I completely forgot that today is CSS Naked Day. I got an IM from Donn to inform that my style sheet wasn’t loading and, to my partial credit, I instantly searched Google for CSS Naked Day to check what day it’s on. I had this recollection that I installed a plugin to make CSS Naked Day happen automatically every year.

Looks like it’s working!

So, once again this year I’m baring all and you can see my pure semantic HTML markup. Hopefully you can still find everything easily accessible on my site (whilst maybe not being quite as refined as the main design). This lasts for the full international day as such, so will stop when it becomes the 10th of April on the high seas between 180° and 172°30′W longitude.

If you’ve gone naked let us know in the comments and happy CSS Naked Day 2010!

I think I have probably successfully communicated the sense of my inordinate workload in recent blog posts, and if not, well that would be a good thing as everyone admires the stalwart type. Stiff upper lip, by Jove.

Either way, yes I’ve been a little busy and, as a result, consistently tired. Last night didn’t exactly help my cause. Today my eyes hurt.

Reason 1: Office Lock In

As the bells chimed midnight I realised I was clearly not going to finish the proposal on which I’d been attempting (and admirably failing) to gain closure.

Oh, speaking of bells, I’ll divert for one second here. I was speaking with dearest mother at 6pm Cambodian time yesterday, just when the Angelus rang out on her radio (it was mid-day there). She asked whether it brought back memories of home. I had no answer. On reflection, it vexed me as it always has, the enforced religious connotations it provokes indicate, to me, the continued hold the church maintains over the state, and hence it’s broadcasting bastion RTE.

Imagine if you will that RTE broadcast a Muslim prayer in order for us to face Mecca. Uproar. Is there any difference between the Angelus and that? One is bells, the other an enunciated prayer, but the significance is very similar. I believe the Angelus is there for the people of Ireland to reflect and pray for a minute at noon and 6pm. So yes, it vexes me that even in Cambodia I’m still exposed to the influence of Ireland’s Catholic Church, a church with no shortage of incredible controversy of late, yet still it holds its control.

Anyway, detour complete, where were we.

Ah yes, at the wee hour. I ventured forth outside the walls of my little office. The restaurant downstairs understandably quiet. To my surprise I realised that all had departed: customers, staff, and the goodly proprietor, my gracious landlord, Caspar. A quick phone call confirmed, I was indeed locked in.

I decided, in the spirit of the aforementioned stiffness of ones upper lip, to say tally ho and attack with renewed vigour the proposal. Freedom from my office imprisonment would arrive in due course.

Two hours later it did, by which time I was ‘in the zone’, so I stuck around for another 20 minutes to finalise things. I finally made it home close to three a.m.

Reason 2: Rathlin

On plonking my tired bones down on my bed I was greeted with a bleep from Rhodan (my phone). An instant message from a fellow Audio Terrorist.

Apparently my lack of physical presence in the country does not relieve me of my obligations when it comes to organising our yearly outing at Rathlin. A point which failed to surprise me as I had already allowed such thoughts to cross my mind.

It begged another question though. What am I doing? There’s been a vague thought that making it back to Ireland for Rathlin would be great, but I worry that on returning I’ll be broke and it will make sense to stay in Ireland for the foreseeable future. My journeying will be over.

But then, it’s Rathlin, my guaranteed yearly highlight. We work our bollox off and try to do something a little more ridiculous than the year before, and each year I feel more proud of what we can accomplish on a barren rock off the north coast of Ireland.

It’s April. Rathlin is August. Given my current workload I’ve got May, June, July. Hong Kong is on the cards. I also have an idea of my return to Ireland being circuitous, crossing the international date line and returning via Alaska, Vancouver, Toronto and New York. It’s just an idea though, and I hadn’t really thought about when it would occur.

As you can see, the whole instant messaging chat got my brain all befuddled and active. Result being no sleep til 4am for me.

So yeah. What was the point of this ramble?

I got to bed late? Possibly. I’m hoping it’s more that I needed to voice thoughts which, as a result of this late night, were troubling me. That would be vaguely better than me writing an essay to just say ‘Last night I didn’t get to be til 4am’, something which would sit better on Twitter. Someone, get me an editor!

P.S. My late meandering home did offer me the opportunity to witness four young western lads sitting outside the 24 hour mini-mart smoking spliffs and occasionally snorting what I assumed to be coke off the table at which they huddled.

