dinosaurs eat everybody

So, you may have noticed that I’ve missed the past few Thing a Week weeks. In my defense I did just get married last Saturday, so I’ve been pretty busy with wedding related travel and planning so I haven’t had much time for extra projects. The wedding was amazing and I now have a wife, which is fun. In the spirit of the wedding I wanted to share a project that I worked on a while ago but didn’t want to show until now.

For the wedding I wanted to build a ring bearer box out of an old book. After looking around some used bookstores I picked an old Tarzan book because 1) it seemed common enough that I didn’t feel bad using it as materials and 2) it had a cool elephant on the cover. I wanted to hollow out part the inside pages and create inlays to hold the rings (like a secret flask holder but for wedding stuff).

I started by covering the covers in plastic (to avoid getting glue on them) painting the sides of the pages with puzzle glue in order to stick all the pages together. I did about 5 coats of this. Once that glue was dried I measured out the inlay and started carving pieces out using an Excato knife. This took a lot longer than expected and when I was down about half an inch, I coded the new inner wall with glue to give it a nice solid feel.

After I had my basic inlay I needed to dig out the slots for the actual rings. This was even more tricky. I thought I would be able to make clean cuts, like I did with the inlay but I ended up basically using the knife to turn the paper into pulp and then just digging the pulp out of the the slots. After removing top page from the inlay, which had been pretty well torn up by all the digging I was left with a nice ring box.

The pages held the rings perfectly and I could even hold the box open and upside down without the rings falling out. The box was put to use by our ring bearer, Sui Chi, on Saturday and it looked great! This was a cool little project and it was fun to build something non-digital again. It really took a lot longer than I expected but the result was worth it.

So most of this week I was traveling so I wasn’t able to get very much work done on any projects. I did, however, attend an Indian wedding in Long Island which was really cool so the week was not a total loss.

The work I did get done earlier this week was mainly with the RecLaboratory interface to Rocktopus, our audio processing API. I built the interface to the bounce_song functionality, which will take all the individual tracks of a song and combine them into a single (probably .mp3) file.

I also set up a sort of hacky but effective, for now, “loading screen” to let users know that their audio is being uploaded/processes. It seems like a little thing but letting the page just hangs after clicking submit is really bad UI. This is a very early version of the product and we haven’t given UI the full focus it needs but this was one thing that would be too awkward to not address early. It was a bit of an awkward fix because we’re not actually doing the audio processing or uploading as a background process. Eventually I’ll build a queuing/callback system in Rocktopus that will work much nicer, but this gets us going now.

This next week is another busy week. It is the last week in SF before we fly back to Chicago for the wedding (which is less than 2 weeks away now…). If I get anything Thing A Week thing done this week it will probably be something wedding related.

Once again, another busy week divided between wedding stuff and side projects.

I spent this week adding more features to the RecLaboratory audio player and I feel like it’s in a pretty good spot for now. Obviously, there’s more I’d like it to do but it’s certainly at a point where it will work for basic track and song playback.

Here’s a list of new features that got added this week:

• Visual indicators on the in page play buttons to show what is playing in the global player
• Some basic layout polish and player styling
• Jump forward or back in the audio by clicking on the progress bar
• Play/pause using the space bar
• Some basic (if clunky) error checking to make sure files loaded

One really interesting thing I found this week that I didn’t expect is that audio playback is not interrupted by navigating around the site. If I reload the page the sauropod.audio object is empty and playback stops, but not if I’m just clicking links on the site. I haven’t had time to explore it completely yet but I suspect it has something to do with either the way Rails caches JavaScript or with TurboLinks.

I’m really happy that is “just works” that way, I was worried that I would have to go back and turn this whole project into a single page app eventually to get uninterrupted playback, so this is a nice win. I do need to spend some time testing things to make sure I understand WHY it works. It seems dangerous to accidentally get a nice feature like this.

Like I said, while Sauropod is still a little rough around the edges, it’s good enough to use for the site. I’m now moving on to fixing up the interface to Rocktopus for audio compression and song bouncing.

This week I’ll be traveling to New York for a friend’s wedding, so my Thing A Week time may be limited. Also I need to eventually finish writing the ceremony script for my wedding or else some people are going to be mad at me…

Another 7 days, another busy week. With the wedding growing ever closer I’ve been squeezing in time for other projects wherever I can. This week I managed to make some good progress on Sauropod by putting in some work before I go to work and on the plane while traveling to Chicago for the 4th.

I got Sauropod hooked up into the asset pipeline of the RecLab Rails site and started attaching it to the various audio controls on the site. While Howler.js handles loading the audio file and playing the sound in browser, I still needed to build all the hooks to control and monitor the audio.

