vesterberg.se

Last week I picked up my fretted Warwick 5-string Streamer bass again. For some six months I have played fretless exclusively. Why? Because I fell in love with the tone, the expressiveness and I figured that if I played all sorts of music for a while, it would help me to get real fluent on fretless. Anyway, it was an interesting experience to play fretted again. It felt like I had cleaned up my technique quite a bit.

After having been forced to have my fingers on left hand exact on the right spot, now my fingers fell naturally close behind the fret and the result was a fuller and clearer tone. Imagine that you push the string 45 degrees down in the crack between the fret and the fretboard. This will give a clear sound with a minimum of fret buzz.

After having been forced to listen closely to get the right intonation, now my ears felt bigger. I could hear more details of each note I played.

Also, I appreciate the clear tone of a fretted bass and the ability to control attack and note length and to funk out real bad. It is just like this; each instrument has its place.

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We, in the industrial countries, are all responsible for the environmental crisis on earth. Our ecological footprint is too large. If all the billions on earth would live as we do, several earths would be needed. We are consuming the resources for poor countries and for our children and our grandchildren and at the same time leaving our garbage for them to take care of. We, as countries and also as individuals have a responsibility and we ought to act on all levels. We ought to inform ourselves of what we can do. We need a personal vision about this.

We can work on all levels…
In our personal lives, choosing bike instead of car.
As lobbyists, persuading people everywhere we go.
As customers, purposely buying food and things according to the sustainable and renewable idea.
As professionals, taking the right decisions, not only avoiding things, but find new ways of doing business that is sustainable.

We need ideas and we need to be creative. We not only have to stop doing wrong things, but we have to do start doing new things. Here are som interesting links about ecological footprint; WWWF on Humanity’s Ecological Footprint and from Wikipedia.

I started my career in the Unix and C world and I soon settled for the vi editor when writing program code. The Emacs editor was also there, but it felt like a dinosaurian, bloated and clumsy. I liked the idea behind editing in vi, being small, quick and fast. Vi is a modal editor and that means (simplified) it either operates in insert/append-mode or in command-mode. What makes it unique is that when in command mode, all keys are used as command keys. For example d$ means delete from cursor to the end of line, M means move cursor to the middle of screen or y3w means copy (yank) the three words following after cursor to buffer. This allows you to perform all editing functions with no use of the mouse or menus and minimal use of CTRL and ALT keys. Keys can be combined and you can do a whole lot with a few keystrokes. When you have the key combinations in your muscle memory you can work real fast. If you have never tested vi, have a look at vim, the de facto vi editor of today. The learning curve is quite steep, but if you stay with it you will be rewarded. Know one editor real well and use it as much as possible. I like to work ergonomic and use the keyboard , relax my arms and avoid the mouse as much as possible, so I still use vi-clones as often as I can. To me the mouse is an evil thing.

Vi was created by Bill Joy back in 1976. Now it is 2007 and we have full featured integrated development environments. But guess what, you can still use the good old vi-paradigm. Almost every day I do work in both Eclipse and Visual Studio 2005. They are highly configurable and since people still like the vi idea there are plug-ins that make the IDE editor work like vi.

For Eclise we have the excellent viPlugin, which I have used for a number of years.

To get the vim control characters to work, do the following in Eclipse; go to menu Window – Preferences and choose General and then Keys. Click on the modify tab and choose ViPlugin in the Scheme drop down box. You will lose some usable functionality, like CTRL-F which is the eclipse find dialogue, so you might want to stay with the default scheme and add those vim-commands you especially like, for ex CTRL-D and CTRL-U.

For Visual Studio 2005 we have viEmu. The company even has a plug-in that gives you vi emulation in MS Word!

In both these cases the vim-functionality is blended into the IDE’s all functionality, like building, refactoring etc in a quite seamless way.

You can find a good quick reference card for vim here.

Pehr Gyllenhammar, president of Volvo some thirty years ago, tried to find new ways to increase the productivity. He got the idea that he would build the technical environment in the factory with the workers as the starting point and not the other way around, as was the rule.

Assembly lines were the common way to build cars ever since Henry Ford. Volvo had developed the practice meticulously and every part of the work was optimized. Time was measured in seconds. The assembler did his work monotonously all day long and he was really seen as an extension of the hardware, the technical environment. The factory was organized like clockwork, planned in utmost detail. The problem was that productivity did not increase as expected as each part was optimized. The human side was forgotten and this resulted in people getting sick and staff turnover was great.

Pehr started to experiment with a new type of factory. He tried to do a paradigm shift. That was not an easy thing and many around him protested; Cars have been assembled this way for seventy years. In the new factory, the assemblers worked in teams and built sections of the car. They were able to control and plan their work and organize themselves. They were involved in decisions and quality control. The advantages of the small engineering workshop were rediscovered. Even the architecture of the factory was different. This factory in Kalmar eventually had the highest productivity of all factories for Volvo cars and visitors from all over the world came to see what was going on.

Interesting, isn’t it; people working in small teams, given the freedom to organize, to decide and take responsibility. Not an easy task to achieve, but the way to go in these days. The result is commitment and creativity and the gain is greater than if you control every part in detail. You cannot take apart a process and optimize every part in isolation. You have to consider the whole system and most of all you have to consider the human aspect. During the industrial revolution the machines ruled, consuming both man and environment in the long run. We must move on and learn from history. We must have a sustainable view of man.