Musicalmidget’s Blog

This evening I paid another visit to the Apple shop in Meadowhall. There were three items on the shopping list. Firstly, my brother wanted a MacBook for his schoolwork and was ready to buy it. Also, I wanted to get my hands on some new software for my own iMac. I wanted iWork ‘08 since I was impressed by the trial and OS X 10.5 Leopard.

My brothers new MacBook was a breeze to setup and he’s now getting himself used to it. Once the OS X installation wizard finished I was a little surprised to see Tiger load up when we were told Leopard was in the box. It turned out the Leopard DVD was hidden under some papers. Whilst the new MacBook was updating to Leopard, I opened up my own copy of the update and began to update my own machine. We left the systems to it and went to watch an episode or two of Stargate Atlantis. We returned a little later to see two new installations of Leopard ready to launch.

I’m not going to say too much about Leopard yet until I’ve had a chance to play with it for a while, but my first impressions are quite positive. In the meantime, I thought I’d attach a few screen captures of Leopard running on my own iMac. If you’ve seen any of the publicity images for Leopard then you’ll probably not be seeing anything new here.

Firstly, the brand new desktop complete with 3D reflective dock.

Along with the new desktop comes a brand new Finder. I’m especially fond of how generic file icons have been replaced with thumbnails of each file. This makes it very easy to find exactly the file you’re looking for.

In addition to the existing Icon, List and Column views in the Finder, Leopard introduces Cover Flow view, similar to Cover Flow in iTunes. Again, this is a great way to quickly find exactly the file you’re looking for in a folder.

Quick Look is a new feature which allows you to quickly preview a file directly from the finder without the need to open it up in an application. Just click the spacebar or select the “Quick Look” option to preview the file. It’s also possible to quickly sample documents, presentations, music and video files directly from within Cover Flow.

The new dock isn’t just about looking great, it has a new feature called Stacks, which are essentially folders on the dock which open out to provide more shortcuts. For instance, I have an applications stack on the dock which quickly displays shortcuts to everything in my Applications folder when clicked. Similarly, the new downloads stack displays the files I’ve recently downloaded so as I can access them easily without needing to clutter the desktop. Stacks are displayed either as a fan or a grid depending on the number of files in the stack, or any custom option you may have already set.

I’m thrilled to finally be able to use the new Spaces feature in Leopard. Spaces aren’t a new concept, they’ve been around for a while in other operating systems including numerous Linux distributions, but I’m not really a Linux user. Spaces are essentially just additional desktops that you can easily flick between to keep your applications separate. For example, you could assign a space for general internet related applications such as a browser and email application, whilst loading a document in another. Whilst writing the document in space two, you can quickly switch to space one to look something up on the internet. It’s also easy to drag windows from one space to another and drag spaces around to change their order. I’m already finding the Spaces feature handy for keeping my different running applications grouped and clutter free.

Finally, front row has also changed slightly in Leopard. In fact, it looks rather similar to Apple TV.

I haven’t yet setup Time Machine, but I’m hoping to do so soon once I get a suitable external hard drive. There are no shortage of images of Time Machine dotted around the internet however and the online demonstration is definitely worth a look if you’re not sure what Time Machine is.

So there’s a peek at Leopard. I’m sure there’ll be some more Leopard related postings from me over the coming weeks too.

It’s hard to believe it’s been a month since my last posting here. Where has the last month gone? It’s largely because I’ve just started my third and final year at university. The first few weeks are always a bit hectic, but I’m expecting things to calm down in a couple of weeks and I should be appearing online again more regularly by then.

Over the summer months I blogged about a number of new items I’d bought, including my new sax, piano and iMac. Although they’re all great fun to use, there were some serious reasons behind buying them. I believed they would make my final year at university and indeed my life beyond that, a lot easier. Now that I’m a month into the new academic year, I’m already certain that is the case.

My new sax is wonderful to play and the included mouthpiece is also of better quality than the old one I was using. I’m already noticing a significant improvement in my tone and with more work on that over this final year, I hope to develop it further. Additionally, because it’s so much fun to play, I’ve been playing it more often. Because of that, I’m also making progress with improvisation, and again, I’m still a long way from perfect but I’m really having a great time working on it. The sax was definitely a good buy in my humble opinion.

