Who's Googling me? Not them.

But I can definitely tell who you who hasn’t.

Dads are cavemen?

I’m baffled yet again as to why this picture was deemed appropriate for ANY ad, let alone one targeting dads in need of scholarships.  They definitely got my attention, but it certainly wasn’t a positive result that came of it.

Stupid Facebook Ad #001

Seriously. What the hell is this? Why is some creepy dude with a wicked unibrow the image used for trying to sell me on financial aid?  The only aid I want after seeing this picture is that which I would lend to this idiot in order to  clean up those eyebrows.

I loved Late Night and watched that show regularly in years past but Tonight could never hold my interest…he was too censored, too controlled being that it was in an earlier slot where things were much tighter from a network interference perspective. And that sucks. I know Conan dreamed of hosting The Tonight Show for years, but he was way above that show and this entire fiasco only goes to prove it.

The $4.8 million bit: Mine that Bird wearing a mink Snuggie watching restricted NFL Super Bowl footage

The final episode was, without a doubt, one of the best hours in the history of network television. It was more subdued than the previous few nights, but that was made up for with Conan’s farewell speech (being setup to really rip into NBC with him stating that, “Tonight, I can say whatever I want”) which ended up being so incredibly classy it was hard to watch and not get a little misty-eyed.

His speech really struck a nerve with me, too.  People who know me know what a sarcastic, cynical asshole I can be and while I’ve been trying to be less like it, I realized I still have a lot of work to do. Maybe it’s toolish of me to be so inspired by a late night TV show host/comedian, but I really am going to try to erase as much cynicism from my life as possible. It’s not worth being angry and upset about stupid little things all the time. There are so many better things I could spend my time and energy on than being pissed off and mean to people.

And then ending with the greatest rock song of all-time played with an ensemble band of Will Ferrell on vocals, Billy Gibbons, Ben Harper, Beck, The Tonight Show Band and Conan himself…it was so unbelievably epic I still can’t help but burst into a huge smile every time I think about it.  Free Bird was such a perfectly poignant song to play for the obvious reasons–what with it being, arguably, the most recognizable rock song ever, about moving on and getting out of a bad/pointless relationship, and most importantly: insanely fun.

I’m going out on a limb and saying this was the best ending to any TV show ever and it will likely be impossible to top. Conan was having such a blast.  Hell, everyone up there was.  Well played, Conan.  Well played indeed. I’m sorry I didn’t watch your show more, but I promise you though that I’m going to go out of my way to watch whatever show you have in September no matter where/when it is.

Ableton Suite 8

But all the weird issues I’ve been having with Ableton Live since upgrading to 8.0.9 a few months ago have only furthered my extreme skills in putting-off everything besides mindlessly surfing the internet for hours and whoring achievements on Xbox 360.

First there was the issue of Massive no longer being recognized/seen by Live.  The VST was right in the folder with all the REST of the VSTs but Massive wouldn’t show up in the plugin folder.  And any Live set using it would report it couldn’t find the VST and that MIDI track was worthless.

However, that was fixed after some help from the support staff…I just had to move all the VSTs to another directory and change where Live looked for them.  It scanned the new folder and found everything as it should.  So that was cool.

But upgrading to 8.0.9 introduced another awesome new bug: the disappearing registration bug. Going from 8.0 > 8.0.4 > 8.0.5 there were no problems. I didn’t have to re-register or reactivate my copy.  But suddenly with 8.0.9 I did.  And that used up my last activation. A simple email to Ableton can get me additional activations (I had to reinstall Windows a LOT…stupid Vista, then new motherboard and CPU and finally Windows 7 upgrade) but still…why should I have to contact them for more when a simple upgrade from an existing installation shouldn’t have forced another activation in the first place?

Now we’re in 8.1.1 (which seems to be the first patch in what may be a series of patches to fix a number of enormous bugs, as admitted by the Ableton top brass) which uses the same new file format that 8.1 introduced. For those unaware, this new format makes it impossible to open any file created in 8.1.x with any version prior to 8.1.  And now I’m having MASSIVE (no relation to the previously mentioned NI Massive) problems with simple playback of tracks. I’ve got a song I’ve been working on here and there for the last 2 months and just listening to the set is almost impossible as Live starts clipping, ASIO4ALL freaks out and performance comes crashing almost to a halt.

I’ve no idea what the problems is as this has NEVER happened before…it almost seems like the system is running dangerously low on resources and is swapping from the HDD rather than the RAM which is introducing lag/latency/terrible performance…but that’s ridiculous. I’ve got 4GB RAM and it’s barely ever over 70% in-use. And the CPU can’t be overloaded because it’s a Core 2 Quad Q8200.  There’s NO WAY I’m using all 4 cores at 100%.

It’s baffling and sort of maddening because I’ve got time off and WANT to finish up this song (at least a demo of it anyway) and I literally can’t because performance is suffering so terribly.  Ugh! I hope the next patch releases soon and somehow magically resolves this!  C’mon Ableton! I love your DAW (the whole Suite, really) and you’ve never steered me wrong before!

UPDATE 1:51pm 1/15/2010

Welp…it would seem I’m the fool. I forgot I disabled multicore support as an attempt to get Live to recognize NI Massive again.  It was a suggested fix I found for another somewhat similar problem and so I tried that to no avail and guess I forgot to re-enable it.  I just did and Live is back to working beautifully.  Now, to go play some Dragon Age: Origins in celebration!