At this point I am able to click a “play” button next to a track and have Sauropod load the song and update global play/pause button, display the name and owner of the track (with links), and display a progress bar and time progress. I also have a global mute/unmute working and started on global volume controls. Most of the controls and UI updates were just simple hooks into Howler and some jQuery for display manipulation, but the progress bar and timer were a little tricky. While a regular HTML5 audio player sends an onprogress event that you can listen for to control the progress display I had to write my own listener that starts an stops with the audio. It wasn’t very hard, I just used a setInterval() function around my own sauropod.updateProgress() function:

sauropod.play = function() {
  if (sauropod.audio.status != "playing") {
    _.each(sauropod.audio.tracks, function(s) {s.play()});
    sauropod.audio.status = "playing";
    sauropod.updatePlayer();
    sauropod.tid = setInterval(sauropod.updateProgress, 100);
  }
}

I still need to build all the hooks into playing a mutitrack song (though it should work based on how I’ve built the system) and then work on the track editing features (muting/level adjustments at a per-track level). I also need a bit more robust error handling and a cleaner UI, but all in all the audio player is coming along nicely.

Thing A Week Progress Update

So this week marks half a year of this “Thing A Week” project. It hasn’t been exactly what I planned, one discrete project finished every week, but it has really keep me focused on building things and I’ve really enjoyed writing about my progress on all the things I’ve been working on.

As seems to be the trend lately, last week was very busy. Between work stuff, wedding stuff, seeing a musical, and going to a show it was hard to find time to get extra things done.

Almost all of the weekend was devoted to knocking off extra wedding things, like designing take-home gifts for guests and buying a bunch of ties. There is a big list of things that we apparently need to do, but we’re making good progress on it.

We had a really productive RecLab meeting on Tuesday where we worked out some good layout stuff and got the feed stuff into a good place. With the basic feed working, I am now able to move on to the audio player component: Sauropod.

Why is called Sauropod? Well a while ago I had to build an HTML5 based mp3 player for a job interview and I decided to call it 5auropod because ‘sauropod’ kind of sounded like ‘iPod” and the ‘5’ because of HTML5. Also sauropods are cool, enormous dinosaurs. When I started working on a player for RecLab I wanted to use the same name, but I was worried about starting JavaScript variables with a number so I just used “Sauropod”. Convoluted, I know, but it makes sense to me.

Right now Sauropod is in it’s VERY early stages, mainly just building out method names to architect the system. The basic idea is to build a library to work with songs and tracks that contain metadata and possibly multiple audio tracks that need to be played simultaneously or adjusted individually. I’m using Howler.js to handle most of the audio heavy lifting. It’s been pretty awesome so far. I’m also trying out Underscore.js to give me a bit of functional programming in JavaScript. This is mainly to make working with arrays nicer, which I will have to do quite a bit with the arrays of Howler.js Sounds that make up songs.

Sauropod is still in it’s very early stages, but I have a pretty good architecture planned out and I’m excited to see it develop.

This was another busy week but I manged to get some solid work done on RecLaboratory stuff.

First I took some pictures to use as a cover photo on our Twitter and Facebook pages. This ended up being a big project that involved moving a bunch of my music equipment around and finding a clear area in my small apartment. I am not a great photographer but I’m pleased with how it looks. Feel free to follow/friend us on either. We’re starting to post things.

Last Wednesday night I just couldn’t sleep so I stayed up until 2:30 and knocked off a few bugs around comments but the major work I got done this week was around the event feed. I knew I couldn’t just rig something together with a bunch of ugly table JOINs I ended up using the public_activity gem. It listens for controller actions and makes an entry in a separate table for every event I want to show up in the feed. Most of our events are just the result of object creation and public_activity handles this really well right out of the box.

Right now I just have basic events around Users, Comments, Tracks, and Songs and I need to clean up how I’m using the public_activity params hash to avoid some n+1 database call issues but so far it’s made it really easy to build feeds on User, Track, and Song pages. I’m working on building the main homepage feed now, which is proving a little trickier. Obviously I’d like to do this with a single call to the Activities model but because it’s tracking polymorphic objects, the SQL is taking some work.

I’m hoping to have the feed stuff done by next week and start setting up a non-local version of the Rails site + Rocktopus soon. Then I have BUNCH of WebAudio stuff to work on around the player/audio tools. Oh, and I should probably be planning my wedding at some point too…

bonus thing

I actually drew a real comic this week, one where I penciled and inked and everything. Check it out!

