 Tripp Black | Tripp Black September 11 2011 10:07:58 AMIt was the day the earth stood still (at least the western hemisphere). I was hurriedly writing some code that was supposedly critical for one of my clients -- I remember which client client, but not the code. It was obviously not as important as we all thought. Nicki calls me and tells me to hurry and come. I walk into the living room to see reporters talking about an accident where a plane hit a building in NY. I was watching the screen when I saw the second one practically go through the second tower and even turn at the last minute to damage as many floors at once. The evil of hate was very apparent This doesn't matter so much if it's Islam or even Christianity, although Christ's only "violence" was driving evil "money changes" from the template and suffering ultimate violence on the cross. The hate cares none who it kills - Muslim, Christian, or agnostic. It only wants to kill and harm as many as possible. What was "good" from it was watching so many rally together to search for victims still alive, then their bodies, and then rebuild. The other "good" was watching for a few short weeks politics and pettiness put aside for all us to be U.S. Americans first. It was a good reminder that our differences make us unique, and the hate made us more united. It's a good day to remember that true love casts out fear and the ultimate love is to give oneself for another. Thanks again to all who served that day and the many months, and now years that's come, protecting and restoring America. Thanks to the families who have a member that's given ultimate love. Comments Disabled Tripp Black June 14 2011 12:47:37 PMWell they've got Skype barely a few weeks. They basically promised when buying it to leave Skypes services intact. They did leave it alone. But in the world of Microsoft, 2-3 weeks is ages ago and who expects such old promises now obsolete to be kept. No worries. They aren't breaking a promise. It just LOOKS like they are. They've already promised to support the next new open-source thing, no mind it's still in process and is just vaporware. I should be out and ready some day. Did I say no worries? Don't, because Microsoft has your salvation ready for you. So don't stress out. Microsoft has a great competitive product out just in time in July. So dump that Asterisk Skype configuration, and get on the MS bandwagon. I know it's looks like textbook conspiracy, but it's not. No worries, they'll treat you with love, and better yet, you can believe in them. This is just good business, savvy marketing. They are a company of their word. Oh, BTW, the new product you're going need to buy is the LUCS, or Lync on-line. So pull out your checkbook or credit card and keep adding those 0s. Feel loved yet? Source: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/microsoft-skype-breaks-open-source-partnership/1111 Lucky for us, our Asterisk-based system isn't using the Skype service, although up to recently, it has been on the consider list if needed. Sigh of relief. Next month could have been unpleasant. Tripp Black June 12 2011 09:46:35 PMWell for the 3rd time in several months, my Windows 7 Explorer task bit the dust - starting hanging w/o saying this time that anything was even wrong. I did a repair from the install disk again, but it didn't work. Another day of work lost. I just wasn't up to yet another day and a half of reinstalling, loading drivers (which thankfully I have all saved now), and all my software again, and again just to have this happen again. It's much more stable than Vista, but it still stinks. So I put Ubuntu 10 on it for a couple days. Ran fine - no hardware compatibility. Upgraded it to the newest 11 release -- a really beautiful release BTW. The window transition and desktop Gnome effects are subtle eye candy, rather than the tacky brute force lens flares and flashes of Windows 7. Unlike Windows 7, Ubuntu didn't have to try to cool or sexy, it just was. Unfortunately, the cool OS isn't good enough by itself. I need Lotus Notes, Designer, a couple older Adobe products, and the VMware VI client. The best platform to get me the most of the way there (except Designer and VI) is Mac. So today I got a Mac mini. In one hour I had almost everything installed. It's running both my 20" monitors - aahhh, sweet. The long part tonight is building my XP VM inside my new version 3 VMware Fusion client. Gee, my progressed slowed when I hit Windows lots of waiting time and driver install time. If only IBM and VMware would get their full client software on Ubuntu or Mac. The really good news is that in NC our