TECH-fidel

My brother Bob had been working in Central America for over a decade and doing some very interesting and important things.

http://subocean-iz.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html Chronicles the efforts of his son and friends to get aid to Hurricane Felix victims

http://www.flickr.com/photos/7698002@N04/ Photos from his own investigative work in the banana fields

His life held great victories.

Posted by Erich Izdepski at 11:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I said words a few days ago, Nov 18, to my wife that I never expected to say, at least not in shock and dismay. I strained to get out, "My brother's dead." He died in Costa Rica of some heart-related problem (heart attack or failure). It was too sudden and he was too young. We had more adventures to go on. I'll write more later.

http://www.suboceansafety.com/ 

Posted by Erich Izdepski at 05:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I am exploring Android. First take- I like it. Just the API list alone is enough to cause excitement. Speech recogntion? XMPP? Maps? The list goes on: nio, sax, dom, json, location, reflection, crypto, sqlite, sound, httpclient, junit, telephony, openGL ES, logging, sound, midi, media playback and record, sms ... Forget about MIDP forever. Forget about OEM java extensions that are weak and non-standard.

Android promises future support for bluetooth and wifi, too. I am really looking forward to getting more bluetooth profiles rather than dealing with crippled iplementations from OEMs.

This system is made for devleoping best of breed apps

There are areas of improvement on the tools front. The eclipse plug-in gets the job done, but how much hand-coding or hand-writing XML for building GUI's do you really want to do? A powerful drag and drop visual editor with property sheets support (think Flex Builder) is what is needed to get things rolling.

Just imagine being able to test your code properly on a handset. You would think this was an unachievable goal given the last few years of J2ME (let's see, two versions in 6 years??). Hopefully JavaFx will compete with Android if only to continue to grow the ecosystem and force all parties to get better.

Posted by Erich Izdepski at 07:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is a powerful little search tool I built for easily delving into a topic of interest. It is called Search Exploder.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=jqsvffV83BGKioe3X0sBXw

On the techie side, this uses 2 yahoo pipes. The first one searches a default list of RSS feeds for terms you provide (searches for each term independently of the rest, so it is like running multiple searches at once). The results are processed and an extra title, link, and description is inserted into them. This extra link invokes the second pipe which simply runs a Yahoo Search on the title of the RSS feed article you are interested in. This explodes your original search but in a more detailed way. Good stuff- it let's you pull in multiple viewpoints  and information on the same general topic.

Posted by Erich Izdepski at 01:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Synthesis- I love the word. I have an Alesis QSR, which is a great synthesizer. It is also very expandable and you can even make your own memory cards for it. One problem- they are pricey and don't appear to store as much as regular Q-cards for the QSR. You can store 8MB and the cost is about $75- if you can find one. Pretec is the only vendor I've had success with. The ability to re-use the card, though, is nice (but they load really slow). Since you can store the card image on your PC, you really only need one card.

To use the card, you need samples. I have a ton. I sample vintage synths, I have a software synth I wrote that generates nice samples, and I make small analog noise units that make great samples. The strength of the QSR is that you can put 4 samples into one patch and use its envelope controls and digital effects on each sample separately. This makes simple samples into rich instruments. 

I primarily use Unisyn for creating patches from my samples. It lets you do a mashup between your samples and someone elses patch settings. You can siply pick your favorite patches and swap out all the samples with your own. This is a quick way to get your samples sounding really good. There is also software to randomize patches as well as intepolate the settings between two. Most results are not good, but you are really only looking for a few good patches. 

To get your samples onto a card, you need Soundbridge.  It's free and still works (it's a decade old) on a modern PC. As I said before, cards get loaded real slow- 10-15 minutes or more. I haven't tried using the serial port of the QSR. Got to get a new cable for that. But if anyone can say they load faster than MIDI, please let me know.

I just made a few samples this morning so you can hear what I am talking about. http://www.erichizdepski.com/music/qsrsamples.mp3

Check out the waveform- that tells you immediately the sounds are more analog and quirky than the overly-beautified digital sounds of today.

Posted by Erich Izdepski at 09:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)