Web 2.0 - I'm trying to keep up

So, I’m doing a post from my email to my blogger blog (boshy) that will then seed automatically to my facebook profile, and then share to my newsfeed with my facebook friends. Let’s see if it works….

 

Ill share my main links, and then see if anyone clicks on them as a result of me sending this to FB….

 

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www.penworks.net

www.penworks.co.uk

www.city.londonmet.ac.uk/~listerp/

 

John Martyn joins the great gig in the sky

So, he went. One legged and alcoholic and miserable. Once he was the best looking and sounding of the 60’s Britpack, and Solid Air was life changing if you heard it at the right moment.

Back in the day I knew a guy (Dave Moran) who had been a fanzine writer and sometime club promoter at the Troubadour, in Earls Court, London, in the early 60’s, when Paul Simon, John Martyn, Pentangle (Jansch et al), Sandy Denny etc had all been playing there. He told me Martyn was the most miserable of all of them, and was always sitting in a corner moaning. He said to me at the time that I (who was just about to sign my first proper record contract) should think carefully about my probable imminent music career, that it wasn’t what it was cracked up to be. He asked me ‘what will you do when it’s over?’, and told me that many musicians he had known in the 60’s had become inward and seriously depressed since then. He told me that Sandy Denny was one of them. He knew I was serious and he knew how much I cared about it. He kept telling me that the price was very high.

Later, I had the good fortune of playing a support gig with Roy Harper, another of the Britpack acoustic geniuses of the time. He was also an alcoholic, drinking a whole bottle of whiskey before he played his first set. He watched my set from the wings, and was very encouraging to me about what I was doing. But I could see he was finished as a man, shaking and empty and just dead in the eyes.

These were the successes, so god knows what happens to the failures, (of which I am one). My career imploded a few years later without really ever coming to anything, after much promise in the early days. But somehow, hearing how John Martyn ended up makes me feel a little more relieved that I didn’t succeed, that I somehow escaped a terrible future, which is weird.

Anyway, I feel sorry for what happened to him. God bless, and thanks for all the tunes.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/4389429/John-Martyn.html

My Employ at London Met

Quick post on what is currently happening at London Met.

I work at London Met, as an overworked unsung hero of the Hourly Paid variety. My students and I have a great time working hard, sometimes very hard, learning and sharing ideas about, in our case, computers and multimedia. We all love what we do, and enjoy each others company and abilities. When equipment doesn’t work, we huff and puff, and try another PC. When the heating breaks down, we put on our coats. When the air conditioning overloads, we put on our coats. When we can’t log in because the servers overload, we try another PC….and it goes on.

We love what we do, despite it all. It is the best we’ve got.

So go on, slag us off, we won’t care, we’ll just come back tomorrow, and try again.

It's all change round 'ere

I always thought this blog would die a natural death but it just keeps hanging on, like a body that’s brain dead but kept alive on a resuscitator. I should have signed the DNR agreement before I took it on.

 

Well, I’ve been away a long time, so long that I passed through Flash CS3 and on to CS4, learned a lot about Encore and Illustrator, used Reason 3 and then 4, got into Ableton Live, and tried a little DJing too. Now I’m on to playing the guitar again (Gretsch), just to keep my sanity intact, and my body pure in mind and spirit (somewhat).

 

I miss my old blogger friends like Spamnet and a few others. I miss Angel B Dean, and maybe fatkid was the most fun. I miss the idea of regular blogging and the feeling that we were all doing it. Sharing, learning, arguing, going forward into the future together.

 

Maybe the Barrack phenomenon will create a whole new generation of bloggerati, I dunno. Prbably not, it feels so *Bush era*.

 

Well, that’s it for now, so blog on, and do what you gotta do. I’m outta here for the time being.

Ambient Combinations - or what I listen to when coding

So I just found a good read off del.icio.us - dealing with what we all listen to while we code. That IS interesting. Apparently, what we listen to can directly effect how we code. As in, 'a great body of evidence' supporting the idea that language and code ability and processes use the same part of the brain (ala Chomsky's ideas on Human language). This may explain why we all appear to prefer instrumental music when working.....

I always favour the olde ambient electronica, with a little jazz at the fringes. My favourite web station is Epiphany Radio, which I'm sure I've blogged about before. Now I have to again, as the post on reddit mentions khavi.org which Epiphany champion on their playlists, is a great source of coding music. They are, with free mixes of great ambiente, lasting up to 2 hours at a throw. Perfect music, and free. They also have many eps and tracks available, and really are doing a great job at that netlabel thing. Go there, download some mixes, listen, and become a better programmer immediately.

Validate your FLV Player

As I blogged a while ago about validating flash swf, I thought it might be useful to include this code for validating flash flv player. I think this validates for xhtml strict so should be OK for everything else.

===========================================


<!-- flash -->
<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
data="../vid/flvplayer.swf?file=yourclip.flv&#038;autoStart=false
8755581808731033658"
width="340" height="286"
id="VideoPlayback">
<param name="movie"
value="../vid/flvplayer.swf?file=yourclip.flv&#038;autoStart=false
docId=8755581808731033658" />
<param name="allowScriptAcess"
value="sameDomain" />
<param name="quality" value="best"/>
<param name="bgcolor"value="#ffffff" />
<param name="scale" value="noScale"/>
<param name="salign" value="lb"/>
<param name="FlashVars"
value="playerMode=embedded" />
</object>
<a href="http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/alternates/"
title="get flash plug-in">Flash plug-in required</a>
<!-- end of flash -->

===========================================

Thx to Kev for his work on this.

For the main flash validation codes, go here

UPDATE

I CORRECTED THE CODE, WHICH HAD A MISSING '8' IN THE PARAM NAME MOVIE VALUE...IT WILL NOW WORK IN IE AS WELL AS FF AND OPERA... :)

I love my PHP...

I've been installing quite a few blog/CMS apps recently. Wordpress, Drupal, Movable Type, Flatpress. Also, the Maianscript Blog and a few other little apps like My Gallery and My Little Homepage.

All have lovely things about them, even the little ones, but overall I think Drupal is the best. Of course Wordpress is the most used/has lots of plug ins and lovely themes. But Drupal has fantastic multiuser features and a great interface (and also has lots of lovely themes). I think it's all down to what you want to do, and how much data you want to collect. Movable Type sits mainly in your cgi-bin, weird, but works great. Flatpress is fantastic considering it doesn't need any MySql. The small apps are fine at what they do, easy to implement and fit nicely into existing static sites.

I've also installed a beautiful Maianscript Gallery here (including full Paypal config), and will try out his Mp3 Cart and normal Cart too. Maianscriptworld rocks.

All in all, it's great to have a few apps on the go, and DB's to mess about with again, I feel more complete as a person.