December 17, 2008 at 4:07 pm · Filed under Software, The blog

I upgraded tumble*jalada (which is running on a server running Lighttpd) to WordPress 2.7 on release, and everything seemed to be OK – the upgrade was actually very quick and easy. I had set up my WordPress installation to use SVN so it was a one line svn sw command.

However I had a problem, scheduled posts stopped working. I knew from previous problems with scheduled posts that they are produced by wp-cron.php running for requests to the blog and if the time has gone past for the scheduled post to be posted, it causes it to be posted. I took a look in my lighttpd log file, and discovered this error was being produced by wp-cron.php being accessed:

2008-12-16 13:04:56: (request.c.1110) POST-request, but content-length missing -> 411

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December 3, 2008 at 11:04 pm · Filed under Apple, Software

After being pointed in the right direction by x5315, who suggested I remove my location bar to save on display space (not so important on my external display, but more useful on my actual MacBook display), I have now also removed my bookmark bar, and intend to learn the shortcut keys for them (cmd+# where # is position number of the bookmark). I must say I’m enjoying the minimalism, and being made to use keyboard shortcuts is speeding up my browsing. Though sometimes the location bar decides to stick on, haven’t worked out why but I’m keeping an eye on it (a simple cmd+shift+\ gets rid of it again).

Read more about how to do this yourself on macfanboy.co.uk

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December 1, 2008 at 8:40 pm · Filed under Software

I’ve been using Spotify for a while now, and it looks like they are getting ready for prime-time as they have been giving out invites all over the place (I’ve given out 5, and I have another 5 queued up waiting to be given out, so if you’ve come here looking for an invite, leave a comment!), which is classic Gmail-type behavior for testing load.

I enjoy using it, and everyone I’ve shown it to has been immediately impressed and overwhelmed by the library available to them, and end up spending time browsing through skipping through songs going ‘oh this is a good one!’ or ‘oh I haven’t heard this before!’. Read the rest of this entry »

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November 22, 2008 at 2:50 pm · Filed under Software

x5315 and I have recently moved our blogs to our own VPS hosted at Xen Europe, and due to the limited RAM available (256MB) we decided to experiment with using Lighttpd in place of Apache, because it’s meant to be easier on the RAM and faster – even for dynamic sites like WordPress. Lighttpd is missing a few Apache compatibilities though, and one of the biggest is .htaccess. Lighttpd handles URL rewrites through the ‘mod_rewrite‘ Lighttpd module, and rewrites are added to the main config file (or included in). However mod_rewrite for Lighttpd does not provide the full functionality of Apache rewrites, so instead mod_magnet can be used (even without mod_rewrite, thanks Robert) to perform the rewrites for WordPress.
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October 16, 2008 at 4:09 pm · Filed under Software

Spotify sounds like a music listeners dream come true. It’s a way of listening to a huge library of music for free, and completely legally. If you don’t like the adverts the free version comes with you can pay just £10 a month for the privilege of unlimited music all the time, or just 99p for 24 hours of ad-free music (ideal for a party or something like that). To be honest though, the adverts are less intrusive than a commercial radio station, so it’s no big deal. Also, as I’m in the UK, Spotify feeds me UK adverts – which I appreciate (you never know, something interesting might come up). It runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux under Wine, and is a very small (just a couple of megabytes) download.

The interface is very clean. I’d like a proper way of browsing by genre without having to use a search function (genre:”folk” for example), but other than that it does it’s job well. It’s a small request – but I’d quite like it to scrobble to last.fm what I’m listening to.

There’s clearly a lot of music here, and it’s not obscure stuff by any means. Sure, there’s some gaps in the collection, but overall it looks pretty good.

As I just have a free account, I have no invites I can give out. However you can go to the Spotify website, and request an invite there. I only requested one a few weeks ago, so it’s definitely worth requesting if you’re interested in checking this great application out. I think Spotify definitely has the potential to become very popular, and could push companies like Apple to do more than just 30 second samples for songs. However I’m not sure their £10 subscription model will catch on, as similar services such as Napster offer the same functionality for similar prices, but also offer additional features like downloading the tracks to your portable music players. I definitely think the ‘99p for 24 hours of ad-free music’ model is a great idea though; it’s a sign that the people at Spotify really understand what people want from their music.