This weekend Eileen was out of the house for her bachelorette party so I tried to knock out a few outstanding wedding related projects (apparently that is coming up pretty quickly). The Bird Watcher project had been dragging on for a while so I thought this would be a good time to wrap it up, too.

For those who don’t remember, Bird Watcher is a system that listens for photos with certain #hashtags and displays them to a live page. I plan to use it to let people take pictures during our wedding and show them on a projector during the reception.

This project has spanned a few Thing A Week posts and involved playing with the Twitter and Instagram APIs, as well as learning a bit more about Postgresql and the Sequel gem.

At this point most of the hard work had been done. I have Twitter and Instagram listeners (which both work in very different ways) that store info about photo posts in a database. I just needed to write something to pull them out and display them.

Originally I had written some nice code for prioritizing new photos and minimizing database calls but that ended up being a scoping pain in the ass in Sinatra. I would have had to build some sort of session object persistence system and honestly, the scale of this project just wasn’t worth it.

I ended up with a simple AJAX loop on a timer that pulls a random “photo card” with the image and some information about it, and displays it on a page that should work nicely full screened on a projector. I still need to run some tests to make sure I don’t get any weird image sizes but it’s working well right now.

I’m a little worried that I’ll spend part of my own wedding reception tweaking code or sshing into my server to restart some service, but I think everything should run pretty smoothly. This was a fun little project and made me play with some new technologies. Hopefully lots of people use it at the wedding.

This was a pretty busy week. I ended up flying back to Chicago on Thursday for my bachelor party, which was really awesome! These good times didn’t leave a lot of time for building things but I managed to get some interesting routing work done on the Reclab site.

I want Reclab to namespace songs and tracks by username, similar to the way Github namespaces repos. Obviously I also want to use nice identifiers for the resources rather than just id numbers, so I started by setting up FriendlyId, which is a great gem for this sort of thing.

What’s really cool about FriendlyId is that it can generate a slug that is unique across multiple fields in the object. For example, I want to allow user1 and user2 to both be able to have a song name “My Song One” so I want the path to each song to be something like user1/songs/my-song-one and user2/songs/my-song-one. Note that the song identifier “my-song-one” is only locally unique, not globally unique. To do this FriendlyId lets you scope slugs:

extend FriendlyId
friendly_id :name, use: [:slugged, :finders, :scoped], scope: :user

Then, in order to get things to work with ActiveAdmin I had to make Songs “owned” by Users. If you don’t do this, ActiveAdmin tries to use the FriendlyId slug as a globally unique identifier. This is an easy fix in the /admin/song.rb:

ActiveAdmin.register Song do
  belongs_to :user

I still need to clean up the routing in the rest of the app but this was a big step forward to some nicer paths.

This seems like a bit of a cop out but when I thought back to what took up most of my time last week it turns out, it was putting together and mailing out wedding invitations.

Again, this is sort of cheating because most of the creative work was done by our very talented friend Debby. After listening to our asinine ideas she designed awesome invitations, RSVP cards, and thank you cards.

Then it was our job to pick out paper and envelopes and all that other stuff (which is a much bigger ordeal than I had ever imagined). Eileen and I both took a morning off of work just to talk to paper stores and printers. It was exhausting.

Once everything was actually printed on fancy paper we had to do all sorts of crafty things like tie twine around the jackets that hold the invitation and RSVP card, addressed all the envelopes, print return address labels, and puts stamps on everything. None of it was particularly hard (except for maybe addressing everything, but Eileen did that because my handwriting is illegible) but it just took a LONG TIME.

On Saturday morning we got everything mailed out, which felt good. This was a much bigger project than I expected it to be, but they turned out really cool.

This week I ended up getting quite a bit of RecLab work done, especially for a shortened week.

The major breakthrough was getting the Rails site talking to Rocktopus, the audio processing API I’ve been writing. It’s not perfect but it has some basic authentication and the Rails Track model gets updated based on the response from Rocktopus. This is all just working locally right now but it shouldn’t be hard to set up a server to server connection once I have Rocktopus deployed somewhere.

The other large chunk of work I got done was due to being home alone this weekend. With Eileen hanging out with friends in Napa I decided to start working on the first real site layouts. I made great progress on the user profile pages and started doing some of the url rewriting work. I considered dropping Bootstrap in favor of Bourbon/Neat/Bitters after exploring the latter libraries at work but I think for what we’re trying to build right now Bootstrap will get us up and running much faster.

As always, there’s still a lot of work to be done but it felt good to make some serious progress this week. Again, if you are interested in this project head over to reclaboratory.com and enter your email. We’ll get in touch with you when we’re ready to start letting people try the site.