office has NO more Windows workstations. In fact, I'm the last running a VMware Fusion on a regular basis. We have about a half dozen Macs and 3 Ubuntu PCs. Only our account manager is still running a Windows PC tablet - she's in VA and if Apple sold one, we'd already have gotten it for her. She'll probably end up with a Mac mini and a touchscreen monitor. Tripp Black May 28 2011 08:44:28 PMIn the question of what would be the biggest surprise or thing some one would notice if they went backstage with the Rolling Stones during a practice, Chuck Leavell mentioned two things: 1. "It's a lot of work." (where he praised his team members for their creative work and work ethic as their key to success) and 2. "Most people just think you get up on stage and it's just lovely." (where he adds, that isn't the way it works). Excellent food for thought. From this, I'm gathering that, talent, although greatly involved, isn't what makes you great or longstanding. It's the quality of what you produce and how you do it. Source: Today, 8:45PM, Fox News Tripp Black May 23 2011 05:30:16 PMThe idea of setting Trim (or Gain) is simple. You want as much signal as possible, but without clipping - that static-like distorting noise. Trim too low and you have low signal to noise and no depth of sound. Too high and you have noise and/or clipping. Input signals with known volume ranges, that's easy. Input signals extremely and unpredictably dynamic, like a shared vocal mic or an electric guitarist with his/her own volume petal, that's harder. Either will keep your fingers busy on the board making adjustments. So, here's a few general tips in this area: 1. See the opening line. The highest trim is lowest piece of equipment's distortion point in your signal path. For example, if the digital board goes to +10 but your Avioms go to the traditional 0 before clipping, then stick with 0 or adjust the outgoing gain/trim back down in your sends to below 0 before they reach the Aviom. 2. Vocals tend to sing louder when they are actually performing then during practice. Be prepared to reduce the trim between practice and the live set. Experienced users will anticipate some re-mixing their in-ear or stage monitors during the first song. 3. What the electric guitarist is sending you, is often rarely all they have for volume. Unless you have a good relationship of mutual respect, they will tell you they've given you their "normal" and keep a large reserve for that kickin' solo. In reality, I tend to see only 30 - 50% of what I'll get sent later. If you are live mic'ing the amp, be prepared to adjust the trim for sure and possible the placement during the first sone. Wait until after their first guitar solo, to see what they are really going to send you. This can be a real problem for in-ear monitors of a lead guitar where the input volume fluctuates greatly. As an engineer, we also have to watch out for that 105% live solo. We don't want the in-ears to clip/distort, nor do we want one instrument to drown out the rest of the house or stage. This is a case where I tend to use a channel Trim as faders throughout the first song or two in the set, until the guitarist has used up their pedal breathing room. 4. Good trim should give good signals into the board on the channel pre-LEDs. Now for a simple example of what to do and not do . . .
Channel Trim Settings  This is an example of good trim. The vocals in the first few channels are similar but their gains/trim are set depending on the vocal strength and confidence of the individual vocalist. Good trim is not a "pretty pattern" and shouldn't be. Their whole point is to adjust each incoming signal to an even sweet mix. Beware of the "suggested list of starting trims" unless it's your band, and you've developed it with your team, and the team has discipline to always be playing the same instruments with same settings including volume, vocalists using same mics, having same distance to the mic, etc. Even with the same team on nice digital boards with snapshots, I load the snapshot and immediately start making small adjustments.
Faders/Sliders with Good Trim Settings  Notice in this image, the active channels are getting signal (1st led) and most are close or around 0 Db. Here the lead vocalist of Voc 2 is out front of the BGVs on Voc 3 and Voc 4. The acoustic guitar is rather hot/active, so its fader is lower, beneath the vocals. The moment of this image is during a bridge where the keys and the electric were having some fun, so I have those faders a little hotter to pick them up. The bass fader shows my personal preference for a good bottom end you can feel.
