I _Really_ Don't Know

My younger brother has explained to me some of the intricacies of perceptual sound and yada-yada-yada

you'll typically find that if the band for 18khz is showing any appreciable level, that level will be reflected louder, lower down. Sounds with an 18khz component will almost certainly have matching (in terms of volume envelope) components across a wide range (in linear terms) of frequencies in the top end. For example - a hi-hat stills sounds like a hi-hat if you low-pass filter it at 10k, the higher components aren't really doing anything different for our purposes. ... So limiting your graph to say 60 > 12k or so would still be representing all the zingy top and hefty bottom visually, but would do it more accurately (by doing it less accurately, if you know what i mean!?!?).

So expect to see these ideas appearing in BetterBars.dll in a few weeks or so when I next get chance to touch it.

I finally got around to adding a couple more visualizations to Better Bars; the first being a stereo version of the standard 'scope' and the second being a trailing scan of the sound, looking something like an ultrasound. If you try Better Bars 2 then I'd appreciate some feedback on the performance of 'Scan' as it's using BitBlt and seems to be a bit slow on my machine if you run it full screen.

Again, installation instructions are:

I have a large and legitimate CD collection - all of which (even the copy protected ones) have been ripped as WMAs (no religous alignment to MP3) and shipped onto my 60Gb player. But today, on Channel 4 news of all places, I heard about an album that intrigued me - The Grey Album by DJ Danger Mouse. Even his name is stolen from a UK children's TV show.

So I did what any one with an ounce of nouse would do - I went and downloaded it to hear what all the fuss was about. Took me about three minutes to find it and about an hour for BitTorrent to download it.

When I was at Uni we watched every year as the University grounds-keepers re-seeded and tended the large lawn next to the Students' Union. Fencing it off in the spring and lovingly watering it and spreading seed. The end result was a beautiful, lush lawn, obviously well-loved.

Then, in early summer each year, we held a large open-air concert and beer festival on the lawn over two days. We built a huge stage, lighting and PA rigs, burieds cables the full length of the lawn for the front-of-house sound and lighting desks and then had around 2,000 people sit, stand, dance, wrestle, shag, drink beer and destroy the lawn.

As in "Placenta Previa" where the placenta is positioned to arrive before the child. Technology Previa is the positioning of a technology to arrive before the requirement. ;-)

I found these posts on Pat Helland's Blog, actually, I didn't, Dave did, but hey.

SOA is like the Night Sky... It's All in a Name: What's a Service?

The timing was really interesting...

Well, we all do a jolly good job at making the right technology decisions and having a good go at building great systems for our customers, but from time to time you get one of those situations where some functionality has been chosen or bought and mandated despite it's lack of suitability.

You know the situation, flashy sales demo is followed by a purchase, the CTO/Strategy Team/Architecture Group/Project Sponsor hands you the box and says "we're going to use this for our foobits logic processing".

Well, here are two subversive patterns I've used to tackle the problem...

Tomorrow is the big day, I get to start my new job working on .Net projects with a consultancy here in the Midlands. I'm really looking forward to getting my brain back in gear and getting up-to-speed with what the team's working on. I'll try to keep the blog up-to-date with what we're doing.

I finally got around to writing a better bar type visualization for Windows Media Player. It took me a day to run through some examples and write this one up.

Rachel Davies has been writing about some insights she gained from a tour of the Toyota plant in Derby, which reminded me I should write something about a couple of concepts Steve Jones (of Egg) and I worked on as analogies for large scale systems monitoring.