Tales from the jar side: My multitrack acapella video, Unboxing the unboxable, Twitter behaving badly (a continuing series), and Other tweets and toots
What do you call an underwater dog? A subwoofer. <rimshot>
Don’t feel like reading this newsletter? That’s fine — I’ll read it to you on the companion YouTube channel. Today’s newsletter is tomorrow’s video playlist.
Welcome, fellow jarheads, to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of January 15 - 22, 2023. I taught my regular Deep Dive Into Spring course as an NFJS Virtual Workshop this week, and completed another three (!) Medium posts on Mockito for the pipeline, which will appear eventually.
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Multitrack A Cappella
I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I participated in a multitrack a cappella recording with Jared Halley.
Note: According to this site, the mnemonic for spelling a cappella is “two words, two p’s, two l’s.” Good to know, because I feel like every variation (including the correct one) somehow looks wrong.
When that was available as an audio track, I put it on soundcloud, and mentioned that a video was in the works. Here is that video, hot off the presses:
As the kids maybe used to say, here’s the deets:
The other singer (the one with hair) is Jared Halley. You can find his YouTube channel at Jared Halley Music on YouTube.
I provided the sheet music. Jared converted it to electronic form and recorded all 7 parts (yeah, he’s got range). Then he sent the file to me (in the form of a LogicPro X file, if you’re wondering).
I recorded my parts and sent the file back, expecting him to tell me what sections needed to be redone or fixed.
Instead, he returned a completed mp3 file that was way more awesome than I expected. Yay!
He then told me how to make the individual videos, which I recorded on my camera in my living room. I sent my recordings to him, again expecting him to tell me what I had to change or redo.
Once again he returned a completed video within a couple days.
I published it to my YouTube channel, Tales from the jar side.
In its first 24 hours, the video already has about 160 views, which I think is fantastic. Heck, I doubt my own views count for more than a dozen or so of those.
As you can see, Jared decided to include only 6 parts for each of us, to make the sections on the screen come out even. That’s fine, of course, but it throws me off a bit knowing there were 7 parts. On the other hand, the blend is so good, I still can’t tell which video box is singing which part, and I recorded half of them. I suppose that’s a good thing.
Anyway, I decided to add it to my Tales from the jar side channel even though it has nothing to do with anything technical, but hey, why not? I’m going to put everything else there, too, as a part of my transition to becoming a YouTuber. Enjoy!
(Oh, and please subscribe to the Tales from the jar side channel, even if you don’t plan to watch the videos. It make YouTube happy, and I’m still new enough that this it will make me happy, too.)
UnBoxing the UnBoxable
When you publish a book on Amazon (or, more properly, when your publisher adds the book to Amazon, assuming you wrote through a great publisher like The Pragmatic Bookshelf), they recommend you add a video to the book’s web page to help sell the book. A popular idea is to add an unboxing video, which shows the author opening a box of print copies they received in the mail.
I did that for my Help Your Boss Help You book at Amazon. If you scroll down that page, you’ll find the unboxing video, which is only 47 second long, but has a lot of charm. :)
My new book, Mockito Made Clear, is part of the Pragmatic Answers series, which means:
It’s short. Those books are supposed to be “about” 50 pages. Mine is 75 pages, but they let me get away with that.
It’s cheap. They’re all about $10 US, which isn’t bad. Since you’re a jarhead and have my grateful appreciation forever, I can give you the coupon code kkmockito35 so you can get a 35% discount off of that, but only a https://pragprog.com, not on Amazon.
It’s ebook only.
That last one means it’s really hard to make an unboxing video, but hey, it if was easy, anybody could do it.
Here’s my plan for the video:
Admit that the real solution is obvious: double-click on the pdf and watch it open in a pdf reader. Maybe I can find a decent free animated gif of confetti or something to show during the video.
Go through a series of increasingly silly ways to overcomplicate the solution. Namely,
Open the file programmatically in Java.
