April 2008

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The Hafler Trio, Dislocation

Posted by Unknown Senin, 28 April 2008 0 komentar

I just received the Korm Plastics re-release of The Hafler Trio’s Dislocation. I’ve been waiting for this one more than any of the others thus far. The Korm Plastics re-issue series is a magnificent undertaking wherein a large chunk of Hafler Trio material that has long been unavailable or available only in “wrong” versions is being re-issued in definitive form. The packaging for each has been stunning: each release in a booklet sized “wallet” form, with full booklets, posters, post-cards, and more. The releases are all wrapped in a vellum (or vellum-like) material with additional writing. The packaging alone is of the highest grade - far higher than what these releases saw in their original forms (even ones that were also in wallet/booklet form).

I first became interested in The Hafler Trio when the Hafler Trio / Nurse With Wound collaboration was issued on CD, which I picked up in … 1995? 96? I was a big Nurse With Wound fan at the time and, thus, gobbled this one up. I was blown away. While I recognized many Nurse With Wound sounds, the overall production and flow was of a different nature. Similar, yes, in it all being (perhaps) some form of Musique:Concrete. It just sounded a bit more … polished? Subtle? In any case, it remains a personal favorite.

At this time, I was 20-21 years old, poor, bla bla bla. Most of these CDs that I liked were all import and out of my price range (when they could even be found). But one day around this time, I was in a used cassette shop, and came across the original Hafler Trio Dislocation cassette. For $4! It was a Staaltape release, in a bag (my second one - a couple of years earlier I picked up what turned out to be a fairly rare Legendary Pink Dots cassette in the same style of packaging, mostly because I didn’t yet have a CD player). Not knowing much of The Hafler Trio at the time, I knew that this was something I should get, as it was unlikely that I would easily come across such a find for years to come.

I liked the tape, but I admit that it took a while to grow on me. It was very quiet and subtle, with a lot of field recordings. It was something that I enjoyed, but I found that I had to give it more attention than similar recordings from other artists. I loved having it on tape, though. It heightened the “found sound” feeling. And I loved what was inside the bag (besides the unlabeled cassette). Inside, there was heavy paper with fragments of maps on one side and various clippings on the other. It was far more interesting than some of the cheap shock imagery (or just cheap packaging) used, again, by somewhat similar artists that interested me at that time.

However, as fascinating as it all was, that would be it for me and The Hafler Trio until 3-4 years later when, after moving to the east coast, I’d find a copy of A bag of cats at Printed Matter’s old Wooster Street location in NYC. After that find, I’d lap up whatever I could.

So Dislocation has been held in a special place, and I’d been watching that Korm re-issue series list tick along, waiting for this one to show up. Now it’s here. And it’s much more impressive than imagined. First, the booklet is a new heavy-stock foldout variation of the same maps found within the cassette version. When folded up… I can’t even describe it, really. It’s just beautiful and very different from the booklets that have accompanied the rest of the re-issue series.

But what’s really been impressive has been the audio. This time, I have no prior CD to compare; only tape. And I love tape. But now, more than any other re-issue done thus far, I can really see how well done the audio restoration has been. Remarkably well done. This album deserved (and required) it. As much as I loved the “found sound” fuzzy feeling I got from the tape, there are a lot of nuances here that I may now appreciate. Goddamn well done.

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What a DVCS gives me

Posted by Unknown Senin, 07 April 2008 0 komentar

I've seen some posts floating around about what a distributed version control system might give you. For me, these are the key elements:

Committing changes is separate from sharing. While the phrase "you can edit on a plane!" gets thrown around quite frequently, I think this is the far more important aspect of that vision. As a developer, you don't always know how a particular path of development might impact the code base. With a purely centralized system, you have to think first about where a path may be taking you as it could affect everybody else. Time and time again, I've seen developers work without any revision control safety net for days or weeks at a time because they don't want to "break the build", and they don't have time to look up the policies for branch naming, merging, etc. Not that such a thing should take a long time, but when under pressure, it's the last thing one wants to deal with. And the untracked changes keep getting bigger, and bigger. And when I say "I've seen developers..." here, I include myself.

With a DVCS, I can commit immediately. I took heavy advantage of this on a recent project where the set of work for which I was responsible was in no state to be set up on other systems. It required new configuration and possibly new tool installations and I didn't have time to help everyone else install and update their sandboxes. They didn't need my code anyways. Instead, I was able to pull in and rebase my work on updates from my co-workers while my personal branch was in development. When my code was mature, it was easy to merge into a more centralized branch. Very easy. In fact, it was just a fast-forward (in Git parlance), since I was rebasing my changes on top of those by my colleagues.

