WordPress 2.8 broke a few things
Some stuff on the Portfolio page isn't working right now (namely columns and Thickbox). I'll fix it later.
Instant Hijack and Digi CoreAudio driver are not friends
Just in case anyone else runs into the same issue…
I just spent about half an hour trying to figure out why I couldn't get the Digi CoreAudio driver to work. It knew that in order to grab the audio from a given application, one needs to launch that application after the CoreAudio Manager is connected to the hardware.
This whole "re-launch the application to grab the audio" thing reminded me of Audio Hijack/Airfoil without Instant Hijack installed, so it occurred to me that maybe Instant Hijack inserting itself between my applications and the Digi driver.
Turns out I was right: I uninstalled Instant Hijack (a quick and easy process, I might add), and when I logged back in, the CoreAudio manager was able to "attach clients".
I certainly can't blame either of these companies — they're both trying to do some rather unsupported stuff with system audio — but I figured I post in case anyone else runs into a similar issue.
You're majoring in control surfaces‽
First things first: yes, that is an interrobang.
Last week I worked tech for a student-produced (MUSKET) musical, Kiss of the Spider Woman — quite a good show, I might add — at the Power Center. It was really great to be back in theatre, and especially great to be back behind a board. The fact that, as a sound guy, it was the "wrong" board, the light board, was irrelevant; it was a lot of fun.
With just a few quick stints in between, it was really the first time I'd done any theatre tech work since high school, and this time I looked at everything with a very different eye: the eye of an HCI student.
Trying to explain what studying "information" means to the uninitiated has always proved challenging, and explaining it to my fellow theatre techs was no different. What I ended up saying that I study user interface design. Overhearing this from across the empty auditorium, one of the lighting guys made an obvious, but not-so-obvious, jump, shouting, "You're majoring in control surfaces‽"
"Well," I thought, "from his perspective, yes." So much of what we study in school is limited to on-screen interactions, be they in traditional software, web applications, or mobile applications, that input devices have been relegated to a single day's worth of discussion in one class. This pushes more complex input devices, like control surfaces, way out into the periphery. But there it was: I'm majoring in control surfaces. Brilliant.
This realization got me started thinking about the control surface with which I am most familiar: the analog mixing console. This is truly an elegant device, with one channel strip for each input channel, and each channel strip laid out as the signal flows: preamp gain at the top, then processing, routing, and finally level. These are then mixed together and sent to the outputs.
Then along came digital. Sure, they can have a much higher input density, and the power to run dozens of mixes from one board is very cool, but it comes at a significant cost to usability. Wikipedia agrees:
Analog consoles remain popular due to their continuing to have one knob, fader or button per function, a reassuring feature for the user. This takes up more physical space but allows more rapid response to changing performance conditions. Most digital mixers take advantage of the technology to reduce the physical space requirements of their product, entailing compromises in user interface such as a single shared channel adjustment area that is selectable for only one channel at a time. Additionally, most digital mixers have virtual pages or layers which change the fader banks into separate controls for additional inputs or for adjusting equalization or aux send levels. This layering can be confusing for operators.
The reason, I believe, for many of these usability problems is that much as computers rely on a nested-folder analogy to manage files and have only recently begun to take advantage of their digital nature by using tags (think Gmail's Labels), digital mixing consoles are using the analog mixing console as an analogy for digital signals.
This point was really driven home when the lighting designer explained to me that the market leader in moving light consoles has been uncontested for ten years because its designers gave serious thought to what makes moving lights different from conventional lights, and what designers and operators need to do to accomplish their goals; in other words, user-centered design.
I don't know what the answer is, but I believe that some fundamentally different way of handling large volumes (pun intended) of audio channels in a reasonably sized board is lurking just out of reach.
Announcing Grammar Fail(ure) — grammarfail.com
In the wake of Monday's horrible "grammar fail" sighting, I am pleased to announce Grammar Fail(ure), based on the social CMS Pligg!
Post your sightings, vote up new contributions, and discuss grammatical errors.
Educational institution punctuation fail.
I just sent this email to the U of M Student Financial Operations office. Does that me a jerk?
Hello,
Thanks for making it so easy to pay online. I do have a complaint, though.
On the Make Payment page of the QuickPAY ASP system, there is a sentence that says:
"Note: This screen is for Student Account payments only - Not for Enrollment Deposit's!"Never mind the somewhat sporadic capitalization and the use of a hyphen where there should be an em dash (I'm something of a stickler) — the apostrophe in "Deposit's" should not be there.
