Monthly Archives: June 2017

Bad Job Descriptions Waste Everyone’s Time

Most companies hiring software engineers want you to know a few specific languages and/or technologies. It makes sense. The more you know about their existing infrastructure, the faster you’ll be able to contribute effectively.

When those companies completely fail to include any of those desires in a job listing, it wastes everyone’s time. They get hundreds of extra applicants who are not even remotely qualified, and those people have their time wasted.

Below is an example of a vague post that I recently sent my resume to. They scheduled a phone interview with me. They said that main thing they are looking for is a Java expert. The phone call was over quickly (I am not currently a Java expert and it does not appear anywhere on my resume).

Java is mentioned nowhere in the description.

Please do not do that sort of thing.

The posted description:

Java: Overcoming A Technology Prejudice

For a very long time I’ve been anti-Java. It started when I was a PC technician in the late 1990’s. The Java Runtime was always a nuisance to maintain and the apps were terrible memory hogs with bad user interfaces.

My view of Java didn’t improve as I learned and worked in C++ and then later C#. Java seemed a poor, clunky way of doing things and there was no need for it, given the fitness of the C# ecosystem for many of the same “enterprisey” purposes.

When the Android operating system was released things got weird. Why were they using this slow memory-hog language for a mobile phone’s applications when the hardware has such limited memory and processor power? It made no sense.

Soon after that, Oracle bought Sun and became the owner of Java. Oracle is a terrible company that I want nothing to do with. In addition to their hyper-litigous business practices, they also deploy auto-accept crapware with their Windows runtime installer*, which is unconscionable. Needless to say, this did not improve my opinion of Java.

Years later I built a search engine. There are a lot of useful web crawling tools in the Java ecosystem that I didn’t take advantage of. The Python ecosystem has a lot of wonderful web crawling tools and libraries, but not having access to the whole set of what’s available ended up being a hindrance.

The same goes for data science. I know the Python data analysis tools, but there are a lot of things in Java that I haven’t really had access to (particularly the Hadoop ecosystem), so I’ve missed out on some possibilities.

I get that it’s no longer true that Java is clunky and incapable, but it’s hard to let go of a long-held belief. But it’s not a useful belief, so it’s time to let it go the same way I let go of my prejudice against Apple’s OSX a few years ago (although I do sometimes still refer to it as “broken Linux”).

Now that I’ve been focusing more on DevOps, it has become more important to be able to support a wide variety of programs. Writing software is one thing – you can usually focus on only the language(s) used by your project and not suffer for it. When you’re deploying applications from dozens of teams, you need to be able to support (and troubleshoot) anything and everything.

Everything I’ve heard leads me to believe it will be fairly easy to become competent in Java given my experience in C# and C++. I have a copy of Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours and some spare time, so I’ll find out soon.

* I hope that one day that the FTC will ban installer bundling. That certainly won’t happen with the current shitministration.

FreeWaveSamples: DMCA Response Period Expired, Samples Restored

This is an update to a previous post about a DMCA request frivolously filed by Roland Corporation against freewavesamples.com.

I sent a DMCA counter-notice to my ISP, Linode, and they forwarded it to Roland.

14 days (10 business days passed) and Roland did not respond.

Yesterday Linode contacted me to let me know I was free to put the content back up, so I today I did.

For reference, these are the URLs where samples have been restored:

http://freewavesamples.com/roland-d-20-kick
http://freewavesamples.com/roland-jd-990-pizzicato-strings-c4
http://freewavesamples.com/roland-d-20-snare
http://freewavesamples.com/roland-gr1-orchestra-hit-c5
http://freewavesamples.com/roland-gr1-trumpet-c5

It’s no surprise that there was no response from Roland regarding my counter-notice. I’m sure the badly-written IP enforcement bot they’re using isn’t advanced enough to handle that sort of thing.

I will not consider the manner closed until I hear from a real Human at Roland. They could continue to harass me, and that is why I haven’t removed the “Free Wave Samples Is In Danger” banner text from the website.

