We are pleased to announce that the new website for virtuosic, world renown, former Canadian Brass trumpet alum Ron Romm is now live!

This site is one of the first sites released incorporating a new service that has not been formally announced, which entails building a NetMusician site using a premade design template, saving money in not having to go through the design and branding process – perfect for musicians or companies on a strict budget! These templates can be downloaded or purchased from a site such as wordpress.org or templatemonster.com where there are many quality templates or “themes” to choose from. The TemplateMonster site provides customers an option to purchase exclusive rights over the design, for those that do not wish to have any site potentially using the same theme, although this additional feature is completely optional.

This site is also one of the first NetMusician sites to feature our new mobile-friendly media player, as well as several revamped versions of our existing modules in preparation of our next major launch. Details on this will be made available in the coming weeks/months!

1. Double tap your home icon while on the home screen to bring up a list of all running apps
2. Press and hold on the Mail icon until a red minus appears, press that minus

This will quit that currently running app (whereas pressing the home icon normally simply switches GUI control to a new process – i.e. the app is left to run in the background). Once the app has been quit and relaunched these errors should go away.

I can’t substantiate this, this is just a theory, but I suspect that since the iOS Mail client (and OS X Mail) are not particularly good about limiting the number of connections to an IMAP server to sane and reasonable numbers that these errors are generated when no more connections are permitted, and will go away on their own after unused connections timeout. Quitting the app presumably kills these IMAP connections in IMAP IDLE state.

We are pleased to release our first, and likely not last CodeIgniter Spark “TwitterFetcher”. TwitterFetcher fetches Twitter data via the provided Twitter username, and supports the following options:

• specify how many tweets to fetch
• specify whether tweets should be returned as JSON or XML data
• an optional cache file which allows local retrieval of tweets to reduce the number of outbound Twitter connections being made by your site
• a “cacheduration” parameter which dictates how often this cache file should be regenerated
• specify whether Twitter links embedded in tweets should be automatically formatted into clickable links
• support for multiple Twitter feeds
• a human friendly “created at” string that is attached to the object returned in the format of “minutes/days/hours ago”, seen frequently on various sites that display recent tweets
• set a cutoff number of days to fetch tweets for

Information on installing and using this Spark can be found here. The Github repository for this code can be found here.

For those of you not familiar with CodeIgniter Sparks, CodeIgniter Sparks are simply third-party CodeIgniter libraries that can be downloaded via the Sparks download manager and integrated into any existing CodeIgniter project (providing the Spark is compatible with the version of CodeIgniter you are using, which is ascertained by the Sparks download manager). This open source project is new, but appears to be quite promising and a great idea, we think! This Spark was built depending on the existing RestClient and Curl Spark, so already the philosophy behind this project in providing a means to share CodeIgniter code and in doing so reduce development time appears to have paid off!

If you have a block of code that should be invoked with each of your CodeIgniter controllers, you may not have found an obvious way to do this, other than using one controller for your entire project. Perhaps the CodeIgniter documentation could be more clear in this regard, but this can be done by creating a core controller via these instructions.

Simply put, dump all of your code that should be shared between controllers into application/core/MY_Controller.php (the prefix of this should be set to whatever your “subclass_prefix” is set as, and if you aren’t using a core system class already you’ll have to create the “core” folder). Once you’ve done so, make sure that each of your controllers extends MY_Controller rather than the default CI_Controller, and you’re set!

Pianist/composer Lynne Arriale is still experiencing the momentum of her previous release, a dizzying flurry of magazine covers, features and stellar critical accolades heralding her skills as an, “ingenious arranger, composer, soloist and performer . . . Arriale has made one of the most original ensemble recordings of 2009.  Nuance is an album of brilliant group interpretations, finely crafted original material, intricate arrangements and rapt solos”—DownBeat. Arriale strikes again with Convergence, an eloquent new work of power and strength exploring previously uncharted musical waters, featuring a new band of some of New York City’s most in-demand players, Bill McHenry on tenor sax, Omer Avital on bass & oud, and her stalwart new drummer (who also played on Nuance), Anthony Pinciotti.

On Convergence, Arriale displays prowess, agility and finesse, in leading her new band, and shining on a repertoire of six memorable originals and five unexpected pop tunes, ranging from the George Harrison and John Lennon’s classic, Here Comes the Sun, to Sting’s bluesy Sister Moon, the Rolling Stones’ Paint it Black, Blondie’s Call Me and Something I Can Never Have by Nine Inch Nails, all brilliantly re-imagined.  On her own compositions she demonstrates a broad compositional skill and a range of cultural and folkloric influences, from the straight ahead jazz romp on Elements to the mystical excitement of Dance Of The Rain’s Middle Eastern influences, featuring the highly acclaimed Israeli bassist, Omer Avital, on the oud.  Celtic influences are clearly evident as well, such as on the up-tempo tour de force, Here and Now and the more rhythmic, harmonic and cultural intersections of Convergence, enhanced by the fresh, lyrical voice of tenor saxophonist Bill McHenry.  Two stunning ballads, For Peace and The Simple Things, shine a light on the particular strength Arriale has of “tugging at the heart strings” (Randy Brecker), a trait that has made her a favorite of audiences internationally.

