It’s all over the place lately and by it I mean life.  I thought finally living alone again would  be awesome and it is.  The freedom of living alone kicks arse, do what you want when you want because you want to; but it’s expensive and trying.

Mid last year I moved house to live on my own. The idea was that 3 bedrooms and a house all to myself would result in more time and room to do music.  The reality of it all was learning a new untreated room to mix tracks in and getting used to a different sound again.  I figured I’d get some reflection panels up, but landlords, life and banks don’t always agree because rent+alone = $$$$ (the lone factor).

It was pear shaped from the start but I remain(ed) optomistic; Most things are pear shaped in this world, it’s best to stay positive.  On inspection of the house it smelt like cat piss, i was assured it’d be fixed.  I moved in, it smelt like cat piss and the shower was blocked.  I complained, put nil odor and baking soda (or was it bi-carb soda? I dunno!) around the place and they sent a plumber to unblock the drain.

Slowly it smelt less of cat piss and one end of the house smelt as i described it “like hydrochloric acid is burning carpet or something”.  I’m not sure how long that hung around for but a few weeks after the cops arrested my then neighbour for making methamphetamine it went away, SURPRISE!  I guess if you smell acid in one end of your house and you know its not yours, you should probably holler to someone.

After all that things settled down for a while, I started mixing some tracks and making some music and then just before Christmas things started falling apart. I was watching T.V. one night when *POP* the right channel of audio dropped out on my TV.  Turned it off, Turned it on and hio it worked! Until the next time it did it, for a few weeks I pissed around turning the t.v. off and on every now and then because I don’t watch a lot of T.V.  It got more frequent so I sent it in for repair and long story short, 4 weeks after sending it in they’re sending me a new T.V.

Not long after that the started happening the right channel in my Beyer DT-250′s crapped out.  I sent them in for repair and waited weeks for them to get back just in time to record on Christmas break.  Tracks were recorded, tunes were edited, things were mixed.

Then the computer crapped out.  I was in the middle of a Goonbag Radio show when it just froze on me.  After power cycling it was OK for a few days and I’d been mixing a new track of ours.  I fired up another compressor and *BLERT* the computer froze, i rebooted and it never came back to life.  Money was tight because I’d just purchased a Group DIY 51x Alliance rack kit and then the computer died, GREAT!

Anyway, I scraped together my butt and bought a new low spec motherboard, CPU and RAM and threw it all together with a spare HDD I got from my boss.  It was faster and better than the old computer and after a week of bullshit I was back in session.

That’s when I notice my DT-250′s have a really dull left channel in comparison to the recently replaced right.   So back for repair they went, 2 weeks have passed and I’m still without them today.  Headphonics have been handling it well though there just seems to be a lot of wait for parts.

3-4 days after sending the headphones in, me and Luke notice somethings not right about the left speaker in my studio, panning L-R you can hear completely muffled tones out of the high side of the Left speaker, and the Right is perfect.  Now i just think I’m going insane, i’m scrutineering everything I hear with anal retentiveness and thinking “is that channel out?”.  I’m confident somethings just dead in the crossover for the speakers, so it should be a relatively easy fix.

There’s a positive side to all of this though, everything that was old and shit got upgraded and everything that was new or good is getting repaired at little or no cost.  I’m happy it all happened, i felt pretty shit about all of it at the time but in retrospect it’s worked out.

As a developer I’ve always subscribed to a couple of theories and one of those is something that was drilled into me in Maths in high school; Show your working out. It’s all very well to have the answer, but if you don’t understand how you got there, you have failed.

This is the number one thing I hate that software developers do, they overly abstract/dry code up until it’s no longer easily readable. They sacrifice all their readability, for dry, abstracted code.

The inherited_resources gem is a prime example of this, your controllers are left looking empty; It completely reverses the expected convention of having to define those restful methods. So when Newbie Programmer A arrives at your controller, there’s a whole heap of things going on he just doesn’t know about or understand.

By all means write dry, abstracted code, but think twice before abstracting every last inch out. Just like a lot of things in the world, abstracting and drying up your code is great when used in moderation.