Clown-faced and over-chipper, but not TOO scary...

But then the ad continues its animation:

Jesus.

Progressive: you’ll buy our insurance or we’ll send her to haunt your ass.

The upgrade from 1.0 > 1.5 was great.  Lots of new, useful features were added…performance gains were made and it felt all-around like a much tighter, well-thought-out execution.

But now they’ve gone to v2.0 and the same cannot be said about this transition.

So many baffling and, in my opinion, downright stupid decisions were made. Plus there are all sorts of performance problems and weird errors that never, EVER once occured in 1.5.  For instance:

• No longer is there a “synchronize” option when dealing with local files and Cloud files of the same application. One of the great things about the Cloud is that you can use any computer with Aptana installed. Simply login using you Aptana ID and bam! You’ve got all your Cloud sites right there able to be edited to your heart’s content. And syncing up the latest version of files on the Cloud with your machine was a simple as clicking a button with an upward-facing arrow next to a downward facing arrow. It looked at all the files on both instances of the site, determined which needed to be changed/added where and did it. Now, that same icon is in the IDE but it simply opens up an FTP-style file transfer window. No more synchronizing.  Why? Who the hell knows?
• Download no longer downloads your site. At least not as far as I can tell. Even though it was apparently downloading SOMETHING for about 4 minutes earlier, none of my local files were actually overwritten/updated to be what was out on the server.
• It’s no longer obvious when a file is local or Cloud-hosted. They removed the helpful text in the title bar/tab of the file stating (Cloud Hosted) or something similar to let you know which files were remote and which were local in case you had to just quick edit something without going through the whole edit local > upload process.
• Intellisense for Cloud functionality is PAINFULLY laggy. This was never a problem in 1.5. There was slight lag as it undoubtedly connected to the Cloud site to bring back dynamically updated command-line functionality, but it takes upwards of 10 seconds to get a list back and while that’s happening, the IDE is completely useless.
• Cloud connectivity is suspect-at-best. I get errors CONSTANTLY about being unable to connect to the remote server or retrieve file lists or put a file out there. Never ONCE did I receive an error like that in 1.5. Remedying the situation requires sometimes logging out of my Aptana account and logging back in, but usually completely closing the IDE and reopening it is necessary.  And there’s no guarantee that if it starts working upon opening up that it will continue to work the entire time you’re in the IDE.

Lots and lots of changes have been made.  There are probably more things happening that have annoyed or baffled me that are not detailed above, but these are the ones that came to mind right away. I don’t know why some of these things are happening or why the people at Aptana made so many boneheaded design decisions, but I’m unhappy. I want v1.5 back. I want a functional IDE back with icons that don’t change functionality to something mostly useless. I don’t want inane and nonsensical errors every other time I fire up the IDE to work. All this crap is not only making me not want to use Aptana anymore, but it’s making me dread doing any Rails development because I know it’s going to be a shitshow trying to get this previously near-flawless IDE to do what it is SUPPOSED to do.

And Aptana’s support is a complete joke, but that’s a rant for another time.  I hope the next release (which seems to be 3.0 in early 2010) fixes this crap and performs the way 1.5 did.

Anyway, my latest addition to the app is the ability to add a photo via Paperclip.

I was getting an error every time I tried to attach a photo to a post.  It read something similar to: “xxx is not recognized by the ‘identify’ command.” And I had no idea what it could mean. ImageMagick (the awesome software needed to do resizing of uploaded photos on the fly) was installed correctly on my server and verified working by me.  I got the migrations completed successfully…so what was it?

Apparently it was an issue with Paperclip not knowing exactly where ImageMagick was installed.  By following the advice here, I added the following line of code to my development.rb and production.rb files

Paperclip.options[:command_path] = "/usr/local/bin"

restarted the Passenger server powering my app and everything worked as it should.

On a *nix based system with Git installed, simply running the following command in your Rails app directory would install the desired plugin:

ruby script/plugin install git://github.com/freelancing-god/thinking-sphinx.git

But running the same command on Windows without Git installed results in the system THINKING the plugin was installed (and even saying it was) but navigating into /app_name/vender/plugins/thinking-sphinx simply ended in an empty directory.

THE SOLUTION is to run the same command slightly modified:

ruby script/plugin install http://github.com/freelancing-god/thinking-sphinx.git/

The plugin installs correctly, even without Git installed on a Windows machine.  Simply by changing the protocol from git:// to http:// and putting the trailing slash after the .git extension is all that is needed.

WHAT A RELIEF!

Linux on PS3

So I installed Ubuntu 9.04 on my Playstation 3 earlier to great success and fanfare. People from all around the world came by to congratulate me and wish me well. It was quite an awe-inspiring event.

Anyway, everything went INCREDIBLY smoothly. There were no problems/errors/hiccups/setbacks or anything at all. I couldn’t believe how well it all went.  I’m still a bit in awe.  But it’s working.

I set up the PS3 VRAM as the primary swap device over the HDD and that’s working brilliantly too.  The only complaint is that it’s a bit sluggish at times.  I attribute that to the overall lack of RAM in the system (256MB) but hopefully using the XFCE interface helps over Gnome or KDE due to it being far less resource intensive.

Now to just get Rails up and running…