UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

Anyone who follows this blog and/or my musical (mis)adventures (and bothers to remember any of it all) may recall that back in January I recorded a 21-minute prog rock suite called 66. If you don’t remember, it’s available in its entirety, both as 10 individual tracks and the complete suite, on my music site.

As usual, I’ve spent a ton of time listening to 66 since I recorded it. If my iTunes play count is to be believed, it’s somewhere in the range of 130 times, but I suspect it’s actually much higher than that, with different versions (the 24-bit version, the 16-bit CD version, the MP3 version), some of which I no longer keep on my computer, plus listening in the car and elsewhere that may not have been logged. The point is, I’ve literally spent days listening to this thing since I recorded it 6 months ago. And, not surprisingly, I eventually started to notice things I was unhappy with.

The most significant issue I had was with the drum sound. I don’t really play drums. (Well, OK, I do play drums, but I don’t really play drums.) The drum tracks are MIDI software instruments, part of GarageBand. I played the drum parts on my keyboard, looped them, tinkered with them endlessly in the track editor, and eventually arrived at an end result. But there were two problems: 1) they were too repetitive, and 2) they sounded plastic. The issues went beyond the drums, but they were my main source of frustration with what I had created.

I’ve been considering putting together a 3-track prog rock album this year called 3, in the format of the Yes albums Close to the Edge and Relayer. That would be one “side-long” track, followed by two “half-side” tracks. In other words, the first track should be around 20 minutes long, and the other two should be about 8-12 minutes each. I already have tracks 1 and 2: track 1 is the 66 suite, of course, retitled for these purposes as “66 (The Mother Road).” Track 2 is the final track of my improvised RPM Challenge album from February, 222, known originally as “All Together Now” but to be retitled “222 (All Together Now).” The final track hasn’t been written yet, and I don’t know what it will be like, other than that it will be about 10 minutes long and its title will be in the form of “Number (Three Parenthetical Words).” A hackneyed concept, I suppose, but that’s how I roll.

Anyway, since I’m repackaging two existing tracks for this album, it also gives me an opportunity to remix them (and, to some extent, to reworking them even more deeply, in that nether region between remixing and re-recording, which I am not doing).

First up was a remix of 66, which I undertook over the past couple of days. I changed the drum sound I was using from “Pop Kit” to “Rock Kit,” did some serious EQ, tinkered a ton with the reverb to make them sound more “live,” and also rearranged some of the notes in the editor to make the parts a bit more varied and interesting. I also reworked the EQ on the electric bass, as it sounded thin and plastic before, too. And while I was at it I made adjustments to the reverb settings on the guitar and Mellotron parts, and I also removed an 8-measure section of the final part, to eliminate some unnecessary repetition.

The end result then went through my new mastering process, which I think does a better job of beefing up the sound without completely squashing the dynamic range. And now, I present it to you. Enjoy!

[audio:http://blog.room34.com/wp-content/uploads/underdog/room34_66_the_mother_road_remix.mp3|titles=Room 34: 66 (The Mother Road) (July 2010 remix)]

Dieter Rams, legendary industrial designer from Braun in the 1950s and ’60s, pretty much invented my design aesthetic. I can’t imagine what the world of technology would look like without his pioneering work. Brilliant.

I especially like his design principle #10: “Good design is as little design as possible.”

I probably didn’t hear of Dieter Rams until about ten years ago, but I’ve seen the world through his eyes since I was a kid. Most of these Braun products were not readily available in the U.S. in those days (the late ’70s and early ’80s), but their designs were so influential that just about everything you could get here still looked like them, or pale imitations thereof.

Jason Kottke also tidily sums up Rams’ influence on modern industrial design:

And hey, I didn’t know that a book had been published on Rams’ work. I bet Jony Ive has at least three copies.

I’ll take one of everything, please.

Source: Monoscope via kottke.org

As I’ve mentioned before, my CMS, cms34, is built on the CakePHP framework. I love CakePHP, but it’s not perfect.

