opinios

Thoughts on Paul Hester

From a rock 'n' roll high in one post, to a low in the next.

What was an otherwise happy Easter long weekend spent camping and watching dear friends exchange vows of love, has ended on a sad note with the news of Paul Hester, former Split Enz and Crowded House drummer, taking his own life.

I know it's silly to think that you should have any kind of understanding of what kind of person a musician is like when your perception is based purely on the music they create. But you still feel some kind of connection anyway, regardless of how real it is, because they made you feel something when they spoke to you using the language of music.

I empathise with the feeling of a tortured artist battling his inner demons, I do. But what is really sad is thinking of how Hester's young daughters will cope with such a loss.

I think I'll go curl up in bed now and be melancholy.

Before This Crowded Theatre

The Dave Matthews Band concert was awesome.

Even though we were sitting near the back in the upstairs section of the Palais theatre, we still had a decent view and and spent more time dancing in the aisle than sitting in our seat.

One thing that really blew me away was how obvious it was that every band member is a true master of his instrument. This isn't any old band - this is a group of 5 maestros at the pinnacle of musicianship, who feed off each other when playing live to create a really unique musical synergy. This was highlighted by the amount of time the band spent just jamming, as every song morphed into an almost entirely different sound, and each member gave a solo that demonstrated their mastery and their roots in jazz and improvisation.

Drummer Carter Beauford has a massive kit that almost dwarfs him (he is not a small guy) and as a result is able to produce a spectacular array of sounds at an amazing rate and with incredible energy; LeRoi Moore manages to belt out those smooth sounds on the sax that make you shiver (not in a Kenny G kind of way); Boyd Tinsley plays his violin either like he is at a hoedown,
or by his side like a rhythm guitarist. And when bassist Stefan Lessard isn't jumping around, slapping and popping his bass to steady the melody, he is plucking beautiful notes that combine to make a sound one would think was impossible with a bass guitar. And I'm not sure who the keyboard player was but it provided an extra welcome dimension, with a solo that I have to say reminded me of Billy Joel, which wouldn't normally be a good thing but it definitely worked.

And then there's Dave.

Mr Charisma's vocals were a little soft in my opinion, but I figure that's the sound engineers' fault, not his. However he didn't fail to disappoint in his ability to really rock out for tracks like Drive In Drive Out and All Along the Watchtower; he delivered his own special touch of crazy as he pranced around like a funky chicken during Everyday, and never missed a beat on slower, softer ballads such as the beautiful Cry Freedom. It was a treat to finally see live a band that I have been following for so long.

The highlight for me was definitely Jimi Thing, a rockin' track that evolved into a 15 minute marathon medley of sounds and reminded me of why I enjoy seeing live shows and got me wondering why I hadn't been to see any live music for more than 18 months. The set list was a tad eclectic, so there were a few tracks that I was hoping to hear that didn't get played. But when you look at the massive back catalogue I guess it is a big ask to be super choosy; plus I get the feeling that every DMB show is different, and this was one show I will never forget.

Another comprehensive write-up of the show over at 35 Degrees.

The Space Between Us

Looking forward to the Dave Matthews concert tonight. It clashes with my design class, but I have arranged to meet with the lecturer before class tomorrow to catch up on what I miss. I have the notes already and have already read through them.

I'm not looking forward to sitting in row Y. In fact, I'm not looking forward to sitting full stop. DMB's songs are for dancing and grooving and not for tapping your foot and clapping politely.

And I am a bit worried about the fact that I have to get up at a ridiculous hour tomorrow morning to speak at the Enterprise Java Australia breakfast seminar. An early night is the best preparation for a morning presentation, and rock concerts generally don't equate to early nights.

But I'm definitely looking forward to seeing them live. Haven't been to a gig for far too long.

Style Sheets vs Print Packaging

After becoming more familiar with Adobe InDesign as part of my design course, I am starting to see parallels between InDesign (or Quark) files in the print world, and with Cascading Style Sheets in the web world.

I guess this is painfully obvious for anyone coming to standards-based web design from the print world, but for someone like me who is moving in the reverse direction it is somewhat of a revelation and gives a bit of insight into where each of the mediums might be headed.

