were able to run Windows inside OSX thanks to Virtual PC. This software was emulating an Intel platform well enough to fool XP into believing it was talking to a Pentium, and not an IBM PowerPC, albeit with a little compromise: performance. Now that Apple has finished its transition to Intel, the landscape has changed quite a bit for Mac users who depend on / have to run / are curious about some Windows-only applications.
The first choice is BootCamp, Apple's solution to dual-boot your Intel Mac. Just like dual-booting on PCs, this requires you to partition your hard drive and to reboot whenever you want to access the other OS. While I consider this acceptable for games (to which you want to dedicate all your RAM and CPU horsepower), this can be a bit of a pain for application you occasionally access, or worse, if you want a Windows and a Mac application to run concurrently.
Enter OS virtualization for OSX: VMWare Desktop and Parallels Desktop. These let you stay in OSX, and booting your virtual machine running Windows (or Linux for that matter) is just like running another application: double-click on your virtual machine disk image, and low and behold, Windows will boot inside an OSX window! I won't do a full review of those two applications in detail, other sites have done that better than I would. But having recently bought Parallels, I thought I would cover a few things I've found out after using it for a couple of weeks. In future entries, I will give you some real-world performance numbers where I will compare an existing PC to a "PC inside a Mac".

Now with today's feature: Parallels Coherence display mode. Build 3036 of Parallels introduced an eye-candy everybody (i.e. geeks like me) was very excited about, which was the possibility to have your Windows windows run side-by-side with your OSX windows. This is really compelling: imagine having two machines in one, only their displays are combined, you can drag'n drop from one OS to the other, copy and paste... this is great. As you can see in this screenshot, you even have the Windows taskbar at the bottom of your screen (or wherever you want it to be), plus all Windows apps will also show up in your dock. In the picture, above the Automator icon you can see the IE icon, on top of which is an Explorer icon, and above that the virtual machine icon with the picture what the display would look like had I not used Coherence. Pretty impressive!
And now for the only letdown of Coherence: how it's implemented. Coherence isn't a Finder extension (or plugin, or hack...). It's actually "just" a way of rendering the windows in which your virtual machine executes. This clever hack consists in giving this window a transparent background, so you'll believe all your windows are running together. They're not. As you can see in the screenshot, the XP windows (IE + Explorer) are in front of the OSX windows (Firefox + Automator). Now let's say you click on the Automator window, both OSX windows will now cover the XP windows, instead of just Automator. So if you're juggling with windows quite a bit, it takes a little bit of getting used to, but it's not that bad. You just have to remember that clicking on a Windows window will bring them all the the front.
See you next time for some benchmarks.

Bruised LCD: the picture

jmt@unanalog.com — 2007-02-15T00:34:45-08:00

After my last entry, I was asked to show what a "bruised LCD" screen looks like, here it is.

The damage is the grey halo around and below the red Pantone logo in the menu bar. My iMac showed four of those, along the top of the screen, most likely corresponding to the four fingers of the perpetrator of the crime. I had personally never seen anything like this. Dusting for fingerprints on the frame, in the hope of finding prints of the thumb of the criminal, yielded no results.

iMac fixed, yeepee!

jmt@unanalog.com — 2007-02-12T19:43:34-08:00

Hey, I'm back online. Almost a month without an update but I had serious matters to deal with: my iMac just got back from the Apple hospital. My 24" was diagnosed with a bruised LCD panel. The doctor suspects it might have been mistreated while being lifted, at packaging maybe.
The bruises appeared over the course of a month and manifested themselves as dark spots on the top of the screen, and could have been left someone who squeezed its top portion, instead of holding the computer case. Had my machine not been under warranty, that would have cost me 1300 USD. Somebody tried to strangle my iMac! Should I be scared too... ?

NAMM 2007: the year of the DJ

jmt@unanalog.com — 2007-01-18T23:17:25-08:00

The NAMM show opened its doors at Anaheim this morning. If you're a laptop DJ, you were in for a treat. This year, it seems the music industry finally realized there are a bunch of Traktor users out there looking for surface controllers, audio interfaces, time coded vinyls, and competition to Traktor. It's worth noting that back in October NI had announced they were dropping support for FinalScratch, so we knew they were up to something in that space, along with M-Audio which had already released Connectiv Vinyl. So here we go for a quick shopping list for "unanalog" DJs:

M-Audio: Torq Xponent (USB MIDI controller + MIDI interface + USB audio interface).

