The weight of my guitars

It finally happened.

After an awful amount of time wondering, I finally managed to temporarily steal a precision weighing scale from my girlfriend’s kitchen, and finally find out how much my guitars weigh. Here are the results of my current guitars, updated:

Year	Model	Weight (kg)	Weight (lbs oz)	Weight (lbs)
2012	ESP Eclipse II silver sparkle	3.75 kg	8 lbs 4 oz	8.25 lbs
1996	Ibanez UV7BK	3.63 kg	8 lbs	8 lbs
1997	Ibanez JPM P2	3.52 kg	7 lbs 12 oz	7.75 lbs
2014	Music Man JP6 silver sparkle	3.45 kg	7 lbs 10 oz	7.6 lbs
2016	Music Man Majesty arctic dream	2.95 kg	6 lbs 8 oz	6.5 lbs
2013	Suhr Modern Satin natural	2.77 kg	6 lbs 2 oz	6.11 lbs

I actually tought the JPM was lighter, and the Eclipse was heavier. The Modern Satin is, indeed, a very lightweight guitar.

The JP6 silver sparkle was said on Reverb to weigh 7 lbs 14 oz, or 3.57 kg, which was actually wrong.

Clean tones of ESP Eclipse II with EMGs

In another chapter of my Les Paul craze, hoping for something more comfortable than my previous Gibson Les Paul Studio, which I had back in 2014, I bought an amazing-looking ESP Eclipse II, in silver sparkle finish. Realy eye-catching. A Japanese one, not the LTD crap.

I’m very pleased with the EMG pickups. Originally this guitar probably had a Seymour Duncan JB/59 set, and they were replaced by EMG 81 (bridge) and 85 (neck). However, I noticed the 85 is higher output and also it has a lot more bass, so I swapped both pickups. This EMG system is great: once you have the circuit installed, the pickups can be changed quickly by detaching the cables. Now, with the 85 at the bridge and the 81 at the neck, the guitar sounds very balanced.

As for the comfort, it’s not bad as my old Gibson, but definitely it’s not a comfortable guitar. The neck made me realize how much I like finished necks, and the ebony fretboard is sweet. Other than that, I played only one gig with it, and it felt very awkward on my shoulder. I guess I’m a superstrat player, definitely.

Tornado of Souls solo

About one year ago I recorded the solo from “Tornado of Souls”, by Marty Friedman, from the classic Megadeth album “Rust in Peace”, from 1990. I’ve seen many people saying that it’s the hardest Megadeth solo, so I decided to incorporate it into my band’s set list, by replacing the “Hotel California” solo, after noticing some theming similarities. The result is pretty great. Unfortunately, in my band gigs, I hardly find someone who can appreciate the effort I put in learning it.

Anyway, this is the take I recorded about one year ago, using my Suhr Modern Satin, which I’m rather disliking the thin tone these days.

Chrome 72 annoying F6 key behavior

On all browsers, since immemorial times, I’ve been using the F6 key to go to the URL bar and select the whole URL. My current browser is Google Chrome, which in its version 72 changed the behavior of this F6 key, which now puts the focus on the tabs or somewhere else. You have to hit the F6 key twice in order to focus the URL bar.

And I’m not the only one who noticed this:

• Super User
• Reddit
• Chrome Help Forum

Fortunately, there’s a bug to the issue:

• https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=927004

I wonder who in the hell decides changes like this. I’m seriously pissed about this change, and already considering go to Firefox, which I already use at work. I really hope they revert this stupid nonsensical change. Stop fixing what isn’t broken.

Follow up: I just installed Chrome 74.0.3729.108, and the F6 key is working properly again. Such a relief.

A very simple, raw Win32 WinLamb program

Months ago I noticed that WinLamb was missing a simple, introductory example. I never really had time to write and publish one. Until today.

Click lines is a very simple program, inspired by Charles Petzold, which draws lines upon mouse clicks. Just this. It’s intended to be a very simple showcase of WinLamb, showing how to create raw windows, raw custom controls, and handling messages. I usually use dialog boxes on my real-world programs, but for this one I really kept it bare-bones, with no dialogs.