Here’s a couple of track we’ve put up on soundcloud for demos, both are still far from finished and will be revisited more over the course of the year:

The Short & Curley

HELO servername
MAIL FROM: sender@adomain.com
RCPT TO: receiver@adomain.com
data
From: The Man Who Sent It 
Subject: A Test Message

This is a test message to ensure your mail is working on the mail server end.

You can safely disregard this message.
.

The Long Explanation

First you need to identify to the SMTP server, the helo command takes care of this. Most mail servers do a lot of anti-spam checks and for this reason it’s suggested the servername you provide should be a valid mail server. That servername should also resolve to whatever IP address you’re connnecting from (another antispam measure).

helo servername

Next you provide the email address you’re sending from. It doesn’t have to be a valid email adress, but many servers will use SPF to ensure you’re allowed to send for that user/domain.

mail from: sender@adomain.com

Follow that with the email you’re sending too. If an error is thrown after this, pay attention to the message as it generally means you’ve got something wrong or that mail can’t be accepted by this mail server for that email address.

rcpt to: receiver@adomain.com

After this we follow with the data command, this tells the email server that everything after this and up until a single line with a lone fullstop (.) is part of the email message. Some exceptions to this are things like the Subject and From lines, which are each used for pretty presentation in e-mail clients.

data
From: The Man Who Sent It 
Subject: Test Message

This is a test message to ensure your mail is working on the mail server end.

You can safely disregard this message.
.

Following all of this, hit enter again to queue the message for sending. A full stop (period) as the first and only character on a line informs the SMTP server that the message is finished.

Posted from Perth, Western Australia, Australia.

So what’s happened in just under a year that’s kept me away from ITALM and other things?

Wrote about music

Back in March 2009 I started Rhythm & Poetry, solo; It’s all me. I don’t think I realised how hard a task that was until I started doing it and I’ve been trying to enlist help ever since.  It’s fun to write about hip hop music in Australia, it gives me a new respect and appreciation for the art-form and for writing in general.  I never proclaim to be any kind of writer, but I try my best to do a thorough and correct job.  Writing reviews has always been a sore point, but I’ve created a way to keep it fun an interesting for me without destroying the joy of listening to a new album.

Wrote some music and started something

Myself and a mate Luke setup a small hip hop group called Selekt Few and we’re working on a lot of stuff.  We don’t profess to be some kind of amazing, we’re just doing our thing and speaking our minds.  Thanks to Luke and Matt-F we’ve setup a small room out the back of my place where I’m writing beats and we’re recording.  Things just fall into place sometimes and the setup was one of those moments, I had no DAW computer and Matt just happened to have a spare computer he wanted to get rid of .

Did some Landscaping

The Landscaper never dies, he only gets stronger.  For a while for me, it felt like The Landscaper was going to die but thank god it didn’t.  Chris is deep into Issue 3 at the moment and i think it may be approaching some kind of epic finale.  The Landscaper comic has by far been the most fun online stuff/thing/experiment I’ve ever had the pleasure of doing.  Chris just does stuff, talking is great, but he tells me doing is better (i should listen more).  We had another comic, we put out at the same time and The Landscaper got a lot of traction so we focused on that.  Also the other comic relied a lot on me writing things for Chris to draw, sure it’s easy, but hey.. I haven’t posted here in a year either.  There’s other comics on the backburners from other people we know that may very well come to Visual Assault this or next year, so keep your eyes out.

Launched Wantsi

Wantz.it is cool, but writing my own Rails app (Wantsi) was better and proved to be a fun exercise.  I’d debated about (and built) a project that never saw it’s real light of day for various reasons and i’d always argued that the best target market was actually something different.  It turns out someone else in another country was on my thought train and they built Wantz.it (hi guys, things are looking good over there!), I found wantz.it about half way through building Wantsi but wanted to keep building my own thing.