The piano is also fun to play, but as I mentioned when I first posted about it, I’m not a serious piano player. In fact, I can play very little. The main reasons I bought it were to aid in my work and also to connect to a computer to interact with Sibelius and other music applications. Already, it has fulfilled these purposes. My arranging assignments require a lot of trial and error when it comes to working out which chords to use. With a full range keyboard at my side it’s proved very handy to quickly try a number of possible options on the piano before committing them to paper.

Similarly, the iMac has proved invaluable so far when it comes to university work. Sibelius works perfectly on the iMac, with the piano connected of course. iWork applications such as Pages and Numbers have already proved useful when writing assignments, and the general reliability and ease of use of the iMac on the whole have really impressed me. When my windows PC was struck by a strange virus last week (that Norton decided it could detect sometimes but do nothing about), my important university work was unharmed on my iMac and my assignments were submitted on time and without problem. Again, well worth the money I feel.

With that in mind, I’m eagerly awaiting the release of Mac OS 10.5 “Leopard” this Friday. Unfortunately, I’ll be away over the weekend but hope to get my copy sometime early next week. Watch this space, I intend to show it off.

Summer wouldn’t be summer without a spending spree, and oh boy have I been on one of those this year.

I’ve been hoping to get my hands on a mac machine for some time now. Earlier this year, I decided I’d finally buy one rather than just drooling over them on the internet. I did some thinking and decided to go out and buy a mac mini, but I’d wait until my second year exams were over first. Eventually, I finished my exams and once again visited the apple site for education to see what I might be able to afford. What I found was that the price of a mac mini with the addition of a new keyboard, mouse and monitor, wasn’t all that much cheaper than the 17 inch iMac. I’d seen the iMac in the Apple shop at Meadowhall and they we’re pretty nice.

To cut a long and quite boring story short, I wasn’t able to buy the iMac before going off to the Edinburgh Fringe this summer. It was a shame because I was itching to get my hands on one, but in the long run I’d say the wait paid off. One day whilst I was in Edinburgh, I logged onto CNet when I had a few minutes to spare, just to see what kind of news had been cropping up whilst I was gone. What did I see at the front of the news section? A brand new iMac range! They looked incredible and the specifications were even more impressive. I may have been foaming at the mouth.

For the same price as the 17 inch 2GHz model I nearly bought before going away, I managed to get a whopping 20 inch 2GHz model. Thank goodness I waited or else I’d have been fuming that I missed out on a brand new range.

Despite the fact that this shiny new iMac is easily the most eye catching thing at my desk, there’s a genuine reason for wanting one so badly. Macs are fantastic for musical folk like myself. The included GarageBand application is quite nice, but professional applications such as Sibelius and Cubase are compatible with macs. In fact, many of the top dogs in the industry use macs for musical production/recording/editing and so on. This machine is therefore going to be my development machine. By development, I mean both musical and internet developing.

On the musical side, my new piano connects nicely into the mac with a USB cable. Sibelius then picks up the piano as a MIDI device, allowing me to play music directly into the software. Additionally, Sibelius can use the piano to playback scores on the computer.

As for internet development, I’m finally a TextMate user. What a fantastic application! The only thing it doesn’t seem to have (unless I haven’t managed to find it yet) is an FTP browser similar to the FTP extension I’ve been using in PHPEdit on Windows. Aside from that however, it’s hard to find a fault with the application. I’d previously tried “E Text Editor”, which was a TextMate clone for Windows, but it was still a beta program and it just wasn’t the same. I’ve also found a nifty FTP program for Mac OS X called Cyberduck. Perhaps a strange name for an FTP client, and the duck icon in my dock tends to make people wonder what it’s for. Don’t be fooled though, it’s a very nice program. I love how most pieces of software written for mac have such nice to use interfaces. This is no exception.

Mac OS X has an Apache server included and I’m in the process of setting that up at the moment, as well as PHP and MySQL. Within a few days, I’m hoping the process of moving all development related stuff from my Windows PC onto the Mac will be completed. I haven’t yet found an IRC client for mac that I’m happy with, but I can live with mIRC on the PC for the moment.

