I really don’t like waiting, especially when I can avoid it. Therefore, when I got tired of waiting for my computer recently I did something about it.

On SSH and passwords

The average ssh logon time consumes what feels like 3-4 seconds on my 2007-era machines. The delay has worsened since Ubuntu 0910, which now retrieves system information on logon (in its default form, nearly useless to me). I really like the idea of seeing useful info at logon time, but bottlenecking logon – the most common act that happens – for multiple seconds is unacceptable. If you’re like me, just use your own script instead of landscape:

apt-get remove landscape-common

I banged out some bash that runs nearly instantaneously and shows only what I actually care about, and it only took some lines in .profile. simple version:

echo 'df -h' >> ~/.profile
PATH=$HOME/bin/

Finally for a really good one that totally pays for itself: think about how many times you type in a password. The net time saved by not having to spend a few seconds typing in your password each time is huge.

echo "PubkeyAuthentication yes" >> /etc/ssh/sshd_config

It’s called public key authentication in SSH, and it’s one of the best kept SSH secrets.

Spot on zinger by Gruber:

I.e. if you think people using iPhone OS devices are an important segment of your intended audience, you can no longer build a Flash-dependent web site. (And if you don’t think people using iPhone OS devices are an important segment of your intended audience, you’re probably wrong.)

50 years ago, if an aspiring Joe Rockstar wanted to step up from recording his garage band to mastering his first demo, he’d soon be thwarted by the cost of time with specialized expensive studio hardware like mixers, multitrack recorders, and (down the line) audio effects like EQs, delays, reverb, and synthesizers. The 90s opened many doors as music software grew up, but limited processing speed and hard drive throughput were frequent road bumps.

Today, a basic laptop and a multichannel sound card are capable of satisfying most common production needs. There is an entrenched market for audio software, and some even stays true to the venerable style of vintage rackmounted audio hardware (i.e. Reason). In some cases modern musical products (such as an MPC drum machine) provide a ‘good enough’ cheaper alternative to their yesteryear equivalent (hired session drummer).

As someone who loves music and technology, I want to take a moment and acknowledge recent years as some pretty incredible ones in the history of music production. Like many other creative fields the advent of cheap and ubiquitous computing has enabled a larger school of musicians to more easily realize their musical ambitions. I think it’s fair to say we are in the early years of the next generation of production and people are in a race to catch up and stay on top of the possibilities.

Personally, I’m an Ableton Live fan, and Logic is pretty cool too when I can cut through the overwhelming interface. (At least the Apple buyout brought us GarageBand.)

I definitely want to give a shoutout to Spectrasonics too, a company whose products I discovered last year. When I first plugged the family’s MIDI keyboard into my old PowerPC Mac, virtual instruments (VSTs, RTASs, or AUs for the OS X guys) existed but had nowhere near the ambition you find today. Between Omnisphere, Trilian, and Stylus RMX there’s an impressive quality to Spectrasonic’s sampling I’m happy to see out there. Trilian, their bass instrument, has 6 different dynamics and 6 different samples that round robin each time you hit a note. There is so much data in the samples that on my MacBook Pro it takes upwards of several seconds just to load an instrument. But the result is worth it – who would have thought a virtual instrument could sound so realistic?

Here’s to the next 10 years of music production!

What took them so long?

When I got my MacBook Pro in 2006 it was heavily marketed with Aperture, Apple’s new pro photo management app. Yesterday I was happy to see Aperture get a long-overdue update to version 3, which is welcome, but hardly seems to do more than bring it to feature parity with last year’s release of iPhoto 8 (2009). In the meantime I’ve personally tried moving to Lightroom a few times because, you know, it actually gets regular updates and unlike Adobe’s other products that end in otoshop, is not mired in UI slurry. Unexpectedly, RAW support didn’t get a major shot in the arm. People complaining about lack of GF1 support should look here.

One thing noteworthy: evidence of a supposed Google-Apple conflict recently discussed ad nauseam by segments of the online tech community is nary to be found in this release. The Places features still uses Google Maps. While this was far easier for the developers to implement, I’m now more curious why Apple bought PlaceBase last year, (mentioned before).

Update: What conflict?