Karaoke and Cold Lazarus by Dennis Potter

I recently watched a pair of British Sci-Fi dramas by Dennis Potter filmed in 1996. Over the years I’ve seen references to Cold Lazarus here and there (including as the title of a Stargate episode) and decided to check it out. It’s the second part of a pair, the first being Karaoke. Apparently they’re available on YouTube in a huge playlist of Dennis Potter’s works (items 42-49).

The first story in the pair is a 4-part mini series drama about an author who discovers that he has pancreatic cancer. He’s also been going through some strange deja vu that I won’t go into because it would be a spoiler. I wasn’t sure what it had to do with science fiction until I saw the second story.

Cold Lazarus is a 4-part mini series and takes place hundreds of years in the future in a dystopian hyper-corporate oligarchy. It features a science lab doing experiments with a frozen head and some drama about what is to be done with the head that I also won’t go into because spoilers. The head used to belong to the author in Karaoke and the memories extracted include some scenes from that series.

Overall, they’re pretty typical for low-budget 1990’s British television dramas. There are some really interesting props and scenery in Cold Lazarus, especially the motorized chairs that look like giant man-eating plant pods. Wikipedia says that many of the props were purchased by a film company that later used them for a movie called The Vampires of Bloody Island, which I have not seen.

It turns out that the first story is very autobiographical. Dennis Potter had cancer and these were his final stories, not filmed until after his death from pancreatic cancer. Dennis hated Rupert Murdoch and had spoken out against him publicly. He went as far as giving his cancer a name. That name was Rupert.

I agree. Rupert Murdoch is a cancer and has made the world a worse place.

In any case, these two stories, while not multibillion-dollar blockbusters, are still interesting. Since you can watch them for free on YouTube, you might as well do it when your Netflix queue runs out.

SpaceTheremin, a Virtual Theremin

Back in 2007 I wrote an application called SpaceTheremin. It is a simple app that lets you use your mouse to control a virtual theremin by moving it over a beautiful public domain image from the Hubble Telescope to control pitch and volume.

Over the years I also released versions for Linux, webOS, and OSX (via the Apple Store). It’s been downloaded tens of thousands of times and is a fun noise toy.

It’s available on the Zeta Centauri website if you’d like to check it out.

Open Sourced: RoboBlather, a Text to Speech Application for Windows

Back in 2008 I released the first version of a simple text-to-speech program for Windows called RoboBlather. Over the years it has enjoyed some popularity among a small niche of users due primarily to its uncomplicated interface.

Today I finished open-sourcing it under the MIT license. If you’re interested, it’s available here on GitHub.

You don’t have to be a programmer to enjoy it — there’s an installer that lets you use it right away without needing to worry about the programmer-y aspects.

Thanks Again, Capitalism

Two days ago I started a new job doing DevOps at a large public company. I was really excited about it because they were doing interesting things combining technology I know well – Python, Django, C#, PostgreSQL, and C in a Linux environment on AWS managed using Salt Stack. They were also using some interesting tools that I’d have a chance to learn – TeamCity, Gerrit, and Ansible.

I told my friends that I was looking forward to spending a while at a company that didn’t have all of the chaos and instability of a startup. A company that would still exist from one day to the next. There’s a thing on my bucket list that I’ve almost but not quite reached – working at the same company for 5 years (I got to 4 years and 9 months back in 2003). I thought there might be a chance with this one.

Yesterday, on my second day, they decided to disband the department I work for.

Why?

They had a bad quarterly earnings report and had to do something to “maximize shareholder value”. This normally means slashing your R & D budget to the bone and crippling your ability to generate new streams of income. So they slashed it, canceled the product we were working on, and dropped a surprise bombshell to everyone at once. A bad time was had by all.

Short-term thinking at its finest.

In any case, I don’t regret a minute of the experience. I met some really great people who made me feel welcome. I wish them all the best.

For further reading:

Why Companies Need to Think Long Term

Short-Term Thinking is Dangerous to Innovation

Can America’s Companies Survive America’s Most Aggressive Investors

How to Stop Short Term Thinking at America’s Companies

My History As A Musician

Like many Americans, I was exposed to the recorder in grade school. I didn’t much care for it, and the terrible traditional public domain songs we played like Hot Cross Buns made me not really care for music.

Later, in middle school, there was a choir class. At least one mandatory semester. Didn’t like that either. The Old Grey Goose Is Dead didn’t excite me, nor did any of the other old-timey hillbilly music that was public domain.

