TXBA Speed Workshop Level 5
This week I was contemplating to delay this post as I barely passed exercise 24 and it turned out that the increased speed on that exercise gave me some grief, so I had to go back and do the end of the exercise on a way lower speed to get my feeling and the hand movements squared out and only then slowly build up speed.
This week has another curve ball thrown at us in the form of a reverse racking in exercise 26. It is really difficult for me to mute strings with one finger while pressing down with the others to let these strings ring.
When I am done with this review I will go back to level 1 and redo the exercises and only cross an exercise off after I can do them effortlessly and cleanly. Anything less will become a problem further on down the road and with each progressing level that problem is getting bigger.
The success of this workshop depends a lot on our work ethics. I know it is difficult to stay with an exercise until it becomes second nature but the guitar is not an easy instrument and blues is not an easy genre. I have 3 kids playing concert level classical music on the piano and violin with ease and I am here paying my dues by repeating the same lick over and over again.
When I wrote this yesterday I heard this tiny little voice in the back of my head telling me that I shouldn’t talk about work ethics if I cannot follow through myself. So I went back to level 1 and started all over again. To my surprise I was able to push through to level 4. With that I could finally put all my self doubts to rest that I just skimmed through. It is also a testament on the teaching of the course.
Cheers – Andy
New Clan, New Opportunity
Since the demise of my first clan I was looking for new people to raid with. After I had the opportunity to do the Raid of TTK on the day it launched there is no way I would miss another Raid release. Read more 
Destiny: The Taken King / Koenig der Bessessen
Even in the darkest time of my frustrations with Destiny, Skolas and the exclusive deals I knew that I would buy TTK. There is no other game that tickle my fancies, not Halo 5, not Quantum Breaks, not Gears of War (Remake), nothing. But I waited until August to actually buy my copies.
Now that the Hype Machine is gearing up here a my thoughts of an early adopter. Read more
What’s Wrong with Bungie
This week a shit storm came over us Destiny players as Luke Smith was saying that players would buy anything and players were outraged. I didn’t pay too much attention to it but when the news about the Red Bull Marketing campaign hit I was outraged. Read more
Destiny Iron Banner Guide
Last week was the first Iron Banner (IB) with the new DLC House of Wolves. Because of my continued struggle with Prison of Elders level 34 and 35 I took the opportunity of IB to earn some Etheric Lights to upgrade boots and weapons. I also helped others to reach level 3 and 5 and so here are my tips.
Adobe AEM 5.6.1: Changes to the Impersonation
In the past few days I had to investigate on how to manage impersonation and it turns out that behind the scenes a lot has changed since 5.5 and I am not 100% sure what and why. Here is a rundown on the changes I experienced and on how to manage the impersonation programmatically using CURL. Read more
IntelliJ, License and Frustration
As a Java power developer I have two Macs, a MacBook Air and a Mac Pro, side by side and develop on the concurrently. Dealing with Adobe AEM (formerly known as Day CQ) I need more horse power than a MacBook Air can provide but I always place the client’s VCS onto the Laptop (Air) in order to be able to retrieve or upload changes on the go.
Now Subversion is not easy to use and IntelliJ makes it much easier to deal with changes that the command line or any other free app. I can look at locally deleted files, unversioned files and incoming changes and so I need to have IntelliJ running on the Air. For the regular development I switch over to my Mac Pro so that I handle deployments or test changes on a scrap AEM instance. For that the 8-core CPU, 16GB Mem and 500GB SSD is very andy and development on it is a breeze.
IntelliJ and License
Since IntelliJ 6 I am a client of JetBrains and bought every single version even after the also provided a Community Version because I like the additional features. Since quite some time when I open IntelliJ on the other Mac IntelliJ come up with a dialog box complaining that I only have a single seat license and should either re-activate or shutdown IntelliJ. So, for now I just ignored that dialog box, did my thing on the other Mac and then shut IntelliJ on the other Mac down, re-activated it and kept on developing. But then when I ran into an issue with Subversion and had to update the code I had to go back and test it and so this whole procedure became annoying and frustrating.
I am one person, have two hands and cannot develop on two computers at the same time. So I think I use IntelliJ within its limits and I don’t see any reason why I should have to buy another license because of this screwed up behavior of IntelliJ.