Faders/Sliders with Bad Trim Settings  This is the result of a mandated "trim settings" given to me a few weeks ago. I was told not to deviate from them, as they had been carefully set a few days before in a practice - the leader didn't want me messing up his mix. I was also told by one of the band members that there is "something wrong with the Avioms" especially for the vocals and drums. There was - lack of understanding and adherence to basic sound concepts and practice. Symptoms: Vocal 3, Vocal 4, and Vocal 1 both could not hear themselves. Everyone else complained of noise or low volume levels for other band members. Various patrons of the house complained they could hear -- muddy or the main singer was "so loud it gave me a headache". The image here was in the first set's song, and the electric guitarist hadn't used his petal yet. When he did, he moved from hear down to infinity. (He had a stage amp, that was so loud, guitar from the board was no longer needed in the space after he got going.) Let's review using the bad example: Q1: Vocal 1 obviously had plenty of signal. - Why could this leader not hear? - How to fix? Q2: Vocal 3 and to a lesser extent Vocal 4 had same issue. - Why could they nor their team members hear them in their in-ears or monitors? - How to fix? Q3: Supposedly, the sound issues were because of bad engineering at the desk and faulting equipment. - What was wrong with the Avioms? - What was wrong at the sound desk? __________________________ A1: Too much signal. The vocal was turning into digital noise which just made everyone's in-ears and/or monitors sound awful. Because V1 was just noise when he sang, the team couldn't hear as the noise ruined the rest of their in-ear mix. A2: V2 and V3 really did have too little signal. These two vocalists really couldn't hear themselves. Neither could the team. A3: Nothing was wrong with the Avioms. The issue was misuse of a set of tools and wondering why there's bad results. Tripp Black May 9 2011 12:54:56 AMMy Windows PC is basically useless. I had a good couple months w/o anything more than the once or twice at most reboot needed a week. I've skirted anything major somehow for the last year or so. That was until Wednesday morning when I found my machine had rebooted early Wednesday morning. Ever since, I have to wait 5-7 minutes for an application to actually start after double-clicking. Resource monitor shows a brief burst and then minimal activity over that 5 minutes or so. Then suddenly, each app just loads like normal - doesn't matter the app. Even the timeout logout/login screen takes about 5 minutes to come up and to then log me back in. Quite a productivity killer. So, to limp along I've left all my apps just running and I leave my little Mac up, for client calls and I needed something where I didn't have an app window already open. Some apps won't start. They give time-out errors. VMware client won't start. Photoshop won't start. Lotus Notes Standard Client and the Admin client starts. Designer won't start. I should have thought about that Tuesday/Wednesday morning update, but it's been a while since a Redmond hangover bit me this hard. Sure enough, the event logs showed an illuminating event message. After the standard messages of apps hard stopping/crashing when Windows Update force rebooted, with the other startup messages is a little message that says something like "Windows has determined that you have an incompatibility with your system firmware, and has disabled certain performance processor features. Visit your PC vendor to get updated BIOS firmware." I'd give you the exact message but it would take over 30 minutes for me to boot the PC and wait for my 5-7 tray icons to load (each taking 5 minutes) and another 5 to wait for Event Viewer to load. I checked my motherboard maker. The board is about 3 years old, so they don't have newer firmware than beginning of 2010. My motherboard and processor may only be 2.4 Ghz duel-core processor, but it was a very nice motherboard and processor when new. It's still fast enough, well until Wednesday it was. I tried my Ubuntu live CD and my machine loads Ubuntu apps just fine. Figures. So it's not a hardware issue. I was lucky to run Windows 7 for a year without having to reinstall. Most people I know w/7 had had multiple reinstalls. The difference is that I know better. With everything else going on right now, I just need a machine that "just works". I definitely don't have a 3-4 days to rebuild by Windows 7, apply patches, and all my apps again. I'm only running Windows as at all, because I have to do so for Lotus Designer. They don't have an Ubuntu/Linux or Mac version. I really have only two choices, install XP SP3 back on the machine, or go spend more money a new MB. I'd do the first option and just wait another year or two, except that I'm not sure if Lotus 9 will be supported on XP SP3. I'm thinking they will. IBM is great in this aspect. However, for the next few days though, I'll just leave the PC off and wish I'd turned off Windows Update in time . . . Tripp Black May 7 2011 05:56:15 PMI was recently given a list "starting settings" which included starting Trim (Gain) and EQ settings for the typically most used channels on a small 