I didn’t really care for music until around 1991. Most of what I’d heard until then was terrible 1980’s pop or classic “phase 1” butt rock as this Overthinking It post describes it. None of that spoke to me.

It wasn’t until the grunge and alternative movement hit in 1991 that I heard music that I actually liked. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Alice in Chains, Rage Against the Machine, and Ministry were in heavy play rotation on my cassette walkman. Some of them broke from overuse and had to be re-bought. I am a product my era.

Since I suddenly liked music, I decided to score a cheap pawnshop guitar (around my birthday in 1992). And, being an introvert living in pre-internet middle of nowhere with nothing much to do, I practiced A LOT. I didn’t really get good, but I sure got good at sucking loudly. And I could suck loudly FAST.

So, here’s my music creation history:

1993-1996 Demo tapes as various versions of “Fred” (Guitar, Bass)

This started out with recording onto a cassette deck as “Fred” and evolved into recording to a cheap 4-track cassette deck. I bought a cheap short-scale bass and a basic drum machine in 1994 and added those to the repertoire too. The name got longer with each recording. The progression went Fred -> Blue Fred -> Navy Blue Fred -> The Navy Blue MultiFred Sweater -> The Sub-Neo Navy Blue MultiFred Sweater. None of these recordings saw the light of day. That’s a good thing.

I stopped recording around 1997, though I still noodled around on the bass guitar quite a bit.

However, I have gone back to some of the style I had then. Something may see the light of day under the “Navy Blue Fred” moniker at some point in the future.

2000-2003, 2005-2006 Member of Dr. Kilpatient, Toledo, OH (Guitar, Bass, Synthesizer, Hand Drums, Studio Work)

I contributed to something like 11 or more albums. So many that I lose count. This also includes the New World Orderlies, which released 5 or more albums. A bunch of improvised live music and a bunch of composed, recorded songs made it onto recordings, some of which were unedited live shows, and some of which we spent many months recording and editing. Tomasz Kordowski was the lead genius of this band, and it was the most fun I’ve had making music. I alternated between calling the music “electronic jazz” and “funky industrial techno polka circus rock”. The lineup changed many times over the years, and my main instrument varied from bass to guitar synthesizer, to keyboards (briefly).

Other than a few badly-recorded VHS-quality clips of live shows and a few songs on my Bloodless Mushroom website, not many recordings survive online as far as I know. Certainly nothing on iTunes, Amazon, or Spotify. For the NWO stuff, getting permission from all the musicians involved to formally publish to paying channels would probably be tough since there were 8-20 people who contributed to each album.

1999-2012 Bloodless Mushroom Solo Project (Studio Work, Multi-Instrumental, Bass, Guitar, Synthesizer)

Bloodless Mushroom started as tracker music posted to MP3.com back when it was an indie music portal. Over the years it has waxed and waned as an experimentation platform for synthesizersand fractally-generated music fused with guitars, bass, and tracker-sequenced drums. I refer to it variously as “experimental electronic”, “ambient”, “classical” and “industrial”. It could probably just be called “soundtrack”.

The synthesizer use started with a Yamaha DJX home keyboard and then added a Yamaha TX81Z and Ensoniq ESQ-1, both of which were used throughout the project.

I worked on this in every spare moment I had from 2000-2002. Then I mostly shelved it until 2008 when I wrote some more music and released another album. It was still mostly shelved, with a remix album in 2012. I really don’t consider this “active” in 2004, 2006, 2007, and 2009-2014 other than the few days I worked on it in 2012. I was busy living during most of those years (college, cross-country moves, career change, etc) and didn’t have much time for music.

The five surviving albums from this era are available on all the various streaming and buying platforms — Spotify, Amazon, iTunes, CDBaby, etc. There’s some really interesting stuff in there. And some less interesting stuff.

2006 The White Russians, Columbus, OH (Bass)

This was something I did with a coworker at the time, Luke Kucalaba, and his cousin. We practiced a bunch and had some songs that sounded good (nearly enough for a live show), but I didn’t stick with it because it was classic rock covers, which I don’t really care for. If it’s not all original music, I get bored quickly. Great guys, though. I hope they’re still making music.

