...nwood...

Ever been listening to a tune and wondered if there exists a chart for it in one of the commonly used fake books? The thoughtful folks at SeventhString.co.uk have provided a searchable database they call The Fake Book Index. Just type in a song title to see what books provide a lead sheet. (See the instructions at the bottom of the page for how to save your preferences of what books to search etc.)

Since I use this all the time while listening to music online I took a few minutes to create a bookmarklet for the search. Now I can simply highlight a song title on a web page and click the FB button on my Firefox toolbar to search the Fake Book Index. If I click FB with nothing highlighted, I am prompted for a title.

I try not to post too much by the same artist, but it would be wrong not to make some mention of Sufjan Steven's performance at Zellerbach last night. The quantity of artistic expression was daunting. Sufjan was joined by members of the Pacific Mozart Ensemble which included 6-8 strings, a five piece brass section and a twenty voice chorus. There were somewhere around 36 people on stage for two solid hours of music. This show resembled more a symphonic pastiche of overtures and laments than a rock concert. Adding to the theatrics, the instrumentalists all paraded on stage wearing hybrid bird-butterfly costumes. Sufjan looked mystical and angelic as he rocked back and forth while playing guitar - wings flapping behind him in slow motion. In another pensive moment at the piano with bowed head, his wings folded forward suggesting...bear with me...reverse metamorphosis to traumatic experiences of a larval childhood.

Might need to get these from another location, so I'm posting them...

Every once in a while I receive detailed music reviews from a music afficionado who shall be known here as Big Dewey. With his permission I'm reposting his capsule reviews of a few jazz DVDs:

Roland Kirk Live at the Montreux Jazz Festival 1972

This is an absolutely stunning video and features
great songs like Volunteered Slavery and Serenade to a
Cuckoo. I also would extremely very highly recommend a
Roland Kirk cd out called I Talk to the Spirits where
the entire album Kirk only plays the flute. Whether

I abandoned the previously blogged phpWiki in favor of the much more
user friendly and elegant MediaWiki
application. MediaWiki, another Apache-MySQL-PHP application, is the
workhorse behind Wikipedia, among other great wikis. One of the most annoying problems that I quickly ran into with phpWiki was that the application began complaining about "conflicting" edits as I made subsequent edits to the same page. Leveraging my programmer impatience, I did minimal troubleshooting and began searching for a different wiki solution.

1. I already had Cygwin installed. http://cygwin.com/
2. Grabbed these Cygwin ispell binaries: ftp://ftp.franken.de/pub/win32/develop/gnuwin32/cygwin/porters/Humblet_Pierre_A/V1.1/ispell-3.2.06-cygwin-1.3-bin.tar.gz (Here's the README.)
3. From the Cygwin shell:
   

    cd / #change to cygwin root dir impt!
   tar zxvf [path/to/tarball/]cygwin-1.3-bin.tar.gz
   

4. At the Windows desktop right-click My Computer and choose Properties, click the Advanced tab and then the Environment Variables button.
   

2006-08-17: I just followed these directions using Thunderbird 1.5.0.5 for Windows, External Editor v.072 and emacs 21.3. Everything works.

On the subject of using external editors with Mozilla products, I discovered that there is a very nice extension for Thunderbird: External Editor. Thanks to Philip Nilsson maintainer of the (now defunct?) extension Editus Externus for referencing this extension.

Note: External Editor (Globs.org) works with Thunderbird. To get the same functionality with Firefox textareas, the best thing that I've found is Mozex 1.07.1 mentioned in How to have a qwiki at work: Mozdev, Emacs and PHPWiki.

As a one-time English major, I celebrate some twisted
pride in documenting my code and projects. In my zeal I've created a slew of text files, many with similar names,
many with deprecated info. How I could organize this
mess in such a way that it would be intelligible to another?
Moreover, how can I improve my own ability to quickly locate
information (full text searching) and deftly navigate related documents?

My problem seemed a perfect excuse to learn more about wikis and how I could tweek my familiar tools to make authoring a wiki quick and convenient.

Purpose: Clean out a directory tree without deleting the directories or destroying their permissions. Don't delete files with certain extensions no matter where they are encountered. This is used to clean out a directory tree before using cvs export to publish new code.

clean_dir.php is pretty hastily hacked together - I'm sure others have written similar routines more gracefully - but it presented some interesting challenges:

• I han't written php for the shell for a while. Had to review how to take user input from STDIN. Had to use ob_flush() to get win32 to display preliminary text before waiting for input .
  
  

A few quick words about Pear Lake Hut this past weekend (4/15-17). Our fearless crew (Justin Desantis, Jen Evans, Roger Miller, Jen Jackson, John Melvin and myself) after a unanimous decision on tall stacks of pancakes at the Wuksachi restaurant (no wussy Mama Bear orders in this group!) departed the Wolverton trailhead at about 10:30 am.

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