I’ve taken to running svn releases of Wordpress. I don’t exactly have a good reason, but it does seem to make themes not work right. (I tried to use two different themes because i’ve been doing a lot with dark backgrounds and light text recently. it went poorly). On the bright side, the new interfaces seem slick and the updates are easier using straight svn access.

For development, I’ve come to find that I’m either in vim or Visual Studio 2008. That’s pretty much the two ends of the spectrum of light and generic program to highly customized and heavy for development. I’ve been doing some development with C#.net and really have to say it’s fun. I love programming in it probably more than any other language. I’m enjoying the environment too. I admit, I kind of miss my vim key bindings and jumping into normal mode to move around, but it’s not all bad. The code completion and intellisense is great in VS2008. The debugger for applications in extremely nice to step through whatever has gone wrong. I really must say that I miss those capabilities when I’m writing something else.

Also, since I mentioned running light text on a dark background, I would suggest altering your theme (if your window manager supports that) to light-on-dark. It’s very nice on my eyes and you can find great places where only backgrounds or foregrounds were specified, making them unreadable! Well, at least it encourages you to think about what happens when someone does try to use high contrast light-on-dark settings with your program/web site. Accessibility forever.

I’m going to be honest. I enjoy writing web apps. I really enjoy the back end code and the product at the end. I have done pretty much everything of significance in PHP also. This shouldn’t offend anyone yet, but some people might see PHP and think less of me. And the real question becomes why?

Now I’ve asked a lot of my friends this question. The general answer usually comes down to PHP yielding bad code or being unmaintainable. Um… I don’t think that’s PHP’s fault that the last person who worked on this project kinda hacked it together into somewhat working but terrible shape. Most if not all programming languages allow you to write bad or unmaintainable code (purely functional languages might be the exception, but my experience with them is far too limited to be able to comment). To be quite honest, I don’t have a problem maintaining my php code. Larger projects always have a framework (one I made usually) to power them and small scripts can easily be navigated by using find in the file or scrolling.

Well Rails and Django are amazing frameworks. This may or may not be true. Rails does have a lot of cool features. It is even cooler when you start giving it extra gems. I’ll give it that, but even that isn’t good enough for me. If you actually want to start using more complicated conditions, you end up writing the SQL you were looking to avoid. Something like Symfony provides most if not all of the commonly requested features for php. There are many other frameworks available too. So if one isn’t good enough, you can always try another.

PHP is slow. To be honest, PHP is usually not where scripts end up being slow. I frequently see one of the following: 1) Are you having PHP do calculations that your database could easily do? Why would you do that? 2) Are you having PHP parse pages that are static or virtually static? Why not use server side includes and not even use the php parse? 3) Did you make a huge data structure that you are recreating on every call? Look into functional programming or restful programming (both are stateless) and consider revising your code.

And in the end, PHP has a lot of well known ways to speed it up. Why not try out a caching solution? memcache is nice and well supported. You could even implement your own.

Are there any reasons to use PHP, not just defend it? YES! Plenty. Integrating kerberos authentication is extremely easy. There is a wealth of information about any common task. the PEAR/PECL code is common and usually easy to use. The wealth of code already available makes it a simple choice.

For quite a while, i have struggled to find the perfect editor. I heard people praise various editors, but I have a big problem: I’m very multiplatformed. I run Ubuntu linux, windows xp, and windows vista on my main desktop and Mac OS X on my laptop. I like things to stay similar between them all so I can be consistent. My editor is one of the big things. This made something like TextMate hard to even look at. It’s supposed to be a great reasonably priced (40 euros) text editor for mac and mac only. Vim runs on pretty much everything. The problem is, I like to be able to see directory layouts, nice open buffer displays and a few other things that Vim isn’t nice for out of the box. I can live without them, but it’s not nearly as nice as I would like. Lucky for me, Alex Young wrote up instructions on how to enable the textmate like features in vim. I am excited and will be trying this as soon as I’m done here.

The end result is a cross platform, comfortable text editor for my coding needs. I would encourage you to look into it if you are looking for a cross platform solution or just want a really nice text editor. You will probably want a customized vimrc for everything you do as well. I’ll post mine after I get all this set up in it. It’s rather crazy (and mostly written by one of my friends, Saleem Abdulrasool).

UPDATE: Success! All the plugins are awesome and work exactly as they should. I uploaded my current vimrc. *nix wants it to be named .vimrc in your home directory and windows looks for _vimrc (i think) in the vim directory. If that doesn’t work (i’m more skeptical about windows; i haven’t used vim in windows for a while), check the vim documentation. View my vimrc at http://quad341.com/projects/vim.rc

The album starts off with a 2 track intro (of sorts). It is a very ambient introduction that seems to bring you to a dark and somewhat problematic location. It is another album that seems to want to take the listener on a trip, but this is a very different trip than what was seen in In Medias Res. In the second track, Distant Scenery, you get a bit of curiosity brimming in an otherwise desolate environment. The music become more interesting and much more chill than ambient. The same feeling gets much more intense as we enter Start, my personal favorite track of the album (though song 5, Stuck In a Loop, is very close). This takes in a lot move bass than a lot of chillout, but in a very cool way. I honestly was taken off guard by how cool this track really sounded to me. The two tracks really blended together well to give me a strong feeling. It seemed to calm down for a moment only to come rushing back again at full force. The track does conclude nicely before it seems that we move into Root Escape, the next track. Up to this point, you wouldn’t really know that Steam and Where The Skys End were done by the same artist easily. It is a very different starting feel. I really like this part.