If you choose to separate your content and your presentation (there are plenty of good reasons to do this in both the print world as well as in the web world) then you can definitely think of a CSS file as being the web equivalent of an InDesign file. Overlooking the obvious differences, everything pretty much maps one to one:

• Image files are linked to externally, usually in an "images" directory
• Text is also linked to externally (if you select the "Create Links When Placing Text and Spreadsheet Files" option in the Preferences window), and
• All of your presentation - position, padding, colours, font - is taken care of in the one place

Essentially, InDesign/Quark files and Cascading Style Sheets are doing the same thing - controlling the presentation of the document. This of course is a sweeping generalisation, as there are more sophisticated things to worry about in the print world like bleed and facing pages and what have you. And if you start thinking about image-replacement and Flash plug-ins on the web then the analogy falls apart.

But looking at things this way does offer some insight into how things could be in the future, both for print and for web-based design. For example,

• Will we eventually be using a WYSIWYG CSS editor? It would need to generate valid code to be a worthy contribution, and I see this as probably the biggest hurdle
• On the flip side, is a standard likely to ever evolve that would allow for control of print documents using a simple text-based language like CSS? For example, if the vocabulary was extended from the current:

  #footer {
    border: 2px solid red;
    margin-left: 10px;
  }

  to stuff like:

  #footer {
    drop-shadow: 5px 20% black;
    blur: motion 20px 15%;
  }

  and it became a defacto standard (or one that was endorsed by some kind of print equivalent to the W3C) then it could open up the market for some open source competition in this traditionally-monopolised market.

• Of course moving in this direction would require far more clarity from the specifications on how such a language should be interpreted, to avoid all the browser craziness that has held the web world back from realising the full potential of CSS. Such ambiguity would not be tolerated in the print world.
• This would also indicate the merging of the two worlds - why use one presentation language for print and another for the web? I think this would be a change from the present where the two worlds seem to be parting ways again as it is becoming necessary to specialize in order to really succeed with either medium.

Anyway, in the mean time I think the fact that I tend to keep my CSS files organized (ala the CSS Sandwich) is boding me well as I learn more about working with print. Keeping your files well-organized makes sense regardless of what medium you are operating in.

Becoming a Font Snob

As part of our time at design school I have started keeping a visual diary.

We are starting to collect images that we like - and ones we don't - in an A4 scrap book, along with commentary about why we like or dislike them. Working in an industrial part of town, there is plenty of ugly signage (panelbeaters, mechanics) for me to photograph. I am definitely starting to look at signs and logos in a different way. Critiquing the spacing between letters on one shop front; the amateurish layout of a brochure in the mail. And of course, admiring some of the postcards and magazine spreads that work really well.

Our first brief was to use three letters from the alphabet, and cut out different sizes, shapes, colours and fonts of those three letters from magazines and junk mail and arrange them all into some sort of abstract or realistic image. I whipped one up on the weekend using three letters that are very close to my heart right now in our endless search for a house - I, O and U. The result is below.

It was fun flicking through women's magazines and cutting bits and pieces out, although I did come to realize that there is little or no variety in the fonts used in those mags. I guess it's a formula that works and they stick to it, but I had a hard time getting any variety. That is also probably to do with the fact that the letters I chose have little variation between fonts and between upper and lower case. I might do another one using some more interesting shapes.

What's your favourite letter? We are talking pure aesthetics here. I think based purely on its shape and variety available I like the lower case f. There is something dorky about the way it hangs forward.

Next Speaking Engagement

I am giving a talk at the next Enterprise Java Victoria breakfast seminar, on March 22nd, at the Centre for Innovation and Technology Commercialisation on Collins Street in Melbourne's CBD (between Swanston and Elizabeth Street).

The topic is Creating an Open Source Development Environment. There are a bunch of tools out there that can help streamline the development process and make it more manageable; I will be introducing some of the most widely-used offerings, some lesser-known ones, and talk about some of the business issues related to using open source in a large enterprise.

If you are in Melbourne and are interested in Java development or open source technologies, come along!

First Day Of Design School

I started my part-time Associate Diploma in Graphic Design tonight.

I have enrolled at a small design school in the city that offer evening classes (two nights a week for 2 years), to get some more guidance in the creative aspect of this whole design thing. I loved drawing as a kid, and have always sketched and drawn cartoons and tried to find the right medium to harness the artist within. After an extended period of allowing the right side of my brain to dominate, I think this might be it. Some of you might remember that this web site actually began as a result of being frustrated at wanting a creative outlet. So in a sense this web site was a step towards doing this course.

Not that I have any regrets mind you: my software developer's salary has enabled me to travel the world and do all sorts of things. But I am definitely excited about this.

