SteamSHIFT

Old now but good:

A Wooster Exclusive: Banksy’s Travel Photos

(Via Wooster Collective / A Celebration of Street Art.)

I have made the move to Wordpress. It was pretty painless really; I had to write a script to pull my blojsom data into wp and another to forward visitors to the old location to the new one, trying to ensure they end up where they are supposed to.

So all good. It also means that I can switch off the java application server, which has got to lighten the load.

I have also moved 5 other blogs to their new homes.

I’ll clean up my blojsom to wordpress importer code and post here in the next few days.

Ooh and how do you like the new theme? I have adapted Vanilla Mist’s excellent Connections. I’ll probably do my own down the line as I get to know wp a bit better.

SteamSHIFT out.

Assuming you are using the most up to date version of Quicksilver, make sure you have installed the Image Manipulation Actions plug-in…

(more…)

I’m currently evaluating using a Wordpress install instead of the current Blojsom that I am using - it has some big advantages for me:

1. I am a PHP developer by day, so I can figure out how to hack it pretty easily.
2. I can install it nicely at the URL of my choice - in this case, it will be http://blog.steamshift.com - much nicer than all the blojsom/blog/default/ business - ick!
3. Templates look to be a piece of cake.
4. Instant fix / alterations - Blojsom seems to need the appserver restarting in order to get template changes to show up.

Any folk out there got any reasons for / against a move from Blojsom to WordPress?

I think I am decided. Wordpress is a nice system with tons of support, plug-ins and being PHP/MySQL is easy for me to maintain, adapt and hack. I am now in the process of writing a php script to pull my data in from blojsom (I’ll post it for anyone who might need it). It should be done in the next day or so; blojsom is pretty cool because it uses simple flat html files - easy to grab.

Anyway, I’ll keep posting here until I am happy with the new blog look and feel. I think I’ll also give it a little style revamp while I’m at it. Nothing major just a refresh (maybe based on a new template).

SteamSHIFT out.

On Monday just gone (27th Feb 2006), I did a gig with Gojira using quartz composer. Various things conspired to ensure that I had not had a chance to test out how the triggers on our drummer’s kit would fit into what I was doing. So I plugged everything in, made sure I was receiving the signal from the kit and got ready for the gig. This now comes back to the discussion from a few weeks ago about being able to alter compositions on the fly:- as we were playing I was able to add (or copy) new midi notes nodes and connect them into existing triggers, all in real time taking effect instantly; awesome! Which kind of brings me to a conclusion … for me, the editor interface is not something I want to lose when using quartz composer, and therefore, rather than re-inventing the wheel by adding similar functionality into my own app, here is what I’d like to see …

(more…)

Strainings: “Strainings is a tactile, sound and light installation contained in a silo. The many interpretations of the word ’strain’ embrace all of this: to sift and to sort, as well as to stretch and pull a string. In Strainings the audience decides what should be heard and seen.

By pulling strings, they change the mesh of the strainer/ the large web. Light, sounds and images are strained and created.

By Anders-Petter Andersson, Birgitta Cappelen and Fredrik Olofsson at MusicalFieldsForever.”

(Via we make money not art.)

There seems to be a lot of complaining about the new mac minis, and their graphics card (or lack thereof). However, maybe there are a couple of things to consider:- 1. they are said not to be hugely fast, but certainly faster than the current cards, 2. you can put 2Gb of RAM in one of these new machines. The latter has got to make a difference? I for one always try to max out the RAM in any machine I have - this is obviously even more critical when your graphics card shares the RAM.

We’ll just have to wait for some benchmarks on these. It’d be very interesting to see how they compare to my older (1.5Ghz) Powerbook (and how well they run quartz composer).

SteamSHIFT out.