Ontic Oren

Hi, my name is Oren, and I’m a borderline audiophile. It used to be really bad, with new speakers every few months, CD players sitting on sandbags, leadshot in the speaker stands. Luckily, my wife and her style sense have cleared me of much of that. But I’m still at heart an audio snob, if not phile. After suffering for years with my Microsoft Digital Sound System 80, I finally broke down last month and picked up a new pair of speakers for my computer.

Allow me a digression: I was flipping through AudioAdvisor’s catalog one day, and saw this big “SALE” notice next to the aforementioned speakers. Save 38%!!!! Big flashy colors!!!! I did a quick internet search before buying: too bad they’re still 25% more expensive than you can find for a “normal” price at ListenUp. In a nice circle-of-life type thing, ListenUp is the CO based store that nurtured my original addiction back in college. I would spend hours hanging out there, talkign to the sales guys, playing with the toys, going at least one weekend a month. I probably spent <$1,000 in the four years, and they never treated me as anything less than a great customer. I was ecstatic to buy from them again.

Back to the speakers. I picked up a pair of the NHT M-00 (affectionately called the Moo), the S-00 and the PVC PC on top of it all. While the speakers and sub are self evident, what’s the PVC PC? There are those who claim that adjusting the volume on your computer limits it’s quality. The PVC allows you to keep the audio at 11 on your computer, and adjust the volume in the analog world. Plus, you can use line-out sources (i.e. the iPod) and not blast your ears.

ListenUp was originally out of stock on the PVC. My initial hookup was a mini->RCA into the sub, then balanced from the sub->satellite. There was a ton of groud loop noise, enough that the auto-power would never kick in, and the speakers would all stay on unless manually powered off. The quality while playing was pretty good besides the noise, but I didn’t listen super critically.

Two days later, the PVC PC was in place. I’m now running the mini->RCA into the PVC, RCA->RCA from PVC to sub, and balanced from sub -> satellite. As it turns out, the PVC is also a ground loop eliminator. There is NO noise at all, and my cables are crossing power lines 20 times up and down, left and right. Silent.

Enough yammering, how does it sound? Amazing. I can not get over how much better this sounds. There is a level of clarity and musicality I’ve never expected from my computer. Compared with my Sennheiser 580, the Moo are more analytical, less crystal clear, but somehow more engaging (probably cause the physical bass). Sure, the cans are better, but not enough that I really care. The M00’s are involving, accurate, fun, detailed, crisp, natural. With the S00 there’s some bass, nothing below 50hz to speak of, but enough to annoy the dog.

In my room, they are far from tonally flat. Possibly because of the layout (tucked into a corner, on a desk), I get this huge +5-10 db (as measured with my rat-shack hand held SPL meter) mid-bass bump around 100hz. It’s noticeable in listening, and even at times a bit annoying. It’s cloys up the sound, almost a bit of pollution in this otherwise accurate gem. None of the settings on the cross-over have had a positive effect – I’ve minimized the impact as much as possible. Don’t let that scare you away though, I’m not listening to the 580’s any time soon while I’m sitting here! I really just love this setup.

I can honestly say this has totally changed my listening habits. I can’t wait to sit in front of my computer now. I’m working more, I’m sure as hell listening to music more, and most importantly, I’m enjoying the hell out of it. Every song just sounds great (or terrible, if that’s what they intended). Yes, it’s a lot of money to spend on computer audio, but I’m using it more than my home setup, it’s significantly cheaper, and frankly it sounds better for stereo music listening. Highly highly recommended for anyone looking for great computer audio.

Next up – A friend has the Adam A7 and Mbox setup. All the cool kids scoff at the NHT (it’s not even sold at sweetwater) and drool over the A7. At some point, one of us will bring the other’s speakers over so we can compare. In the meantime, I have NO regrets, and strongly encourage anyone out there to give these a spin.

Disclaimer: My source so far has been 192KBPS VBR MP3 (or higher) from either the Great Re-Rip of 2006 (that’s a blog post for the future) or Amazon MP3 store. For some out there, that’s enough to invalidate any thoughts I have, as clearly my ears are crap if I’m not listening to FLAC/Apple Loseless/whatever with some fancy external DAC.

This weekend was the kickoff for the Amgen Tour of California. I’m lucky enough to live <1 mile from the start line of the Prologue and took advantage of the situation to take a few pictures. The prologue is a 2.1 mile time trial through downtown Palo Alto and Stanford. They riders had a mostly straight route, with two turns at the beginning and a 180 sweeper at the end. They ride alone, one every minute. The course is ~ 4 min total.

I arrived an hour before the start, and positioned myself right at the exit of the second turn. The corner was in shade, with great even light even at 1pm in the afternoon. I set the shutter to 1/200 sec in the hope of some motion blur, and tried my hand at panning. I used a polarizer later in the data as a ND filter to keep the aperature open and help blur the background. Pictures link to larger versions and the full gallery.