I hope it can be useful to anyone interested in WinLamb.

Git commit with specific date

Very interesting Git option I just found: --date. When making a commit, you can specify the date manually. However, if you make a new commit with a past date, it will still be shown as the last commit, even with a date prior to the previous commit.

A new commit at January 1, 2019, 12:00, specifying timezone UTC-2:

git commit -m "Comment" --date="2019-01-01T12:00:00-02:00"

Changing the date of the last commit, using UTC+0 as timezone. Will be prompted to write the comment:

git commit --amend --date="2019-01-01T12:00:00Z"

This goes hand-in-hand with this current date trick.

Node.js script to kill a JBoss instance

I’ve been dealing with consecutive JBoss restarts lately at work, and I needed a quick way to kill a running JBoss server instance. First I wrote a PHP script, but then I translated it to JavaScript, so it could run upon Node.js, which I’m using a lot lately.

I’m using it a lot.

Reading a file line by line in JavaScript and Node.js

While writing a small Node.js utility in JavaScript, I needed to read a text file from disk, line by line, into a string array. I wrote a small utility function to this task, which is async, returning a Promise.

Usage is pretty straightforward:

const readLines = require('./readLines');

async function foo() {
  const lines = await readLines('myFile.txt');
  console.log(lines.length);
}

Hot reloading in Node.js

While experimenting with Node.js, I was writing a small webserver to see how the things assembled together. Then I noticed that, each time I made a change in any file, I had to stop the Node server with Ctrl+C, and then restart it back again.

Obviously there’s an easier way. The nodemon utility is a direct replace for node command, and watches all files to reload the Node server automatically. Huge time saver, and very well done.

I installed it as a global NPM package, so I can promptly use it anywhere.

Wikipedia Templates, using React and TypeScript

I’ve been testing out React recently with great joy. The ability to grow a web application with components is really good, so much I was able to refactor an old application, a Wikipedia template generator, making it easier to mantain while increasing its complexity, becoming multi-language.

First I started writing ES6 JavaScript, but soon TypeScript caught my eye. My previous experience with TypeScript was a bit traumatic, since it involved the awful Angular 2, but after an initial struggling to make everything work, I can say that I can’t imagine a large scale project written without the aid of TypeScript.

I struggled with some things like HTML5 routing, which seems to be a pain to deploy, so I just used HashRouter. Also, the deployment to gh-pages branch is neatly made with gh-pages utility. Also, I used Redux in a very simple way; I’ve seen overengineered examples that put me off at first, but Redux itself is very simple, and I ended up choosing it instead of MobX. I used hooks from the upcoming React 16.7, and I believe it will completely change the way React components are written, it’s really different.

The Wikipedia Templates project is open source and it’s hosted on GitHub. The project isn’t ready yet, but the basics are done, and I plan to grow it as I have time.

SRTEd 1.3.1, minor release

This week I released a new SRTEd version 1.3.1, with has minor, but many usability improvements. Also, it’s built with latest version of WinLamb, my very own personal raw Win32 library, which I use for everything.

I was planning a bigger release for SRTEd, with more advanced features, but since my time is pretty short these days, I just released a version where it is now, with the UI improvements. It’s already more than a year since the last version, time flies. One notable difference is the absence of a 32-bit executable, which was not included because it was firing false positives for malware, something completely absurd. To avoid the hassle, I opted to keep only the 64-bit version.

SRTEd can be downloaded from CNET.

Vue.js builds for non-root web directories

The React’s lack of scoped CSS annoyance made me want to try Vue.js, which solves this problem right out of the box. And so far, I’m liking this framework quite a lot, I must admit. The idea of single file components pleases me greatly.

This morning I stomped over a problem: I was generating a build release to run under a non-root directory in my web server, and the application was getting lost by searching the files at the server root.

Fortunately I’m using vue-cli v3, actually 3.0.0-rc.3, which has quick solution, as I found here.