Musical Interests

A couple things that I found that maybe people who enjoy similar music might like.

On di.fm’s chillout channel, you might have heard these.  First i have the mixes by JINN.  I’m not hosting them (for the moment), but I do like them a lot.  They aren’t as wonderful as … well i’d say most if not all of what is on the mixes mirror, but that doesn’t make them bad.  Those are hard to beat really.  These actually have vocals and lyrics.  It’s weird, but they are nice.  I think it was serenity that’s the best of the three, but you can find the mixes over at JINN’s site.

Second, i found Honeyroot.  The song i caught on di.fm was Falling and i was impressed.  The cd it’s off of is Sound Echo Location.  The first about half wasn’t anything special, but it got a ton better including and after Falling.  Some of it would be damn cool if someone remade them with an industrial feel.  You will see how close it seems if you listen (i think that was the eighth track that struck me as being a perfect candidate for becoming industrial.  If anyone knows of a good electronic industrial artist that can remix, please drop me a line.  i’m thinking of checking with unmediated productions considering some of that stuff sounded similar… especially unwoman’s first album). Enjoy!

Mac things that I forgot (or just did)

I forgot a couple things on my last post (that i split onto another page because it’s … long). I also did a couple more things.

I forgot to mention auto-updates.  Windows gives you choices on how you want these to work.  Mac says that notifying you by having the update manager bounce in the bottom of the screen is the best way. It is the way that i like my auto-updates, but a choice would be nice.  and the bouncing icon just makes me think of the happynowhere apple switch movie.

I was thinking of reformatting my mac to get all the unix tools installed in the right order and such, so i went to look through what i had for software.  I found two things strange: i have a more up to date version of iLife (media stuff) on a disc in the box… and no disc for appleworks. Hm… well, i can update iLife safely i guess. Well, that’s what i thought.  It took about a half hour to install (there might have been a lot, so that’s not what annoyed me) and then killed my dock menu (that did). Now, the doc menu is a pretty useful little thing to have running so you can get to your applications easily… and minimize… and more things than you might have thought.  Considering finder was still running and i couldn’t see any easy way to start the dock again, i rebooted.  this fixed it, but it shouldn’t have happened. but now i have iWeb!

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My feelings about a Mac

This is one of those posts that probably will show my non-biasedness. Hopefully it will come off that way, at least, since i really don’t want to be biased in any way.

So i got this mac thing. And honestly? It does do its claim to fame. It works out of the box. You don’t have to fiddle with a whole lot (and looking through the preferences doesn’t even give you a whole lot that you will want). It has one hell of a lot of features out of the box. It saves you the time of installing a lot of software that you might want and can configure things such as samba and the like.

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New Mix

In an effort to post all additions to the mixes list, here’s the latest:

Cardamar has put together an awesome mix called Globespinning.  Between the expert track selection and impressive transitions, this mix should really take you away.  Between the last two additions (of both I really enjoy, don’t get me wrong), I would have to say that Cardamar’s experience gives him the edge that puts him on top for the moment.  With S. Zeilenga’s mix being so good with his first, though, I don’t know how long that will last.  Make sure you check them out!

Making a fruit do a trick

This is better known as my first impressions with programming an Apple.

I just finished going through this introduction and tutorial for programming with cocoa. It was using Objective-C. For those non-Apple programmers (of which I would still consider myself), it’s kind of like a minor upgrade to C to incorporate OOP. I like Java and C# syntax the most personally, so I didn’t really enjoy how everything must be written.  It isn’t bad really.

It’s good framework.  That really is what it all comes down to.  I was so happy with the integration of all of the XCode tools.  It suprised me that I felt like I was setting up more of the code and less of the interface even when declaring instance variables and the like.  It felt more like setting up the GUI as something different than your class, rather than your class contains the GUI.

The interface builder is set up nicer and has more features than Visual Studio (at least features that I care about).  It just was more enjoyable to work with independant windows when designing the window.  It feels better to keep the interface design separte from the code.  I still believe that the best applications run from command lines and have an interface to be nice. This felt like that.

Now for the coding experience.  This is where it all makes a difference.  Let me itterate again: I don’t like Objective-C syntax.  The methods and all the like with their messages seem like slow ways to reference everything.  That made my experience worse.  But that won’t influence how I consider it overall.