Write code to download the book from a Dropbox link, because when you buy a book from the Prags they offer to add it to your Dropbox account.
Write code to send the book to a print service, which is where I can add a mock for the service and test the whole thing with Mockito.
Spoiler alert: I’ve already written three — yes, three — Medium posts describing the whole process. The problem is that they’ll be in the queue for the Pragmatic Programmers publication on Medium. That will give them a decent audience, but it could be a while before they actually get published.
What about the video? I’ll definitely have to put that together, but if I show all the variations it could get long quickly. I may have to divide it into multiple parts. That’s okay, though. Of course I’ll post the links here when it’s ready.
As a spoiler, here’s how you use Java to open an application based on the associated file extension:
If it wasn’t for the checked exception, this would practically be a one-liner. I have to admit, though, that since my job primarily involves server-side coding, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen the Desktop class.
If you want to see all the spoilers, the code for all three blog posts is in this GitHub repository.
More to come about that entertaining nonsense.
Twitter Sux, A Continuing Series
The descent of Twitter into madness and chaos continues unabated. The latest abomination was the introduction of the For You tab, which is filled with posts from people you deliberately wanted to avoid but who “the algorithm” wants you to follow. They combined that with the horrible decision that if you leave the app and return, it switches back to the For You tab even if you don’t want it to. It’s likely that the negative feedback they get from this decision will cause them to change that, but it’s just so typical.
The real horror this week, however, was when they disabled all the good third-party Twitter clients without warning.
Suddenly third-party apps just stopped working. After a five day delay, they finally posted some ridiculous claim about disabling any apps that violated their terms of service, which they hastily updated.
Twitter: Your third-party app, which has been working fine for years, now violates our terms of service in some vague, unspecified way, so we disabled it.
George Santos (R-Riker’s Island, eventually): Wow, even I wouldn’t try to get away with a lie that obviously wrong.
Elon is so deeply evil. On a related note, the best part of the Glass Onion movie to me was (mild spoiler) the fact that the tech billionaire character who everybody thought was a genius turned out to be an idiot. How topical can you get?
For many years, I’ve been using Fenix for Android. It’s limited, but in good ways. By that I mean there are no ads, no promoted tweets, and no polls. It only had tweets from the people you follow, in chronological order. I paid for that app happily. Now, like all the rest, it no longer works, and I’m suffering through the official app. Yuck.
Yet, despite everything, I haven’t left yet. There are still too many good people there that I follow.
Ugh. I may need some kind of support group.
Tweets and Toots
National Park Service Has A Great Social Media Manager
You know, I think they’re on to something there. The replies were even better:
Explains a lot.
The Art of Camouflage
Here’s the actual photo, in case the embed doesn’t show:
It took me a moment to see, but there actually is a deer in that photograph.
It’s Not A Bug
An old joke, but a good one.
So That’s How It Happened
ICYMI, Pink Floyd released a 50th (!) anniversary edition of their Dark Side of the Moon album, whose cover featured light scattered by a prism. Of course some clueless culture warriors objected to the band being suddenly “woke”.
That objection is roughly comparable to asking the band, “Which one’s Pink?”
Oooh, Donuts
And finally:
Have a great week, everybody. :)
The video version of this newsletter should be uploaded on the companion YouTube channel tomorrow. This time I’m going to break it up into a series of shorter videos as part of a playlist. We’ll see how that goes.
As a reminder, you can see all my upcoming training courses on the O’Reilly Learning Platform here and all the upcoming NFJS Virtual Workshops here.
Last week:
Deep Dive: Spring and Spring Boot, an NFJS Virtual Workshop.
I’m a Florida Man this week. I’m on vacation, but between my blog posts and this newsletter, you can see that clearly I’m not very good at it.
This week:
More vacation until Wednesday. I’ll try to do better this time.
Spring Data and the Java Persistence API, an NFJS Virtual Workshop.