Cubase 5.5 Features

At the recent Musikmesse conference Steinberg announced Cubase 5.5, a free update for registered Cubase 5 users (which makes me happy). In hearing the announcement I realised I missed out on a the 5.1.1 update which came out in December.

The main items that jump out at me are:

• Optimised performance (better multi-core resource handling)
• REVerence and LoopMash are more efficient
• New video engine (hopefully will make working on film scores better).
• Improved scrubbing
• Better channel batch export options

There’s more in there including a new automation panel (something I don’t think I ever use, but maybe will look at it in the new version), an improved Media Bay, and various GUI enhancements.

Full press release below from Steinberg’s announcement page.

Cubase 5.5 – More Features, More Enhancements

Cubase 5.5 and Cubase Studio 5.5 are the latest updates to Steinberg’s music production systems, featuring performance, automation and video enhancements, as well as refined beat tools and workflow improvements. Both updates will be freely available to download for registered users of Cubase 5 and Cubase Studio 5.

Optimized performance

The Cubase audio engine has been tweaked for an even better low-latency performance on systems with four or more CPU cores. Updated versions of LoopMash* and REVerence* reduce CPU demand for these plug-ins. The native x64 version of Cubase 5.5 now features an improved VST Bridge that boasts higher performance and dramatically enhanced compatibility with the majority of bridged 32-bit VST2.4 plug-ins.

More mixing and video

The automation panel has been given a smart facelift, and now sports additional automation functionality such as the new Fill modes. For even more convenient access to all required track, mixing and plug-in parameters, the Quick Control system has been expanded to Group, FX, Input and Output channels, while the setup of VST Connections has been simplified. A new Open GL accelerated video engine with full HD support*, scalable performance and the ability to play out videos via FireWire on Windows round out this much anticipated update.

Bigger beats

The Cubase Sample Editor has witnessed significant refinements when it comes to reworking with beat-laden loops, including a new sensitive hitpoint-detection algorithm and the introduction of a local timeline for the AudioWarp definition mode. Groove Agent ONE boasts extended Export/Import functionality, visual adjusting of sample start- and end point and 19 brand-new and exclusive drum kits made up of over 800 finest vintage drum machine samples. LoopMash* has been updated with track-dedicated level meters and volume controls plus a new global similarity threshold slider for controlling the overall density of a loop construct.

Workflow consolidation

The MediaBay interface has been redesigned to provide improved usability besides simply looking pretty neat. It now also comes with an integrated virtual keyboard and memo recorder to quickly record preview phrases. The Channel Batch Export provides user-definable file naming options and includes a non-modal audio export window which remains open for adjusting settings whenever required. Both the Infoline and the toolbars have been cleaned up and consolidated for improved legibility and faster access. The scrubbing function features a much smoother and acoustically accurate feedback for precision editing.

Yes, it’s completely unexciting news time for all of you out there, but quite important for me.

On Monday I decided, after a day of pins and needles in my right hand, to upgrade my home workspace from me sitting in front of my laptop on the kitchen table which was a terrible height, to me sitting in front of laptop on a special stand and second monitor (I do love those extra screens) and separate keyboard and mouse.

The desk chair height is a lot better, so hopefully this will assist in reducing any discomfort.

That is all.

This morning, in a very bleary state I said goodbye to my friend Ed, who had been visiting for the past week whilst on an extended holiday around South East Asia and beyond. It was great to have him here, even though I was extremely busy with work on websites and a new short film.

Whilst here he got to do all the tourist things, such as Toul Sleng, the Killing Fields, the Royal Palace and the National Museum (two of which I’m yet to do) and this morning headed off to Siem Reap to visit Angkor Watt (another item on my to-do list).

We also got to hang out doing fun things like butchering a million songs at karaoke on Saturday night (Bonnie Tyler would have been horrified).

If you’re looking for an entertaining time and happen to be in South East Asia, call into Phnom Penh

On Saturday morning I went for breakfast at a nice little place on riverside called Kandall House. Half way through the meal we noticed an unusual looking fellow stop nearby on the back of a moto. He was wearing something which could loosely be described as a turban, a sort of mock turban, something designed to protect his head from too much sun exposure, although, as it turned out, I think it could have been a little too late to save him.

He had what appeared to be a spliff hanging from his mouth and he proceeded to have an animated discussion with the moto driver. After this he spotted us and headed in our direction.