I either must really, really not be the target audience, or Finale 2010 for Mac is underwhelming to the point of sucking. Last week was my first time using Finale since 2003 in music class, and my install lasted about 10 minutes before going straight to the trash.

It feels like a Microsoft product of the late 90s – scattered, intractable UI with backwards compatibility concerns taking form as an innovation hindering albatross. The UI is almost exactly the same as I remember the OS 9 version being, with the same Carbon era UI quirks. They embraced OS X by lamely Aqua-fying a few buttons. It seems like the developers value backwards compatibility and user familiarity with all of the Finale quirks to the point of being uncompetitive with modern music software. Maybe the legions of Finale users fiercely resist any attempt at change. And granted, Finale is among very few competitors when it comes to music notation. But what a travesty. My sympathy goes out to the many musicians out there that have no choice but to use this.

I’ll be sticking with Ableton. GarageBand, the same one that came free on my Mac, is fine for those few notation-needed occasions.

Certain things that once seemed cool when the blogging world was nascent I now consider trite unnecessary clutter.

Therefore, as of today:
Blogroll: gone.
Tag cloud: gone.
Post calendar: gone.

When you’ve got search, who uses a tag cloud? Or when you’ve got archives, who cares about a post calendar? And a blogroll seems spammy. Better replaced by posts linking to content on the sites you like and read.

This is step one of an effort to redesign onpaws.com with experience. Next up, individual pages need some overdue attention.

1. Despite buying Placebase in October 2009 the iPad still uses Google Maps. I was hoping we wouldn’t have to wait until June to see what that brings to the table.
2. Similarly to the original iPhone’s ugly chin, 3G connectivity requires an ugly plastic window that even wraps around to the front. Look for the 3G picture here.
3. ‘iPad’? Really? To me, that’s evidence not enough women work at Apple.

I’ll reserve final judgment until I’ve used one, but despite a certain appeal of an Apple-designed e-book reader, an LCD display seems far from ideal for reading (for photos/videos, sure). After years of reading text on an LCD screen I can say it’s OK at best. eInk or real paper is far better than another LCD screen.

While typically people work in a studio to accomplish most kinds of creative production, inspiration can certainly arrive at less than opportune times. In the case of music making, my two favorite DAWs (Logic and Ableton Live) both offer onscreen keyboards that simulate a real MIDI keyboard. Obviously you sacrifice velocity sensitivity, but this can be immensely useful when, say, waiting at an airport.

The keyboard is limited in that its only one octave at a time and starts at a. In Live you can change octaves with z and x, in Logic as the screenshot shows this adjusts volume.

In Logic 9, simply hit caps lock and an onscreen keyboard appears.

In Ableton 8, hit Cmd-Shift-K or click the little keyboard icon on the upper right.

The only thing left is mod wheel support, if you know any free solutions for Mac let me know in the comments!

Four years ago I installed some Cat5e cable throughout the house (that’s Ethernet cable for you non-network types). Last time it was for three upstairs rooms, and it went pretty well despite the sweltering heat in the attic.

Last week I finished installing another outlet in the den. This one was harder since the cable ran two stories and across the house, from one side of the attic to the far side of the basement up to the den, but the result is totally worth it. It was free since I used exactly the cable I had left from four years ago with 1′ of extra. The PS3 can now stream NetFlix and media from other computers to the TV, no stuttering or dropouts like I got on the wireless. And I can still crimp cables like nobody’s business.

For some reason, restoring a DMG image to a block device has been an atypically frustrating experience under Leopard and Snow Leopard. Apple Disk Utility comes back with user unfriendly errors citing an ‘invalid argument’. For some reason Disk Utility insists on doing some silly ‘image scan’ which never actually works, thereby blocking any successful image restore. Delving deeper I thought it was likely some other component utilized by Disk Utility was failing and I found what it was.

It turns out that Disk Utility employs Apple’s ASR utility, stored at

/usr/sbin/asr

To learn more you can run ‘asr’ by itself in Terminal. While

man asr

shows a lot more, I’ll save you from reading that (this man page has even got a History section).

Simply restore without an image scan:

$ sudo asr -noverify -source source -target target