As well as the lovely new iMac, I’ve got yet another new toy. Since I got my own sax, I’ve been playing a rather basic Yamaha YTS275. It’s a nice sax, but it’s only a student model. I thought perhaps it was about time to update that in time for my final year at university. I managed to pick up “the deal of my life” on a brand new Yamaha 62. The 62 is a professional level saxophone and it’s really great to play. I’m looking forward to getting back to university so as I can play it more often. For the moment however, the new “Gordon Goodwin’s Big Phat Band Play-Along” book is doing just fine.

I’ve been syaing it’s coming for a while, but the new MyBB Mods website finally went live today. The new website boasts a host of new features and improvements. I mentioned some of the important ones in the official announcement, mostly so as authors could begin making the required changes to their submissions as soon as possible. However, there are plenty of other things that weren’t in the announcement. Here are a few…

The statistics page has had a major overhaul. You can now view the latest submissions and updates, the most popular submissions and the highest rated. Additionally, for each, you can choose to view only submissions of a certain type. For example, I could click “most popular downloads”, and then filter the results using the options on the left to view the most popular plugins only, or the most popular themes, and so on.

With the help of some AJAX magic, you can edit your reviews inline, just like you can in MyBB or on the MyBB Ideas site.

When you make a submission, you can specify a link to a live demonstration of your mod or theme. If you enter an address here, it’s automatically shown to users along with the other options on the information page for your submission.

It’s not so much just me running the mods site anymore. I’ve had help from a number of people and I should really take this opportunity to thank Chris Boulton and Tikitiki for their help during the development of the new site. Together, we’ve really worked hard on this update and we hope you enjoy the new site!

I’ve recently returned from my second visit to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, with the Hull University Big Band. Great fun once again. I’ve been home about a week now. Tonight I noticed a film on channel 4 called “Festival”, made in 2005 and set during the Edinburgh Fringe.

I’ll not go into all the details of the story, but towards the end, there’s a comedy awards ceremony. Now, throughout the film I was noticing various Edinburgh locations and landmarks that I’ve seen whilst at the Fringe, such as the Royal Mile, Princes Street Parks, the Hilton Hotel, the meadows and so on. However, there was something quite familiar during the comedy award scenes.

It turns out, the location used for shooting the comedy awards part of the film was City, the nightclub we use as a venue for the big band show. I don’t really have any decent photos of the venue with the “lights on” to put up some comparisons, but the still images from the film below should be enough for anyone that was in or came to see the big band to recognise the surroundings.

All the familiar fringe surroundings made me wish I was still there. Roll on next year I say!

I’ve been working away pretty much all day everyday for the past week on the new MyBB Mods site, which is starting to take shape nicely now. There’s still a few issues to work out but most of the development is now on the admin side of things. I don’t know when it’ll be ready to go live though, so you’ll have to keep an eye out for information on that front.

What originally began as a relatively simple process of adding some new features to the site and perhaps improving the look a little bit, has blown into what is essentially an entire rewrite from the ground up. As I’m sure you can imagine, writing any site from scratch can be a little testing at times. It’s easy to get frustrated when things aren’t working as they should and it sometimes gets a little tedious when you’re at it for long periods of time. But, I’ve got a new “toy”, shall we say, that’s great for when you need ten minutes out from lines and lines of code.

It’s actually a little more than a toy. Enter, the brand spanking new Yamaha DGX-620 (with visible mess and clutter in the background).

A few weeks ago, I thought it would be a good idea to look for a new keyboard. My old one is quite outdated now and doesn’t even have full sized keys. I’m not really a pianist, but I am a budding composer. With both composition and orchestration modules to deal with in my third and final year of university, I thought it would definitely be beneficial to have a keyboard around, particularly if it was the full range and able to connect the computer for MIDI in/out. I had a look around online and went to a number of music shops and quickly realised that the budget I’d set originally, was only really going to get a much newer version of what I already had, in terms of functionality at least. So I upped the budget a bit, and came across the DGX-620.

This thing is absolutely huge. I knew it was a full range piano, but we thought it was going to fit in a specially cleared space. Boy were we wrong! The only place up here where it’ll fit and still connect to the computer, is slap bang in the middle of my floor. So, it gives me much less space for the moment, but each time I turn around from the PC, it’s there. That means, when I’ve been typing and typing lines of code all day and start to feel a short break is needed for my own sanity, what do I see when I turn around? “Well, since it’s there, I may as well play it for ten minutes“. And, ten minutes later, I’m refreshed, in a calm state of mind and ready to get back into it.