For more information about this release, to hear samples from this CD, and/or to purchase this CD please visit Lynne Arriale’s Website

/var/log/httpd/* 644 2 * $M1D0 GBJ /var/run/httpd.pid 30

this will also re-compress files that have already been compressed, giving you an endless number of files with suffixes such as 1.bz2.1.bz2, and so on. Instead, enter the following into your configuration:

/var/log/httpd/*.log 644 2 * $M1D0 GBJ /var/run/httpd.pid 30

This will zero in on your compressed files. Be sure to restart newsyslog once you have made this change (/etc/rc.d/newsyslog restart)

After an OS upgrade we started getting “unsupported filesystem layout” errors when invoking certain executables – this was causing fatal problems. While we are still investigating the cause of this, clearly a quick fix was needed. The files generating this error message all lived in /usr/local/lib/compat/pkg, and from a Google search it was discovered that this error message is generated with the presence of 32 bit software on a 64 bit OS (and likely vice versa). It can be determined for what architecture a file was designed for with the “file” command (file /path/to/file). Several of these files were indeed being reported as i386, so replacing these with 64 bit versions found in /usr/local/lib/compat was an effective fix to this problem. Perhaps there was some path change that was implemented and updating all installed packages would have solved this (although this doesn’t explain why 32 bit versions were ever installed). Unfortunately, there were some packages that were not upgraded prior to the OS upgrade.

At this time it is still being investigated whether this is a sufficient long term fix, as well as what installed these 32 bit files and how this can be prevented from happening again, but if you are getting this error, hopefully this blog post gives you an idea as to what you can do to restore the functionality of your machine!

This posting will attempt to deal with the basic strategies and choices available for providing this functionality. We won’t delve into actual code, but rather (hopefully) help point you in the right direction to tackle this on your own!

There seems to be a number of different forum threads and webpages that deal with constructing AJAX based file uploader tools that don’t require that the page be completely reloaded to process the file upload. In addition, this is further complicated by the desire for progress bars and other forms of feedback.

The most important caveat to understand is that AJAX based file uploaders are simply not possible the way one would expect. You can’t simply include the “enctype” property in an AJAX call and expect the upload to be processed with an AJAX post (or get). There are a few reasons for this, as far as we understand. One is the fact that different browsers have different file selection mechanisms, and therefore it is difficult to use Javascript to get the file name/path of a file in a consistent way across different browsers. Second is security – if a user’s browser were to be compromised this could perhaps result in the files on the user’s drive being somehow exposed. Thirdly, Javascript right now simply cannot manually encode files via AJAX. Perhaps a new web standard is in order to address all of these challenges? On the iOS devices, an Objective-C based API is needed to select and upload media stored on these devices, maybe some sort of similar bridge should be devised and ratified as a web standard?

Workarounds

No AJAX

One workaround is to simply concede this functionality and initialize a standard form submit via Javascript, resulting in a complete page load.

Use of an iframe

Another known workaround is to do the same, but to include the “target” attribute in the form tag that targets an iframe that you can keep concealed via CSS. Once the form submission has been received by the iframe you can call a parent function to “break out” of the frame via the following:

parent.yourFunction(arguments);

If you do this, don’t forget that this Javascript will have to be attached to the page being rendered by the iframe, not to any of its parent pages.

This solution is a little bit clunky in part because it uses frames which are themselves rather clunky. In fact, frames are generally discouraged as evidenced by the fact that the form “target” attribute is considered deprecated. However, it is still supported in all major browsers so long as you do not use the “strict” doctype. If you don’t mind instead using the transitional doctype, this is probably your best overall solution short of resorting to using Flash (see below)…

YUI IO Library

The YUI 3 IO library provides an easy way to handle uploading files within a form using an iframe with an example you can easily copy and paste and customize to your liking here. Using this library is recommended, particularly if you have other reasons to use YUI (and there are definitely many), since it does all of the heavy lifting for you, above. The example provided here is easy to follow and setup to work with your forms.

Flash

If you have used WordPress you will notice that its default uploader is Flash based. Flash will handle not only uploading tools that do not require your standard form submission, but also progress bars. The YUI IO/uploader library supports using either Flash or a hidden iframe.

Progress bars

If you are interested in providing a progress bar in PHP, your options are somewhat limited. You can use the APC utility to track file uploads and include a setTimeout to check on your upload periodically and update the progress bar accordingly, but this is a little ugly and also does not work with PHP CGI installations. If you use PHP and you really want to provide a progress bar, your best bet is probably to stick with Flash. This is what the WordPress team evidently decided to do since their default uploader is Flash based.