Daniel Von Fange

Photos of Pompeii.

I updated my old post about Pompeii with photos. For some odd reason, random people just keep visiting that page. Their visits give me a sense of responsibility to have more content then just a few quiped lines written late at night.

LDI in Review.

(Our family business's booth at LDI.)

Fun things I did:
* Learned how to use a Wholehog III. (Thanks HighEnd for bringing four of them for people to play on, and thanks Tristan for the help.)
* Played with a well designed Palm based lighting board, the Figment.
* Saw an good peice of software, ProjectMaker, designed in FileMaker by a production company for internal use and now being sold. I was very impressed with FileMaker's capabilities, and resolved to try FileMaker out when I got back.
* Admired the Pathport ethernet to DMX interface. If I ever build a Mac based ligthing board, this looks to be a good way to get DMX out.

It's great to be able to talk face to face at the tradeshow with people you have dealt with over the phone. People can talk to the people that actualy design the products, instead of having them buired behind sales wall. Ideas can flow both ways. Person to person relationships are a excellent foundation for both selling and buy. I can see why even with the high cost of attending or exhibiting at the convention, people still come from around the world.

Booth is Setup.

After arriving in at 4am after a bit of a grueling drive, we are finaly at the show. Ten minutes left till the crowds come in. Across one asie from us people are posing for photos with their booth, while to the other side, techs are last minute taking apart a intelingent light with their pocket leathermans.

Our booth looks really good. Having the booth framed in with truss allows us to light it well, so rather than the typical dark booth, ours feels very open.

I am posting from my phone. Photos will probably have to wait until I return.

Off to LDI.

I'm off to the LDI Show in Orlando. Entertainment lighting is a world I grew up in.For three days this week I'll be doing the fun parts of working at a lighting company - walking a tradeshow and playing with $40,000 gagets or standing my Dad's company's booth talking about small peices of metal.

Colonel John Boyd.

I've picked up a trail of Colonel John Boyd. His ideas on military victory sound good, but finding the his real thoughts on the web is tough work, hidden as it is behind a cloud of journalists who don't know what they are talking about, and lauding friends who tell you how important his ideas are without telling you what they were. Here are the best of the links I have been able to find.

The Strategy of the Fighter Pilot - A Fast Company article, my orignal introduction to Boyd's ideas.

The Essential Boyd - One of the best overviews I have found. Written by a man who went on to write, The Mind of War (Amazon), a book covering Boyd's ideas.

The Fighter Pilot - A short article on the life of Boyd, written by the man who wrote an apparently over idolizing book on Boyd's life, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War (Amazon).

Genghis John - A freind's biography of him.

Tribute to Boyd - A contractor's remembrance of Boyd's involvement with fighters.

ParaPundit on Boyd - Collection of random snippets and links.

D-N-I.net - Site by some of Boyd's associates. The PDF presentations available for download are Boyd's only real writings available.

Macromedia Flex.

The newly announced Macromedia Flex looks interesting. I ilke their concept of data binding and services.

Learning Struts.

I am learning Jakarta Struts.

( My usual plan of attack when learning a new programing language, is to buy a few books by intelligent authors. I read the books cover to cover to get the big picture, and to try to find the "Clue" or "Way" of the language. Then I do a tiny goofy project to actualy get code written down, going back over the book to find out the specific ways concepts are implimented. Finaly, I do a small real world app. )

Up until the past two weeks, I had had little experince with Java. From the intoductory books I had read, I belived that the way of Java was to break everything down into business related objects and avoid the use of getters and setters. I regarded Java as a verbose, brittle way of programing that was horribly unsuited to web coding.

About half way through my first read through of Struts in Action, I came across a sentance that ran something like this, "It is generaly agreed that the best way to build multi layered applications is to only pass primitives, (Numbers, Strings, Collections) accross layers." I was quite staggered - this was totaly against everything I thought good Java programing stood for.

Now I am learning "real" web programing Java. Other than the mass of classes created, it is very similar my MVC PHP coding I am already doing.

Part of the Way of Programing Struts is to use Beans. Beans are nothing more than classes with get and set methods on every attirbute. This makes the class open, and eliminates the need for other classes to know what they are dealing with. If you are a filling station, and the Bean that drove up has a setFuelLevel() method, then you can fill it up. It does not matter if that particular object subclasses MotorizedVehicle or not. For all you care it could be a GasCan. Beans are nothing more than a way of doing Duck Typing in Java.

Struts solves many of the little ickies in web programing - forms, messages, control flow. Time will tell if Struts is worth the verbosity that comes with using Java.