There you have it. That’s what’s been keeping me sane recently. It’s also hopefully something that’ll help me pass third year and be worth the trek to find it. It’s certainly something that relieves computer-related stress. I need to learn something other than Bill Bailey’s “BBC News” theme though.

You won’t have seen much of me over these last couple of days. I’ve not vanished off the face of the earth, at least not yet anyway. I’ve instead been beavering away at some of the many new features planned for MyBB Mods, particularly the submissions page. I posted a while ago that I’d started planning and putting together the new system, but the last couple of days I’ve been working almost constantly on turning the plans into a reality. There are so many things to do though, I’m nowhere near finished yet.

I’m very excited about some of the planned features and would love to show you them all, but I’m going to resist for the moment. I will give a related update on the submissions script though. Did I say submissions script rather than submissions page? I did. Thanks to the new features for the site, it simply isn’t feasible to keep all the submission options on one page. Rather, the new and improved script will be split into four steps, two of which are optional.

Step one is where the basic information about the submission is entered. A screenshot of step one is attached to this post. It’s largely the same as the last screenshot I posted, although there are a few differences. Can you spot them? Note that the image is cropped this time. That’s because some of the new features I’ve been working on were also displayed on the page, and tempting though it may be, I’m not ready to reveal them quite yet. I was up until 5AM in the morning working on this, largely because I was fighting as usual with the simplest of javascript code (another hint at something on the page maybe?).

Step two is where the actual submission file is uploaded. Why not allow that in step one you may ask? Well, during step one, a GUID (globally unique identifier) is generated for the submission. This GUID can be added to a the info function of a plugin before it is uploaded in step 2. By adding the GUID, users of the plugin will be able to check for plugin updates with only one click in the new Admin CP that you’ll see in MyBB 1.4. For more information on the feature, see Tikitiki’s related blog entry. The GUID is shown to the user during step two if they’re submitting a plugin, as are suggested instructions for adding the GUID to the plugin file. Below the GUID is the file upload field, which is obviously shown for all submissions. A screenshot of step two is also attached. Note that the “What is this?” and “Show me an example…” links load the associated content below in a javascript controlled drop-down (that wasn’t the javascript causing me problems, so what was? ). Also just a quick note that the existing submissions system has been generating GUIDs for new submissions since the end of March, although they haven’t yet been shown to users for implementation, since only a select few have access to the version checking feature at the moment. However, once MyBB 1.4 is released, users who already have submissions in the MyBB Mods database will be able to see their GUID (or generate one if their submission was made before the end of March 2007) from the site control panel.

Steps three and four are both related to some of the new features I’ve been working on. They’re also both entirely optional, so users who don’t want to make use of them don’t have to go through a submission process that is longer and more complicated than it needs to be. Instead, if a user decided not to make use of one of the features, they can simply skip the step and be done with it. I don’t have any screenshots of these new features for you just yet, but keep an eye on this space.

Although the submissions script still may change before it goes live, the current step four would provide some easy to find additional information about a submission, if the author decided to use it. Not any old information though, something specific. The current step three is also very exciting and could potentially benefit all MyBB users.

Am I being a little vague? All will be revealed soon.

I haven’t even scratched the surface on some of the other things I’ve been working on or have planned. But, after working until 5AM yesterday and from 11AM to now (about 3:30AM) today, I hope the hard work pays off and users can start enjoying the updated site soon.

For about a year now, perhaps more, I’ve been following the making of an independent film online. It generally takes a lot to get me interested in a film, especially one that isn’t finished, as was the case when I discovered this particular film. So, why is it I’ve been so interested?

If you’ve never been good at anything in your life, why would murder be any different?

Patrick has always had a somewhat combative relationship with his little sister Marilyn. But when she brings home her new sci-fi-soap star fiancé Ryan, it’s all out war. When Patrick fails to drive a wedge between the happy couple, he reaches for sharper instruments. Every family has a few skeletons in the closet; A Dog’s Breakfast is the nightmarishly funny mess Patrick makes when he tries to add another to his.

A Dog’s Breakfast is a head smacking, bone breaking, fiancé bashing romp, with a family that just loves themselves to pieces.

