Author: Martin

Upgrading To WordPress 2

I’ve just upgraded the site to use the new WordPress 2.

Everything seems to have gone smoothly, although i took a slightly different route to the upgrade than they recommend in their documents.

The only thing i did differently was to upload the new version to its own directory (choronzon2), then I copied the plugins and the theme from the old version into the correct places in the new version.

I did this so that I would have a quick escape route back to the old version should anything go wrong. (Of course, I backed up *everything* first). To backup the database I used MySql admin running locally and connected to the remote database rather than installing PhpMyAdmin just for backing up..although PhpMyAdmin is a great tool if you have more involved database management needs.

I dont have a huge amount of plugins running and I had already tested them with a local installation of V2 on my home computer. (I use broobles simple tags plugin for generating [tag]technorati[/tag] tags and my own del.icio.us link generating plugin)

Once I had uploaded all the necessary files the upgrade process itself was incredibly easy (like installing wordpress, but with even less to do).

All that was left was to rename the original directory to choronzon-old and rename the new directory to put it in the right place.

Easy.

If you are wondering about making the move from an earlier version of wordpress I can definitely recommend it if you want to take advantage of the new features. I decided to upgrade because I much prefer the post / page editor in the new version. Having a window to edit the actual HTML is vital when entering pages with a lot of content so I can avoid the auto-formatting process that wordpress applies to the content.

For a guide to what else is new in version 2 you can head over to asymptomatic.net for the lowdown.

New year, new look, new content

Now that 2006 is well underway I thought it was time for a new look to the ole blog and some new content. The theme is based on ‘Gentle Calm’ by Phu Ly, but I modified it a bit to give more space for the content and other little bits and pieces. Hopefully it will make things easier to read.

Also there is now the first of my tutorials on using Plogue Bidule. Its a beginners guide to using [tag]Bidule[/tag] and takes you through the process of creating a complete polyphonic synthesizer using the vast array of modules they provide. You can read it here.

If you have been interested in [tag]modular audio[/tag] software before but either never got around to trying it or just felt daunted by the whole experience then hopefully this should gently ease you in to the wonders of creating your own instruments and sound mangling tools. At the moment you can try bidule for free, or buy it for a cheap price before the full release hits the virtual shelves (and its cheap at only 70 dollars). So there has never been a better time to get started.

Any comments or ideas for this tutorial and future tutorials are warmly welcomed.

Christmas Hits

The soundtrack to your christmas is here.

Everyone wants to know, what will be the christmas number one? Cliff Richard, Westlife, Some other manufactured rubbish that will make you regurgitate your turkey?

Do your ears a favour and check out the hot hits from some of the people who make no-future the worlds premier electronic music forum. Featuring Cristian Vogel, Pleated Lemon, Rob Acid, Bavin and many more family favourites.

To save you the time and trouble of searching through this thread to find all the seasonal gems therein ive compiled a list right here, just for you.

1. Pleated Lemon – Yuletide Logs
2. Black “E” – Ho Ho Ho
3. Kams – When Im 64
4. Phillie-T – Little Donkey
5. Hektor Ruiez – Console For Christmas
6. ActionJetzon – Get The Rod Again
7. Ultrafoetus – When were you i
8. Komakid – Stikla Vocal
9. Bavin – Jinglebavs
10. Knusbert – Wenn mal der schuh drueckt
11. Crud – Mistletoe and Wine
12. Tec-Ho – Happy Maggie
13. Chelmsford Industries – Bad Tidings
14. MDK – Merry Christmas
15. Oliver Rosemann – Underwearwolve
16. Rob Acid – 4

Download them all, burn em on a cd, give it to your gran. Thats christmas sorted.

MTASC and ANT : error running mtasc compiler

If you are trying to run MTASC from ant and are seeing the message ‘error running mtasc compiler’ this means that ant cant find the mtasc executable. There are 2 ways to remedy this.
The first is to add the folder with MTASC in to your system path. The second is to use the ‘mtasc’ attribute of Simon Wackers mtasc ant task to point it at mtasc.

If your mtasc executable is in D:devtools then you will need to define the task something like this :

<mtasc mtasc=”D:DevToolsmtasc.exe” …./>

I’ve written a more in depth guide to using ASDT and MTASC with ant over at osflash.org

Java and zip files

I’ve just spent a day debugging what at first appeared to be a permissions problem. Im using the jakarta commons file upload with a tomcat / spring setup to allow users to upload zip files, which are then unpacked and the contents are processed into a database. Obviously using a zip should make it easier to upload multiple files and directory structures.

What was happening is that the directory entries I expected to be in the zip werent being created, so none of the files could be written when it was unpacked. Eventually i discovered that the problem was related to how different tools create zip files. I use winrar, which creates a seperate entry for a directory, as luck would have it the tool my client was using doesnt.