I am feeling really positive about the course; there is a good mix of people (seven of us, I think I'm the oldest!) and the lecturer is a very enthusiastic, chatty, positive person with a ring through her nose and crazy hair. I think she'll be great, as her approach to learning is very much "we're all adults, we all learn stuff from each other, there will be things you can teach me and things you can teach each other". The whole evening was more of an informal chat and I can see it will be a very supportive environment.

Even though tonight was very much a meet-and-greet and administrivia session, she also gave us quite a few handouts to get us thinking about our first project which is related to typography: capturing different examples of type out there in the world and grouping them and presenting them on an A3 sheet. And the first brief which is a logo and brochure exercise for fictitious company. Straight into it!

She also encouraged us to start keeping a visual diary, which should be interesting - capturing images that we like (and ones we don't) from magazines, photographs, anywhere, to use as a reference for the future, to dissect and to help us develop our own style.

I'll try and capture as much of what we cover in class here as I can, including the images. I think it will be useful to look back on.

Reviving a Book of Power

When I first discovered computers, it was on an Apple.

It must have been about 1985 when my father bought home an Apple II computer with an amber screen, 64K of memory and a single 5 1/4" floppy drive (that's right, no hard drive!) I'm sure some of you remember the one.

It was a pretty ugly box, but I used to do all sorts on that beast. A major high school project involved a program which displayed (with coordinates defined pixel by pixel) Japanese characters from a basic menu. I also programmed the very limited speaker (that normally emitted a high pitched beep) to play Axel F. Again, the frequency and pitch were all individually set using numbers, note after note, in Apple BASIC. And what classic games like Defender, Robotron and Dig Dug lacked in graphics, they made up for ten-fold in playability.

However somewhere along the line I made the switch to a PC. All the guys at school were programming DOS batch files, and there were games coming out like Leisuresuit Larry and Castle Wolfenstein that seemed to indicate that the PC was the 'technology of the moment' and worth investing in. Pirating of software was rife, and - legal issues and ethics of a 15 year-old geek aside - the availability of otherwise expensive programs like MS Office and Photoshop via this network of friends was an economically attractive reason to convince my parents to buy an Intel 286 PC for school and university.

Throughout the 90s computers got faster and grew RAM and hard disk space at an enormous rate in order to accommodate Microsoft Windows and its continually expanding demands. The corporate world embraced PCs, and when I began to pursue a career in software, it made sense to stick with them. I never looked back at those days spent on the Apple, and I haven't thought about it much until now.

In exchange for a recent web site project, I got hold of an Apple Powerbook laptop. It's an older model (1998) with only 128MB RAM and no USB or Firewire support, but it is good enough for what I need - to test how web sites display in the Mac browsers like Safari and IE5.

Mind you, getting it up and running was an ordeal: To run the latest browsers and other software, you need to be running Mac OS X. At first it had OS 9 installed, but it required the hard disk to be repartitioned in order to install OS X, and when this happened the restore disk turned out to be OS 8. Which doesn't let you jump to OS X directly (you need OS 9 as a "bridge"). And even after I had purchased an OS 9 disk from eBay for $50, I then had to use an open source tool called XPostFacto to trick the OS X Panther installer into ignoring the fact that my Powerbook has no USB support.

But I got there in the end, and here's where I get to the point of my post: it rocks!

I can't believe that a machine that is 3 years older, has 1/5 the RAM and is 1/8 the processor speed of my Toshiba 1 GHz Windows XP laptop, can run some things faster than it. It is more stable (the Toshiba shuts down every now and then without warning). The interface is prettier and more intuitive. The display is nicer to look at. Admittedly I don't have any large apps like Photoshop for it, but for running iTunes, Thunderbird, Firefox, Safari etc (all at the same time) the speed seems comparable to the XP machine. Plus it doesn't seem to leak memory when I put it to sleep, so I never have to actually shut it down or reboot it. And it wakes up quicker.

And, get this: when I have the machines both connected to my home network, it plays the shared iTunes music from my PC more smoothly than the Windows laptop that the music files live on!

In short, even though OS X is meant for more recent, more powerful machines, it still runs great on older machines like this one. I can't imagine running Windows XP on an equivalent machine with those specs. If the thing even installed, it would run like a dog.

For those of you who have not seen the light and thought (like I did until recently) that Macs were only for graphic designers and were too Mickey Mouse for those of us who like to get under the hood and tinker - think again. I am thinking very seriously about making the switch for my next computer purchase.

