Look at the time

Wow, almost three weeks since I've ranted. I got the laptop back from Dell in excellent time, so I can't even use that as an excuse.

What have I been doing in the meantime? Doesn't seem like much. I re-edited our movie reviews into the new MT blog that meriko set up for them. That took a while, as I never felt like working on it for long stretches of time. I have a long list of movies we've seen that aren't on the review page yet, though. And there are more that we've forgotten about.

I played some of the Unreal Tournament 2003 demo. Verdict favorable overall: good gameplay, great graphics, excellent performance even on two-year-old machines, silly title, some idiocy in the server browser, and why even bother with teamplay modes if you aren't going to put voice communications in the game? If I can get meriko hooked on the demo, we'll probably get the full game.

It's been really warm here, too hot to think sometimes — I just don't do very well in the heat. Everywhere you go, though, you have some sort of climate to deal with, and San Francisco is really exceptionally mild. The northerners laugh at our silly little 40-Fahrenheit winters. The desert creatures don't laugh at our hot days, they just tell us how lucky we are that we can go outside without stillsuits.

The iMac was ordered and is on the way. I'm excited, but I still think I'm going to have to clone myself to deal with all the projects I want to start. I think the curb-household-spending dam is cracking a bit — we've both ordered some books and tee-shirts and CDs and random other toys recently. Nothing big apart from the computer, but just a few little releases after reining in successfully for a while.

Some bastard stole the potted mint plant and another pot (empty) from right in front of our house. In two missions. One of them in broad daylight on Friday, between 9 and noon. I had the rage. If I catch the guy I'm going to do something stupid. I feel like we should set up one of our dust-gathering webcams looking out the front window, except there's nothing nearby, really, to hook it up to, and I don't like bluffing.

Oh yeah. A couple of rants ago, it sounded like I was going to do a soft synth, Heartburn, using some ideas from Edge. Instead, Gregg talked me into rewriting Edge with some new goodies (yes, you can do Fifty-nine tone Miller's Porcupine-7 Major on it), but the oscillator redesign that came about from doing that will be a substantial part of Heartburn, so it's all good. Edge2 is available in the usual place.

Uh-oh, I feel a REAL rant coming on now.

I've also been revisiting some Computer Music Journal articles, trying to stuff more concepts into my mental percolator. Seems like one or another article always offers some insight into something I was already mentally toying with; I can't tell if it's because I select those articles to read, or because those are just the ones I'm ready to comprehend.

I get a little annoyed with the articles in some cases, as I think they have a tendency to use mathematical notation when plain English is more useful, as well as to forget to tell you what C_β is supposed to mean. Maybe it's just programmer-not-mathematician bias, but concepts that I think should be expressed iteratively, they always express in a math-functional way. This does lend itself better to analysis, sure, but it's about as informative to the reader as machine language. Yeah, I'm just whining 'cause I dropped out of college before I learned all that complicated stuff. That's it.

Oh, and to compound this, I decided that I didn't want a stack of dead-tree CMJ lying around the house, so I went for the electronic subscription. Their electronic subscription system is a mess. You can get the articles in RealPage plugin format, which, oh sorry, doesn't work on IE6. You can get them in PDF format, which isn't so bad, except that some of the formatting is a little weird — extraneous whitespace on the left of certain equations or symbols pushes them out into the margins from time to time, and the kerning is awful. And the Acrobat reader plugin tends to hose IE on my machine, so I never really trust it, though it seems to work okay on the CMJ articles. Finally, there's Adobe's SVG format, which as far as I can tell is PDF with extra features that takes twice as long to load a page. Oh, and the "remember this preference" control that you're supposed to check once you've found a format that works for you? Doesn't work.

So I'm going with PDF. Either I have to scroll around the page, or squint at tiny tiny 8-pixel type: my vertical screen real estate is spent on the IE title bar, IE menu bar, IE tool bar, IE address bar, then about a vertical inch is spent on a toolbar which includes within-the-issue navigational controls (prev/next article, TOC), then finally the Acrobat toolbar. Oh, and then down at the bottom I have the Acrobat status bar, IE status bar, and Windows start-bar. Come on, guys, does not one of you, browser, journal, or portable document format guys realize that most printed pages have a portrait aspect and you're already fighting a landscape aspect ratio? Could not one of these toolbars have gone vertically on the side? (Yeah, I know, the Windows bar can be moved to the side, some of the others can be removed, etc., etc.) I'm on a freakin' 1400x1050 pixel screen here, and I can't read the thing. At 1024x768, it's a joke. How do people stand this crap?

So I'm reduced to printing out the articles that I'm actually interested in if I want to read them at all comfortably. I think I'm gonna write some mail to MIT Press and/or CatchWord and see if I can't get them to fix some of this. Blurg.

Posted by russell at September 23, 2002 06:38 PM