A client contacted me last week, reporting that customers using her website — specifically, a complex form that might take 30 or more minutes to complete — were having their sessions timeout during that process. Now, yes, you may point out (and you would be right) that this is an excellent scenario for using AJAX to save a draft of the users’ form data, or at least ping their session to keep it alive. And you would be correct. But there are two reasons I did not take this path in response to the problem: 1) I’m trying to remember to follow the web standards principle that JavaScript should be used only to enhance functionality, but the site should still work even with it turned off (though in practice I often forget to honor this principle), and 2) the site is in its peak of activity this week, and it would be daft to implement a major functionality change in the form right now — not enough time for adequate testing.

So, the task at hand was simply to increase the session timeout period, so users could stay on the form for a longer time without losing their sessions.

Seems easy enough. The CakePHP config.php file has some settings that play directly into this: Session.timeout and Security.level.

Session.timeout is an integer representing the number of seconds in the session. Well, not exactly. It’s a multiplier value, and the actual session timeout duration is determined by multiplying Session.timeout by the value associated with Security.level, which itself has three possible values: high, medium and low, corresponding respectively to ×10, ×100 and ×300.

I already had Security.level set to low and Session.timeout set to 1800, so really, the sessions should have stayed alive for over six days of inactivity. And yet, sessions were timing out after about 20 minutes. What gives?

What gives is another value in the config.php file: Session.save.

CakePHP offers a number of ways to store session data, but the default value is php, which means it uses the built-in session functionality in PHP. The problem is, PHP has its own session timeout setting (in the php.ini file), and frankly my dear, PHP doesn’t give a damn what CakePHP’s session timeout setting is. And so, with Session.save left at its default php value, my sessions were timing out after 20 minutes (the PHP default) no matter what I changed in config.php.

So, an experiment: I decided to change Session.save to cake, which tells it to use CakePHP’s own session cache, located inside your CakePHP application under app/tmp/sessions. (Be sure that path is fully writable by Apache!)

Success! I left a browser window open on my test site overnight, and the session was still active the next morning. But along the way in my troubleshooting, I had changed my Session.timeout value to 14400, which when combined with the Security.level setting of low (that is, when multiplied by 300), had my sessions enduring for a ridiculously long 50 days! Some quick work with a calculator (although, in retrospect, I ought to have been able to divide 14400 by 50 in my head) told me to set Session.timeout to 288 if I wanted my sessions to last for 24 hours.

I’m a big fan of the blog Brand New. I like seeing the “before and after” of various brand identities.

Lately I’ve been contemplating a brand refresh of my own. I’ve been mostly satisfied with the current Room 34 Creative Services logo. I really like the “rings” design element, the color palette, and, even though it’s overused, the Avenir font:

But there are some things I don’t like about the logo. I’ve been getting a little tired of the colors (even though I like them); I’m increasingly regretting including the “.com” (even though I like the fact that my logo is my web address); and I don’t like the redundant “Room 34.” Plus, Avenir is overused.

So, today I took a first stab at a new identity. It has a new color palette, using one of my favorite colors, reddish-orange (or vermillion if you prefer a more poetic name for it), it eliminates the redundant text, and it switches to another of my favorite, but much less common, fonts: Proxima Nova:

I’m not 100% committed to this change yet; rebranding is a big undertaking, even for a business as small as mine. Switching to this new logo will require redesigning my website, my letterhead and my business cards. But I like the direction. I especially like the letterforms (or, I guess, numeralforms) of the “3” and “4” in Proxima Nova Black. So nice. The new logo is also more compact and scales down better than the old.

Update: Based on JW’s excellent recommendations (and a few observations of my own) I’ve made a few adjustments: 1) improved spacing between the “o’s” in “room”; 2) resized the rings slightly for better lockup with the text — the top of the “4” ring group is now aligned with the top of the letters in “room”; 3) slight change to the color in “CREATIVE SERVICES” so it is more readable on either a light or dark background.

Here’s the new version, on both white and black: