This User's eXperience

Embrace Chaos

rkleahey — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 14:36:46 +0000

I have a friend who is blogging every day for 25 days before Christmas. It’s usually quite insightful and a very good read. It’s related to our church’s (Preston Trail Community Church) Tinselectomy approach to Christmas (www.tinselectomy.com) – the idea of turning our usual approach to Christmas upside-down. The series is at EmbraceChaos.

Miles

rkleahey — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 05:07:07 +0000

The story goes that Gil Evans taught Miles Davis the value of minimalism.
Miles used to bring in arrangements for the band to play, and Gil would take the score and just start hacking out large sections, seemingly at random. The point, of course, being that Miles wrote too much stuff. Once Gil cut some out, the charts were better arrangements.
Now that may or may not be true, but it came to mind this weekend while I was working on a big band arrangement of Miles’ tune All Blues – I realized that I was forcing in a lot of stuff that just didn’t need to be there. I’ve started cutting some sections and it seems like a better tune for it. Thanks, Gil.

Found it again – Live Plasma

rkleahey — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 21:26:24 +0000

Ha! A couple of years back I had found this insanely cool site that graphically linked musicians to other musicians based on style, such that if you entered an artist name, it would show you a collection of other artists who you might also dig.

But then I lost the site.

Thankfully, I found it again the other day – and they’ve added movies and directors/actors to their database. Coolness. Just enter a movie or artist in the search box and you might see something like:

LivePlasma result for my favorite band. (Yes, I'm a Hazelnut)

No Errors; No Warnings; No Hints – NOT

rkleahey — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 21:36:03 +0000

All the software development projects I’ve ever been involved with that showed a glimmer of hope of being a success shared this rule-of-thumb: “No errors; no warnings; no hints/messages.” Or stated another way, treat compiler warnings as errors and eliminate them immediately, as you would a compiler error.
Shops that don’t do this tend to have less chance of success…
This from a recent compiler run:

Considering Warnings as Errors is a good thing...

Doc-o-matic; continuing Top 5 Dev Tool winner

rkleahey — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 16:27:23 +0000

Many years ago I reviewed a brand new product called Doc-o-matic. It was a nifty little utility that could read source code, extract code comments, and build a simple help file from what it found. That was maybe 8 years ago. Now, there are plently of cheap or free little tools that do this sort of source code comment processing, but Doc-o-matic has evolved into a true documentation powerhouse with a vast array of options and settings for how the generated documents (HTML, old WinHelp, HTML Help, Help 2, XML or PDF) will look. As always, you can generate all those different output formats from a single set of source code files.

I love Doc-o-matic.

Right now I’m using it as part of my nightly build/test/deploy/notify automation. Every morning, developers have a brand new build of a help file that’s specific to our source code base. In addition, I’ve developed a way to generate help topics that are specific to our process and to our tracking software, AutomatedQA’s much under-appreciated AQdevTeam.

ModelMaker 10 Released

rkleahey — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 20:27:29 +0000

A long-time 3rd-party tool vendor favorite of mine, ModelMaker Tools, has released version 10 of their flagship product, ModelMaker. I’ve been using this tool for over 10 years; first as a Delphi programmer, now in C#, and it continues to stupify me just how many new features they’re able to cram into a new version. Just go have a look at the list of new stuff in that link, above, and you’ll see what I mean.
Congrats to Gerrit and company on yet another great release!

Go Big Blue!

rkleahey — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 19:43:08 +0000

The HSAA Blue Angels, that is. Tomorrow I’ll be doing something I have not done in almost 20 years: take a horn out into the football stands and blow like mad. The Home School Athletic Association has a pep band that plays at some of their football games, and since tomorrow is “Homecoming” (difficult when you don’t actually have a home field), I’ve volunteered to join their small but very enthusiastic crew in the stands.

And if you’re not doing anything from 1:00p-4:00p tomorrow, consider coming out to support homeschool athletics (see their website for details).

Big-time commuter guy

rkleahey — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 16:54:04 +0000

So I’ve been availing myself of the opportunity to ride the DART light-rail line part-way to-and-from work. I park at the northern-most stop for the DART red-line, at Parker Road and Central “Express”-way, and ride down about 9 miles to my stop at Spring Valley. I’d say that, while taking the rail really doesn’t save me any time at all (total time = 1hour either way) what with walking to/from car and workplace, it definitely is worth it from an emotional stand point. Those 9 miles are hellish in the car, but taking the train makes me feel like I’m in the big city, on my way to a gig (of the musical sort – I can dream, can’t I?!)

R.I.P. John Collins

rkleahey — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 15:52:44 +0000

I just learned, to my great sadness, that an important person from my earlier years has passed. John Collins was the leader of Chapter Eleven, a somewhat successful Dallas-based cover band with which I played starting when I was about 19. John was special to me, teaching me a great deal about the professional side of music. Chapter Eleven was an oddity: a part-time band that was cohesive and stable, and largely lacked any real egos (save mine), staying together for a considerable period until I lost my mind and bolted. It’s now been over 15 years since I left that band and I have never found the same thing again. Chapter Eleven was special (I was too young and inexperienced to see it at the time) and much of that was due to the presence of John Collins.

If you have special people from your past, I encourage you to not let 15 years go by without contacting them. I’ve lost my chance to tell John what he meant to me.

There are three recordings of Chapter Eleven on my audio page; here are the direct links:

John sang lead on Get Ready.

So….what’s up?

rkleahey — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 16:25:43 +0000

In the interest of splitting up my professional thoughts from this, my ostensibly personal blog, I’ve created a new blog called The User eXperience where I’ll be holding forth on some of the issues surrounding designing digital products for analog lifeforms. Now I can use this current space for more friends & family-type ramblings, while I wax lengthy about user-centric design issues at the UX. Enjoy.

Tonight I’m sitting in with the Frisco Community Jazz Band at the start of their summer concert series. Their lead alto player has to miss and asked me to sub for him. That will be about 7:30 pm in Frisco Commons, north of Frisco proper.

Then, tomorrow morning, I’ll be playing sax and Irish whistle with the Stonebriar Community Church worship team. We’re doing a tune in Eb for which I was asked to play the low whistle, and had to rush, rush one of the beasts in here. Eb is not really a common whistle key – I had E, D and C low whistles (plus a G that I made out of a PVC pipe – no, I’m not kidding), but no Eb. Well, it finally got here today, so call off the hounds, I should be able to do the gig…