planet g33k aotearoa

I didn't like the knobs on my Akai LPD8; they were too short & shiny. I wanted to use the same knobs that I put on my Polymorph, but (a) the LPD8 pot shafts were too short, and (b) the knobs were meant for knurled shafts and the LPD8 pots had "D" shafts.

Fortunately I was able to make some "adapters" by gluing some thick "cigar" matches together, cutting them down and then gluing them to the pot shafts with UHU glue. I added a bit of heatshrink to help hold them on.

The knobs fit over the end of the glued matchsticks, and it all worked quite well. As long as I don't clout the knobs too hard...

Well, 2010 has been and gone, but we're still here, tired but happy. Hopefully 2011 won't be quite so relentless, particularly once I've finally wrapped up the TRaCS 3 project (soon!).

This year I'll finally be exploring my synth collection and making some music (and this time I really mean it). I'll also be cataloguing it all on this site.

So what has happened in the last fifteen months?

• We went on a lovely family holiday to France and EuroDisney.
• I went back to NZ for 16 weeks to try and finish the Railways project (I failed).
• I have moved my "office" out of the small wooden shed into a nice new "log cabin", still at the bottom of the garden. It's lovely. Thanks, Bernard!
• Theo has started pre-school. And the changing of that final pooey nappy is inching ever closer...

Nginx setup (in /etc/nginx/sites-available/blog.johnp.net):

server {
    listen      80;
    server_name blog.johnp.net;
    access_log  /home/www/blog.johnp.net/log/access.log;
    error_log   /home/www/blog.johnp.net/log/error.log;

    # Common include & image files.
    location ^~ /i/ {
        alias   /home/www/i/;
    }
    location ^~ /images/ {
        alias   /home/www/images/;
    }
    # There are only two non-blog URIs to worry about.
    location = /favicon.ico {
        alias   /home/www/blog.johnp.net/htdocs/favicon.ico;
    }
    location = /robots.txt {
        alias   /home/www/blog.johnp.net/htdocs/robots.txt;
    }
    # Pass all other URLs to PyBlosxom running under Paste.
    location ~ / {
        fastcgi_pass    localhost:4999;
        fastcgi_param   PATH_INFO $request_uri;
        include         fastcgi_params;
    }
}

My little server is running Ubuntu, which has /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params for all the "standard" CGI variables. But PyBlosxom wanted PATH_INFO as well.

Python Paste setup (in /home/john/blog/etc/blog.ini):

#!/usr/bin/env paster
[default]
debug = false

[exe]
command = serve
daemon = true
reload = true
reload-interval = 120
monitor-restart = true
pid-file = /home/john/blog/etc/paster.pid
log-file = /home/john/blog/log/paster.log

[server:main]
use = egg:Flup#fcgi_thread
host = 127.0.0.1
port = 4999

[app:main]
paste.app_factory = Pyblosxom.pyblosxom:pyblosxom_app_factory
configpydir = /etc/pyblosxom

Unfortunately the "executable shell script" stuff mentioned in the docs doesn't work too well for me (which it does warn you about), so I've wrapped the paste serve invocation into a short script:

#!/bin/bash
# serve-blog.sh - Run Python Paste to serve my PyBlosxom blog.
# File Created: 14 October 2009
# Author: John Pallister (mailto:john@synchromesh.com)

CONFIG_FILE=/home/john/blog/etc/blog.ini

/usr/bin/paster serve --daemon \
    --reload \
    --reload-interval=120 \
    --monitor-restart \
    --pid-file=/home/john/blog/etc/paster.pid \
    --log-file=/home/john/blog/log/paster.log \
    $CONFIG_FILE \
    $*

# End of serve-blog.sh

I have added this script to my rc.local to run at boot time.

Relevant bits of my PyBlosxom setup (in /etc/pyblosxom/config.py):

# 2 Oct 09 JDP Note: I have modified /usr/share/python-support/pyblosxom/Pyblosxom/pyblosxom.py
# to read '.blog' files instead of '.txt' files.
#
# Unused variables:
#   renderer
#   default_flavour
#

py["datadir"] = "/home/john/blog/entries"

py["logdir"] = "/home/john/blog/log" # This doesn't seem to be used...
py["log_file"] = "/home/john/blog/log/pyblosxom.log"

py["log_level"] = "warning"
# The next two lines were good when debugging my archives plugin.
#py["log_level"] = "debug"
#py["renderer"] = "debug"

py["base_url"] = "http://blog.johnp.net"

py["flavourdir"] = "/home/john/blog/flavours"

py["plugin_dirs"] = ["/etc/pyblosxom/plugins", "/home/john/blog/plugins"]
py["load_plugins"] = ["disqus", "myarchives"]

py["cacheDriver"] = "entrypickle"
py["cacheConfig"] = "/var/run/pyblosxom-cache"

This is not the complete setup, but it has the interesting stuff. I copied the default HTML flavour files (content_type.html, date_head.html, foot.html, head.html, and story.html) into /home/john/blog/flavours/html.flav/ for tweaking.

Hopefully someone will find this useful.

Emboldened by my success in writing an archives plugin, I'd now like to do one for my blog categories and another to suck down my recent Delicious link posts.

