I hope this is not my legacy

I have finally released a version of BeatButcherMPC! Hooray! Click here for a download link

It is vastly cut down on functionality compared to the original prototype, but hopefully will provide a feature which is conspicuously absent on the Akai MPC500 device. I will explain the reasoning behind this feature-cull in this post.

Shout out to all the guys from mpc-forums hopefully you don’t hate me too much for taking so long to get this out there. I have had a lot of great support from you guys and I really feel like I let you down. I promised and promised that it would eventually get finished, but I found it very hard to keep them! If any of you were banking on features which I have removed then I apologize heartily. Hopefully you will find patched phrase editing useful though.

This is a screen shot of the new release:

Compared with the old version:

So as you can see it is MUCH MUCH simpler. Program editing is the main casualty, and this requires quite a complex interface for a relatively simple problem. I am thinking about releasing a second tool “BeatButcherMPC Program View” to address the problem of program editing some time in the future (hopefully not three years). I personally never found editing programs on the PC to be especially useful, since you can’t hear the changes that you are making. There is no point in being able to adjust the filter or envelope on a sound unless you can hear the output- to do anything else is creating music by sight rather than ear which is ridiculous.

The tool which I just mentioned would look something like a spreadsheet- allowing you to see an entire program on one page. You can sort of see this in the following screenshot. I’m not sure if this would be helpful to people or not. It would provide at-a-glance viewing and editing of programs without any of the cumbersome slider or spinner controls on programs such as “mpc maid“. N.B I like, respect, use and recommend mpc maid, all I am saying here is that it’s program view models the MPC500, albeit with a (much) bigger display, no disrespect intended.

A part of the problem I have had in releasing the software is that I initially wrote BeatButcherMPC when I was in my second year at university. I have since graduated and now work as a software engineer, and looking back at the code I see a lot of things which I want to change. However this is generally a lot of work for not a lot of visible gain, so it is hard to be motivated to do it!

All in all, I hope this is useful to someone!

I spent this afternoon at the Northackton Ballistics Day at Racecourse Park. We were out in full force with a selection of trebuchets, catapults, rockets, longbows and other assorted tennis ball launching devices. I think it is fair to say that some contraptions worked better than others. I think only the water rocket based launcher managed to move the ball further than a man with a tennis racquet.

I had originally intended to make a mortar style launcher similar to this but I had a bit of a mishap in Wickes leading to abandonment of that plan. There is now a tennis ball wedged firmly into a 2m section of drain pipe in the Sixfields store.

In the end I settled for a Rube Goldberg-esque design, pictured above. It was never intended to be an effective weapon, but it did achieve a launch distance of at least 2m. Using a bike frame isn’t actually a bad idea- the bottom bracket is an effective bearing for the tennis racquet to pivot about, and the rear wheel could potentially store a lot of energy. However in the couple of hours I had to create an entry, I couldn’t think of a good way to utilize this, so I went for looks instead and made a funky Northackton stencil.

More Photos:

I want to read more often and in more depth
I want to be debt-free
I want to learn new things every day
I want to be able to adapt to any challenge
I want to be able to take the points of any debate and come to my own conclusion
I want to be able to create something totally honest
I want to put instant gratification aside
I want to be funny and respected
I want to ignore marketing and adverts
I want to constantly raise the bar

I have it within me to do all these things

What is your manifesto?

Links
http://codebetter.com/blogs/jeremy.miller/archive/2006/10/30/My-Programming-Manifesto.aspx
http://www.mithral.com/~beberg/manifesto.html
http://www.jamieoliver.com/school-dinners/my-manifesto
http://changethis.com/manifesto/36.04.HappyatWork/pdf/36.04.HappyatWork.pdf
http://www.bravenewtraveler.com/2009/11/20/a-life-well-lived-developing-a-personal-manifesto/

If you are travelling by foot to a station to catch a train, when is it worth running? I am assuming you want to get to your destination as quickly as possible and that you want to put in the minimum amount of effort, and that you don’t know the train schedule.

If you run all the way to the station then you will obviously catch the first available train, and get there as quickly as possible.

If you walk all the way to the station you will put int he minimum amount of effort and take the maximum amount of time possible.

However, if you run all the way to the station, there is an equal chance that the train will be just leaving the platform as if you walked all the way. So by running and expending more effort, you don’t necessarily gain anything- you may still catch the same train as if you had walked.

So when is it worth running?

I think that an important factor in the making the decision would be the frequency of the trains. The more frequent the train schedule is, the less the cost of just missing a train will be. The correlation between speed of travel and time of arrival is smoother. This makes it easier to trade off time versus effort.