Hey Mr. Big Shot, how did you get there? We humans seem to have serious issues considering the role randomness plays in our life. I’ve run into this many times before – my least favorite boss ever was the typical “Master of the universe” type who insisted it was his way or the highway. He justified this since he had “been successful so many times before”. You run into these people all the time. Survivor bias is a nasty nasty thing. One of my favorite books – Fooled by Randomness – has a great thought experiment:

Assume someone offered you $1M to play Russian Roulette. Would you? I’d argue that almost everyone out there can evaluate if this makes sense for them – I’m sure most would say no, but someone desperate enough may well say yes, and know what they’re getting into. Now let’s say that you are offered $1M/year, for 30 years to play it ever year. Now would you? You would have to be insane.

But what if 100, 1,000, or 1,000,000 people all did in fact play this “game”.

After 30 years, you’d have over 4,000 people with $30M. Yes, you’d have almost 1,000,000 dead people too, but hey, that’s 4,000 very RICH people. And I bet they would find each other, and offer the fact that there are THOUSANDS of them as PROOF that if you follow their SUREFIRE method, you too can be a multi-millionaire, GUARANTEED! Just jump on one foot before pulling the trigger. Or maybe flap your arms. Or pray to your god. We really are just pigeons.

Want to know what the odds are? Go ahead and play with some numbers:

What should I build? And who says so? When do they need it? Will we be able to deliver?I’m working with my team and engineers every day to answer these. Although tools will never make up for a terrible process, a good tool can also make things go much much smoother. For 2 years, I’ve been using Accept 360 for requirement tracking. My wife is leading up an evaluation at her company right now, which sparked some more investigation on my part.To look at all the players out there, you need to break the SW development process down. I’d say there are three phases, irrespective of development methodolgy. Regardless if you’re a Scrumer, a XP developer, or a plain old waterfall, it seems like you always have three tasks:

1. CRM/Customer interface. Collect data from customer, define and justify your requirements with data. This is almost always driven by email, personal interaction, meetings, notes. The tool is here to help the product manager collect their thoughts, organize the data, collaborate with other marketing people, and feed the status back to the field and customer. Very focused on traceability – show me who is asking for what, when and how. Very CRM like.
2. Project Management. Manage the development, what is in what release. Know when and what you’ll have. A very blury line often between product management, engineering, and gobs of other people. Focus on the deliverables, the specifications, and getting releases out. Heavily used during development by all involved.
3. Release management. Bugs on released products, feedback into step 1. Close the loop. Collect the feedback from users, community, post-release QA. Feed back in to Phase 1 and continue ahead. I see this as a combination of bug database and Wiki.

I looked at bunch of tools. All except featureplan I’ve looked at in the past month – featureplan I last looked at over a year ago, so much may have changed.

• Accept 360
  • Phase 1 Focused
  • Web UI, Slowest interaction, though still acceptable
  • Very focused on the requirements gathering phase. Very strong relationship definition.
  • Recreating the CRM – if you use anything else gets frustrating to enter in data duplication.
  • Methodology agnostic. Neither helps nor hurts with Scrum.
  • Weak Phase 2. Not worth using IMO. Too complex, can’t actual inteagrate. Very heavy project management overhead.
  • Seems big-company centric. Doesn’t feel “cool”
  • Doesn’t publish pricing, but it’s >$1000/user/year.
• Rally Software
  • Phase 2 focused. Plugins with others to satisfy phase 1 and 3.
  • Medium-complex UI. Very usable, fast.
  • All about Agile/Scrum. Uses terminology, flows that force you to use agile.
  • Focused on what they can do – doesn’t try to solve it all
  • Best integration – subversion, eclipse, Visual studio, jira, salesforce, etc.
  • Super cool wiki/community integration with end-to-end salesforce tracking as well.
  • $35/user/month or $420/user/year. Salesforce integration extra.
• FogBugz
  • Phase 2 & 3 focus
  • No methodology implied, do whatever you want.
  • Integrated wiki appears weak – separate from reset of product. Would personally use mediawiki instead.
  • Very slick UI, very fast, VERY easy to use.
  • $25/user/month
• VersionOne
  • Waiting to get a demo account still. Demerits to them. Who requires talking on the phone in this day and age to get a demo account?
  • $30/user/month
• Feature Plan
  • Phase 1 only, but crushes it.
  • Deep requirements planning. Integrates with Rally.
  • Development methodology agnostic.
  • Only windows only client (they’ve got a web UI, didn’t exist when I looked last)
  • All about pragmatic marketing (but then, I am too. :)
  • Darn expensive as I recall.
• Trac
  • Phase 2 and 3.
  • The dark horse in this group – open source, PITA to install
  • Scrum plugins to make project management in Scrum very reasonable.
  • Good integrated Wiki features
  • Possibly better as a project tracking than a product – need investigation but initial feeling is this works GREAT for open source projects, but may run into issues with wiki and others for real product release lifecycle (i.e. permissions on documentation).
  • “free”

Rally really impressed me. I used it 18 months ago, and was underwhelmed, now it seems like a great tool. I especially like the integration – Salesforce for your CRM (and bugs even), take continuous integration data, and have it all useful from one tool. It’s probably a high investment strategy, but I could see starting small, just trying it out, and growing to make it a core part of the platform.Alternatively, fogbugz looks like a great choice. It’s less of the uber-tool, and more focused on the development. For Scrum management, I’d suggest using good old paper (burn down, planning, etc).The data geek in me says go for Rally. KISS says Fogbugz and paper.