A Dog’s Breakfast is written and directed by David Hewlett, known by many as Dr. Rodney McKay on Stargate Atlantis. The cast of the film includes various other familiar faces from the Stargate universe, including Rachel Luttrell (Teyla Emmagan), Christopher Judge (Teal’c), Paul McGillion (Dr. Carson Beckett) and others. Throw that cast in with a comedy story written by David Hewlett and the whole thing starts to sound quite appealing.

Almost a year ago, a short clip from the film was released on YouTube by David Hewlett and partner and producer Jane Loughman. Within a matter of hours, more than 20,000 people had viewed the clip. A similar clip was released about three months later, which also proved quite popular. Finally, the official trailer went live just before Christmas.

Since the first trailer was released I’ve been eagerly awaiting the film. Today, there was finally some good news on that front.

A Dog’s Breakfast is available to download from the iTunes Movie Store and Amazon Unbox. That’s all well and good if you live in the United States, but for the rest of us elsewhere (who outnumber those in the states), we can still do nothing but wait. Thankfully though, an “international” release is due in early 2008. That’s still a long time to wait for a film, especially if you’ve been following it for the best part of a year. It is at least progress, and I look forward to finally seeing the film in all it’s glory.

Anyone that’s interested in the film can check it out on the official website:
http://dgeek.com/
http://adogsbreakfastmovie.com/

I’ve recently returned home from university after completing my second year. It’s apparently the summer break, but you wouldn’t know it from the weather. It’s rained almost constantly since I got home, and we’re not talking a little rain here, we’re talking torrential downpours that drainage systems across the region are having problems coping with. Numerous places in Doncaster are flooded, as are so many other places across Yorkshire and the north of England in general. I’m fairly sure the house I’ve just left behind in Hull is also flooded, since the news is reporting severe problems on the roads around the area. The news suggests water is knee-deep. It’s not quite that bad in Doncaster, but driving the car to the garage wasn’t fun this morning. Some roads were so waterlogged that the short 20 minute round trip took just short of an hour.

The weather has obviously had an effect on the first day of Wimbledon. A few matches have taken place, but the Henman/Moya match had to be suspended a short while ago. Probably quite frustrating for Tim Henman, since he was essentially only two points away from taking the first set. Wimbledon is really the only major sporting event I follow since I’ve never really been into any other sport. Thus, it’s typical that the tournament by disrupted in this way right from day one.

It’s really shaping up to be a typical “British Summer”. In other words, it’s basically a monsoon.

Updated 27/06/07: Doncaster is now one of the worst affected places in the UK. A large number of houses (particularly in the north of the town) have already been flooded, and it’s feared many more will flood if Ulley Dam bursts. I’ve also seen a number of videos online of Hull, which suggest that the house I’ve just left behind at uni has indeed flooded. Although I’ll not be living there anymore, had this happened a couple of weeks earlier I would probably be going through hell right now, especially since I lived on the ground floor.

Although we’re not in any immediate danger at home (very high above the river), the floods have caused major disruption across town. For that reason, it looks as though I’ll be spending the next few days indoors…still.

I’ve never been one for social networking on the internet, despite the fact it seems to be all the rage with people of my age. However, a little before Christmas, I decided to see what all the fuzz was about with Facebook. The last big networking craze seemed to be about MySpace, although I never really understood what it was about MySpace that made people like it so much. When I signed up to Facebook, I was actually quite surprised. It was something different. The “profile pages” were cleaner and the user interface was pretty nice to use. The photograph tagging system was also something I’d not seen on many other similar such sites. I’ve stuck with Facebook for a few months, but it seems that probably wont be the case for much longer.

The recent addition of “applications” to the site has in my eyes, made it more like MySpace than the fairly decent site it was before. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not bad to the extent that you click on someone’s page to have your music interrupted by some crappy rock clip blasting out that’s embedded in the page. That said, since the applications arrived, I’ve been constantly bombarded with “requests” to add the same applications as others on my friends list. I signed in this evening to find no less than 12 requests which had appeared in a matter of mere hours. Many of the requests were for applications, and they were mostly for applications which I had previously rejected numerous times. It seems it’s more a chore to deal with requests than to sign in and catch up with recent goings on. That strikes me as strange, since I thought the idea of Facebook was to make it a fun place for all.

The only social networking site I’ve ever been willing to use seriously, and it’s starting to get like the others that annoy me so much. Perhaps I’m a strange teenager 20 year old (bugger), but I don’t think I’m ever going to get on with this sort of thing.