24 channel board. It also included drum EQ settings with the instructions to "do not touch" those settings from the Head of Sound. Great time had been spent tightening the drums and then setting the EQ on the board to just right. So obviously protection was desired for that time and the settings. So a couple days later, I got to try out the new settings my next time on the board, here's what fader levels I ended up using for the drums:  From Left: Snare - Tom - Lo Tom - Kick Although a picture doesn't normally let you hear a couple problems, but this time it can. (Despite the dark room and grainy picture.) Notice the input meter for the Kick is +5 to +10 dB. 0 dB is where you really should stop. An occasional blip into +5 is fine, but not a constant +5 and common blips into +10. Although this board is a nice board and doesn't clip till +10, it doesn't mean you need to run it that "hot", especially if you are sending an output to Avioms, which have a traditional 0 dB max before you get just a mass of loud "fuzz" or "static" - aka clipping. Normally, a quick fix would be in order to reduce the trim and or adjusting EQ. In this case, it didn't matter for the house mains, because of the fader levels. Since tightening, the drums do sound tight. In this relatively small space, they are also more pronouced and have more punch than ever. In this regard, the work on the drums may be successful. With the new tightened heads, no amplification was needed. Previously, I did use to bring up the faders to around -40 depending, and around -20 for the kick. Although, we got to hear the drums basically un-plugged, what can we say for the perfect EQ settings so important they carried a "no touch" command?. Unfortunately, most of the night the electric guitar had the same problem - careful massaged EQ settings on the board only to have the fader rarely leave infinity.The guitar's amp was on stage with a mic, but whose volume was up enough to also require no other house amplification. If there is any good news, my job was more turn-key, I had only keys, and acoustic and a few vocal tracks to manage as best I could within the baseline of the drums and electric. So in summary, if your faders are showing the symbol infinity (or nothing being sent), how much of that great EQ made it into the house? Tripp Black May 4 2011 03:51:49 PMI haven't been able to play with XPages Extensions library out of OpenNTF that IBM donated. Unfortunately, its update site wouldn't install into my Designer on my Windows 7 machine. So I thought I would have to wait until 8.5.3 when I hear it's going to be included in the base product. That is, until I did my enablement for the new XPages advanced development class. (I teach. Great class, BTW.) So I downloaded the new build and about an hour later I had the library in my Designer client and on our development and production servers. I finally got to play and see what the demo application can really do. The demo library is quite excellent for code snippets and techniques. But, it's pretty lacking as a full demo application. It really should be the cool tips and code snippets app. A demo app to me is a mostly more vs less demo app written that you can use and then reverse engineer and see fully how the demo app is built. Still, for the most part, we figured it out in a couple hours. We created our first application with the library, you can see it here: http://www.southmainstudios.com/MWSMSNameLists.nsf (Just don't use your iPhone/mobile - see below) My main thoughts on the library and the "demo" app ... 1. They did a great job of GUI vs data separation. The controls are well labeled in their XPages on what they are intending. However, the implementation for the layout is in the control, which I like, but it definitely, shall we say a little raw. The controls typically use property definitions and properties, but not navigation as much. You don't do navigation as properties/arguments in the All Properties. You actually build your data trees for the menus not in lists (file resources) but within the OneUILayout control - this part is nice. But the bad part - you do it ONLY in source. As for navigation, each page had a navigational name/alias passed which tells the tree tree what option to show selected. Very nice. 2. The search demo with the drop down is nice and it shows how the search is passed w/o using the URL to the search page, but they didn't bother to finish the demo to actually have it do a search. I had to watch what was happening in Firebug in Firefox and figure out what controls were publishing/passing and then just do it. It ended up being quite simple. They key are the the two fields in the results XPage that contain the "c1"/"c2" and "name" variables passed. Just create a view panel, use the view panel data category key property or do a search formula in the search property. I'll be posting the XML source in our Mindwatering Support library along with the other XPages tips/notes. It reminded me about my first apps as a newbie Domino developer. I was constantly "fighting" with Domino because it did so much for us. I came from the MS VB side where you constructed everything yourself. It was a very different paradigm switch. You had to know where to add just a few lines of code to leverage Domino. I know other developers who never bothered to learn how to leverage. They clicked the checkbox in the Database Properties to have it not generate JavaScript code and let it just be a database store. You have to look at what's being generated to figure out how to plug-in to the library's extension points to use the last term liberally. 