“Would you trust me to give me a dollar?” he said, his accent revealing him to be English, and he proceeded to place on the table an iPod touch, a point-and-shoot digital camera, his lighter, and his mobile phone. Sensing some potential entertainment value I agreed and fetched a dollar from my wallet. He headed off to an Internet café leaving his things on the table.

A few moments later he returned and retrieved his mobile on which he was obviously dependent, but left the iPod, camera and lighter with us (obviously not feeling the need to light his long ignored spliff).

This time his absence was much longer and I was left wondering whether he would return, and if we wanted to leave should I bring him his things. But then his moto driver came up to us and collected his things and proceeded to the Internet café 3 doors up. All very strange.

A while later he returned and sat down at our table.

He took out a notepad and borrowed a pen from the proprietor (well, took it out of the proprietor’s hand would be a better way to say it). On a page of his notepad he proceeded to draw around a stencil explaining that this was a company he worked for in England. I couldn’t quite make out what it said.

He then proceeded to write a number down, carefully noting it from him phone. Beside the number he wrote “OG” and “Ploce”. He explained that if I ever encountered trouble in Phnom Penh, or anywhere in Asia, I should call this number and ask for OG as he was with the police (he said pointing at the word “Ploce” on his note. He then leaned closer and said “Because I’m with the Police as well”, and put a finger to his lips indicating that we should keep this fact very quiet. He then wrote his name on the notepad and said just tell OG you know me, pointing at his name on the paper which read “Mr. K”.

How marvelously ludicrous this was all becoming. He then looked for other numbers in his phone, first adding the number of a Tuk-Tuk driver I could call if I was ever stuck and then adding the number of a doctor (which he spelt “Docter”). He said this doctor would look after me very well and wrote down the doctor’s name, which was “Mr. A”. He then drew a double arrow between his name and the doctor’s name and said to me triumphantly, “A to the motherfucking K”.

Upon completing this documenting of privileged information, he ripped out half of the pages in the notebook in order to give me the single page on which he had written, and meandered off, spliff still hanging from his bottom lip. I looked at the company name he had copied through the stencil and it read “ADDICT”. We watched as he interacted with various locals selling sunglasses or hammocks as they do up and down riverside, after one such interaction he came back to return the pen to the proprietor and said farewell again. Meandering here and there, he eventually engaged the services of another moto driver and went on his merry way, perhaps to conclude some secret mission.

Oh, as you might have guessed, I never saw my dollar again. If it was nothing more than a carefully concocted way to scam me out of a dollar I can’t imagine he makes too healthy a profit by going about it in this way.

Recently I decided to do some solid research into an e-commerce system called Magento Commerce. It’s an open-source system which has gotten some very positive feedback with regard to being extremely customisable, although possibly quite difficult to learn and find your way around initially.

As this is quite an important thing to research well before deciding to really invest the time becoming familiar with a product, I decided it would be worthwhile to not only follow various user guides and watch some screencast tutorials, but also to purchase a PDF book which was recommended over on stackoverflow.

Following that recommendation I proceeded to PHP Architect and, without thinking too much about the purchase, went ahead and bought the book. At the end of the payment process I was greeted with a message saying:

Thank you! In order to help protect against unauthorized transactions, your order requires manual verification from our staff; no further action is required on your part at this time.

Your order number is #xxxxx. We will notify via e-mail, usually within one business day, about any further steps required to complete the order.

I thought, oh, that’s fine, I’ll get an email looking to verify my email address or some such.

Thanks for buying, can I just get some DNA?

Today I checked my email and lo and behold there was an email with a subject of:

Order Confirmation #xxxxx—Documentation Request.

Documentation Request? Pardon. That seems a little weird. Reading the email did not make anything seem less strange.

PHP Architect Documentation Request

The email is displayed above. The main thing that amazes me is apparently, in order to complete this order, I have to print and sign the email, and make a photocopy of the front and back of my credit card and fax it to them.

There is no future, the now is 15 years ago

Em, perhaps I’ve missed something, but I was fairly sure that the internet was meant to make things easier, not more difficult. I wish to purchase a digital version of a book they have published, yet to do so I have to find a photocopier (which I don’t have), and a printer (I don’t have easy access to one of those either at the moment) AND a fax machine!! Hello?! A fax machine? I definitely don’t have a fax machine. Is this the 90′s? Nope, we’ve lived through an entire decade since the 90′s and thankfully I can get through my life without faxing things.