I like the tabs of Visual Studio.  It works very well for getting around.  As far as I can tell, there is NO code completion for Objective-C if anything.  This means that not only do I have to keep track of all these floating windows, but I have to keep finding the correct one whenever I want to go and check what I called a method of another class.  Not nearly as enjoyable as it could be. There is also no on-the-fly error checking.  I can’t tell any preformance drops from VS doing this, so I find it to be depressing that it is lacking here.  The error reporting on build is pretty nice, but I wouldn’t call it better than VS by any means.  Documentation also seems limited in immediate reach.

So what does it do better than VS?  Well…. uh…. it is free.  I do have to say that it does pretty well for a free program. VS is better for developers though. It is very nice for designing interfaces, but it sucks for the coding.  I’ll have to try it with Java (which is supported by XCode) so I can see how it does with something like C#.  That would be a better comparison. It needs a better help system, on-the-fly error checking, code completion, code folding, and tabbed windows for source files to expect to be on par with Visual Studio.  It is lighter though.  Microsoft wins this one for me.  I like the help with the interfaces since i’m no artist, but it is my code that I put my love into.  Don’t make it more difficult.

Oh and for those of you who want to call .Net God (which I may or may not agree with you…), just realize that Cocoa has almost if not all of the features as well as really easy ways to implement printing, undo, and plugins among others. I would have to give Apple that one at the moment.  Maybe .Net for Vista will make Microsoft king of the hill once again.

Not written on a BlackBerry

Note to self: you can’t write blog posts from your blackberry. I tried once. It was a little overview of my mac mini. Yes, i have a mac mini and it’s impressive. I might even write about it again. We’ll see.

Latest little project has been playing with phpBB 2.1.2 (the pre alpha stage of phpBB3. you have to grab a cvs snapshot to play with it at the moment). It breaks during install. I hacked that into working and have since found a few more errors. After I get mine completely set up, I’ll post all of my hacks to make it run.

On another note, there’s a new mix from S. Zeilenga on the mirror here. It’s a really nice mix. Be on the look out for a new one from Cardamar later this week or next also. Cardamar Music is going to have a limited release of Xerxes latest album, the mirror formula, in march. It’s more ambiant than Cardamar, but is far from boring. It’s a beautiful album.

I have more work to get done. Will update more later.

Word Press Hacking

Well, as per usual, I wanted more out of my WordPress and hence got it. This time, it was searching. I don’t know when the basic searching was added to WordPress, but I really like MySQL’s FULLTEXT matching abilities, so I went to implement them on my site. NOTE: this is not a plugin and does indeed cause you to modify core files. preform at own risk.

I started by copying the searchform.php out of the default template and adding it into my current template’s folder. That is for ease of typing. I then opened my template’s header file (you might put this in sidebar.php also) and added in for it to include searchform.php by writing (note i added a div so i could edit its appearance in css):

I verified that my edits worked and updated my css to display that div as I wanted it. The search should currently work, although poorly. Next, I modified my database. You need to execute the following query on the database that holds your wordpress tables. (You can execute it from the sql input in phpMyAdmin if you have that set up. Note that this assumes the default prefix of wp_ that you should change as appropriate): ALTER TABLE `wp_posts` ADD FULLTEXT `realsearch` (`post_title`,`post_content`) Next was time to modify the actual search function of WordPress. This is stored in the wp-includes/classes.php and is in the get_posts() function of WP_Query. You need to do the following:

1. locate line 416 and cut it (it comes after the comment about search pattern and reads $search = ' AND (';)
2. add the following after line 424***:
if(strlen($q['s'])>3){
$search .= " AND MATCH(`post_content`,`post_title`) AGAINST('".mysql_escape_string($q['s'])."' IN BOOLEAN MODE) ";
} else {
3. paste the line below this.
4. add a closing brace after the closing brace of the next else (should end on line 448, add another on line 449 so you can read it)

You may want to alter the lines around 580 to have it order by the match…against clause also, but you have to be aware that wordpress will add post_ to the beginning of the $q['orderby'] clause by default. i decided to override the $q['orderby'] with ’score’ when i was matching fulltext and then editted line 585 (4 for me since i removed part) to add the direct section if needed. the place where $post_ is added was changed also to only occur if it was not matching fulltext.

i tested and made all this on my new child. Her name is Sin. She is a Mac. I am somewhat ashamed to admit how nice it is to work with. More on that later though. To look at my finished file, browse over to http://cardamar.quad341.com/classes.phps. Enjoy.

*** = for some reason, I cannot use IN BOOLEAN MODE on this server but can on my testing server. Just remove it for it to work again. If anyone can explain that, i’d be appreciative.