dinosaurs eat everybody

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.

So this Thing a Week post is late because I was out of town from last Saturday until late yesterday night.

While I did make some progress on getting the RecLab Rails application to connect to Rocktopus (our audio processing library) the main thing we got accomplished last week was setting up our RecLab presence online.

A major part of this was building out a Launchrock page to point our domain at. So now if you go to reclaboratory.com you actually see something! Right now we’re just collecting email addresses, but building this out helped us think through some basic service descriptions, a tagline, and formalizing how to write the name. It’s officially RecLaboratory. Note the capital ‘R’ and ‘L’. It took us a surprising amount of discussion to decide on this convention.

We also cleaned up our Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts, so those are ready to be used.

Feel free to follow us at any of those places as we’ll be starting to use them soon.

I didn’t really plan to do anything outside of RecLab work this week but yesterday I got in the mood to play and record some music so I ended up with a new recording for this week’s thing.

Eileen and I have been talking about doing more recording together (as Packets and Waves) and after a recent Hurray For the Riff Raff show, we were in the mood to do some old country songs. We settled on doing a cover of Loretta Lynn’s Wine Women and Song. It’s a short, simple song (which was important because we started learning it at about 11:30pm on Saturday night) and I just like the phrase “wine, women, and song”.

We didn’t want to it be an exact copy of the original so I tried to give it a dirty Black Keys-ish guitar sound and keep the guitar part pretty simple. I resisted to urge to layer on a bunch of random instruments and only used guitar, bass, and drums for most of the song. The piano was only added in the chorus and solo sections, even though I tried a few takes where I recorded some sporadic piano comping throughout the whole. In the end, the stripped down version just sounded cooler.

I’m really coming around the the virtual drummer in Logic Pro. At first I really resisted the idea of letting the software “write” my drum parts for me, but the sound is so much better than MIDI drums and I can actually get some interesting parts. For this song I used “Logan” with a retro sounding kit. I thought the tom driven verses worked out really well.

Eileen’s vocals turned out nicely, as usual. I was tempted to dirty up the vocal recording with a tube mic simulator, but I ended up just using a simple “out of the box” compressor effect, which sounded fine.

This ended up being a really fun little project. It only took a few hours from idea to finished product and the result was really satisfying. Enjoy our cover of Wine Women and Song!

This week, while I was busy with the first week of my new job, I did manage to get some RecLab work done. Also, I’m a few weeks into my drawing class, so I wanted to post an update from that.

While not the most productive RecLab week, I did finish the basic comment functionality for Users, Songs, and Tracks. I also learned about seed.rb and wrote some seed code for the Instruments data. The trick there was that I wanted to be able to run rake db:seed multiple times, so I needed seed code that would let me update or create records. I ended up with a nice solution that lets me break the instruments down into separate arrays by family and then loop through everything to create or update:

instruments = [[strings, "strings"], [woodwinds, "woodwinds"], [brass, "brass"], [percussion, "percussion"], [keys, "keys"], [other, "other"]]

instruments.each do |f|
  f[0].each do |i|
    instr = Instrument.where(name: i).first_or_initialize
    instr.family = f[1]
    instr.save!
  end
end

Now I’ll need to use a tagging system to attach both Instruments and general Tags to objects. I’m leaning toward As Taggable On, which apparently was written by an old childhood friend of mine. Awesome!

The art class is going well. Value and shading are still pretty tough for me because I’ve spent the last few years just doing line drawings for comics. I also have a tendency to draw pretty lightly (which is probably also a result of erasing pencil lines for comics). I don’t think I’ll leave this class a brilliant artist, but but I’m certainly learning things and getting better.