Isolationism

I don’t usually comment on music as it’s a highly personal experience subject to individual tastes. But I couldn’t let this one pass by unmentioned.

The duo famous for turning the electronic music scene on its head in the 90’s is back—sort of. While the FSOL have released several new albums since their disappearance from the scene in 1995 after Dead Cities, most notably Translations, The Isness, its re-work album, The Otherness, Alice in Ultraland, and a few other releases of remix material/singles, although worthy of note here.

From the Archives comes in volumes 1–3; three separate ‘discs’ of around 70 minutes worth of FSOL tunes. “So fucking what,” you say, “when it’s all just the same shit we’ve been hearing for years played back in a different order?”

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Recently I heard back from Topher, a fellow Boodler who had asked me some time ago about some difficulties he’s been having running it under Ubuntu. While I have a PC here that dual-boots to Kubuntu 6.06, I confess that Gentoo is my desktop distro of choice, and Boodler seems to co-exist nicely without requiring any extra effort on my part.

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Lifted from Dreaming in Reality, it’s all you ever didn’t want to know about who/what I listen to.
A: Amon Tobin, Aphex Twin, Arovane, Autechre
B: Biosphere, Boards of Canada, Brain Pilot, Bob Marley, Blade Runner (OST)
C: Chrono Cross (OST), Chrono Trigger (OST), Charlatans UK, Children of Dune (OST)
D: Deathprod, Dune: Spice Opera, Dune (Space OST), Dead Can Dance
E: Enya, Electronic
F: Future Sound of London, Final Fantasy (OSTs)
G: Global Communication, Ghost in the Shell, The (OSTs), Grim Fandango (OST)
H: Hardfloor, Hitman (OSTs), Homeworld (OST), Hobbit, The (VG OST)
I: ILL Mitch
J: Jackson and his Computer Band, Jimi Hendrix
K: Kirité, Kiki’s Delivery Service (OST), Koudelka (OST), Katamari Damacy (OSTs)
L: Labradford, Lull
M: Meat Beat Manifesto, Mick Harris, Myst (OSTs), My Bloody Valentine, Maps & Diagrams
N: Nirvana, New Order, Neil D. Voss
O: O.Rang, Oöphoi, Origa, Orb, Orbital
P: Paul Schütze, Pete Namlook, Proem, Popeye (OST)
Q: … Nope.
R: Rapoon, Rez (OST)
S: Steve Roach, Spacer, Speedy J, SubtractiveLAD, Saint Etienne, Samurai Champloo (OSTs), Supergrass
T: Thomas Köner, Techno Animal, Tron 2.0 (OST)
U: Ulrich Schnauss, UmJammer Lammy (OST)
V: Vapourspace
W: Wings of Honneamise (OST), Wipeout, WOXL (OSTs)
X: Xenogears (OST)
Y: Young Gods, Yoshida Brothers,
Z: Zoviet*France, Zone of the Enders (OSTs)

I decided today that I would move my so-called “web assets” to DreamHost; the decision having been based chiefly on a few additional perks there combined with a few minor frustrations at the previuos joint. Any hosted sites are still on the old server and will stay there for at least the next few months unless you request otherwise; there’s no rush to migrate so I’m leaving things as they are over there. This website, on the other hand, has already been moved—and I doubt anyone was out there to notice the transition, anyway.

In the coming months I hope to spend some time cutting my teeth on a few Python projects to gain greater familiarity with the language and how it applies to the web (so far my experiences have chiefly involved writing lengthy shell-scripts for work, and the odd fiddling around with Boodler); I still like CherryPy but it seems as though TurboGears or Django might be better choices for me based on their sophistication and provided features—but it’s still too early to tell. Whichever I choose, at least now I’ll be able to host my projects on a public site without having to saturate my DSL connection to my home server.

A few friends and acquaintances are still stuck on pMachine and are considering converting to WordPress. I wish I could tell you the conversion is as simple as installing WordPress itself. What follows are a few suggestions on how to go about it, though, that might ease your transition somewhat.

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Since I wrote my original article on the subject of font rendering in Linux, a few things have happened: Freetype development has moved forward, and I’ve experimented quite a bit, always trying to improve on how fonts appear on screen. I’ve achieved significantly better results using the latest Freetype and Cairo LCD patches than was previously possible, and have finally spent a morning putting my experience in writing to help others with similar interests.

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I decided to spend my Friday working on a small side-project for work; as mentioned in a few earlier posts, I wanted to learn a bit of CherryPy and Cheetah, so it looks like this is my chance.

Since jEdit is my favourite text editor, and I couldn’t find an existing mode definition out there for Cheetah’s template (*.tmpl) format, I made one myself. Not exactly rocket science, but it might save someone a few minutes.

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My better half has relaunched her website, Dreaming in Reality, after having switched over to using WordPress after five years of using pMachine. We managed to successfully convert all of her posts not only from pMachine but from Blogger as well (which she had used for six months or so until late 2002). The process was a little tricky—not least because the domain that used to host the conversion script from pMachine -> Wordpress is now gone (thank you, Google cache)—but it’s done now.

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