Root Escape has actually been up on chilloutmixes.com for a very long time, but it isn’t the same version that is here. This version holds a much darker feel, but it does seem to bring something of a light to the end of the tunnel. I do get some of the feel of Steam starting to show here. Stuck In A Loop is the next track that seems very much like a bridge between the Steam-like ending part and the new style beginning part of the CD. It has a very interesting feel to start that slowly seems to bring some of the harsher tones that you might recognize from Steam into play. A subtle voice track is used at one part (too softly in my opinion; it seemed as though it could be a very cool sound but it is overpowered by the piano track). This track just seems to fade away until Obscure Scenery starts playing. Obscure Scenery starts really weird with a clapping sound. I wouldn’t call the sound a good way to start a track either. It’s somewhat harsh for coming out of a track that just faded to silence. This track seems to show the last of the new style before we seem to plunge very much into the older Steam style music from Cardamar. It has some of the same kind of weird, off sounds that sounded a bit experimental but not always the most fluid sound. The clapping in the background seems to really be out of place when it becomes more flowing. Rather abruptly it ends and moves to a burning sound of Dancing On The Furnace. This doesn’t start with a chillout feel at all and instead actually feels like it could be house or trance. Some strong but slow other sounds help to keep a somewhat ambient background for somewhat of a dance-inspired track. It feels very repetative to me (though for someone who enjoys house more, it might be great). It is followed by Chilling on the Furnace which seems to be a sort of rest afterwards. This is a quite nice chillout track. I can’t say that it struck me as particularly innovative, but the happy, somewhat jungle feel of the music is nice. It seems as though it could become something absolutely great if taken far enough. Unfortunately, it seems as though the track is restrained for some reason. It stays too traditional to be great.

After going through the first 8 tracks of the 19, you unfortunately have experience a lot of the better sections. The remainder of the CD is a lot like Chilling on the Furnace. I don’t mean the jungle feel, but I do mean the Steam-like style mixed with common or traditional chillout. It never gets increadibly complex nor simplistic. The sounds aren’t new nor revolutionary. Tears of a Man Who Never Cried (really cool name) is another track that is pretty cool, but I think it uses too much piano to be as cool as the beginning (but it is another cool track). The two tracks after that also start in a cool fashion, but the song progresses to just feel like another Steam-inspired track.

The end of the CD is disappointing. If it ended at Beyond the Stars, it would have ended in an interesting use of white-noise. Unfortunately there is the final track, Beyond the Infinite, that adds in an overused violin-ish sound that doesn’t sound particularly interesting by this point. For the close, the entire mix of sound just fades off without real conclusion. That is disappointing.

Overall, the CD is good. I would say that tracks 2-4 are not to be missed, but the rest is only as great as you felt about Steam (and you want a lot more of that). You can pick out the tracks you want and listen to previews using iTunes, so I would say that is your best bet if you are in doubt. I hope that in future Cardamar CDs we see much more of the front half of the cd and fall away from his original style.

The interface itself is different. You use the 2.5 in. touchscreen for everything normally. It isn’t cumbersome or anything if you do realize that it takes one tap to just wake up the interface. I actually see that as an advantage to stop stray taps from doing anything. Scrolling in songs is the only action that is a bit difficult to just use your fingers to do, but it isn’t impossible. Also, if you are anything like me, you only use next track and previous track; scrolling inside of tracks is a feature I pretty much stay away from.

The screen itself is bright and vibrant. I have yet to encode a movie and try it on the screen, but I imagine, although small, it does seem to have a good picture. Lines are crisp and colors seem very accurate.

The size and weight of the device are quite comfortable to carry. I left it in my pocket all day without even noticing it there. Also, walking with it seemed rather natural.

The device has two ports: a 5 pin usb mini b (the normal usb mini) and a 4 pin usb mini b (smaller than the other). The 5 pin is used for everything from data transfers to TV out if you buy the cable. The 4 pin is used for charging from the wall. I would suspect if you have a 4 pin cable, you could charge from your computer as well, but I have not tried it (i don’t have a usb a male to usb mini 4 pin b male cable laying around).

To transfer files, it mounts as a standard usb mass storage device and you can transfer files by copying folders into wherever you want. I used my ubuntu linux set up to copy my files over without any problems. The device seems a little slow (it seems to take a chunk of data, hesitate, then continue), but nothing too terrible. I do have to say that it deals with incomplete files well by playing what is there and then just going to the next track without any errors (I disconnected it early once).

My first impressions are to love this device. With the changable SD card slot that supports SDHC (the 4+GB SD cards), this device seems extremely versitile. It is fun to use, but the screen may be a bit small for active video watching. If you want a review from someone who has had it for longer, check out the AnythingButIPod review.

A 4GB model is about USD200 and the 2GB is currently about USD160-170

I admit that both this is not terribly easy to set up nor is it terribly hard. You have to modify 1 php file and include the required components on your web page. There is a full readme enclosed to help you get it set up.

If you have any questions or comments, please leave a comment!

Download the code

On a lighter note, I just got a new PMP: a Cowon D2. I also will give some feedback on that and give a link to the excellent review I read before purchasing (I need to get it out of my history at home). Hopefully all that tonight.

Also, Freefalling into Freedom (on chilloutmixes.com) is a great mix. The use of kettle was somewhat surprising but very well done. Check it out.

The tutorials are coming later still. I hope to finish them … um.. maybe by tuesday. So just hang in there! I made the reward better in compensation for the delay and will make it easier to get even without doing the optional third demo. Sorry for the delay.

Also, there is a new mix from Cardamar available. Honestly, i haven’t even listened to the full thing yet, so head over to chilloutmixes.com and check it out.