Thank you!
-Noah
So You Lied to Them.
Spoiler alert! If you have not seen Wicked but intend to, do not read on!
Two weeks ago today, I saw Wicked at the Detroit Opera House (which was great except for the seating fiasco). Two weeks later, I'm still listening to it — and thinking about it. I already knew the music, but the Original Broadway Cast recording is brilliantly done so as to not reveal the plot; therefore, I had constructed my own version of the plot in my head, one based on traditional character interpretations. I was in for quite a surprise, and two weeks later, I'm still analyzing the story, analyzing the characters, and generally thinking about what made it so compelling.
First, a note on the production. As a theater tech guy, that's usually what I watch for. It was a very good production: the sets were minimal but great, the lighting during the last scene of Act I was absolutely brilliant (pun intended), the pit was really good (as was the pit mix), and I could hear everyone without straining, although the mix between Elphaba and Glinda was a bit uneven sometimes. And although outside my area of expertise, the costumes and wigs, especially those of the Ozians, were at once over the top and perfectly fitting. But more than the tech, it was the story and characters that drew me in (a highly unusual occurrence), so that's what I'm going to talk about.
The Oz of the musical (I'm only a few pages into the Gregory Maguire novel on which it is based right now) is based more on that of the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz than the Oz of L. Frank Baum's 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It is actually highly consistent (though not perfectly so — the Scarecrow at the end comes to mind) with the film, which is impressive considering the unexpected interpretations of the characters.
In trying to figure out why I personally found the story of Wicked, and the character of Elphaba in particular, so compelling, I first came up with the obvious answer about how everyone has the desire to be accepted rather than being the outsider, but I think it goes deeper. For me I think it has to do with two things: one is that she does what she knows is right, not what society tells her is right; the other is that I really love how she holds people accountable for their failings, like when she finds out that the Wizard is a fraud. I don't know; I just think she's a really cool character. Plus the fact that the story turns something familiar on its head and makes you think about the effect on the social psyche of which labels are able to persist (i.e. history is written by the victors).
This is achieved by adding a tremendous amount of depth to one one of the modern literature's flattest, and most flatly evil, characters, the Wicked Witch of the West, named Elphaba by Maguire (apparently in honor of L. Frank Baum, whose initials, L.F.B., when pronounced phonetically, are "el fa ba"). G(a)linda, the Good Witch of the North, is still a two-dimentional character, but rather than seeking good, she is really just seeking attention in the form of popularity. The Wizard of Oz himself, we find out, is a fascist ruler intent on keeping the Ozians (an ethnic majority) happy by scapegoating and persecuting the animals (an allegorical ethnic minority). This is the stroke of genius that makes the entire show so compelling: Glinda is willing to sacrifice morals and grovel in submission to the Wizard in order to feed her own ambition, her political career, whereas Elphaba stays true to her sense of right and wrong when she is confronted with the fact that not everything is as she believed, that the Wizard lied to the people of Oz about his power and intentions, and is willing to abandon her lifelong dream of working with the Wizard, becoming more cynical all the while.
In this sense, Elphaba really is a fascinating character, and, I think, the best character in the story. Best in the sense that she (and Fiyero) were the only uncorrupted characters.
In one of the most important scenes of the second act (Wonderful), the Wizard tells Elphaba how the world is and about how he got hooked on power and glory and being "wonderful", but she knows that it's wrong and refuses to accept it ("So you lied to them." — a line brilliantly delivered by Idina Menzel on the OBC recording). He goes on to explain how you're "a liberator or ruthless invader" depending on "which label is able to persist," powerful commentary on the power of history. It sort of reminds me of how the world is a much nicer place when you're young because you're naïve, then you find out all the nasty stuff that goes on behind the scenes (i.e., behind the curtain).
(At this point I have to step out of the story for a moment to comment on how incredible Idina Menzel's performance is on the OBC recording; specifically, the way her tone changes from light, airy, and optimistic to dark and cynical. (I only mention this performance because it's the one I've heard the most.) Compare The Wizard and I to No Good Deed. Or the contrast between "I can't want it anymore" (wistful) and "Something has changed within me" in Defying Gravity. You can hear the growth and transformation of the character in her voice. Wow.)
Everyone else submitted to the Wizard's very fascist agenda (all-powerful leader, discrimination against an innocent segment of the population as a scapegoat, a literal witch hunt, etc.). Elphaba saw through it all, and made it about the truth and common good rather than about herself. As she says to Glinda, "I hope you're proud how you would grovel in submission to feed your own ambition." That's not what "Elphie" was about.