So, if you are writing java code to unpack zip files you will be better off doing something like this :

Enumeration entries = zip.entries();

    while (entries.hasMoreElements())
    {
        ZipEntry zipEntry = (ZipEntry) entries.nextElement();
        File file = new File(outputDirectory, zipEntry.getName());

        // check the parent of this entry to see if it exists
        if(!file.getParentFile().exists())
        {
            file.getParentFile().mkdir();
        }

	InputStream is = zip.getInputStream(zipEntry);
        FileOutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream(file);

	while (is.available() > 0)
        {
            fos.write(is.read());
        }

	fos.close();
	is.close();
}

rather than just checking if zipEntry.isDirectory() and then doing a mkdir.

Of course its wise to do both, because the zip may contain empty directories and you might rely on them being present later on.

last.fm recent tracks in flash

If you’ve been wondering when the code was going to return, well, here it is. Its a little app to show you your [tag]recently played tracks[/tag] from Last.fm. [tag]Last.fm[/tag] is a great site if you like music, and who doesnt like music? So whats it all about?

As they say ‘You get your own online music profile that you can fill up with the music you like. This information is used to create a personal [tag]radio[/tag] station and to find users who are similar to you’

One really nice feature is that a lot of the data is freely available from the audioscrobbler.net site in a variety of formats. This has prompted some people to create handy little scripts that generate sigs which show what you have just been listening to. Most of them have been made using php and GD to generate a graphic, or just plain ol html. So i thought this would be a perfect opportunity to do the same in [tag]Flash[/tag], but using only open source tools and libraries (You dont need the flash IDE installed to build it..)

You can download a zip of the code from here.

To build it you will need swfmill and MTASC, and to make your life easier i’ve included an ant build file.
The build file requires the as2 [tag]ant[/tag] tasks created by Simon Wacker which you can grab from here.

Also included in the zip is a lovely font created by the nice people at orgdot and a little php script that will cache the response from last.fm so you dont hammer their servers (they ask that you dont make more than 1 request a second..)

For now the implementation is very basic, im sure theres plenty of improvements and extras that can (and should) be added. Drop me a comment if you do something interesting with it.

and if you want to see it in action you can go here

Give it away / Take it back

I like this idea a lot. Its all too easy in these times of manufactured obsolescence to just throw away things without any consideration of their potential usefulness to others and to the potentially damaging effects on the environment caused by the disposal.

One thing that I have experienced which shows a stark contrast between a rich country (the UK, where im originally from) and a poorer country (Macedonia, where I am now) is the attitude towards consumption and disposal of goods. A lot of people in the UK think nothing of throwing away and replacing things which can be fixed, could be useful to others or have even just ‘gone out of style’, whereas here (and im sure the same applies to a lot of countries around the world) the attitude is more careful and considered (although the influence of unachievable aspirational advertising is starting to erode that attitude)

Which brings me nicely to art not ads, which ‘is the start of a campaign to replace intrusive advertising in public spaces with more thought-provoking content’

Check them out and offer some help if you can. Signing the art not ads pledge is a good start.

Step to Noam you get done in.

After a particularly shabby interview with Noam Chomsky, the Guardian have realised the error of their ways and published an apology.

About time too, I wonder how many times he’s going to have to deal with the simple misunderstanding that supporting the idea of free speech doesnt mean you agree with what the person chooses to say.

As he points out in the superb documentary Manufacturing Consent, freedom of speech means freedom for exactly the views and opinions you dont agree with, otherwise where is the freedom?

Realize.

Free Music

Everyone likes free stuff and these days theres a lot of music you can get *legally* for free. Irdial put out a lot of decent records and in an act of benevolence embraced the Free Music Philosophy

This is a good thing.

So go and grab yourself some classics like Neuropolitique and Aqua Regis.

While youre at it heres some other net labels putting out good music, get your ears round some of these

pathmusick
hippocamp
monotonik

sorted.

SWT and Flash

I’ve been thinking about ways in which to use flash within eclipse and had considered using XML Sockets, but after reading the API docs for the SWT Browser I noticed that you can execute javascript functions by calling the execute method (funnily enough), and I already knew about the Flash / Javascript Integration Kit. So I knew i could send messages from java into flash, but how could i get information the other way?

Fortunately I noticed that the SWT browser allows you to listen for changes in the status text, so as a proof of concept I made a little project. Its nothing too exciting, but it shows how you communicate both ways and with a bit more work and some clever serialization I should be able to pass some rudimentary data types back and forth.

If you want to have a play you can download a zip file of the eclipse project here.

You’ll need to make sure the SWT library is on your build path to get it to compile. I’d be interested to hear if anyone has any problems using this, or if anyone makes any interesting additions to the code so we can do more complex java and flash communication within SWT.