Ontic?  What the hell is Ontic?  Honestly, it’s such a pretentious word that even the definitions leave me baffled.

“‘ontic’ is an abstract way of denoting the object-domain of a particular scientific area, field, or inquiry.”

So look at this blog as my study of the real, even if it sometimes talks about virtualized stuff being real.

I’ve aggregated the postings from my other blogs here, and will be posting exclusively here moving forward… except for food.  Food deserves it’s own blog – keep checking out All In for food (and travel, and maybe wine, and…).

Great, you’ve got a bunch of photos. I’ve got 15,790 (who’s counting?). What do you do with them?

For years I’ve posted them to the web. Works great, but darn if people aren’t analog junkies. After coming home from the most recent wedding, Olivia and I decided to give the bride and groom a photo book as part of the wedding gift. There are a ton of different sites for doing POD (print-on-demand) photo books. Overwhelming really. I decided on SharedInk.com after researching, and especially after this article at Nikonians.org. Requested access to the pro-program, and away we go.In the process of creating our first book, I ran into a few various “learning experiences”.

I can’t escape without a mini-review however. Sharedink is for people who know what they are doing. It is not a replacement for iPhoto. If you can’t use photoshop, stay away. Sharedink will tell you how many inches and recommended DPI the page is, the gutter size, and that’s it. You’re on your own. All the rope in the world to hang yourself. You upload (preferably via FTP) a ZIP of JPGs. Their website is almost a joke – it’s Web 1.0 old skool, but not in the cool way. It’s fast enough, and it works.

The book, is awesome. First, I want to call out the cover and binding. It’s a thing of beauty. Beautiful linen, a real hardcover book binding. It’s basically perfect, there’s not at thing more I would ask for. I read online all the time that people find this the #1 issue in books. I wouldn’t know – this is the only book I’ve ordered so far, and it’s ideal. The interior quality is wonderful as well. The paper is thick (so thick the book won’t lie open. Check out the last photo below – I had to bend the book >180 degrees to get it to stay for a few seconds). The printing is really nice – sometimes a bit dark, sometimes a bit light, never as good as a inkjet, but good enough that I’m ordering many more!

What did I learn?

• You must consider the righ/left page interaction. On a few pages, I have one photo on each, with one slightly taller or shorter than the other. It looks dumb.
• A corollary: on my 8″ (tall) x 11″ (wide) book, the vertical dimension is MUCH more noticible. Play with the width, but make sure the vertical stuff aligns.
• Second corollary: Careful how you bleed. Many of my pictures were wider than the page, so I bled off the left and right, and left a bit of white on the top and bottom. If there’s <0.5″ on the top or bottom of the page, it just looks like I made a mistake in printing. Interestingly, the same is NOT true for the vertical pictures, probably because they have more whitespace on the sides than the horizontals do on the top and bottom.
• 20 pages = 40 sides. As you go through and lay things out, you begin to feel like maybe it’s all repettive, and try and come up with new designs. Don’t. Pick a few, and use them. It’s OK to repeat. By all means, be creative. Go crazy (some of those worked out great!) But don’t do it because you think the book will be boring, it won’t be.
• That linen picks up dirt! I ruined this first book in <10 min. Water, a touch of grease, anything, the Linen seems to suck it up. This spot is after we tried to clean it up. The cover has a few spots too now. Just be careful.
• I love how the dual-page spreads work out! Full bleed really works well, and being slightly asymmetrical really pays off. As with anything, don’t overuse it. And be aware that the middle part will dissapear. In this picture, there are 5 bridesmaids, but only 4 show up in the spread!

Good luck! This was super fun, the results are great, the costs not unreasonable. Maybe after 5 years I’ll finally do something about my own wedding photos!

Installed the latest leopard update – 10.5.2 today. NOT a good idea.Neither of my computers can now connect to my DLINK DIR-635 over wifi. Or at least, they connect, get an IP address, etc, but I can’t actually send any data. In fact, it’s really weird. At one point, I could ping external IP addresses just fine, but I couldn’t ping my router. Which is the default route. WTF?

I tried pinging my router – that didn’t work well:

PING 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=14 ttl=64 time=544.516 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=15 ttl=64 time=0.485 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=16 ttl=64 time=0.483 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=22 ttl=64 time=543.981 ms^C
--- 192.168.1.1 ping statistics ---
28 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 85% packet lossround-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 0.483/272.366/544.516/271.882 ms

I changed my SSID, turned on WPA2 (really bad idea, now I get no route to host) turned it off, rebooted everything. No go.In the middle of writing this, I even just lost ALL connectivity via Ethernet. I had to reboot my iMac just go get connected again. Something very very odd is going on here.