Got a new Job

Around 2 months ago I left PerthWeb to go work at The Frontier Group and I traded my PHP/Windows toolkit for a Ruby/OSX toolkit.  PerthWeb was a great place to work, but an opportunity arose to take on a new language and work in a bigger team, so I jumped at it. Thanks to all the crew at PerthWeb for 4 awesome years.  While working at Perth Web I wrote a lot of code into a core system myself and Ben designed and built over the years.  In a weird way I wish I didn’t have to leave my code baby behind to be nurtured by someone else, we built a framework/cms system from the ground up and after building with it for a few years had to leave it and it’s idioms behind.  Most people will never get that opportunity and I’ll probably never get that kind of opportunity again, but it only happened because we made it happen.

So what did I take away from my year long blog break?  Shit only happens or gets done when you stand up and do it.  What’s that, what about Tomorrow? I guess I’m gonna clean my room or something like that? It does feel nice to write this though, I guess we’ll talk again soon random internet people,  for iTALM 0.6, if not before.

If you need to work out what’s going on and how to fix it, head over and check out the post describing it. In the mean time I’ll be releasing an updated 0.5.2 later this evening with that fix and maybe a few extras.

1. Tweetdeck – Possibly the best iPhone application for Twitter, TweetDeck is great for users who are following lots of people.
2. Flickr – Yahoo’s Flickr iPhone application is used for browsing flickr and uploading your iPhone photos
3. eBay Mobile – eBay on the go, this application is great for just browsing eBay on the move or getting push reminders about watch items
4. FStream – FStream is great for listening to those streaming radio stations on the go!
5. Google Earth – The world at your fingertips, literally!
6. Google Mobile Application – Everything google Web App under one convenient roof, it’d be nice if the web apps launched inside this app though.
7. WordPress 2 – WordPress 2 is an application to manage your WordPress blog, whether it be creating and editing posts or trashing comments.
8. Uno™ – Do you know Uno? The great game, transformed to iPhone with multiplayer capabilities.  A free version is available if you don’t want multiplayer.
9. Facebook – Facebook, duh.
10. Stanza – Stanza is an e-book application for the iPhone and features purchasing through FeedBooks and others, plenty of free works available.
11. Apple iTunes Remote – A must for all iTunes users the remote will allow you to control iTunes over your wireless network.
12. RampChamp – Another addictive casual game, think shooting or ball toss at the carnival
13. Quota – Quota is an application for viewing your bandwidth quota with ISP’s like Telstra, iiNet, Optus, 3 Mobile, etc. free versions are available for iiNet and Optus
14. Peggle – The world’s most addictive casual game is now on the iPhone, waste time wherever you may be!
15. Oz Weather – The best weather tool for Australia on iPhone, Oz Weather data is supplied by BOM and doesn’t just provide numbers, but satellite imagery also.
16. OsXs – OsXs is a free Naught and Crosses game from some guys i know
17. NetNewsWire Premium (Free/Lite/Ad Version)
18. Domino’s Pizza – Sometimes you just want to order cheap pizza and have it meet you at home, this iPhone application will do just that
19. Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D – One of the first driving games to hit the iPhone, a fun little game
20. CardStar – CardStar is an application for storing the barcodes of all those customer loyalty cards you carry around, enter them all in CardStar and never carry them around in your wallet again.
21. Bomberman Touch 2 – Volcano Party – A classic video game, the Bomberman series for iPhone is everything you’d expect it to be and then some.

The system now works around the shortag [itunes] with the following attributes:

• url – a mandatory attribute, this a clean itms store url, fetched via link maker or your itunes client
• title – the string in this field is passed into the output link as the alt tag on the image/title of the link
• content – if you don’t use this field, the itms link image from the settings page is displayed, if you do use this attribute the string is output instead.

Saying all that you don’t need to type this stuff anyway, because that’s the beauty of the button being in both editors. Select text (it’ll be output as the content attribute) or don’t, click the button, search for what you want (or click manual url) and be quickly prompted through the process.  If you enter nothing in the box? It’ll still enter someting like <Artist Name>-<Album name> out for you.

I think this is a nice step forward for the plugin, your feedback is appreciated, the general consensus seems to be to drop feedback over at the article page but i’m now closing that, so please leave your feedback on this post.