UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

The tech world is abuzz this week over the news that, despite his open letter from last week stating that he was going to stay on the job, Steve Jobs has announced that he will be taking a six-month leave of absence from Apple.

For those of you who don’t know, Steve Jobs has been battling pancreatic cancer since 2004. He underwent a surgery called the Whipple procedure in which large portions of various intestinal organs are removed, and has appeared mostly healthy since then. However, throughout 2008 he was observed to be losing an alarming amount of weight, which as he described in last week’s letter, is not (directly) related to the cancer.

I’ve been reluctant to delve into this topic here, because I have a personal connection with pancreatic cancer. Someone close to me has been battling the disease since 2005, and in fact underwent the same surgical procedure as Jobs. It led to a remarkable recovery, allowing her to travel internationally in 2006 and 2007. She’s still with us, but it’s been a hard-fought battle against both the disease and the effects of chemotherapy. So, in short, I probably have a better idea than most observers of just what Jobs is up against.

His cancer may or may not have returned, and he may or may not return to Apple in June as he has promised. But regardless of his health, it’s true and obvious that eventually he’ll be leaving Apple, regardless of the reason. And despite his role as the company’s founder, prodigal son, and visionary leader for the past dozen years, Apple will go on without him. But a lot of people seem not to be able to imagine how.

Apple went on without him from 1985 to 1997. It struggled, yes, and was the butt of many jokes. But I became a loyal Apple user in the darkest of those dark days: 1993. I witnessed the foibles of Gil Amelio, and yet Apple managed to soldier on.

Then of course came the return of Jobs. The past decade since his return as CEO has seen the company vault from laughable also-ran in the computer business to an innovative leader, not just in computers but in portable music players and now smartphones (though that name does a disservice to the fact that the iPhone/iPod touch is really a brand new, pocket-sized computing platform that defies the currently available categories). Their computers are more popular than ever for home users, and they’re even making inroads into the business world.

And yet, Apple fans are still viewed as something of a cult. It’s a cult of personality, largely, focused squarely on Steven P. Jobs. So, what happens to the cult of Apple without His Eminence?

It’s true that Steve Jobs is a uniquely skilled CEO. He’s a visionary without peer, he’s a ruthless businessman, a shrewd leader, and a great showman. So who can fill that void?

Well, as it happens, Apple has some pretty impressive leadership in its other corner offices as well. I think the situation at Apple, and whether or not to be worried about Jobs leaving, is best expressed in pseudocode:

if (Cook + Schiller + Ive < Jobs) { panic; } else { do_not_panic; }

There are three people at Apple who really stand out from the crowd, besides Jobs himself. They are Tim Cook, the Chief Operating Officer, who was largely responsible for the outstanding success of the iTunes Store; Phil Schiller, the showman who more than adequately filled Jobs’ shoes at this year’s Macworld Expo keynote; and Jonathan Ive, the visionary designer who has been at the heart of just about every new product offering Apple has introduced since Jobs’ return and the world-changing original “gumdrop” iMac design.

In short… these are some brilliant, talented guys. What’s more, together the three of them are at least as responsible for the current state of Apple as is Jobs.

Apple is in good hands.

OK, I actually know the answer to the question posed in the subject line. Despite the palpable suspense, I am sure 99.9% of my audience can tune out now. That leaves the remaining 0.001 readers to dive into this problem with me.

I’m doing a lot of CakePHP development these days, and I’m loving it. (What? The McDonald’s legal team is on its way over here? Damn. Fine, McDonalds. Have it your way. What, Burger King too? I guess I better make a run for the border. OK, joke’s over.)

Of course, plunging into a sea of someone else’s code is always fraught with a little peril, and today I found some. Here’s the scenario:

MySQL is a pretty cool database. I’m very loyal to it. But there are some things it should do, but it just doesn’t. One of those things is support a boolean data type. So, we make do. A common way to make do, and the way preferred by CakePHP, is to use a tinyint(1) field and just store 0 or 1 in it. In fact, CakePHP loves this approach so much that whenever it sees a data field that’s a tinyint(1), it “automagically” refuses to accept any values for that field other than 0 or 1.

That’s super-dee-duper. If that’s what you want. But I have a data table, my users table, as it happens, and in that table I used to have a field called admin, a boolean value. Either the user’s an admin or not. Great. But I decided to upgrade this to allow more access levels than just 0 or 1 (and while I was at it, changing the field name, shockingly, to access_level). I wanted to be able to support up to ten levels. Well, great! A tinyint(1) will nicely store values from 0 through 9, so I’m set!

Except… it didn’t work. Every time I tried to save a value greater than 1, I’d find that it had saved 1 as the value. I could change it to 0 just fine, but anything else became 1.

I checked the documentation and found ample evidence for the “automagic” behavior, so I figured there were a couple of possible changes I could make that would fix the problem: I could change it to a tinyint(2), or I could change it to a char(1). Since I decided I’d rather (in theory) allow letters in the field than double-digit numbers, I went with char(1).

Only it still didn’t work.

I did some more research, found that I seemed to be on the right track, but I was still confounded.

Then it occurred to me. I knew I had seen a cache directory somewhere in the labyrinth of directories and subdirectories and sub-sub-sub-sub-subdirectories in the CakePHP package. And I also knew that a framework as developed as CakePHP probably wouldn’t hit up the database for schema information constantly, so maybe… just maybe… it was cached.