I'd also like to re-do the layout so it doesn't look so primitive. I was reading a post on Peter Seibel's blog the other day, and his layout & HTML source looked pretty good, so I might do something based on that.

But none of these things are particularly urgent, so I think I'll move on to trying to get ABCL running on the Google App Engine (after having spent a fair bit of time getting JDEE and its dependencies set up in Emacs). But I do intend to do a post on my Nginx/Paste/PyBlosxom setup.

And now, having finished this post, it's time to go to bed.

Well, I've finally got around to moving this blog to PyBlosxom. I've written my own plugin to generate the archives at the top of the page; I'm also now running on Nginx as a web server, which talks to Python Paste via FastCGI. So the blog is now dynamically generated. The next thing is to try and integrate the Disqus comments plugin.

The other thing I need to do is move the rest of my personal site(s) to this server.

I have lots of things I'd like to blog about; it's great to finally have this sorted out.

And yes, it's been another very busy year. Since my last post my third child was born (Hi Theo!), my oldest has started school (Hi Bethany!) and we've moved half-way around the world for a while... so stay tuned for more news (OK, maybe "news" is the wrong word).

Via Tim Prebble's blog, some nice video podcasts by Christopher Willits from XLR8R TV. The story so far:

1. Part 1 (Ep. 42), the basics.
2. Part 2 (Ep. 46), using Ableton Live.
3. Part 3 (Ep. 52), a MIDI pickup and a GR-20.
4. Part 4 (Ep. 74), recording at SnowGhost.
5. Part 5 (Ep. 82), automation clips.

You can download nice 640-by-360 H.264-encoded QuickTime movies of each episode (approx. 100MB per video), and I thought it'd be nice to watch them on my Nokia 6234 phone. (These seem to be very popular here in New Zealand; at least, after I bought mine the next four people I met with a 3G phone also had a 6234.)

After reading a useful Nokia article on creating mobile videos, I fired up QuickTime 7 Pro and started exporting the movies with different settings. This is what I came up with for the best results (and about 28MB per video):

Audio export settings.

The nice thing about doing this myself is that I could keep the audio bandwidth high (so it sounded pleasant) while scrunching the video (so the phone could play it cleanly). The audio bitstream accounts for half the file size.

I would love to have time to actually try this stuff myself. I have a GK-2a pickup and an old GM-70 I picked up on Trade Me; one day I'll manage to get it all set up and have a play. (Perhaps by then I'll have a Graphtech Ghost setup and an Axon AX100 instead.)

I have managed to get trac-wiki.el and TRAMP set up under Emacs 23.0 on Windows. This means that I can now edit Trac wiki pages via XML-RPC and edit these blog posts via SSH. Sweet!

References:

• trac-wiki.el by Shun-ichi Goto.
• xml-rpc.el
• The Trac XML-RPC Plugin

.emacs configuration:

(add-to-list 'load-path "D:/src/other-lisp/emacs-lisp")
(require 'trac-wiki)

(trac-wiki-define-project "tracs3" "http://tracs3.synchromesh.com/trac/" t)

(let ((auth (base64-encode-string (format "%s:%s" "<my username>" "<my password>"))))
  (set (symbol-value 'url-basic-auth-storage)
       `(("tracs3.synchromesh.com:80" ("Restricted Access" . ,auth)))))

(autoload 'trac-wiki "trac-wiki" "Trac wiki editing entry-point." t)

My .emacs configuration for TRAMP is:

(require 'tramp)

(setq tramp-default-method "pscp"
      tramp-default-host   "synchromesh.com")

(add-to-list 'tramp-default-user-alist
	     '("pscp" ".*\\.synchromesh\\.com\\'" "<my username>"))

Hopefully this means I'll update both the TRaCS 3 wiki and this blog a bit more frequently...

I've started some notes on the future of Ngake. The idea is that I develop Ngake as a site all about Ngake sites. Simple, really.

I have recompiled mod_lisp2.c against Apache 2.2.8 for Windows using Visual C++ Express 2008. mod_lisp itself only needs the include files and libraries that are an optional part of the Apache binary installation, but I downloaded the Apache source (that includes Visual Studio 6 project files) so that I could check the compiler and linker settings.

My slightly modified mod_lisp2.c, the Visual C++ 9 project file and the Release build of the module are available in a .zip file. Please note the title of this blog when considering whether to use any of it.

The diff looks like this:

*** ../../download/programming/Other Lisp stuff/mod_lisp2 - svn.c Tue Apr  8 23:33:07 2008
--- mod_lisp2.c Mon Jun  2 18:15:31 2008
***************
*** 443,451 ****
  {
    char crlf[2] =  {0xd, 0xa};
    char length[16];
!   snprintf(length, 16, "%x", n_bytes);
    
!   apr_status_t status = write_lisp_data (socket, length, strlen(length));
    if ( status == APR_SUCCESS)
      {
        status = write_lisp_data (socket, crlf, 2);
--- 443,453 ----
  {
    char crlf[2] =  {0xd, 0xa};
    char length[16];
!   apr_status_t status;
! 
!   apr_snprintf(length, 16, "%x", n_bytes);    // 2 Jun 08 JDP
    
!   status = write_lisp_data (socket, length, strlen(length));
    if ( status == APR_SUCCESS)
      {
        status = write_lisp_data (socket, crlf, 2);