3. The mobile XPages don't work. They don't work locally on the workstation or on our server. They are obviously incomplete, but they don't give me enough info, on how to "finish" them. The documentation is still "To Be Done". The XPages just display a white empty page on our iPods and iPhones. We separate Mobile controls demo application from OpenNTF works, but that doesn't help you know where to plug-in to this ExtLib library and integrate it. That's going to take more time, this is not yet completely RAD. < 2011/07 - Update. You're supposed to use the mobile tools as a separate NSF for the mobile devices and then do a hand-off based on the browser detection you do at load. > 4. There are lots more toys. (a.k.a custom controls). My control sidebar palette looked pretty sparse before. Now there are lots of toys to play with. :-) Evidently even more exciting stuff is coming in 8.5.3! Cannot wait to see it and next gen Domino9. Tripp Black October 2 2010 11:15:41 PMFrom reading Ed Brill's blog today (www.edbrill.com), it appears the Android e-mail client is coming in November (2010) and is only a month or so away. Since IBM built their Android e-mail client from scratch using SyncML, it should be good to go at a time where Android and their Telcos will be pressed to remove one of the two existing e-mail clients for the wonderful toy - the one that mirrors the iPhones "Exchange" ActiveSync Lotus Traveler-based e-mail, contacts, and calendaring. M$ is suing (blogs.technet.com) for it's implementation of mail sync and group calendaring. Great time for some IBM commercials trumpeting their Android e-mail client, the Lotus Traveler server, and the other phones the Lotus Traveler server supports "natively". As a fan of the Android, I love the open platform that, from my view, has mostly been liberated from software maker and Telco strong-armed restrictions that has hampered my beloved iPhone . . . - Installing apps is restricted to Apple's iTunes marketplace (unless you jail-break) for the obvious reason. - Jail-breaking works but isn't allowed (thanks to the "open" community that figures out how). - I can only Skype text due to a restrictions place on Skype. - I cannot view/run Adobe Flash on my Apple iPhone, thanks to two vendors fighting. - I cannot use my iPhone to connect to two Traveler-based accounts. This is, at least, just a feature, software limitation. Like my old BlackBerry I used, you can only have one BES account. - Since I'm on an older iPhone, I cannot talk on the phone and look-up a coworker or client contact because it's not multi-tasking (not local - but via Global contacts via my data plan). That will come to me though when I upgrade to either a new iPhone or Android. :-) And then there are the AT&T service issues: - Phone calls never arrive, but the voice mail does. - The phone call does arrive, but the voice mail takes several minutes to hours to arrive to the phone. (Since a Treo, a BlackBerry, and multiple iPhones all display both of these issues, this is clearly an AT&T issue which they've never admitted when we complained and we' just live with to use the iPhones. Thankfully the latter seems to happen a lot less over the last year.) It's about time to upgrade our phones at work again . . . Unfortunately, we still have other iPhones and are currently locked into AT&T obviously as Apple's sole US provider. I was leaning to the Android. However, I did not realize that loading apps on the Android was restricted to AT&T's marketplace. Not nice, again. So, it looks like the arena is as fluid as ever with the old stalwarts still trying to bully the other players in the sandbox . We're watching, we're tired of thumbs pressing on us, and we'll be buying . . . Tripp Black July 26 2010 10:56:00 PMToday, Ed Brill posted a blog entry about how an IBM Power mega server can save a bunch of money. It's an analysis piece. In other words, it's not a real case here's how we did it and proved it. I may not have thought much about it until I glanced at the first couple comments. Already, both of the scalability and what's best camps are played -- It's the Lotus paradigm's version of "Why you want a server farm" and "Why you don't want a server farm." #1 Commentator said basically: The numbers look right, but one massive box doesn't give you as much flexibility. Server farm is better because you have flexibility and one big box doesn't give it to you. #2 Commentator said basically: Yeah, but by the time you add a redundant cluster member for each mail server you've doubled your servers, traffic heat and energy and Power makes more sense. You're limited to 750-800 users per box. (Which I think is low with modern servers, even if these are "good" admins who give their users big mail mails and full-text indexes for searching. It made me recall what some of my larger customers taught me.