Here's why: about 4 years ago the Mac OS X operating system was rewritten completely, based on open source BSD UNIX. Rather than taking the Microsoft approach of putting band-aid upon band-aid, Apple made a decision to wear the risk of backward compatibility issues by thinking long-term and developing an operating system that really is as robust as UNIX but very easy to use. And if you know what you are doing, you can tinker to your heart's content - a bash command shell, built-in Apache web server and other utilities are all there out of the box.

Not to mention that the interface is beautiful. Really. There are a few things that are a bit different, but basically there's very little in terms of a learning curve as it is all quite intuitive.

And apart from Office and Photoshop, most of the software packages I use the computer for these days (text editor, web browser, FTP client, CMS packages, iTunes, Apache, MySQL email client) are all open source licenced, so they don't cost anything anyway.

Hmm, those G4 iBooks are lookin' very attractive right now...

Really Simple Sponging

I have been very late with jumping onto the whole RSS bandwagon.

A couple of years back when mass mailouts to your buddies were cool (?) a friend of mine, also named Matt, seemed to always be absorbing a ton of information.

For a while there (before he moved on to other obsessions like mobile GPS systems and current affairs radio) he was the ultimate source of crazy internet links. Every day it seemed like he had something new, fresh and funny to share with his online friends. And these weren't the usual crap that you get forwarded a few times a year, this was original, unusual stuff that had me in hysterics. Stuff like monobrow.com.

He also seemed to always be on top of the latest trends in the web publishing world, like a powerful little blogging tool named blosxom, which powered this very site for a year or so.

Knowing Matt to be the diligent and productive IT professional that he is, I couldn't imagine that he spent the entire day surfing the web, accumulating this information, yet I couldn't possibly see how he managed to come up with this stuff.

He shared his secret: RSS, or Really Simple Syndication.

When he first explained syndication to me, I didn't get it. It was something to do with XML that got the pages for you, but you needed something called an aggregator to read them. And on the Windows platform in 2001, the only free aggregator (I wasn't about to pay for something when I didn't know what it was!) was Syndirella.

So I downloaded Syndirella, installed it, and tried to give it a go. Things may have improved these days, but back then it wasn't intuitive. It kept giving me "broken feed" errors, and it was all too hard. I gave up pretty soon.

Besides, I thought, what benefit would this aggregation thing offer me? It doesn't take much time to visit a site to see if it has updated. My web browser (back then, Mozilla) had tabbed browsing, so I could load all of my favourite sites in one hit. And besides, I'd heard that these aggregators stripped away all the presentation and just gave you the bare content; How boring - I like looking at the design of a site! It shows the personality of the author (and in the case of a web designer's site, their credibility too).

However, I've certainly changed my tune.

Version 1.0 of the Thunderbird mail client includes an inbuilt RSS aggregator. You can set up folders for all of your favourite sites (the ones that offer an RSS feed), and it pulls in the content for you when those sites update. I didn't think it would be, but this is actually a massive time saver! I never realised how much time I spent visiting my favourite sites, one by one, being disappointed that they had not updated but admiring the design anyway, then moving on.

Now I don't have to waste time visiting a site that hasn't changed since I last visited it. I just have the equivalent of a number of "unread mail messages" in Thunderbird, and I peruse each of them, get on top of the latest information that I have chosen to aggregate, and it takes a quarter of the time.

Well, I must be honest. I don't spend any less time reading web design blogs. I just read more of them in the same amount of time!

So the point of my post is: I know that a lot of the readers of this site have yet to discover RSS. My advice is:

1. Download Thunderbird - aside from a lack of a calendar function, it is a far superior (read: secure) mail client than MS Outlook.


2. Visit some of your favourite sites and see if they offer an RSS feed. A lot of online newspapers these days do it, as do pretty much all the web design blogs.


3. Copy the URL for the feed you are interested in reading into Thunderbird, using the "Manage Subscriptions" menu option. There are sometimes different types of feeds; depending on how considerate the site author is, you may be able to choose by category, a short summary or the full article. It also offers you the option of viewing the styled web page or just the bare bones content.


4. Sit back and absorb your favourite sites from within Thunderbird, without having to check if they have updated, leaving you with more time for... reading other feeds!

Note: I must apologize in advance that opinios currently only offers a summary RSS feed. I haven't worked out how to change the Movable Type template to offer a complete feed (I admit, I didn't look terribly hard). This will all change when I change over to Textpattern, some time in the next couple of months.