Vestax: VCI-100 (USB MIDI controller)

NI: Traktor Scratch (Traktor + time coded vinyl support + dedicated audio interface), Audio 8 DJ (USB audio interface with phono preamps).

Behringer: the BCD2000 has finally been updated to become the B-Control DEEJAY (MIDI controller + USB audio interface) with Windows/OSX support and ships now with Traktor LE at the behringersque price of 299USD.

Numark: Total Control (USB MIDI controller) which looks almost identical to the ION iCUE I saw at CES.

Advanced RapidWeaver: edit your page template code.

jmt@unanalog.com — 2007-01-16T23:06:40-08:00

I'm using RapidWeaver to author this site, and I was wondering whether it was at all possible to add specific code to all pages of the site. Why would you want to do that, one might ask. Well maybe you want to add javascript code to incorporate tracking statistics, or use snap.com for page previews. RapidWeaver has limited code editing capabilities: it either lets you author a page from scratch in HTML, or you can use the Page Inspector (Window > Page Inspector), with which you can edit the page prefix, add custom CSS styles, or custom javascript code that will end up in the header.
If those options are not enough, all is not lost. Here's what to do:

Create your own theme: if you make any mistake, you don't want to alter the themes that ship with RapidWeaver, so make your own. So click the Toggle Themes View button (left of the Publish button on the lower right of the window), right-click on your current theme and select Duplicate Theme.

Select this new theme and right-click again to select Show Contents. This will open in the Finder the location where RapidWeaver stores all the files that make up your new theme. The file we want to edit is index.html, it is the template RapidWeaver uses for all your site pages. Open it in your favorite text editor and make the required changes. In my case I added the javascript code at the start of the body section for statcounter to track this site's page stats.

Save the file, look in the Code view of RapidWeaver to double-check your changes were incorporated at the right place, save and publish your changes.

That's it, you are now an official RapidWeaver power user.

Oh come on, Numark/ION!

jmt@unanalog.com — 2007-01-15T19:27:18-08:00

So I'm walking down the aisles of the central hall in the Las Vegas convention center for CES 2007, and I stumble upon the Numark/ION booth. I see speakers, MIDI controllers, people playing keyboards and drums, seems like a fun booth, especially after countless displays of wireless chips and iPod accessories. Let's see what else they have. Cool, they have the iCUE, a new DJ controller! It looks a lot better than M-Audio's X-Session Pro, with blue and red backlighting (one color for each deck). On the booth, it's connected to a desktop Windows PC but nothing seems to work. Fair enough, maybe they don't want people to mess with the settings. On the screen is the Numark DJ app that uses the same color cues as the interface, nice. A quick look at the facts sheet tells me it only runs on Windows. Bummer, I really wanted one... but wait, what's that picture on the top of the booth? An iCue, connected to a Powerbook 12"!!! So it's not using BootCamp or Parallels, it must be OS X. I ask the first person I see that seems to be in charge of that booth section: "Can the controller and software work on both Windows and OS X?". I can tell by the way the guy looks at me that a/ he didn't understand the question at all, and b/ he's going to BS me big time. "Uhhh, well you can turn the knobs to change the way you scratch the music" he says. "Sorry Sir, I meant: can it run on a Windows PC and an Apple computer?" I fire back. "Oh, yes it uses MP3s, and what you play on your computer". I was speechless! Why couldn't he just say "Shhh, I have no idea what you're talking about, but let's keep that between you and me, I have a family to feed", or "I don't know, but let me ask someone who is more familiar with this product line". Hopeless...
If you go on the ION website, you'll get the same confusing message: Powerbook picture with "DirectX compatible soundcard" requirements. Come on ION, there are cool looking non-Apple laptops out there! UseSony Vaios, or a UMPC, but don't confuse your audience! If you want sexy laptops, port your stuff to sexy laptops. Ni's doing it, M-Audio's doing it, why can't you?
CreateDigitalMotion (a great blog BTW) has a good coverage of the Numark VJ'ing solution, whose controller seems awfully similar to the iCue, and they mention cross-platform support. Let's hope the same will materialize at NAMM for the iCue. I'll definitely keep an eye open for USB DJ solutions at the next NAMM, it seems companies are finally taking notice of this market opportunity. CreateDigitalMusic (another great blog) has already posted some really interesting infos about upcoming NI and M-Audio products.