I burrowed down in my application to the app/tmp/cache/models directory, and sure enough… there’s a cache file for each data table, with the schema in a serialized form. Well, it’s a cache, right? Nothin’ to lose. Trash can, here we come! I refreshed my page, and voilà! Success!

So… word to the wise (or, not so wise, like me… otherwise you’d probably already know):

1. CakePHP will only store 0 or 1 in a tinyint(1) field. Period.
2. If you change the schema for any of your data tables, and CakePHP acts like you didn’t… dump that cache!

We now return you to our regular, slightly less geeky programming.

The last thing I’ll say about concept albums, and I’ll try not to go on for 47 paragraphs this time, is that I think it’s easier (and maybe more necessary) to do a concept album when your music is more abstract and/or experimental.

I think my approach would be a lot different if:

a) I could sing
b) I could adhere to a recognizable song structure
c) I could write lyrics about something other than science and man-made disasters

In other words, if I were a better songwriter, I would probably focus on crafting songs. As it is, my music is more sprawling and chaotic, and the only way I can rein it in at all for the purpose of producing an album is by coming up with an overarching concept.

I love concept albums. They’re self-indulgent and pompous… two of the best traits a musician can have! (And anyone who thinks punk’s ascension in the late ’70s killed off pomposity in rock music is deluding themselves. Punk is as pompous as it can get!)

Anyway… the topic of concept albums came up in the RPM forums today, and I wrote such a self-indulgent and pompous post on the matter that I just felt I had to cross-post it here. To wit:

I don’t think I’m capable of making an album that’s not a concept album… although the nature of what constitutes a concept album can vary a lot. Let’s see… here’s a complete chronology of my solo albums and EPs since I really got into doing this in 2001.

THE DEWEY ‘JONE’ McNUKKLE STORY: SOUNDTRACK TO AN UNMADE FILM (September 2001)
Concept: All track titles are nicknames a particular friend of mine has had at some point in his life; music on each track corresponds to characteristics of the nickname.

TAI CHI AND CHAI TEA (October 2003)
Concept: Not so much, really, although I did structure the CD as if it were two sides, with a “Tai Chi” side and a “Chai Tea” side, and the track sequence was designed around that. Oh, and there’s a 13-minute, 5-“movement” suite about the Iraq war, to make up for the lack of an overall concept.

LIMITATIONS OF THE SYSTEM (EP, August 2004)
Concept: Atari. All of the tracks have Atari 2600 sounds incorporated in them.

INFLATIONARY COSMOLOGY (May 2005)
Concept: Can it get any more grandiose? The album represents the entire arc of the existence of the universe, from Big Bang to Heat Death. A suite in the middle also represents the entire arc of human existence from cavemen to the present day, in case it wasn’t pretentious enough already. I was so spent by the concept on this album that I went two years without recording anything after it was completed.

HIGHWAY 34 REVISITED (May 2007)
Concept: Probably the only thing I’ve ever done without a real concept, but I guess I was trying to capture the essence of all of my musical influences, right down to the second-hand nature of the album’s title.

DIVISION BY ZERO [VOL. I] (EP, August 2007)
Concept: The beginning of an extended autobiographical project. Each track has a year in the title and corresponds to some significant event in my life from that year. This 3-song EP features events from 1973 (my conception), 1976 (not sure, but it involves a new bed, vomit and hospitalization) and 1978 (pizza).

UNNATURAL DISASTERS (February 2008)
Concept: This was my RPM submission last year. The concept is strange places, or more accurately, places made strange by human activity. Each track is a sonic representation of some of my favorite made-weird-by-people places on earth.

TECHNETIUM (EP, February 2008)
Concept: A one-track, 38-minute “EP”; the characteristics of this minimalist techno track were determined based on properties of the technetium atom. Yeah… I forgot to mention “nerd alert.”

MELLOTRONIC (EP, July 2008)
Concept: The Mellotron. Oh, how I love it.

THE BEE LP! (October 2008)
Concept: Bees. All tracks represent something about bees and their behavior.

ANAGRAMMATIC PSEUDONYMS (February 2009)
Concept: This is going to be my RPM submission for this year. Each track title is an anagram of my name. The first letters of each of the 13 tracks, in order, spell out my name. How’s that for establishing some parameters for yourself.

Anyway… my reason for going on at such length here (besides extreme narcissism) is to perhaps give some ideas as to how broad the idea of a “concept album” can be — and how inspiring it can be to dive into a project like this with a specific concept in mind. I find I can be most creative when I have a set of parameters to work within. It gives me a starting point… and a destination.

As a kid I often wondered if the whole “dig a hole to China” idea really held water. I was suspicious that my hole through the center of the Earth wouldn’t actually come out within the boundaries of Asia’s most populous nation.

Of course, at the time I was probably so young that I wasn’t aware that China was Asia’s most populous nation, considering that I also somehow thought such a hole would actually be possible to dig. Oh yeah, and I never just, you know, looked at a globe to prove that it was a ridiculous proposition.

For a long time now, I’ve realized that line drawn from Minnesota through the center of the planet would emerge on the other side somewhere in the remote vastness of the southern Indian Ocean, but I never knew where until antipodr came along. Now I know that it would be roughly midway between Perth, Western Australia and the Kerguelen Islands, a place I have known about for approximately 5 minutes now, and which is apparently populated predominantly by feral cats, rabbits and sheep introduced by human visitors over the past couple of centuries. Sweet.

Well… I’m off to the garage for my shovel. Gotta start digging sometime!