And why the hell do I have to send you a copy of my credit card front and back? I can’t think of a single other internet based purchase that has required this of me.

I’m going to email and cancel my purchase. This is one of the most retarded purchase processes I have every seen (only topped by our mammoth and incredibly woeful experience attempting to buy Adobe CS3 last year).

Sorry phparch.com (I’m not even going to give you link juice here), but you’ve instantly lost a purchase here. You could almost swear that they don’t want to sell you anything.

Tag Scanner Screen Capture

I’ve use a lot of applications to try and improve the state of my ridiculously over-sized music library. Some have been better than others, that’s for sure.

Over the last while I’ve been entirely falling back on a Russian developed application called TagScanner. It’s solid, dependable, doesn’t attempt to offer any crap-ware on install, receives a reasonable amount of updates (which work well!), and it allows you to happily tag every different sort of music file you can think of with pretty much any or all tag types. So whether you prefer mp3, OGG, or FLAC, TagScanner will do the job. You can search for matches in FreeDB, Discogs, Amazon or TrackType.org which means you’re definitely going to find a match for most albums in existence. Did I forget to mention the best bit? It’s free!

This also means that you’ve got access to a huge range of sources for album covers, letting you embed the album cover into each file as well as giving you the option to save a copy of the album cover locally.

Finally it also includes something I consider to be important – the renaming of actual file names in whatever format you choose. So, once I’ve gotten the correct tags for said album I just switch to the “Music Renamer” tab and using “%artist% – %album% – %track% – %title%”, I rename all the files. This keeps things, somewhat anally, neat in my filing system and also means that if I’m searching for music files through the OS rather than a music library, I can easily find what I’m looking for, it also means if something accidentally gets misplaced, I can track it down.

Spiel from TagScanner Website

TagScanner is a multifunction program for organizing and managing your music collection. It can edit tags of mostly state-of-the-art audio formats, rename files based on the tag information, generate tag information from filenames, and perform any transformations of the text from tags and filenames. Also you may get album info via online databases like freedb or Amazon. Supports ID3v1, ID3v2, Vorbis comments, APEv2, WindowsMedia and MP4(iTunes) tags. Powerful TAG editor with batch functions and special features. Playlist maker with ability to export playlists to HTML or Excel. Easy-to-use interface. Built-in player.

via The Ultimate TagScanner.

Merry Swing Dancers!

Last night, being a a Thursday night, means it’s swing dance night for me. This involves wrapping up work a little earlier than usual and heading to the Amrita Centre for Performing Arts where we have an hour and a half class courtesy of the excellent Phnom Penh Pswings.

After this we head to Equinox and get some food and do some less, un, structured dancing.

Last night was a little different though as we had live Gipsy Jazz, two French guys playing guitar and electric violin run through a small amp. They played some well know Django Reinhardt (sp!) and Stefan Grappelli, along with other great tunes.

Lots and lots of dancing ensued and much much fun was had.

Great night! Hopefully I’ll get some photos uploaded soon.

Update

I sorted out uploading a short video clip. Quality is fairly poor as I’m just using my old point and shoot digital, but it gives you an idea of what was going on. The band were great!

Update 2

I’ve also uploaded some photos from the night! You can check them out over here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/alexleonard2003/PhnomPenhPSwingsAtEquinox

It’s all getting very exciting in the world of WordPress. Version 3 isn’t a million miles away and includes some fantastic changes!

1. Menu Management built into core
   WooThemes introduced a menu manager and the WP team liked it so much that they asked if WooThemes wanted to contribute it to the core. It looks solid, straightforward, and very nice altogether.
2. Mµ Merge
   WordPress is merging the WordPress Mµ codebase. There’ll now just be one version which will do all that you need. This is great news.
3. BuddyPress for all (not specifically version 3 related)
   BuddyPress is now available as a plugin and works on standard WP installations! Not only that, there’s a new “Template Pack” plugin that ensures you can keep your own theme but get all that BuddyPress goodness.

The future is looking bright for the WP platform!

Read more over on wordpress.org:

• http://wordpress.org/development/2010/02/menus-merge-patch-sprint/
• http://wordpress.org/development/2010/02/buddypress-for-one-and-all-3/