Now I'm building my tiny goof-off application - it's a way based control panel to command the mythical rodents that live under the Center and chew on network cables.

Seen that before.

Steven Garrity talks about seeing things in real life that you have already expirenced digitaly. Once in Williamsburg, I was walking down the shops part of the historic area, and turned my head to the side. A brick dead end alley was before my eyes with a black metal ladder bolted to one wall giving access to the roof. I imedatily felt pulled to dash to it, climb up, and lay belly down on the roof to await the enemy. Too much America's Army.

I have also understood dog's learning in terms of Baysain spam filters - speaking of which, somebody needs to train a dog to recognize spam.

Flags.

I found a good set of free flags.

Buzz's talk.

I watched the video of Buzz Bruggeman's talk from the Zap Your PRAM conference.

"Mental Impulse > Utterance > Predictable Result" is his mantra. He spoke of avoiding the typical intermediary steps currently imposed on us by current software software.

In an industry I am familiar with, pure PC based lighting control systems have not taken off, while the real jewels are expensive behemoths with motorized knobs and faders. The difference is that with a PC you have to move your mouse around, pick one item, and a manipulate it. During a live show you have want to just be able to think, and then move your hands in "preprogramed" manner. Mouses are lousy interfaces for many things in life.

It is common wisdom that modes are bad interface design. Yet essentially mice are very modal - the event that takes place when the mouse is clicked varies widely with the location of the cursor.

ActiveWords is a cool piece of software. One thing about ActiveWords that bugs me though is that it must be preprogrammed. Useful shortcuts are only useful if you have set them up. The Mac "equivalent" of ActiveWords, LaunchBar, though only used to launch applications, urls, documents, and emails, requires no setup and sneakily learns shortcuts as you use it.

Another remark that struck me was "After thinking, language is the most important human activity." (Or something like that.) I've been doing quite a bit of thinking lately about language and it's unnoticed importance.

Jupiter Research.

I just noticed the "Jupiter Research Analyst Weblogs". It is interesting how each analyst has a specific area to be an expert in. This seems like a good idea for customer focused blogs.

Textpad.

The handiest text editor I found on Windows is Textpad. In my pre Mac days, this was the editor I used to build php powered websites. I'd not used it in a while, but recently since I am working off of a Windows PC at JAARS, I have become reacquainted with it. I still love it. Many thanks to Wayne Luke for first introducing it too me.

Anger, Magic, Treachery.

I watched "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers" for the first time last night. It was outdoors under, projected onto a barn, with a fire burning for warmth. The evening was great. (But somebody turned an exceptional tale into a soap opera of movie. I'll spare writing about what the movie did to the heros Elrond, Faramir, and Theoden. )

Watching the way the movie changed from the book, I was reminded of the way losers view winners. I used to play a lot of multiplayer computer games. I've found that both in games and in life, many people believe that personal success comes from one of three things - anger, some magic personal attribute, or treachery.

Anger

Mindless anger is not your friend. It makes you do stupid things, and is a very good thing for your opponent to have. Yet many people believe that if they get angry enough or passionate about something, that the emotion in itself guarantees victory. I have seen movie-watching newbie after movie-watching newbie work themselves into an angry passion, and then unceremoniously get stomped by someone with skill. One paintball game, a guy on his first game stood up from behind cover, began screaming at our concealed enemies. He was properly splattered out in short order.

Magic

My younger brother is a crack shot. Last year at the national matches he finished thirtieth in the nation out of eight hundred and fifty contestants. Watching him shoot, you would think that he is personally a magnificent shot, and yet what you do not see is the hours he spends outside on frosty mornings or hot summer afternoons practicing. The huge vast majority of people skilled at things are that way because of hard, smart work, not a mysterious "attribute".

Treachery

My youngest brother is a skilled computer game race car driver. One of his favorite things is to get kicked out of an online race by the other drivers for "cheating" - Obviously anyone that can defeat top of the line Ferraris while driving a Ford Mustang must be cheating. This same pattern can often be seen in left political/economic debates - "these people have more money than we do; therefor they cheated, and we are entitled to take their stuff"

They are Distractions

All of these things are distractions from what really brings skill. And the sadness of their prevalence in movies is that people subconsciously believe that these are the ways to skill/success, and they miss the real path.

Perhaps, the reason for these bad ideas' widespread appearance in films is that they are easy to portray. ("Never ascribe to conspiracy what can be explained by stupidity.") Anger, personal magic, and treachery are all "easy" things. You can work yourself up to passionate anger in a moment, but spending an hour a day practicing in grueling conditions is both hard to do in real life, and impossible to film.

Real cluefullness is work.