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September 2, 2008 at 8:44 pm · Filed under Software

A few things that weren’t answered by the comic or pre-release information.

• You can make a desktop shortcut for any webpage, not just ones that support Google Gears, though a website with Gears (such as Remember the Milk) automatically asks if you want a desktop shortcut in the same way.
• Google Gears is integrated by default, no surprise there.
• I’ve heard a couple of reports already that Gmail seems slower in Google Chrome which seems ironic. I’ve tried it, and scrolling seems to be heavy on the CPU (and a bit sluggish).
• The OmniBox fades most of the URL, leaving only the actual domain black. This was something that I believe was being suggested for Firefox, and is a useful visual aid to help avoid phishing scams.
• The options box is fairly thin on the ground, separated into 3 tabs: Basics, Minor Tweaks, and Under the Hood.
• You can search both history and downloads (which open in separate tabs)
• You can edit the keywords for the automatic searches (that appear when you use a search box anywhere on the web) in the options. Useful.
• Search on page highlights results, also searches through text boxes.

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August 30, 2008 at 5:52 pm · Filed under Software

Tobywuk writes:

Im just wondering, how do you write your blog entries to your wordpress blog?
Eg.. I find it a pain having to visit my blog, log in, click write new entry… then write it, then tag it, then put it in a category and then finally publish it. There must be a better way, or is this how you do it?

I personally just use the WordPress admin page, coupled with the Turbo setting using Google Gears for Safari Beta to try and make it a bit more snappy. But I can understand the clamour for a desktop client. I recommend giving MarsEdit or Ecto a try on Mac OSX (both are trialware), and Windows Live Writer on Windows (free). There’s also a relevant Lifehacker article with more comments and programs to try.

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August 27, 2008 at 3:24 pm · Filed under Software

MixWizard expressed interest in trying out my Compilation Tag Modifier script, but I agree having to install Strawberry Perl and compile a bunch of modules on Windows is a pain, so I looked into packaging the script into an EXE complete with modules. PAR Packager seemed a good choice, so I used that and gave him the EXE. But he found that it wouldn’t work, it would crash like this:

Finding directories...done, found 276 directories
Checking directories for valid music files...done, now have 247 directories
Finding directories with more than 2 artists...
Unknown encoding 'UTF-16' at MP3/Tag/ID3v2.pm line 1921

I tried using an eval statement to catch error messages and ignore them, but that didn’t seem to work. I couldn’t understand why the script ran fine on it’s own, but didn’t when packaged together. I googled around a bit, and discovered someone having a similar trouble, and there was a solution. I tried it, and it now works!

The problem was, the Encode module uses an eval statement of it’s own, and PAR Packager doesn’t know what modules that will load without actually running the script. So I ran the script myself with an extra line of code:

print STDERR "$_\n" for grep {/Encode/} sort keys %INC;

Which allowed me to see what encode modules are loaded, and then I ‘use’d them explicitly in the script. I packaged it again, and now it works!

I’ll probably be releasing a packaged EXE soon, I just need MixWizard to test it himself.

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August 26, 2008 at 4:43 pm · Filed under Software

I couldn’t sleep in the taxi on the way to Bristol Airport at 4 o’clock in the morning to catch the plane to Cyprus for my vacation. Instead I worked out how to improve my MP3 and M4A Compilation Tag Modifier script (I really need to think of a decent name for it). I decided it needed to work through your music library itself, without needing to be moved around all the directories by the user. It also needed to be intelligent and work out which albums were compilation albums based on the number of artists. And finally, it needed to ask the user if everything is OK (something that could in future be made an option, but for now you have to go through with it), just in case it’s got something wrong.

Today I sat down and coded all of these things, and also used it as an excuse to try out git, which was fun.

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August 15, 2008 at 6:11 pm · Filed under Software

My music collection is very varied, amongst it are quite a few compilation dance albums, which often have different artists listed for every single track. This is fine, but makes browsing by artist impossible on an iPod or in the iTunes library, as so many of them are just single tracks from compilation dance albums. I decided to fix the issue. Read the rest of this entry »

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