Glinda, of course, was all about pleasing others; that made her happy. Even at the beginning of Act II, when it becomes clear that Fiyero doesn't love her, by the end of Thank Goodness she is apparently happy again because she is basking in the praise of the Ozians.
Elphaba does have two lines that have me stumped, though: at the very end of As Long As You're Mine when she says, "...for the first time, I feel wicked"; and during No Good Deed, when she asks, "Was I really seeking good, or just seeking attention?"
Personally, I think the latter question was a moment of self-doubt brought on by her awareness of her friend Glinda's personality, but I'm not sure. "If I'm flying solo, at least I'm flying free" would seem to corroborate that.
The wickedness referred to at the end of As Long as You're Mine, I wonder, may just be a stand-in for "naughty", which is a wonderfully humanizing interpretation. This is in contrast with the wickedness referred to at the end of No Good Deed ("Let all Oz be agreed: I'm wicked through and through"), which I think is only a little bit about how she sees herself (I'm not convinced she really believes the "no good deed goes unpunished" creed; it's a heat-of-the-moment passion thing) and more about angrily coming to terms with how she is viewed.
Before I wrap it up, I also have to quickly comment on Stephen Schwartz's use of leitmotifs. The way the songs reference one another to represent certain characters and ideas is incredible. (I noticed a lot of the subtitles of the score before reading this, but it's a great discussion of the themes and leitmotifs, as well as the creative process.)
Weird brain typing thing
I was trying to type the word "without", and without paying attention I typed "within". I didn't notice it till I went back to proofread. Is the word "in" stored in neurons near the word "out" or something?
I'm pretty sure that type of "proximity typo" has happened to me before, too. Why does that happen?
What to do about the automakers
Apparently there's a limit on how many characters can be in a reply to a posted item on Facebook, so I have to post this here.
I'm responding to a comment that was generally in agreement with Tom Friedman's column of 11 November 2008 about what to do about the automakers, but also frightened of the implications their failure will have on the economy, especially here in southeast Michigan:
I know, it's a tough one. I feel sorry for all the employees (and retirees) who are being screwed, but on the other hand, if the market isn't allowed to punish the shareholders (who will in turn punish the management), nothing will ever improve.
I also think that ultimately education is going to have to improved because there is no future for manufacturing in the US; Americans will do R&D, manufacturing will happen overseas. We just need more Americans capable of doing "brain work".
My brilliant plan (just thought up while typing this): the government acquires the assets of the automakers for pennies on the dollar and auctions them off to the highest bidder (i.e. Toyota, Honda, and defense contractors (the only manufacturing that should stay domestic)).
With the capital raised by the sale, put some into health care, but most of it should go into alternative energy research and training. The white-collar auto workers can be trained to do engineering, etc., and the blue-collar workers can handle the massive deployment of new energy technologies.
(While they're waiting for the research and engineering to happen, they can fix what President Elect Obama(!) has been calling our "crumbling infrastructure". The Eisenhower Interstate System was designed to last 50 years[citation needed]. Time's up.)
Photoshop in the Real World
My dad just emailed me this cool picture of Photoshop in the "real world".
It's interesting because it's cool, but from an HCI perspective it also drives home the importance of affordances: you don't just pick a tool, you actually grab it and use it; you don't just choose a color, you actually dip your brush in it.
Proxyless Domain Proxy
The Premise
I have a site for a school project that I'm hosting on a school server. I want to keep it hosted there for reliability/accountability reasons (i.e. if their servers go down on the day of a presentation it's their fault; if I use my discount host, it's my fault), but I'd like to use a custom domain.
Neither school nor my host seem to allow proxies (RewriteRule ^/~nliebman(.*)$ http://localchi\.com$1 [P] doesn't work), so there had to be a different solution.
The Solution
First I need to credit this to pippo over at Dev Shed.
Rather than having Apache rewrite the school URL to my own URL, the trick is to have PHP do all the work, and simply rewrite the PHP file's URL (on my server) to show the filename from the school server.
On my server, I created the following PHP file, called getRemote.php:
<?php readfile( "http://projects.si.umich.edu/~nliebman/".$_SERVER[ 'REQUEST_URI' ] ); ?>
Then, I added this rule to my .htaccess:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/getRemote.php [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /getRemote.php [L]
I didn't need to touch anything on the school server. I do take a performance hit since my server needs to get the content from the school server before serving it to me, but it's pretty light-weight stuff, so it's worth it for the pretty URL.