vesterberg.se

I spent five days at a developers Ccnference a few months ago here in Sweden. I listened to a whole lot of interesting seminars and some not so interesting. I was particulary interested in two sessions that was about Ruby and Rails (RoR). I was not impressed by the presentations. The first speaker hadn’t that much experience and some of his demos failed. The second (leading a workshop) failed to get the neccessary programs (Radrails) loaded in our PC’s. He was enthusiatic about Rails and assured many times that Rails makes development easy, but the participants probably left his workshop with the feeling that RoR is difficult and not ready for real usage. Doing demos and hands-on is taking a risk. You cannot just show up on time and assume that others has prepared things, especially if you believe in what you are to present.

I also went to a couple of sessions about Unity Testing and TDD (test driven development). I am all for testing, but often in projects there is a pressure to deliver and keeping deadlines. You have to be practical. What I mean is this, with all the good methods, approaches and tools, we have to be pragmatic and wise. To be experienced is to be wise, take from your toolbox and apply what is needed the most. TDD-people sometimes sounds like they write test-methods for even the most tiny and obvious method they have.

When EJB came, it became popular and every Java project used EJB and reaped the consequences thereof. When something rises and becomes popular, we ought to study it for a while, let it challenge our ideas and preconceptions and then integrate it with our previous experience.

Yes, yes I know. I ought to use some blogging software to host my site, not just plain html in apache. Honestly I haven’t had the time yet. I have actually done some research and Typo is the hottest candidate for the moment. It is popular, seems reliable and uses Ruby on Rails as engine. I have used Ruby in a project and have done some coding in Rails.

A way to train your arm muscles for better slapping is to grab an ordinary drumstick in the middle with your hand (palm) and do the typical slap movement with your arm and wrist in the air. Position the arm like you normally do when you are slapping, but with no bass. The stick will be like an extended thumb. The added weight through the drumstick will help your muscles to build more quickly. But, as always, start with a few minutes at a time. To much and you will get pain.

It is quite possible to go through a bassline in a song in your mind only and explore alternate ways of playing a certain passage. To do this we must be able concentrate and stop our mind from wandering. One of the ways that helps, is to have a clear mental image of the fretboard.

Start out with the fretboard in front of you and visualize how you play scales while looking at the fretboard. Next close your eyes and visualize the fretboard and do the same thing. Extreme! Yes! I have found you can actually exercise virtually this way, while riding a bus or when laying down sick. But, don’t do it while driving your car!

In a project recently I have used Ruby to build a prototype. The production version was done in Java. Why? Because the customer wanted it. One thing I definitively miss when working in Ruby is an IDE as powerful as Eclipse for Java. All the refactorings, the code completion and debugging facilities enhances my productivity. I used Ruby plugin RDT for Eclipse. The more dynamic a language is, the more it helps if the IDE keeps track of the relationsships and inheritance between your program parts. The earlier you discover your errors the better.

Smalltalk is/was very dynamic and had a great IDE. In fact the IDE was integrated into the language from scratch. Why doesn’t Ruby have a similar powerful IDE already? One of the reasons I can think of, is that Smalltalk had it’s IDE from scratch, but Ruby started more like a file-oriented script-language.

So far I have tried Komodo, which is to slow to be useful and Radrails/RDT, which still is missing reasonable debugging facilities. Arachno had a corrupt installation exe when I last tried to install. So I stayed with RDT.

Besides enjoying bass playing, I am very interested in the factors that governs growth as a musician. I am interested in pedagogical things and how people learn as I have worked as a teacher in different areas. My wife also is a teacher.

Since I started to play bass relatively late, I want to make the most out of every hour I get to practice. I have noticed that an hour sometimes can pass without anything special happening and sometimes you discover things that takes you further. Yes, I know that I have to be patient and that growth is step-wise. But I am interested in maximizing my investment in time. Aren’t you?

There are principles for learning to play bass and some of them are similar to other areas in life. Some has to do with how your mind works and some has to do with how your muscles work, the anatomy of your body and the mechanics of a string instrument.

We get impressed when we listen to some cool bass player, but it is even more cool when they share some of their wisdom and secrets how they got there. Some of them have the gift to analyze and communicate this understandably. I try to find them or what they have written. Not every player has to find out what works and what doesn’t work from scratch. So I am eargerly searching for gems. Exciting road!

Every year when autumn starts I like to do an evaluation of the year that has passed concerning the bass part of my life. I want to feel that I am learning and growing, because I want to get good at this instrument. I want it eventually to feel like an extension of myself. It has proved to be very helpful to think through weak areas, if a certain type of exercises does not give the expected effect and so on and even put it down on paper. Sometimes we just automatically continue to do what we have been doing before, when we really should adjust or stop or move to something else. Take control over your growth.

The most recent book a read about amplifiers was “Valve and Transistor Audio Amplifiers” by John Lindsley-Hood. It gives an overview of amplifier construction during the years from the first primitive valve circuits to the latest transistor designs. The book is full of schematic diagrams and you can follow his interesting discussion of pros and cons with the solutions. I found the book very interesting and I especially got much from his discussion of different kinds of feedback. Just 208 pages, but full of insights.

Last month a fretless beauty came to live with me, a warm burgundy red 4-string Warwick Corvette fretless. I have dreamed for a long time to play fretless. I remember how I enjoyed the bass playing of Jaco Pastorious in A Remark You Made by Weather Report many years ago. Fretless is an instrument so expressive, the wooden tone, the slides and vibratos. Well, it takes some time to get fluent but I have started, playing scales with tuner and all that stuff. AND I am now playing A Remark You Made, not perfect, but still! I am very satisfied with the Corvette. It feels in my hands like I thought it should.