Lewies Blog

I recently pulled out my W-10 Digital Voice Recorder and started grabbing the old files from it. I immediatley found two things that I just hated about this thing. First - the speed at wich files are transfered to the computer is very slow. The other is these thwap sounds. The recorder inserts these high noises of clicks, thwaps and scratches. I eventaully found a program to help me edit the files to remove the sounds called Audacity. The thing is, these sounds shouldn’t be there in the first place. Hopefully with the WS-200S that I just purchased, these problems will not be apparent anymore.

I also found a few old files on my old hard drive and uploaded them to the DreamyAudio podcast. It looks like I need to download a program (such as ID3-TagIT) to edit the meta-data within those MP3 files, as the feed that reads them looks a bit odd now.

It appears that the ID3-TagIT website is having some problems.  I’ve sent an email to the author, but thankfully I still had a copy of the program on my old hard disk.

I went for a walk around the pond today at with a few coworkers during lunch. One invited me to come and see the new baby geese. We saw the father hissing a few feet from the mother with her six goslings. The father calmed down as we walked away.

Every summer we have about six to ten geese that come to the pond and hang out. There are only the two and there children, and a lonely duck that hang out there now. I’ve heard reports of people being chased by one of the geese, and now it is apparent why that was.

I also got some spare change fro a few countries. One of my coworkers knew that I liked foreign coins and handed me ten coins from different countries on Monday. They look pretty neat.

So I was still skimming a bunch of info about the Olympus WS-200S.  Some interesting things that I found.  One item that appealed to me was that it had a microphone jack.  I’ll tell you this - having your own microphone can do wonders compared to built-in microphones.  Hopefully I’ll be able to understand my slurred and sleepy voice easier.

I also found a picture of the item taken apart so that I could get a feel for its actual size using the USB jack as reference.  The buttons on the side appear to be much easier to use in the dark, as that is when I record my dreams in the middle of the night and early in the morning.  One of the features advertised on ebay was that you could drag-and drop documents rite from the device as if it were a mass storage device.  This is a selling point, as it is exactly what I was looking for.  No need to install junk software.  I can also drag files onto the device other then audio.

One downside is that it records in Windows Media Audio (WMA).  But from what I have found, there are not any digital voice recorders out there that record in MP3 format.  I shouldn’t have any problems converting WMA directly to MP3 though.  My current W-10 records in WAV.  Before I can convert it to MP3, I have to convert it to a different type of WAV format.  It gets confusing for me to go through that part of the process.  The quality of WMA is rite up there with near CD quality at 44kHz and can record in Stereo or Mono.

So in the end, I spent US $99.99 + $8.99 for shipping from Ohio on eBay (Item 9720797974).

For a good while, I think I’ve just been out of it. I don’t know how to explain it, really. Lately, my creativity and eagerness to learn and experiment has been comming back. I’m starting to program at home a lot again. I also did a few yardwork chores this past weekend. Yardwork is just something I dread. Sometimes I do it out of boredom really.

I don’t know all of what is involved with how I got to where I was. Computer problems was one issue. Waiting forever for VS.Net 2005 was another. You could fit some depression in there as well, although it has pretty much gone away at this point of my life. The SecondLife addiction came on pretty heavy back in November and has recently tapered off a bit. In fact, I’ve started working on little projects to assist me in SecondLife, so that probably means that I’ll stop using it so heavy. I also purchased Civalization IV this past weekend, so that has got my mind away from SL as well.

Another thing that I am starting to do is use my online services a bit more. Take Del.icio.us for example. I have started tagging pages that I find useful to reference later rather then bookmarking the pages. I’ve started posting to flickr again and my blogging activities have increased.

My iPod has been synched up with my newly formatted drive. Unfortunately, I lost all of my music ratings in the process. I have to rate all my songs again. I have about 3500 songs and desperately running out of room on it. I’m down to less then a gigabyte left on a 20 GB drive. I think it is due to all of these audiobooks and podcasts that I’m losing precouse space. Eventually I’ll upgrade to the iPod video so I can have a color screen, pictures, and of course, videos. It would be nice to see my album art too when I’m listening to a song.

My dreams, I feel, are still odd at best. I’m looking into a few gadgets that should help me out a bit better with my Dreamy Audio podcast. It seems Olympus is very popular with digital voice recorders. I’m looking for quality and capacity. One of them (WS-200S) stores about 4 and a half hours for its high quality mode. My current W-10 that I got used allows me 45 minutes in HQ Mode. Of course, I always go to ebay for my supplies. I see that I can knock of $30 on the WS-200S retail price and get it at $100 US. The W-10 is still selling for around $35 on eBay, a $65 savings. I got my W-10 for roughly $40 a year ago. Maybe I can resell it and only suffer a $5 loss. It doesn’t have any wear or tear showing and it still works just like new.

I’ve also seen Digital Audio Tape (DAT) recorders out there. Some of the results that I’ve heard from One-Minute Vacation are impressive that were recorded on these devices. They have a high sampling rate as well as a high price. The thing though, is that they are not so digital. It’s not as if I could hook a DAT player up to my computer and transfer files. It appears that they would have to play the audio while my computer would record it. What a mess that would be. I think I’ll just stick with Digital Voice Recorders for the time being.

So this past weekend I learned a thing or two about new technologies (ORM) for bridging the gap between programming data and database data. I figured out how to solve my problems I had yesterday with inheritance using subclasses within Hibernate.