2008 The Untermensch Denial, Columbus, OH (Bass)

This one was a bit of a train wreck. It was an industrial band. The drummer was phenomenal. He combined an electronic and acoustic drum kit to great effect. The lead singer was really good. The guitarist was really good. It was really well-written, punchy original music. It could have gone somewhere.

We got our act together well enough to play one gig (on really poor booking terms) which nobody attended. Everything fell apart after that — the whole band was disheartened and life happened to everyone. The drummer moved to Florida. The singer discovered weed. Guitarist had medical issues (recurring problems from a motorcycle accident). I think I was the oldest and most boring person in the band (I had a real job and a house), so I was too uncool to hang out with. It all just kinda fizzled out.

2013-2014 The Freedom Drones, Portland, OR (Bass)

I was kind of the interloper in this project. I moved to Portland, where Tomasz from Dr. Kilpatient fame above lived. He already had something going with Mike Karras, another phenomenal performance artist. It was called “Too Big To Fail”, but another band had the name earlier and they had to change it. It changed to The Freedom Drones.

Practices were always a fun hassle of an ordeal. I was the only one without kids, but I lived as far away as you could live and be in the same metro area (25-mile commute to practice sessions, and since I was mostly working in startups at the time, I was usually tired of life on the weekends). Mike had a newborn, a demanding day job, and a successful improv comedy career, so it was hard for him to make time.

I performed once with them at an open mic night. They performed a couple times without me. Maybe this will be a thing again at some point, but it’s hard to get everyone together in the same room. There’s some brilliant songwriting that deserves to be heard, though. None of the brilliance is my fault.

2015-2017 Bloodless Mushroom, Beaverton, OR (Synthesizer, Guitar, Bass, and Production)

I got back into creating music as Bloodless Mushroom in a big way in 2015. Some of what was on the Marasmius album released that year started as unfinished tracks recorded in 2005. And some no-longer-unfinished tracks from 2005 will be on the upcoming Cymatella album. I also released Lichen (weird fractalesque chill-MIDI tunes) in 2016, Moss in 2017 (fractal classical), and Oreades in 2017 (ambient electronic).

I’ve been working on Cymatella since fall 2015, starting from some ideas that didn’t fit onto Marasmius. It’ll take as long as it takes.

There’s more that needs to be done. Moss and Oreades both have follow-up albums in the same style partially written. They’re tentatively titled “Gymnopus” and “Nothopanus”, respectively. I also want to use the names “Toadstools” and “Calyptella” for something, but I don’t know what yet.

The Future

In addition to the potential creations from Navy Blue Fred and Bloodless Mushroom mentioned above, there’s also a terrible death-punk metal project I’d like to release some music as. I do not know what the future holds, but I don’t doubt it’ll be weird.

I know I’ll never have a professional music career, but I do enjoy creating original music. Even better if it can be performed live.

Roland: Wrong But Persistent

This is an update to the unsubstantiated legal threat I received from Roland a few weeks ago.

My ISP, Linode, was reviewing the situation and still hadn’t come to a decision (I suspect they wrote to the email address of the sender and failed to receive a reply, as I did). However, today they received a DMCA takedown notice.

— BEGIN NOTICE —

Dear Sir/ Madam,

I, the undersigned, state the following:

1) I am the legal representative authorized to act on behalf of Roland Corporation, of certain exclusive intellectual property rights (“Roland Corporation”);

2) I attest, under penalty of perjury, that I have a good faith belief that

freewavesamples.com
http://freewavesamples.com/roland-d-20-kick
http://freewavesamples.com/roland-jd-990-pizzicato-strings-c4
http://freewavesamples.com/roland-d-20-snare
http://freewavesamples.com/roland-gr1-orchestra-hit-c5
http://freewavesamples.com/roland-gr1-trumpet-c5

use Roland Corporation’s intellectual property in the content without authorization. This use falsely suggests Roland Corporation’s sponsorship or endorsement of the website and violates Roland Corporation’s exclusive rights;

3) Roland Corporation represents that use of the material is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law;

4) Based upon information at its disposal on freewavesamples.com, we believe that the statements in this notice are accurate and correctly describe the infringing nature and status of the Infringing Material;

5) I understand that, pursuant to 17 U.S.C. § 512(f), any person who knowingly materially misrepresents that material or activity is infringing may be liable for damages, including costs and attorneys’ fees.

