Back to Basics and Soul of the Funky Drummers
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I recently aquired two new drumming DVDs: Dave Weckl’s ‘Back to Basics’, and Jabo Starks and Clyde Stubblefield’s ‘Soul of the Funky Drummers’. While both DVDs are infinitely excellent and highly recommended, I feel that Dave Weckl’s video much more educational. Actually, out of all of my drumming DVDs ever purchased, ‘Back to Basics’ is probably the best one I’ve ever watched. Dave shows how he seats new heads, give tips on posture and how to sit, how to hold the sticks, and even a segment on how to use brushes. The only criticism that I have is that there is no included charts in the video nor captioned in the video itself. Rod Morganstein’s video ‘Putting it all Together’ was great in that respect. Rod slowed down a lot of his complex beats, and transcribed the charts as captions which was very helpful. Despite this oversight, the technique and good drum karma that I gained from playing along with ‘Back to Basics’ was invaluable. |
Rsync
Rsync is a great tool that allows you to trade network bandwidth for CPU bandwidth. It’s great for keeping a mirrored directory current on a remote system. I’m currently using it to mirror involution.com two different machines in two different states to minimize the chances that I lose any of my hard work.
This is the command that I use for the backup:
rsync -ave ssh --include .htaccess /var/www/html/ tony@backupsite1:www/ rsync -ave ssh --include .htaccess /var/www/html/ tony@backupsite2:www/
It’s Done
Involution.com is now running on Wordpress. I’m not 100% happy with the CSS, but it looks fairly close to my original design. I didn’t hack the Wordpress PHP at all, so my installation is a clean 1.52 with an involution.com theme that I’ll GPL and post to codex once I’ve cleaned up a couple of things. Overall, I’m pretty happy with all of the cool stuff that’s possible with Wordpress and all of the plugins and themes that are available. I’ve retained livejournal mirroring, and added commenting, an Atom feed, and a more coherent HTML structure (have you ever looked at the old involution HTML?). Also, I’m messing around with k2 as well. I actually made a modified k2 theme this weekend, but I HATED it after I was done, and decided to retain the original involution.com look and feel while porting the back-end to Wordpress. I want to port some of the k2 code over to the involution theme, especially the AJAX commenting and searching… I’d also like to incorporate my bloxor and gallery into the main Wordpress CMS as well.
Involution.com On Wordpress (Almost)
Well, I have ported the entire involution.com backend to wordpress. This post should automagically mirror to my livejournal as well as my new beta wordpress blog. Wheeeeeeh.
Hill of Life
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I managed to run “The Hill of Life” portion of the Austin Greenbelt yesterday. Here is satellite map GPS goodness of the run. |
Bloxor works with Flock
I tried out this new Flock browser this morning, however, it appears that it unfortunately does not support running bloxor. I’m downloading their source code now….
Update: this was my bad, I was attempting to gain XPConnect privileges into Flock, but it doesn’t observe my Firefox user_prefs.js.
Update2: It still doesn’t run JavaScript code that was signed with a dummy certificate.
16th Place in HEB Hairy Man 5K
I ran 16th out of 201 people in the HEB 5K Race. I wrote some perl to read in the Word file that was sent (huh?), and output results in a sane format here.
Involution.com Now OPML Indexed
In addition to exporting blogrolls with OPML, you can index your entire web site with it! Currently, there isn’t a lot you can do with OPML files, but this is rapidly changing. You can see my entire site map in opml format by clicking here.. I’m currently working on extending bloxor to allow opml browsing in addition to rss. I have seen the future, and it’s going to arrive in OPML format. David Winer , the father of RSS, had the idea of this new use of OPML last month with some instigation by Robert Scoble.
I believe that in the near future, most sites will self index using OPML. I wrote three OPML adaptors for involution.com very quickly, so it’s very simple to do. The only problem that I see with it is that it would be better implemented as a temporary table than a dynamic view of the data on a site. Right now, I’m indexing a bunch of gallery and legacy files in addition to my new fangled blog database. In addition, I think I’m probably going to bite the bullet and move my entire site over to WordPress or MovableType soon, and handle OPML indexing in a temporary table that is updated as content is added rather than polling my entire site for this metadata after the fact.
Now With RSS 2.0 Feed
I just added an RSS 2.0 feed with proper date formatting (this works in bloxor). If you need such a thing, you know where to look.
The Chase and Baker Orchestrion
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In my travels this weekend, I made it out to Lampasas, Tejas to the Country Kitchen restaurant right off 183. In the restaurant, we were seated directly across from this very strange player piano-looking thing that had a bass drum, snare drum, wood block, cow bell, and tambourine all operated via a piano roll and pneumatic beaters. I googled for the manufacturer, “Chase and Baker”, and not much turned up. After some more research, I found out that these multi-instrument playing machines are called orchestrions. Coin-operated player pianos and orchestrions started appearing in 1898, and by the late 1920s they were everywhere. After the invention of the phonograph and radio, these machines weren’t really commercially viable due to their immense complexity and reliance on scores of moving parts and pneumatic devices. Orchestrions faded into obscurity very quickly, and that’s probably why I had never seen one before. |