Again, this is possible with a purely centralized system, but it would have required me to realize the significance of my changes and their impact on others. My sandbox was in a "guts on the table" kind of state. Just about every commit I made was stable, but sharing them would have made it harder on other team members to do their work due to the changes made in tool and configuration dependencies.

In essence, a DVCS inverts the control back to individuals. As a developer, I can commit my changes whenever I want. With a purely centralized system, I have to think more about what I'm about to commit, since it immediately impacts all other developers.

A DVCS encourages experimentation. Being able to commit my changes whenever I want and being able to make local branches so easily makes it easier for me to start playing around with new ideas. Whether that's doing a big refactoring or restructuring of code, experimenting with a new feature of third party library, or working on updating the code to run well on the latest release of Foo, I know that I can experiment and SAVE those experiments in small chunks, without impacting anybody else. I can choose when and how I want to share my results. I can choose to throw my experiment away and not have to be reminded by its grizzly branch name for years to come.

We have an internal toolkit that bridges SQLAlchemy and Zope 3 and provides various other useful features and integrations. Late last year, I started looking into updating the code to work with SQLAlchemy 0.4 and to also clean up some ancient hacks. We were still using CVS at the time. I can't remember when I made the branch, but I knew at some point that I was heading down a potentially long path and that a branch would be required. Other priorities were coming up and I'd have to leave this work aside for a while.

Well, there's 2-3 days of feverish work, all held hostage within a single check-in. I've been wanting to pull some features out of that branch and into the current mainline branch, but since it's all in one big check-in, I can't do that easily. This is the second time I've done that (the other time was on a feature branch that lead to a dead end, but along the way I had some good ideas that I'd love to be able to extract now).

If I'd been using Git, I would have been making more commits, more frequently, and in much smaller sizes. Using Git, I would then be able to quite easily cherry pick individual commits out of that branch and apply them to the mainline.

Finally, a DVCS makes it easy to vet changes through the system. We don't have to give new employees the keys to the kingdom, particularly when their skill set is focused on a specific area. Instead, the code can go through review channels. They make commits in their local repository, and tell someone (like me) that they've made some changes. Using Git (or any other tool - but Git's named remotes makes this hella easy), I can pull in changes from their repository, verify that they're good, and push them to the canonical repository. I can merge them into other branches, if required.

Imagine this in a team situation: team members can share their repositories with each other as needed, giving each other chances to do code reviews and fixes before sharing those changes with the larger group or division; all without requiring permission to touch the central repository. Suddenly whole new workflows open up, based on the "networks of trust" inherent in all of us: a team leader collects commits from their team, and shares those changes with other team leaders. Those team leaders pull together changes from all of their teams (while sharing said changes across team lines) and push those on to a QA / Testing division. The QA / Testing division then puts their seal of approval on things by being the ones who control pushing to the "canonical" repository from which builds are based.

There's just so much more that can be done with a DVCS, and we're in an age now where there are very usable and useful tools for this job. A DVCS restores individual responsibility, encourages experimentation, enables adaptive workflows, and I believe it fits more naturally into how we humans organize our interactions. Whether this is in a rigidly defined corporate structure or a loosely connected set of worldwide open source contributors, the peer to peer nature combined with getting the whole repository enables people to step up and do bold things without having to go through channels to get any coveted "write access".

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Sunday Great Openings

Posted by Unknown Minggu, 06 April 2008 0 komentar

In my last post, I revisited an earlier write-up of a personal experience involving The Hafler Trio’s so-called Trilogy in Three Parts. I’ve been on a bit of a binge lately, trying to grab up a lot of Hafler Trio releases that I let slip by over the past few years. Right now, I’ve got two thirds of the Exactly series of long-form dual disc releases revolving around the voice of Jónsi Birgisson (Sigur Ros), with one of those releases being in the form of the deluxe packaging from Simply Superior. I’ve been starting to pick up vinyl releases as well and will soon have all three evidences according to Wolf Sheep Cabbage, among others. I even managed to find a well priced vinyl copy of what has become one of my all time favorite albums: A Thirsty Fish.

But on this here Sunday morning, I find myself ill at ease. Shoulders are tense, bones are cracking, mind is dazed yet burning. To try to find a spot of calm, I first went through what I have so far of the Exactly set, but it wasn’t helping today. So I returned, again, to this initial trilogy. I haven’t listened to it much since my grand encounter four years ago. That was just a little too powerful. But up until that point, I got a fair amount of comfort out of the series. It’s still a remarkably powerful. The trick is not to get too lost in it when not wanting great and terrible visions. All I need right now is a warm, sustained, and calming presence. These can do that job rather well - enough to get me through the morning and into a much needed hot shower followed by a cold walk with the dog and some lukewarm coffee.

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