In this economic environment it is natural for companies to begin question themselves, what they do, how they do it, etc.

For example, it has long been hard for Electrotap to be competitive from a price-point perspective. Our expenses are higher than others in the same market, owing to the fact that we build better sensors, and a better interface, with better materials and we do it all in the U.S.A. rather than outsourcing the work to Asia.

Now we have competitors dropping their prices even further. What is Electrotap to do? Do we start moving our manufacturing overseas to compete? The reality for a small company serving a niche market is that competing on price alone is the road to nowhere. There will always someone willing to cut-corners and engage in less than ideal ethical contexts to undercut prices.

We could try something else altogether, and start acting like a much bigger company. For example we could claim something outrageous about our ‘award-winning’ support (of course we would need to make up the award) and open a phone center to handle calls. And brag about it a lot even if it wasn’t 100% true. There are a couple of problems here though (besides the disingenuous parts of it). The big companies are all failing, so obviously it is foolish to think that acting like them is going to help. A call center? Where? In India? And how is it that Electrotap has been successful over the past 5 years — by keeping costs and commitments to minimum while being dedicated to environmentally sound practices and devoted to the highest quality.

It seems, in fact, that the right thing to do is to remain true to who we are as a company. To not be distracted by all of the noise around us. And to remain firmly attached to the principles that we’ve stood on.

So now we have just one other little problem to solve. How to make this blog post not sound like the first page of one of those magazines in the seat back of an airline.

A fellow Cycling ‘74 colleague recently referred to "This commentary on Wiio’s laws":http://www.cs.tut.fi/%7Ejkorpela/wiio.html.

If you ever need to communicate with others, especially on the web, and even more especially on a mailing list, then this is essential reading.

If it seems like hyperbole when the author says that communication is much worse, then consider a couple of things:

• The author makes no mention of the effect of typos in electronic communication. I happen to be notoriously bad about this. A misplaced, misspelled, or missing word can be crucial. And it’s common to have this messed up.
• What about the accidentally hitting the button to send when you meant to hit a different button? Oops.

Those are just a couple that come to mind immediately.

Last week a group of us from the Jamoma project were finishing up some work on a paper we submitted to ICMC.

During the process, Trond Lossius and I were talking when somehow we were off on a tangent about mapping. Trond mentioned that one example of mapping is BabelFish: given some input, it produces a translated output.

The implication of this is that many of our mappings in the computer-based arts are like BabelFish: they work in simple one-to-one or limited context translations. BabelFish can manage the translation of words, but it can’t handle the translation of meaning nor understand the context within which a word appears to make a better selection.

I find this parallel with BabelFish quite compelling, and have been thinking about it ever since…

A group of us from the Jamoma project have spent quite a bit of time in the past couple of weeks working on a paper for NIME regarding our Open Sound Control (OSC) schema, and the syntax we use to address various parts of our system.

The process has been rigorous and, to some extent, exhausting. Behind every corner has been a whole new can of worms. When we thought we had solved a conundrum, there would be three more popping up.

But in the end, I feel very confident that we nailed it. The key observation came from Trond when he realized that OSC, as it is presented in the spec, is based on constructs from functional programming (e.g. C). But what we are doing with OSC in Jamoma is based on classes and object-oriented design (e.g. C++).

While taking on the topic of making OSC object-oriented would be a mammoth task, I think that the work we are currently doing in Jamoma is a definite step toward thinking about OSC addressing in a fundamentally different way than I have seen others doing up to this point.

Of course, this probably means we’ll have to re-write Jamoma yet again! ;-)

There is an article in the New York Times about Radio Head’s recent album. It mostly focuses on the marketing model.

It even starts off with an anecdote about Cycling ’74…

I was recently reminded of a couple of a blog posts I have bookmarked by Allan Odgaard, the man behind the very excellent TextMate app. This one is a good one:

• http://blog.macromates.com/2006/20-will-require-leopard/

This is an even better one!

• http://blog.macromates.com/2007/buy-a-mac-get-textmate/

As my frustration over a number of issues on Windows (particularly with the Objective-C mess), and as a number of other things have collided on different fronts, I’m realizing that the points Allan makes are really good ones.

This also presents me with an opportunity to mention that the ObjectiveMax project, as of about a week ago has become a Mac-only project. It’s a bummer because we then won’t be able to use it in TTBlue or Jamoma (because they both need to support Windows). Objective-C actually made the code fun to write.

Not having Objective-C on Windows also means that Tap.Tools 3 is not going to be all of the hoopla that was predicted in an earlier blog post. It will still be nicely integrated with Max 5, but the object set needs to be cross-platform (except for tap.applescript), and so won’t be getting an Objective-C re-write.

Hopefully this means I’ll have some more time to write music – which will positively improve my personal happiness :-)

One of my favorite parts of a good book or dissertation is reading the quotes at the beginning of a chapter. I recently read the dissertation of Alexander Refsum Jensenius, and it has some great quotes. Here are a few of my favorites:

It is easy to play any musical instru-
ment: all you have to do is to push the
right keys at the right time and then the
instrument will play itself.

J.S. Bach

If you take a photograph of some-
thing […] you separate it from
the rest of the world and you say,
“This deserves special attention”.

Brian Eno (Kalbacher, 1982)

Computers have promised us a
fountain of wisdom but deliv-
ered a flood of data.

(Frawley et al., 1992, 57)

You have to have an idea of
what you are going to do, but
it should be a vague idea.

Pablo Picasso

Technology at present is covert
philosophy; the point is to make
it openly philosophical.

(Agre, 1997, 240)

And of course, I love the Albert Einstein quote at the very beginning of the dissertation:
bq. If we knew what we were
doing, it wouldn’t be
called research, would it?

Somehow it reminded me of another quote that I like a lot. When Einstein was asked to describe how radio works, this was his answer:

You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.