Today, I spoke with my manager and we discussed that the ORM and MVC technologies that I was looking into was only a first generation approach. We went into a brief history of the second and third generation of this technology. The third generation tools that are available actually do most of the work for you. You visually setup your business objects, and the program creates/updates your database, sets up your data tier, and models your business objects for you. I was just a bit stunned.

My managers argument in support of this technology was that most of my time is spent going through the same process on the database and the business logic. Granted that I did make a ton of little utilities to help me out along the way, there are programs out there that walk through the whole process.

There were some tools that we talked about and I started looking into one called DeKlareit. It took a little getting used to, but by the end of the day, I got most of the main concepts of how it worked and the intelligence behind it. Each time I understood another feature, I was just impressed. Most of it is just visual. I don’t write much code at all except for a few formulas or rules.

It is amazing that my manager is suggesting these kind of tools. I feel like it is taking me out of the classical erra of programming, bypassing the industrial age, and going strait to the modern age (if I was comparing it to Civalization IV, of course). I can not say that I no longer need to worry about the database at all, but I feel that this is a huge step in increasing my productivity. The price of this tool can’t even compete with the number of hours I would be doing the same thing by hand.

Since Friday, I’ve been researching a bit here and there about Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) and Model-View-Controller (MVC) at work and at home. These are technologies that help with manageable programming.

ORM is used to help store objects within a relational database. A database stores data differently then an object. This technique is used to map data between objects and databases. A popular and open-source tool to assist in this mapping for programming in .Net is nHibernate. nHibernate is a port of Hibernate written in JAVA. I have figured out the basics of saving and retrieving objects to a relational database. Though I’m starting to have difficulty with polymorphism in inheritance. I’ll keep up the R&D until I get it rite. So far, the technologies involved are showing a lot of promise. On top of that, I have found many websites offering supporting documentation and techniques that apply to both platforms on JAVA and .Net.

Model-View-Controller (MVC) can work with or without ORM. ORM would only be used with the Model portion of MVC. MVC breaks your application (desktop or web applications) into three parts. Model represents your business elements, or data schemata. “View” represents the final web page, also known as your “presentation layer”. Last we have “Controller” wich is the business logic between your presentation and your data. Business logic can manipulate data, authorize that you do in fact have permission to access that data, and just about everything else. It can be thought of as the API undernieth the presentation itself. Some people claim that it is the glue between the data and the presentation.

I’ve worked with MVC often, but not to its full effect. The rules with MVC pretty much go something like this. If any one part of MVC changes (The model, view, or controller), then the other two parts should not break. That is the part where I am not successful. I usually develop 3 projects initially in my applications. The web or desktop application, a project for business logic, and another project for the data tier.

I believe most of my problems arrise from the stability of the model. As long as the model doesn’t change, the control and view should be able to change more easily without any impact. I’ve originally kept a virtual model in place and manually mapped it to an older model that was practically inherited from another project. This worked great in the first phase as there were very simple requirements and tight deadline.

In this second phase, requirements change every day and are still being gathered. After much research into ORM and MVC, I am wanting to just get a definition of the domain that I can rearchitect the model after. Currently, I am having to rearchitect the older model many times due to its current incompatabilities with the requirements. This still raises a problem though for future architecture. How can a database be architected properly to be able to grow not in data scalability, but in schemata scalability? I understand normalization as such, but the current model already has normalization and needs to be reworked often when changes to requirements occur.

My mother inlaw came over this weekend with my neice and spent the night.  I was constantly doing things all weekend.  Shopping for groceries, pet food, gardening supplies, and even took my neice to Toys ‘R’ Us so she could spend her allowance.  Thankfully, she didn’t spend too much time looking around at the toys.  She got a toy fishing rod with sea critters, and I found a pinwheel that she liked too.

I picked up some sand at Wal-Mart so that I could fill in some holes left behind from when I tore down an ugly fence between me and my neighbors house.  I saw some people were moving in next door with some kids and I figured it’s about time to make the neighborhood a little safer.  I also mowed most of my lawn.  I keep getting worn out when I try it out.  I ran out of gas on the front half and I got two large sections done in the back.  My back keeps aching from all that pushing.

Some bee-balm flowers arrived in the mail on Friday and I purchased some potting soil for them.  My wife and I were going to turn over the dirt in front of the house, but just a few centemeters under it we just kept hitting rocks. We are going to find a flower box and put the soil in there.  Bee-balm is my wife’s favorite flower.

My neice woke up early on Sunday and from what I heard, she kept asking if she could wake me up so we could collect rocks.  I told her on Saturday we could find some rocks and put them down in the old fence post holes.  Well, we soon went ahead and found some rocks.  We only filled one hole half way.  All the other holes were filled completely with sand.  It turns out that I had some extra sand left over in the first back, and one back not even opened.  I took the two bags into my back yard and dumped them into a pile in a bare spot where the grass doesn’t grow.

For about an hour, my neice and I built sand castles.  I taught her the steps to making them so that she fills the bucket all the way up, dumps it fast, pats the top, wiggle the bucket, and then slowly pull it up.  She got it perfect after her second attempt.  We also built a giant ant hill, and a house out the the sand.

By time the afternoon came on Sunday, I was so exhausted from being with her so much that I took a nap.  I was supposed to do a few more things with my mother in-law, but by time I woke up, she had already left.  There is always next weekend.