The reasons that the domains named above must be suspended are as follows:

a) Offer(s) a counterfeit or otherwise unauthorized item for sale that violates the IP Owner’s trademarks and/or copyrights.
b) Misuses the IP Owner’s brand name, trademarks and/or copyright.
c) Uses a copyrighted image without authorization from the IP Owner.

The reported website(s), and by consequence the infringing content, is accessible globally, and is protected under the Berne Convention, the protection of which extends to 168 countries (full list here: http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ShowResults.jsp?lang=en&treaty_id=15).

We are providing you this letter of notification pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act 17 USC§512(c) to make you aware of material on its network or system that infringes the exclusive copyrights of Roland Corporation.

Attempts to resolve this issue with the Registrant have been unsuccessful. We seek your help in removing the infringing content. Please take reasonable and prompt steps to investigate and respond appropriately to this report of abuse commensurate to your commitment to addressing abuse as outlined in your terms of service and commensurate to your obligation under relevant law.

We may be contacted at the email address below.

Sincerely,

brandprotection@rolandipr.com

— END NOTICE —

I do not agree with Roland’s claims and do not believe they would win a court challenge.

This content on freewavesamples.com does *not* violate Roland’s copyright, nor Roland’s trademark. The trademark issue is explained in this earlier post. Here I address the copyright (Linode thought that was their concern, but to me that letter still reads as a trademark threat).

The samples posted on freewavesamples.com are not samples that were created by Roland. They are sounds that I played on and recorded from the Roland synthesizers that I own, recorded at a specific pitch (C in the best octave for the patch, usually), edited and denoised, normalized, etc. Some of them sound better than the original instrument (particularly in the case of some of the noisy 1980’s synths).

This is a very important difference.

In buying an instrument, you also buy the right to do whatever you like with recordings of sounds *from* that instrument. If this were not the case, every song recorded using a sound from a Roland synthesizer would be in violation and the music industry would fall apart.

This is why there is a thriving sample pack industry, with retailers selling CDs, DVDs, and downloads of samples from various synthesizers and drum machines. If you want all of the quality, flexibility, programmability, and versatility of the original instrument you buy the instrument. If you just want access to some of the preset sounds, you buy the sample pack. You don’t get much value from a sample pack, though – the presets are the least interesting part of an instrument, and using them in a song makes you sound unoriginal and uncreative. In addition, the pitch shifting involved in transposing a single-note sample to other pitches loses any articulation associated with that sound and introduces artifacts and aliasing that makes it sound less realistic the farther you go from the recorded pitch.

This is also true for other instruments. You can buy a guitar and get all of the flexibility that comes with owning an expressive instrument with hundreds of years of design history behind it. Or you can buy a sample CD with a few notes and sounds that you’ll be hard-pressed to make sound like a real, live version of the instrument on a recording.

If these were binary dumps of the actual samples in the synthesizer’s ROM, this *would* be in violation of Roland’s copyright, assuming the samples in that particular synthesizer are legitimately copyrighted. That has been a problem for emulator developers, such as the MT-32 emulation project. (references HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE). I was aware of that case before ever starting the site, which is why I have not taken binary dumps of any samples. Interestingly enough, the MT-32’s samples were not copyrighted, and things turned out favorably for the emulator.

However, worrying about this stuff makes me tired. And at this point thinking about Roland fills me with disgust. I’m not sure I even want to mention them on my site, freely advertising and promoting their brand and increasing their name recognition when I get nothing for it (these are FREE downloads, for pete’s sake!).

For now I’m taking the mentioned Roland samples down and filing a counter-notice to their DMCA request. If they don’t respond in 14 days, which I doubt they will, then I may put them back up. If I can stomach it. I’ve also emailed the EFF to ask for their opinion since they were involved in the original MT-32 emulator case.

I have not taken ALL of the Roland samples down. Only the ones mentioned in their complaint. Based on the outcome of this dispute, I’ll either remove everything from Roland (there’s lots more), or keep them all up.

There is an update to this situation.