We lost our Piggy last night. She was 15 years old and a very good girl.
Below is a video from Fire Island in 1998 of her younger (sight-filled) days. Roscoe was only 4 and Charlie was 18 months, swimming and romping with their friend Ethel. We miss them all.
Download (ctrl-click to Save As...)
MOTU released DP7 recently, and we’ve just installed our upgrade and 7.01 patch. I was very pleased to find that DP7 fixes many bugs introduced in DP6.
There are possibly many more things fixed, but these were specific DP6 gripes checked off my list.
CPU usage seems much improved, and I’m a huge fan of the UI refinements (namely the more slender automation line weight) and the inline channelstrips. After a bumpy DP6 ride, I feel in good hands again.
I’m not done tho. Next post:
Bugs from DP6 not yet fixed in DP 7.01…
Alot of research, planning, and work culminates this week with some exciting things. We’re changing notation programs, installing acoustics improvements in the studio, and completing vocal tracking of Mike’s demo with a visit from a Tony-winning Broadway star.
I’ve had misgivings about Finale’s seriousness toward the Mac ever since Sibelius released their Mac OS X native app 18 months before Finale. Some of Finale’s OS X implementation (i.e. printing parts as PDF) is still broken even 5 paid upgrades later. Finale’s yearly upgrades are $100, the file formats are not backwards compatible so upgrades are essentially mandatory, yet serious bugs remain unfixed and new features are rarely worth the cost (either pandering to the education market or playing catchup to Sibelius). In addition, I couldn’t even launch Finale 2008 (a “MOTU bug“, they said), but it mysteriously fixed itself in Finale 2009.
We’ve demoed Sibelius 6, tested MusicXML file transfers out of Finale, and had our friend and professional music copyist Alden Terry give us a quick walkthru of Sibelius. The tipping point was Sibelius’ support for ReWire — a potentially exponential timesaver letting us sync vocal arrangements in real-time to our DP projects. We’re convinced, and today we start our transition.
Most of the Sibelius vs. Finale posts I came across were horribly outdated, so I will be live-blogging our transition — warts and all. Look here for my series of blog posts about switching from Finale to Sibelius.
Last fall, we reconfigured our studio (featuring a snazzy custom desk from KK Audio). This new layout made the acoustic imperfections in our room even more troublesome, but theme park season and general lack of acoustic theory kept me from addressing it.
I saw a college friend’s studio pictures on facebook, and he pointed me in the direction of RealTraps. Mike and I had been reluctant to just ignorantly plaster our walls with (honestly, ugly) acoustic foam, so the panel design already appealed to us. I’ve been corresponding with RealTraps’ on-hand acoustics expert “JWL” who looked at photos of our room and was really helpful in identifying what configuration would give us the most improvements.
I’ve measured our room’s frequency response in its current state, and I’ll do the same afterward. Look here for the results!
Mixing is progressing nicely on the 3-song demo for the new Kevin Del Aguila/Michael Shaieb musical, “The Protagonists”. The last vocalist is now confirmed, as Mike wrote earlier.
This Thursday, we’re happy to have Alice Ripley (Next To Normal, The Rocky Horror Show) joining us in the studio singing the part of “Eagle Woman”.
(Fans of Go-Go Beach will also know her from demo track #14: “The Love That Cannot Be”.)
Alice recently won a Tony award for the role of “Diana” in the Broadway musical Next To Normal, and we’re thrilled to have her back again.
This blog and the Snowferno site both run WordPress on separate but identically-equipped Lunarpages servers. When I went to apply today’s WordPress 2.8.4 upgrade, one install was giving me “WP HTTP Error: name lookup timed out” messages and no upgrade button, while the other worked just fine. There are some workarounds detailed on the WordPress support site, but I wasn’t happy having to disable cURL on one host and not the other. It had to be something else…
The problem for me was caused by lines 1276-1277 of the WP_Http_Curl request() method in wp-includes/http.php:
1276 1277 | curl_setopt( $handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $r['timeout'] ); curl_setopt( $handle, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, $r['timeout'] ); |
I commented those lines out and threw in a line of debug code on line 1325 (after the curl_exec call)
1325 | print_r(curl_getinfo($handle)); |
and tested the cURL transport using Core Control. I found that my requests were simply taking longer than the timeout provided. I don’t know quite why, except to guess that one server must be just more swamped than the other.
I fixed it by building myself a little plugin that adds an action for the 'http_api_curl' action called on line 1315.
After enabling this fix, WP showed the 2.8.4 upgrade button on the Dashboard page, but the WordPress Development Blog and Plugins RSS feed boxes still showed timeout errors. So, I looked further and found a filter that catches and can modify $r['timeout'] in the WP_Http request() method on line 237.
Here is my barebones plugin code, which overrides all timeouts to a massive 15 seconds:
//adjustments to wp-includes/http.php timeout values to workaround slow server responses add_filter('http_request_args', 'bal_http_request_args', 100, 1); function bal_http_request_args($r) //called on line 237 { $r['timeout'] = 15; return $r; } add_action('http_api_curl', 'bal_http_api_curl', 100, 1); function bal_http_api_curl($handle) //called on line 1315 { curl_setopt( $handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 15 ); curl_setopt( $handle, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 15 ); }
I recommend you make sure this does not cause any other issues for your WP install. If you know how to make this code into a plugin, then you are capable enuf to be responsible for any adverse fallout. :) I only know this solved my immediate problem while still maintaining cURL functionality.
Our pal and Snowferno collaborator, Ben Britten Smith, asked me a while (weeks?) ago to port his website and blog over to a 100% WordPress-powered site. After we submitted the Snowferno build to Apple, I got working on it, and here’s how it turned out:
new benbritten.com homepage
Ben had previously rolled his own mini-CMS, but had started wanting to unify his site content with his K2-themed blog. Ben’s site is also his portfolio site, so I wouldn’t have normally gone 100% WordPress. But after becoming familiar with the family of WooThemes premium themes for the Snowferno site, we selected the VibrantCMS theme and I went about the business of porting his content over to the new site. Through a little bit of backend category magic, many of the WooThemes manage to separate the blogginess of WordPress Posts from the CMSness of Pages. I’m sure a whole host of plugins would have done something equivalent, but this way it came all built-in to the theme. We also weren’t quite ready to learn a whole new platform like Drupal or Joomla just for a cosmetic upgrade.
And who’d have thought I’d ever buy a theme for WordPress when there are so many good free ones out there. But the thing I do love is the profit motivation keeping WooThemes well-maintained. Just today I found and applied a big update to the VibrantCMS backend. After you consider how many hours they saved me just by including a new IE 8 stylesheet, you can hardly justify not using premium themes.
I needed to map his old URLs, so .htaccess handles routing the old blog permalinks from http://benbritten.com/blog/ up a level to the root http://benbritten.com/. Then since his old CMS used a querystring scheme similar to WordPress, I had to use the Redirection plugin to catch those incoming links.
If we don’t find anything tragic in this build, we’re gonna submit the current beta (Release Candidate 2) OF Snowferno to the App Store.
I searched the App Store for “hell” and came up with a slew of gory and disturbing games, which we’re certainly not. As long as that concept is okay for the store, I see no other reason we would be denied. But, still we’ll have our fingers crossed. It’s our first app, our baby!
In the meantime, the Leaderboard is completed and live. I’m actually quite proud of my own scores. (In spite of the fact that I knew *how* to solve most of the puzzles, you still have to *do* it. It’s more challenging than it seems!) And here’s another trailer:
Read more on our Snowferno development blog:
http://www.snowferno.com/2009/07/22/rc1-crasher-rc2-now-released-to-testers/