Two new search engines worth bookmarking.

jmt@unanalog.com — 2007-01-12T20:54:30-08:00

A number of alternatives to the good ol' Google search interface are starting to create some buzz. I've started to play with two of them that offer pretty interesting features.

The first is Snap.com. You may have heard of Snap not for its search engine, but rather for its website enhancement that's pretty clever. With a tiny bit of Javascript magic (relying on the defer command), leaving your mouse over a link will display a snapshot of the link content. Snap is currently caching an impressive number of website snapshots and is supposedly increasing its coverage at lightspeed. Besides this feature, Snap is also a regular search engine that will display your query results on the left side of the screen, and a snapshot of each result you click on in the other half of the screen.

On Snap, the image search follows the same model. But this time it uses a Flash interface to incrementally display the images that have been found, and display the one you've clicked on on the right side, along with the image URL and size. It's quite nice to see the page getting populated by the pictures, and the preview size is quite large.

Next up is searchmash.com. A number of sites are reporting this is Google experimenting with a new search interface. I read this online, so it must be true. A few random tests I've made have given me the same results between Searchmash and Google, so it could really be true, unless this is a good service mashup. Anyway, the cool feature is that this engine packs on the same page traditional search results plus image results, blogs, videos, and wikipedia entries. On top of that, you can directly preview the videos inside that same page (Google videos only, wink wink...). Proof that this is an experimental site, a feedback section asks you whether the results for each category were useful to you.
While I can't give you any metrics as to the quality of the links that were found, I can comment about how the result were displayed. It seems Snap wins for the most stylish layout, albeit with a slower display, especially for the picture display (first the Flash plugin needs to be loaded, then the images are displayed as they are downloaded). Searchmash definitely gives you a pretty complete overview of all aspects of your search, even though the first have to expand all the search result sections before they are displayed. I did a few searches and counted how many results were displayed, here's what I got:
Text search (in number of links per screen): Google: 11, Snap: 15, Searchmash: 11.
Image search (in number of links per screen): Google: 20, Snap: 18, Searchmash: 6.
All searches were performed on a 1200 pixel high screen, in Safari, with tab display activated.
So after this test, am I still a Google fan? Yep! It seems to fully take advantage of Snap, you'll have to do a lot of clicking to see the site previews, which I don't believe is quite necessary since I'm quite fond of tabbed browsing, and I'll quite likely use that instead. The cool thing about searchmash is that it lets me directly access results that would have otherwise required me to go to specific sites for the search (videos + wikipedia), and the blog search is quite useful too. Let me know what you think.

OpenAL on OSX: get the best 3D audio out of your Mac.

jmt@unanalog.com — 2006-12-25T22:18:44-08:00

Popular amongst game programmers, OpenAL provides interactive positional 3D audio on the Mac, as well as Linux, Windows (to name a few OSs) and is natively supported in OSX since Tiger. Not all Mac games use OpenAL as their audio library, but a good number of flagship titles such as Call Of Duty 2 or Unreal Tournament rely on OpenAL for their game audio.
The OpenAL renderer is the piece of OS software that gets directives from the game engine such as "play this sound at this 3D coordinate", or "the listener is now at that 3D coordinate", and computes the sound stream that you will listen to on your speakers. In order to do the best job possible, the OpenAL renderer needs to know what your speaker setup is. Do you have just two speakers? Or do you have a 5.1 speaker system? 6.1? 7.1? You want the renderer to take full advantage of all your speakers so you can enjoy the most accurate spatial recreation of the game soundscape. Depending on the audio output device you use, you need to tell OSX how many speakers you use, whether it's your laptop speakers, a Creative Xmod, or a Griffin FireWave.

Unfortunately, you cannot use System Preferences to take care of that. Instead you need to launch Audio MIDI Setup located in Applications > Utiities. For instance to properly configure an Xmod, in the drop-down list "Properties for", select "Creative Xmod". Click "Configure Speakers". Select "Multichannel" then "5.1 Surround.
Note that clicking on each speaker label will play white noise in that speaker. Use it to test you are getting "surround sound".
Now go and test that Call Of Duty 2 (or any OpenAL title for that matter) and enjoy the difference this makes.

Disclaimer: my current employer is Creative Labs, which is an active supporter of OpenAL, and I have been involved in the release of OpenAL on Windows. Oh, and I'm an active supporter of OpenAL too!