Todo for today

Ok, I need to write a short review for Ulrich Schnauss’s A Strangely Isolated Place as well as Marco Torrance’s Reconstructed Moments (got that Saturday). Also, I set up a new domain for the music mixes that I’ll talk about (though I really should get it properly set up).

DNS Problems?

Ok, something went wacky on the server and it restarted itself last night. Now, for some reason, I can’t seem to get to cardamar.quad341.com. If you are trying to get there, just go to 216.120.255.175. I’ll try to fix later

Walk down Memory Lane

I don’t know how many of you actually saw my first PHP site. It was when I first got the domain quad341.com in 2003. I was working on remaking my school’s web site with a friend and also starting making this site for myself. Everything was written from scratch. It never really got changed either. I added on at times (so some parts are later coding than earlier), but generally the old stuff stayed. I didn’t add any documentation either. This is all original. I don’t have the original index page or the /new directory anymore (in 3 or 4 server changes, that didn’t make it or just got deleted sometime). It’s poorly written, procedural code. There are some vulgar comments in there that show my frustration (just check out my database password). The original install script is still present too, so if you want to actually set up my old site, just run that. Anything that references th /images directory probably still references a current file on my site if you want to grab any of them I didn’t pack in the zip. It just makes me laugh. I also packed my first attempt at PHP object oriented code in there (which was to parse Live Journal) as well as the flash version of my old site. I don’t have the flash source files anymore (or don’t know where they are if I do). If you want them, I can look around a little, but i’m pretty sure they’re lost. Check out the archive to have a look at how I started out. I’ll finish up a game project this weekend maybe and you can compare the code. It should be funny.

In music news, I finally uploaded the md5 hash of Marco Torrance‘s mix, Silent Train of Thoughts. I have not listened to that mix by Torrance, but I have heard another of his, Return to Cape Arcona, on di.fm. If I remember, I’ll ask him if I can put it up. That one is definitely chillout though, so I’m not sure what to expect out of a truly ambiant mix. (Torrance is also Zilent Zpott, if you were wondering, so he can do very good ambiant). I also added the track lists for the last two mixes added on the mixes page if you’d like to look.

Oh and a little note: MacBooks are VERY impressive machines. I can’t stop loving mine.

Cheers all.

Moved (a little) mirror

Because of some DNS problems (and because i was saving the ip for someone who enlisted in the army), I moved the music mirror’s ip. This means that the url, cardamar.quad341.com, will NOT work for a while (between 5 minutes if you’re lucky to 72 hours if you’re really not). You can, however access it through it’s new ip directly at 216.120.255.175. Just use that for now (or indefinitely. that won’t stop working while i mess with dns). Cheers.

Updates with some music

How good it feels to post again (and not bad news!). Remember how I said I might update the music mirror? Well, I finally got around to doing that. I only changed two things and they both are not really noticable if I don’t point them out. First, I made sure that all of the music is sorted into alphabetical order based on file name (this is the best it can do since there is not database; it is just reading the flat files). The more significant change was pagenation. I thought the page looked a bit long with all of the files listing so I changed the script to split it into pages after 15 entries. As always, the source is available.

When I was listening to di.fm, I kept hearing this artist called m-seven. After some googling, I found one album was produced by Oh Records. A bit more googling took me to the producer’s site where I could find the album: only available on beatport and other expensive services. No physical copies. No download sites I knew of and liked the price. Angered, I opened iTunes on my Mac Mini and searched. It was there. $9.99 for a 17 track cd. I definitely made the purchase and was again disgusted by the ease of use and the selection and how good iTunes is (it’s hard to let go of my feelings that Apple is implicitly bad. I probably should before my MacBook gets here).

The music itself is good. Of the 17 tracks, the middle (numbers 8-13) are particularly good. Unfortunately, no part of the cd (called Activate) is really amazing. m-seven could use to tone down or blend the beat more into the song. The melody is nice, but it reminds me too much of trance or house because of the over powering beat. I can’t remember which track, but Xerxes did used a traditional beat in one of his songs on the Mirror Formula, but then blended it into the melody so it became something both minor and consistent with the rest. I think that m-seven could become amazing just by following that little idea. So it’s a good album and more of an upbeat one. Submit to iTunes and purchase.

