some sunsets from the past spring/summer

Just got back from a pretty nice vacation – in this order: Williamsburg, VA – Hilton Head, SC (base camp) – Savannah, GA – Charelston, SC – Hilton Head, SC (chilled for a day) – Williamsburg, VA – back to Bkln, NY (9 days)

Last week we launched the newly redesigned usmagazine.com… Has a cool new look and it’s backend is much more structured which should make it easier to create new sections/features down the road as well as keep everything much “cleaner” code-wise. It is now built on a much better framework (IMHO) that uses MVC principals much better than the old site’s framework.

I am pushing to add user registration on the site next… as soon as all the wrinkles have been ironed out of this first iteration of the new site, hopefully.

I feel like there are still some performance issues but no one but me seems to be noticing anything. I’m definitely going to look into it more when I get back from a long deserved (IMHO) vacation…

This year, I finally got to the Vision Fest… It was really great… I went Wednesday and Friday nights – the best session by far was the Ayler Project on Friday night. The Ayler Project was made up of Roy Campbell (t), William Parker , Joe McPhee and Warren Smith a at Abrons Arts Center in the lower east side. Apparently, they are coming out with an album next year which I am dying to get. (Hope I’m not disappointed).

But there was other really good stuff too (Charles Gayle, Sun Ra Arkestra) and I got a buttload of great cd’s (which I haven’t done in a while) so overall, I was really glad that I didn’t miss the shows this year! (It made me feel like I was in college in Baltimore again)

Here’s a review of Friday night

We’re starting a new Symfony project soon at work (new job since my last post, oh so long ago).  Anyway, I’m pretty excited to start using the framework.

And, as a random little sidenote, here’s a link to a blog post I stumbled upon about clearing session variables in Symfony:

$this->getUser()->getParameterHolder()->clear();
$this->getUser()->getAttributeHolder()->clear();

http://eatmymonkeydust.com/2008/08/symfony-security-sessions-not-cleared-when-logging-out/

My external drive died last Tuesday…  Dagnabbit!  and of course I hadn’t backed anything up…  looks like I’m going to have to cough up some dough for data recovery…  I would try something like GetDataBack (http://www.runtime.org/howto_datarecovery.pdf) but the drive doesn’t show up in windows explorer or even spin…

If anyone has any ideas, I’d love to hear them.

Added a couple of nifty new things to the site.  The Most useful one is the lastfm audio player widget that I aded to the mus.so des homepage.

Also, a spiffy information visualization of the artists in the collection has been added.  It was created using the Google AJAX visualization API.

Well, If you really must know, it’s been going very slowly.  I’ve been working on hooky-kid for a long time and I just finished a small piece I made as an xmas gift.  They’re all on this page in the last row – http://ahsodes.com/auto_thumb_generator.php

Did a little bit of prettification the other day.  added graphics for the ratings on individual album pages.

Given, not every album is rated.  I’d like to make it so that users can rank albums, too, rather than just admins…  We’ll need to implement some sort of registration system, first.  (hopefully coming before next December.

Hey, finally made it so that anyone can leave opinions, remarks, what have you on individual album pages.  It’s just a home-brewed system that I may need to take down if there is abuse.  But check it aht while it’s open for anyone to use!

example page: http://music.ahsodes.com/album.php?album_id=1578