Today’s Business: 2009-11-10
Tuesday, November 10th, 2009Today’s Chores
- Cat duty
- Gathering up dirty dishes
- Taking out garbage
- Dispensing Mom’s meds
Log
08:00 AM: I’m up.
09:25 AM: Sister Mary Ann called. Mom and I are hosting a Thanksgiving dinner here and Mary Ann called to say that she and her family would be here. Possibly sister Jojo will come with her husband and kids as well. However, sisters Christine and Diane are cooking their own meals. So they’ll come to our place later, for dessert. [Emmy] will also join us.
10:45 AM: Wrote a program that uses the QuickTime player to convert the M4a files that Promo Only supplies on their Express Audio DFF discs, into .WAV files. I tested it as well and it works as expected. The WAV files do play in Winamp.
10:50 AM: However, since I was building this new program anyway, and since I haven’t built the complete suite of Tommy’s Tunes DJ software since June of 2008, I thought I’d build it all today. The new build has problems that require debugging. The TTNorm program (used to raise volume levels in WAV files to 100 percent, crashes immediately after you run it. So I’ll work on fixing that here and there. In the meantime, I can use the old build software for getting new music into my library.
12:00 PM: Went to Sheets to pick up a few things for Mom; she’s having a few friends over for lunch today.
12:35 PM: Found that some of the software components had not completely been migrated to Visual Studio 2008 last year, when I did this upgrade. Thinking that this might be the cause of the TTNorm crashing problem, I immediately checked all fifty plus components and made sure that each and every one of them was completely migrated to the latest C++ compiler. But alas, the crashing problem still persists. Looking elsewhere now for the cause.
01:06 PM: I’ve traced the problem down to a routine that validates the format of the input WAV file before normalization. Looking there now for the answer.
01:10 PM: When the validator routine looks for the fmt chunk, it’s failing.
02:45 PM: Just prior to reading the format chunk, we read the chunk length bytes. We’re getting garbage when we read this. Investigating why. I did look at the input WAV file and these bytes look good. So, something’s wrong with the reading process itself.
03:30 PM: Played with debugging the TTNorm application a little more. But I’m getting sleepy. So, time for a nap. 
04:55 PM: Worked the Christmas lighting, 2009 project. Put up a few more blue LED strings.
07:05 PM: Watched today’s episode of The Young and the Restless, and the 2009-10-20 episode of Dr. Phil.
07:50 PM: Took a shower just now. Not sure if I like the morning or night ones best because no matter when I take one, it feels wonderfully relaxing. Of course, in the morning, I probably don’t need as much relaxing as in the evening, because, presumably, I’ve just awoken from a full night’s sleep, which leaves me pretty relaxed anyway. But by the time evening comes, the day’s drama has worked it’s negative magic on me, and so, I feel a little stressed typically. This is when a bath or a shower is most helpful for me insofar as relieving the tension accrued throughout the day. Yet, the morning showers have their pluses as well, because no matter how late in the evening I have a shower, the next morning I still feel not quite clean, as seven to eight hours in a bed it usually a sweaty business, even when the room temperature runs only at around 65 degrees. So I suppose that if I want to enjoy the relaxing qualities of an evening shower yet still start the new day feeling as clean as I can, I could take two showers a day. Would this be frivolous? Hmmmm.
08:20 PM: Calling [Emmy]. Hmmm. I think there’s a Penguins game on tonight. Perhaps I’ll catch a period or two. She’s a much more emphatic hockey fan than I. But I like listening to the games with her, if ro no other reason than to hear her grunt and sigh with disgust when the other team scores, and to listen to her cheer, yell, and get all happy when the Pens score. In this way, [Emmy] is rather funny.
10:53 PM: Added exception handling (try-catch blocks) to numerous places throughout the TTNorm code. This stopped the program from ’crashing’. Now, it exits gracefully, though still prematurely. There’s still the problem of the faulty data being read for the fmt chunk. Still chasing that one down.
11:20 PM: Found that the format chunk data is being read into memory correctly. However, the pointer that I’m using to access this memory once the read is one is pointing to the wrong place; pointing 16 bytes higher in memory than it should be. So a bug appears to have crept into the code that calculates the address for this pointer. So, going there next.
12:00 PM: [Jack] called, and I talked with him for a half-hour. We got caught up, although neither of us will be attending the foot parties anytime soon with Christmas coming up, with the need so strong to avoid frivolous spending in these tough economic times, and such. He reported that I have a not-so-secret admirer from the most recent social networking forum in which I’ve participated, who was asking him for my phone number. That’s nice. But actually, he gave me the number to her voice mail box, though I’m not sure if I’ll actually call her yet. We’ll see.
12:38 AM: Found and corrected the problem memory pointer calculations, although I don’t understand why it worked well before yesterday’s build; this code, to my knowledge, has not been changed in years. Well, now, it’s fixed. However, now that the input file is read in and its data are normalized, when TTNorm attempts to write out the new data to the original file, it fails. Chasing this problem down now.
01:11 AM: All problems with the TTNorm application have been resolved, and I’ve tested it on 26 WAV files. All play and sound great. So this clears the way for importing these new DFF discs from Promo Only into my library. I’ll try it later and let you know how it goes.
01:50 AM: Well, as reward for getting some bugs out of the Tommy’s Tunes software earlier, I listened to one of those repeater songs. A repeater is a song that is so good, that you never get tired of playing it over and over. Tonight’s song was from Frida, and it’s called There’s Something Going On from 1982. I bet I played it ten times through my Sony MDR-7506 headphones. Sounded terrific.
Frida is the dark-haired woman who sang with the group ABBA during the 1970s and 1980s. In fact, she gave the group most of its unique vocal characteristics in my opinion, because when you listen to this song, you’d swear that ABBA was singing it. But no, it’s just Frida, who dominated ABBA’s vocals. So yes, she, by herself, would sound very much like ABBA I think.
The song has driving drums that beat your spirit up off the ground if it’s down. It’s a great glider song. That is, to really enhance the enjoyment of this song, sit in a glider rocking chair and move to it.
02:00 AM: *Yawn* I’m getting quite sleepy. So I’d best get off to bed. Take care, and I’ll catch you in the next post.