EDIT: I should warn commenters that putting links (i think 1 is ok) in your comment will make me have to approve it. That is quick as soon as i get near a computer, but hard from a blackberry.

Music to my ears…

And music is contained in this post. The two big topics are Boards of Canada – Trans Canada Highway and some new mixes I’ve stumbled upon.

BoC’s new cd isn’t supposed to release until June 6, but preordering paid off since I got mine yesterday (actually was shipped a week prior). It’s a short EP, but it is still pretty impressive. Dayvan Cowboy appears here as well, but I love the track so I don’t mind. The tracks in the middle follow the more recent and more aggressive style of BoC seen on The Campfire Headphase. I love that style but can hear some of the slower and bass-ful track style that I think was most prevalant on Boc Maxima (or maybe that was Geogaddi… I get those two mixed up since I got them both at the same time). I think it’s a wonderful ep that is completely worth the cost. Warp Records is the producer. Visit that link to find and purchase. Warp also has a downloads site, but I cannot remember the address.

If you listen to di.fm‘s chillout channel, you might have caught a mix or two from Helix. I was interested, so I tracked down his music page. All of his mixes as well as some from a couple others are listed there. It looks interesting, but getting the downloads can be a bit annoying. I will probably contact him soon and propose adding the mixes to my mirror. The mirror listing might also might undergo an overhaul to add pagenation. We will see.

Internet Problems

This is a quick post to say that I have basically lost connectivity to the internet except through my blackberry. Email still gets to me and I might turn on google talk if anyone wants to message me. Other than that, no updates will come to any project I am working on until this is resolved. I’m currently borrowing internet to make this post.

Name server keeps giving me problems. I think i’ll remove cvs and install subversion and see if that helps. If not, I might have to downgrade to php 5.0.5 instead of 5.1.2. This will all happen once I have a connection. For now, I’ll just restart bind from my blackberry when it goes down. Sorry for the problems.

osCommerce Source

If anyone is looking to set up an online store that supports free shipping and purchases, downloads, an event calendar, visible products without stock, and all the perks of osCommerce, this code is for you. Let me just warn you, though: the zip is kind of big. It’s about 48 mb. I could have taken a couple things out to make it smaller, but I left them in so that there was a demonstration.
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You’d think I wouldn’t be distracted this much…

Well, I’ve been distracted. I generally think that a post about my cds is now just too late. Here’s a really short description:
Psymeditation from Organic Records is some excellent chill that starts of very strong and somewhat dwindles towards the end. It has at least 3 or 4 really good chill tracks and the rest is decent. “Yours to Enjoy,” the first track, is most excellent. Still a good investment.
The Mirror Formula by Xerxes is outstanding. I have to say that the title track (that was added to the cd version. It’s not in the hellian.org version) is fabulus. It even takes what seems like a boring beat and makes it marvelous. I have but one complaint in the album: The final track is a weak conclusion. It’s not remarkable and doesn’t seem to close very well. This also might be my thoughts because I want more, but I think the final track could have been better. The rest must be heard to understand its excellence. Cardamar Music is sold out. Check the releases page on cardamar.com to find other distributors that might have a copy left.

What has taken my soul (as it seems) is osCommerce.
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Site finally moved…

Well… this transfer didn’t go as smoothly as I had planned. DNS is being annoying. It managed to updated in the about 2 minutes I had it pointing to another ip… so I changed my host file so I could easily post this. Oh well.

For the transfer, I had to write a little script so I could ftp my large files separately from the rest of the site. The entire thing can’t be moved at once because stuff times out. That’s reasonable. My script worked anyway. Then I just used the built in transfer to get it over. I’ll post the script when i’m not so exhausted.

I promised a more thorough review of my cds once my site moved. I didn’t expect to be anywhere near this tired. I’m sorry. I will have to postpone that as well. Maybe I can finish my xapian stuff tomorrow and have a couple happy posts. For now, I wait for dns.

I really do like the new server. Seems a lot more intellegent and Host Rocket has been great. I can’t wait until their “freedom bandwidth” is available for my server.