However since we don’t know the schedule, this is of no use, and thus no trade off can occur, it has to be a straight decision of minimize effort or minimize time. Of course you could compromise and run and walk sections of the journey, but by doing this you are still in exactly the same position.

The only point I am trying to make is that without a deadline, sometimes it is hard to make good decisions, and it is tempting to just minimize the amount of effort you put into things. I think this applies to far more than just train travel.

I often worry about time. I once read an amazing forum post (they do exist) which I wish I could quote but I can’t so I will paraphrase rather badly here. Time is constantly travelling forward and you can either pretend that it isn’t happening, or you can embrace it. When you look back you can either see all of the progress that you made in that time, or you can see a time where you did not take positive steps towards your goals. Realize that if you experience the former, there is nothing you can ever do to change the time that has passed.

This scared me.

This scared me so much in fact that I started filling up my days with as many activities as possible, playing multiple sports and going to the gym, musical instruments, reading books like “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, and such. I think this is when I earned the “manic obsessive” tag in the minds of many.

When I left university I was very scared that going into a full time job I would have much less time to do what I wanted and that I would end up as a mindless drone stuck in the monotony of the daily grind. I read “The Four Hour Work Week” by Tim Ferris in an attempt to solve this predicted problem, but it turns out that the book recommends pulling a bit of a scam, and I’m pretty sure that my boss now wouldn’t be too happy if I tried to outsource my work to India (that’s why they hired me right?).

So, I’ve been working full time for a year now, and I have to say that at no point have I felt like a mindless drone. The only problem is: that is what a mindless drone would think.

I think that it is important to step back out of the daily routine sometimes and think “what would my perfect routine be, how is it different to what I currently do, and what can I do to improve it?”. It is easy to get caught up in doing the same thing every day or week, without any reason other than because it is what you always do.

As an example, every week when I go food shopping, I buy 9 KitKat Chunky bars. Now I quite like them, I guess, but I can think of better things to eat as my 10am snack, and every week at the supermarket I think “maybe instead of these this week I’ll make some polish cake/florentines/whatever” and then I think “I probably wont make polish cake/florentines/whatever” so I buy the KitKat Chunky bar multi pack anyway, and then because I have them I don’t make anything. And so it goes on with other foods, I don’t want to eat a NutriGrain, they taste like cardboard, it’s just the alternative would take a bit of effort (to get out of the current routine).

I’ll give another example, hopefully one which you can relate to better (unless you too are a massive KitKat consumer). What do you eat for breakfast? For me it is a bowl of cheerios and a cream cheese bagel with orange juice. Now imagine your perfect breakfast. Personally I love the meal of breakfast, so this would be a selection of waffles + Nutella, croissants, pain au chocolates, American style pancakes with crispy bacon beans and eggs, bagels with various fillings, all with orange juice and coffee. Mmmm, I’m salivating just thinking about it. Now why don’t I have that every day? Because it is too much effort keeping all of those things in stock and it just seems easier to do the same thing every day. And if I start the day like that, how can I expect things to get better as it goes on. But it isn’t all about food, it’s just a good place to start looking at yourself because everybody eats.

As a footnote I still have the irrational fear of time. In a Sunday night I still feel anxious, as if there is something I should be doing, like last minute assignments, or reading up on Monday mornings lecture. Maybe 17 years of continuous education does that to a person. I’m hoping to grow out of it. A few nights ago I actually got annoyed because R phoned me while I was doing something and I felt like she was stealing my evening by wanting to talk. Of course this is nonsense, so sorry about that.

I had a silly idea yesterday about running a 30 hour day, similar to the old poly-phasic sleep theory. The idea was to move the day around so that you don’t always work through the best hours of the day. I worked it out on paper and everything. I calculated that it would allow me to have seven hours of free time in the evening to do whatever I wanted (albeit at a different random time each night). Then I realized 5pm to Midnight is seven hours.

There are seven hours of time to do anything you want every evening. Use them.

There is something about well engineered quality products which makes the exorbitant price tag almost part of the attraction.

It has been a while since my last post (five months). I would love to say that is because I have been busy, but in reality it is just because the longer you leave it, the harder it gets. What has happened to me since the end of January? Umm.. in february I spent a fortune on my car, in march I did nothing of note, I was in Thailand for the whole of April, in May I recovered from Thailand, and I moved house in June and bought a pair of deck shoes and fell in love with Eminem’s new album, Recovery. So this is really a filler post to say, I will be back soon.

I finally finished BeatButcherMPC. I ended up stripping out the program editing functionality, which I decided wa not overly useful, and there are other programs such as MPC Maid which can do the job. Instead I decided to simplify the interface and focus on the wave editing functionality, making it very easy to create patched phrases (not possible on the MPC500 itself) and sequences of chops. I will be putting it up here for download shortly.