On Grails

July 25th, 2010 § 0

Working on a rather large project in grails, I’ve come to realize two things: there is some absolutely amazing software frameworks out there, and some people who write documentation appear to be 3-year-old kids who speak English as a second language.  The embarrassing part about that is that, since the project is open-source, I could contribute to the documentation very easily, fixing problems that I see and adding where I see fit.  However, the problem is so large and daunting (and the project I’m working on way more interesting), so instead, I wind up just living with it and searching El Goog over and over again for the same things.

I’m going to try to change this as best I can, and I’m going to start by collecting a few nifty tips and tricks I’ve pulled out of thin air here, and hopefully pull them all together into one place soon enough.

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Atlassian, GO!

June 19th, 2010 § 0

My experience with software developing in any sort of managed (read: rational) way is actually rather limited.  I didn’t really know what Agile was until a few days ago, I’ve only been using RCSes for the last few years, I sold or gave away all of my O’Reilly books, and I always seem to be a little behind the times.  Now that I’ve been getting more and more into programming, though, I’ve decided that managed programming environments are most definitely a good thing, even as a solo developer.  I read up on Agile, switched from Subversion to Git in several cases, and I’ve been trying to keep a little more current, finally caving and adopting an IDE (NetBeans) and some project management software.

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I’m.. such a dork

June 10th, 2010 § 0

Not only did I give my dog a Twitter account, but I made him a website.  Oy vey :D

You can follow Zephyr on Twitter as @zephyr_sc or on his webpage, http://zephyr-sc.com.

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The Manifesto Project launched

May 14th, 2010 § 0

The Manifesto Project, my most recent service project, just launched over at http://manifesto.mjs-svc.com The goal of the project is to provide a place for people to write down their ideas on their own beliefs and faiths in order to sort their ideas out into words. The idea stemmed from my own problems in articulating what I believed, and I found that the more I wrote, the easier it was for me to define my thoughts.

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Senior Recital Audio Recordings

April 19th, 2010 § 2

The audio recordings of my senior recital have been posted – video will be coming soon.  I’m feeling okay about the recordings – not great, and not bad.  Overall, they are too slow, not up to the tempi I would like.  Also, there are a few problems with the performances of each piece, but not so much as to ruin them.  They are all posted here, after the cut, but they may be found at http://drab-makyo.com/collection/senior-recital/.

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The Importance of Processes

April 16th, 2010 § 0

In my post-recital… ennui?  Freedom?  Afterglow?  Well, anyhow, after my recital, I’ve found that it’s rather difficult to get back into writing music after spending so long away from it simply trying to get the recital up and running with as few hitches as possible (as has already been previously beaten to death here), and even though its been two weeks, I’ve only written about five bars of music.

Part of the problem has been that I was fairly demoralized after the recital.  After seeing how difficult it was to pull together the performers and get them learning the music as best as possible in even so long a time, I felt that perhaps I was doing something wrong with my music, writing it in such a way as to make it difficult for the performers to learn, read from, or perform.  It was hard for me to go back to writing music that I felt would cause more of the same reactions that I got to my music on my senior recital.

Beyond that, though, I felt that I had lost the sense of process that I had used to write music in the past, a process that served me through several years.  Several of my pieces are based off one process or another.  For example, each of the Character Dances was based off one aspect of a relationship between me and another.  TW was based off the idea of constancy against flightiness.  The left hand of the piano only plays two notes for the entire piece, while the right hand skitters around it indicating a change too quick to handle.

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Recital

March 31st, 2010 § 3

On Friday, March 26th at 4:30PM in the Organ Recital Hall at the UCA, I had my senior recital.  The recital is a for-credit class that is technically geared towards performance majors, but they’re required of composition, education, and bachelor of the arts majors as well.  Usually, grading is pretty straight-forward.  Your applied teacher sits in the audience and watches you along with everything else, grading your performance of music that you have learned under their tutelage over the last however many semesters.  Grades are as you would expect them – technicality, stage presence, song interpretation, working with the accompanist, and so on.

Composition is a little different, however.  With composition, your work on the pieces has already been graded by the applied professor, for the most part, you aren’t even performing the pieces.  The point of the recital shifts away from proving you can sing or play to proving you can pull together music and get it performed somehow.  Your job changes from learning music and reciting it on stage to writing music, finding performers, organizing rehearsals, then organizing the recital and possibly conducting or performing the pieces, though the focus on that latter part is minimal.

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The New Drab Blag

March 31st, 2010 § 0

Alrighty.  I used LiveJournal for quite a while and some of their current changes combined with the changes I’ve gone through in the way I think about blogging have prompted me to switch to a more personal system such as this.  WordPress was just the ticket, and since it was free and I can set it up the way I want, it all works out for the best.  I’ll try to link my posts over to my old LJ blog as well, just so that they get read by the masses over there, but I’m thinking that all of my writing will take place here, for the most part!

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