You CAN have your cake and eat it too. For a duel core machine, a good general rule-of-thumb for decent user experience is about:
1000 concurrent users on a dual core server with 3GB of memory. You can do 2 GB of memory if on Linux w/o a graphical interface (GUI). Same for VM if you give the Domino server a processor reservation so there isn't that short wake-up delay during slow times. Obviously what I consider 1000 concurrent users might not be exactly what someone sees as one. I'm talking 1000 users hitting the box within say the same 15-30 seconds bring up mostly Notes-based mail with some doing web-mail and some doing replication to their local mail replicas. If you are talking about a constant bombardment each second of 1000 full hits, then yeah it might drop to 800 users assuming the server is also doing other things like indexing, replicating, serving up custom apps, etc. Back to the main topic. . . As comment @2 said, we don't necessarily want "mirrored" clusters. I do personally like the 2 server "mirror" clustering because it's simple - I like KISS. Any new admin or consultant can walk up to a mirrored cluster and immediately "get it".. But as I was shown by a few of my larger clients over the years, clustering with 3-5 servers makes more sense when ROI and being "green" are more important. Although you still have users only on 2 of the 5 servers, it begins to act more like RAID 5 than RAID 1 by "scattering". The technique is actually simple to do. The users have one primary server and their secondaries are "scattered" on the others. Typically, the admins use policies and OU units to "scatter" the second additional/fail-over mail server. The fail-over load on each remaining cluster member isn't 50% anymore but something like 15-20%. Hopefully, all us admins have scaled our boxes to have at least 10-15% free during "rush hour" and we can handle one server coming down for maintenance or the unexpected issue. So you no longer have a server with only a 50% load -- or realistically 40% since you still need that extra 10% - wasting 60%. Add VMs with CPU reservations and you're basically doing the same thing as the Power example but for far less of a cash outlay. VMware (my preferred flavor) takes care of absorbing the rest of that wasted CPU and memory. If fact, I have a couple clients, who don't worry about that wasted 70-80% per server because they let VMware do it all. As I am more than just a VM administrator, I still want to eat cake if my primary mail server goes down though. Assuming you still have at least 2 pieces of server hardware for the VMs, you'll still save a lot of heat and electricity on what would be lost cycles. This a the way to come close, meet. or possibly beat the Power example above except with our cheap duel and quad core IBM x eServers instead. If the 800-1200 users are not "concurrent" users, then obviously the whole argument doesn't matter, anyway. However, in my opinion, you should still have at least two Domino servers clustered so you can "mirror" them. But with "low" load Domino servers, you can put as many users on one box as the NIF (Notes Indexing Facility) can keep up with on the box. Realistically, on a quad core system, which is typically what I see in a non-VM environment, that's anywhere from 5000-15000 users on a box as only still about 750 - 1000 are really "concurrent" sessions. This huge range is for the differences in e-mail and activity overall. How much mail is still being delivered and sent to those other 5k to 15k users. Even if they're not an active session, their mail files are still getting copied those thousands of e-mails and being indexed (hopefully) so they can find something. Of course we could reduce scenario quite significantly per server with DAOS. We'll see storage savings of 50-75% pretty easily with this kind of user base and can probably increase that load another 10%. (We still have the NIF.) But that leads us to another post some other day . . . |
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