Musicalmidget’s Blog

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.

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 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.

This weekend is quite a significant one for the MyBB Group. As I’m sure you’re aware by now, MyBB 1.2 was released yesterday. It’s great to finally get MyBB 1.2 out there for the public to use. A lot of work has gone into this release and we hope it’ll be apparent in the finished product. Many new features have been included in the release and much of the code has been improved to allow for a more stable and efficient product. You can read more about the improvements in MyBB 1.2 in the official release announcement on the MyBB Community Forums.

It’s also a rather sad time for us this weekend, as developer Peter will be leaving the us to attend the Li Po Chun United World College in Hong Kong. We wish him all the best there and hope to see him again soon. He has contributed greatly to MyBB and his participation will be missed.

With 1.2 finally released, many plugin/theme authors are now directing their attention to updating their work in order to make it compatible with the new release. I’ll be doing the same too in a short while, once I’ve completed the MyBB Mods upgrade to 1.2. I shall probably only update my popular downloads first and then work on the rest depending on the demand for each. Unfortunately, many of my mods/plugins have had very little attention of late and any recent updates have largely been only compatibility updates. Soon however, some of my more popular plugins (such as the Board Message, Shoutbox and Downloads Section plugins will all recieve a major re-write. The code will be improved and some requested features will be added. More info on that soon.