This and that

[mdlbear]

Woke up with my shoulder feeling considerably better: down from pain all over to pain that was pretty localized and felt like a muscle spasm. It's been getting gradually better all day, though it still hurts to shrug or to raise my left arm more than 45^o above horizontal. Even that's an improvement: last night horizontal was as far as I could go. Hooray for gin and Flexoril.

Took a 2.5 mile walk at lunchtime. Went much better than yesterday, when I only went 2 miles and was feeling distinctly shaky by the time I was done.

I've been moderately productive at work this week, getting involved in an interesting side-project involving Google Maps and a bit of browser-side scripting. So I'm learning Javascript. The syntax is, of course, familiar; the prototype-based (classless) object semantics are a little unusual, but fun. (There's a proof, by the way, that classes and prototypes are formally equivalent in the computations they can perform, but that's small consolation when you need an anonymous closure for a callback and the language you're using doesn't provide them. JS does provide them.)

The equivalence of function in Javascript, blocks in Smalltalk, and function plus lambda in LISP makes me feel all warm and comfortable inside.

For the last couple of days I've been trying to work through the exercises in my old recorder book. I've taken to practicing in the car before heading home from work, so as to avoid driving my family crazy. (Some might argue that it's more of a short walk, but I digress.) The book, Enjoy Your Recorder by the Trapp Family Singers, has been in my possession for roughly half a century, and I have not been practicing in all that time, but the fingerings seem oddly familiar.

The album is progressing through the fab line at Oasis; the press run has started and the CD replication is scheduled. Their tracking web page leaves a lot to be desired: refreshing the job status page puts you back two clicks away. Weird. I'm not sure how you would get that effect in the first place; it may be a side-effect of whatever weird Microsoft crud they're using on the server side. (It's all .aspx pages, and some of what they claim are links aren't.)

I've been plagued by doubts about just how thoroughly I QA'ed the master. I really wish one could simply upload .wav files and a table of contents, and let them put it together.

Comments

[hms42]

upload .wav files and a table of contents, and let them put it together.

Within a few years, I suspect this will be possible... (Uploading the .wav files to a duplicator.) As for having them do the artwork, I know one that does have that option available, but they likely are VERY expensive... (Good graphic artists DON'T come cheap.)

Then again, neither does the software to do the cover for a CD or the cost of the duplication either... (I am going thru a similar learning experience on a CD I am publishing for Roberta Rogow.)

Harold S.

[mdlbear]

Oasis is perfectly happy to do your artwork, and it's not all that expensive: on the order of $450. And they take artwork uploads with no problems. It's the audio that's the problem, and from what I've seen, even after they start accepting audio, they don't have any process in place for CD text or multi-session CDs.

[hms42]

Interesting.... I am glad to hear that I saved $450 by playing with Adobe Indesign and Illistrator. (Way overkill for what I was needing done.)

Maybe someday they will take an iso upload and burn out the CD from that.

Harold

[mdlbear]

They can already take an ISO and burn a single-session CD-ROM from it, but there's a big problem with multi-session that makes it almost impossible for them to do the work for you, and that's that the ISO's table of contents depends on the size of the previous session. It's stupid, but there it is: absolute sector addresses in the ISO.

[eleccham.livejournal.com]

And Ruby does blocks and lambda; but then I've heard that Ruby arguably is a Smalltalk.

[mdlbear]

Ruby has blocks, but it's somewhat different: it's prototype based where Smalltalk is class-based, and it doesn't use blocks for conditionals. A method can take at most one block argument.

The main reason I didn't list Ruby is that I haven't used it yet.