Little Snitch to the Rescue
As of lately I upgraded Little Snitch to version 3.3 and so I wanted to see what IntelliJ does in order to figure out if there is a license violation. I am not giving away on how that IntelliJ does it or how to use Little Snitch to fix it because people should pay for their software but IntelliJ is annoying the honest customers and crooks can get around it fairly easily. It took me about 20 minutes to figure it out and to fix it. In the past I was always annoyed when I saw users in a big, profitable companies using the evaluation version as if they could not afford it. Since I started my own company I always bought my software if it wasn’t for free and I refuse to use Eclipse because I don’t have the time and thus the money to waste.
Proposal for a Fix
Most likely I am not the majority of IntelliJ users and so I don’t have much faith that JetBrains would consider my proposal but I don’t want to end this post without at least show an idea on how to fix it.
The basic problem is that IntelliJ should look for concurrent usage and not concurrent launch or processes. Developers should be allowed to have multiple IntelliJ instances up and running if they only use one at the time. IntelliJ takes quite some time to fire up and so keep the instances up and running would be a great feature.
Therefore instead of sending out a message to other IntelliJ instances and then complain if such a message is received IntelliJ should connect the two instances and then check from time to time if they are used at the same time. But if you do so please give some slack because not every concurrent use is a criminal act.
Cheers – Andy Schaefer
A Half a Year with Rocksmith
A Half a Year with Rocksmith
It is now 6 month since I bought Rocksmith for the XBox 360 and for most parts I played at least 1 hour per day. Without any doubts I am making progress and playing along a song is for most parts an enjoyable past time. In addition when I am under pressure in a song I am sometimes surprised that I find notes quickly or slide over the fretboard quite accurately. There are already a few song that I can play lead over 90% mastery on full speed and new songs like the Matchbox 20 pack was quite easy to get the basics down.
That said I am now struggling to master any songs except Blitzkrieg Pop. Either there a chord progressions that make me trip off or fast solos that are difficult to conquer. For example there is a very short part in Self Trap from Playground Kings that elude me now for 3 months to master. So far the most effective way to master them is to play the slowly (70 or 80%) until I can play it with closed eyes. Then I increase the speed and repeat the procedure. When I feel under pressure or overwhelmed then I am too fast.
Funny thing though is that when I finally get the hang of it the riff seems rather mundane and slow.. I guess this is mostly due to the fact that I now can relax and enjoy playing it.
Lately I discovered on how to cheat Rocksmith and even though I don’t do it regularly when it bugs me with a song I have no inclination to learn I might use it to get pass that mission. I am not sure if that is really cheating of it that was the intention from the creator. At the end I am interested in learning the guitar and not to accomplish as many missions as possible.
Some of the songs have a strong and powerful bass sound and so I decided to buy an Ibanez SR250 bass and learn the bass as well.
Currently I am wondering where I will be in another 6 months. It would be great if I could play the most popular chords quick and effortless, find the fret on the fretboard blindly and that I could do bends easier, quicker and with less effort. Maybe mastering 15 more songs (2 now) would be great as well. Finally playing along a song outside of Rocksmith would be really an accomplishment especially if I could play with my kids.
Looking back it was a fun half a year with some great accomplishments and I am looking forward to the next 6 months.
- Andy
CQ 5.5 and Link Rewriter Failures
In CQ 5.5 one can rewrite links by extending a RequestRewriter interface inside an OSGi service. This way links can be dynamically adjusted to external views or can be adjusted to internal conditions. In my current project we use this extensively and for most parts it works fine. That said for a few pages that did not work at all exposing internal structures to the client. It took me a while to discover the cause but fixing as quite simple. Read more
ByWord Publishing Test
Update
You might not see if but it did what I expected and converted Markdown to HTML when it published it to my WordPress site – bummer. Maybe they fix it later but that renders it unusable for me. There is also no way to update a page because after the publishing the link is lost and there is no way to retrieve a post from the blog.
I would expect that there is a flag that allows me to post in Markdown and a way to list all my posts so that I can update their content because I post in Markdown. Right now I am better off using MarsEdit on the Mac and Post on iOS. I don’t mind spending $5 on a good add-on but this is just half-done with link bloggers in mind.
For now I give two thumbs down for the Byword Premium even though I enjoy the App and I am willing to spend money on good updates. That said the Publishing is not well done or designed.
Original
This is my first test to see how the Blogging Support from ByWord Premium works and if it is usable for my purposes. I am mostly concerned if they do send the plain Markdown text over or if they convert it to HTML which would make it completely unusable for me.
Let’see – Andy