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Archive for March, 2008

What happened to the Aulochrome?

March 24th, 2008 1 comment

Francois Louis, a Belgian instrument maker, invented the instrument back in 2001. I found the idea, the mechanism, and everything about it amazing!

Basically, the instrument is two Soprano Saxes stuck together. The connection point being the mouthpiece that has two reeds on it that the player blows through. Also there is one set of keys. The player can choose to have both of the horns to play in unison or for them to be off by a certain interval.

After they were produced, I stopped really hearing about the instrument. The initial reaction was great, but then… Then one day I went to Symphony Space in Manhattan to hear an Ode to Coltrane’s late period and Joe Lovano played the thing. It was magical! I wish I could’ve got a recording of it. It was like out of another world.

Currently there’s only one track recorded with the instrument, that by Lovano and it was before he really had a handle on the instrument. At the concert he was really just on another level with it. In the recording he’s a bit out of tune. It’s interesting to hear, but I wish there was some new stuff/other stuff out there.

Also, I think that just two of them were made. Please, mass produce this thing! I want to start seeing it out there. Along with alto, tenor, and bari versions. I think I would flip if this thing were made in a Bari version and James Carter got a hold of it. Don’t think anyone else would be able to handle it…

One of the craziest things about the instrument is the effects that can be produced by taking advantage of the fact that the two horns’ waves come out so close to each other.

Aulochrome site

Lovano recording session

Categories: Music Tags:

Multiple Desktops in Gutsy Gibbon

March 24th, 2008 No comments

I like having the Cube setup in my environment. To properly set it up of course activate the cube, but you’ll also need to have the desktops setup properly.

From ‘general options’ go to the ‘Desktop Size’ tab and set ‘Horizontal Virtual Size’ to 4 and the other to options to 1.

Categories: Ubuntu Tags:

Subversion – ‘No repository found’ error

March 20th, 2008 2 comments

I was getting a “No repository found in” error which was a result of starting up subversion wrong. Even if you’re in the directory where svn resides you need to call the “-r” option on “svnserve”

svnserve -d -r svn

Another problem I ran into was that my user needed permission to change the files from Ubuntu. To aleviate that run:

sudo chown -R user home-directory/

Categories: Subversion, Ubuntu Tags:

Django through Apache on Ubuntu

March 14th, 2008 No comments

To: /etc/apache2/httpd.conf
Add:

<Location "/">
SetHandler python-program
PythonHandler django.core.handlers.modpython
SetEnv DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE <project>.settings
PythonDebug On
PythonPath "['/parent', '/parent/project'] + sys.path"
</Location>

I found the instructions a bit confusing on the site. So I hope this clears up things a bit. My thought is they think the setup for live systems and where those files reside is different in the minds of the developers although that pathway isn’t really brought to light in the docs. It’s kind of hinted at, but here it goes.

In order to get my project up on Apache I had to include both the path for my project as well as its parent. The reason being is that it needs to be able to tie into your settings.py file and wants to know the project that’s a part of. In order to get that relationship it needs the folder of the project itself. I also added the path for the project so that it could tie into the applications.

What this means.
Replace <project>: with the name of your project
Replace /parent:  with the directory of the parent directory to your project
Replace /parent/project: with the directory of your project
Save the file and then restart apache:

apache2ctl restart

Categories: Apache, Django, Ubuntu Tags:

Installing Django from SVN and setting up django-registration (on Ubuntu)

March 14th, 2008 No comments

Go to the shell and navigate to a directory that you want to leave the Django codebase. then enter the following code to check out the current codebase from Django:
svn co http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/trunk/ django-trunk

Next you will need to make a symbolic link to the Django codebase:

sudo ln -s `pwd`/django-trunk/django/ /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/django

Link to django-admin, which is used to create Django projects:

sudo ln -s `pwd`/django-trunk/django/bin/django-admin.py /usr/local/bin

Make sure not to use regular apostrophes around pwd or else you could run into an error with your libraries.  I was getting this error (since the mapping was going to the wrong place)
Traceback (most recent call last):

File "manage.py", line 2, in <module>
from django.core.management import execute_manager
ImportError: No module named django.core.management

Django registration

svn checkout http://django-registration.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/registration/ registration/
sudo ln -s `pwd`/registration /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/registration

Categories: Django, Linux, MSSQL, Ubuntu Tags:

Accepting NULL value in URL

March 10th, 2008 No comments

Within my Django project I wanted to have a page within the site for example “/page”. For that site I want there to be an optional value the page can take. So any of the following examples are acceptable: “/page/1″, “/page/2″, “/page”

There are two ways to do this.

First way (which is probably the right way) is to use the urls.py to handle this logic, like this:


(r'^pages/$', 'my_messages', {'page': page}),
(r'^pages/(\d*)$', 'my_messages'),

The other way is to handle it within the view with the following check:

if page == u'':

Categories: Django Tags:

Inclusion Tag

March 7th, 2008 4 comments

While putting a site together I was trying to clean up the code a bit and insert a piece of logic in a couple places. In some frameworks this concept is called a “component.” Regardless, I found out that Django had this thing called an Inclusion Tag. Which allows you to insert the output from a function/template pair into another template.

The resources online confused me a bit, so here’s the summary of what you need to do.

First create a folder named “templatetags” within your application’s directory. Within that folder you will need to add two files, one named “__init__.py” and the other the name of your tags, I’ve named it “tags.py”. This name is important since it will be the way you call this piece of code. You will also need to add a template for this “component”, I named mine “temp_mesages.html”

The tags.py file looks like this:

from lamalo.microBlogApp.models
import Message Profile
from django import template

register = template.Library()

@register.inclusion_tag('temp_messages.html')
def show_messages(userProfile):
message_list = Message.objects.filter(profile=userProfile).order_by('-timestamp')[:5]
return {'message_list': message_list}

temp_messages.html looks like this

{% for message in message_list %}
&lt;table border="1" width="100%"&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;
&lt;td&gt;{{ message.timestamp|date:"F j, Y h:i:s A" }}: {{ message.text }}&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;/table&gt;
{% endfor %}

Now the code is ready to be used… The way that you make use of it is by first loading the tags.py by calling ‘load tags’ and then calling the function. This code goes within one of your templates:

{% load tags %}
{% show_messages userProfile %}
Categories: Django Tags: