A Leased Line to the Collective Unconscious

Over the last few weeks I’ve been entertaining a new boat guest.

This is Dame Margot Fontaine and she’s very curious. She likes to drop in during the day to see what I’m up to.

She officially belongs to my neighbour Beth.

Update: Beth’s been away for a month now, getting her boat replated and I haven’t seen little Margot for ages… =(

This is a video clip from 2005 that I took of a very talented musician: Ohad Rein. He’s a solo artist who is also a member of an Australian band called ‘Nations By the River’ and has played with the likes of the Sleepy Jackson and Gomez.

His MO is a little peculiar - he travels round the world, stops off for short periods and then assembles a band to play his music. Everywhere he goes, it sounds different.

I was fortunate enough to see OMR in late 2005 - I saw them by accident at a gig at the Rock Garden in Covent Garden, where my friend Arda was playing, and they were so good that we all went to see them again the same day. We saw them one more time, for their final gig at the 12 Bar club in Denmark Street, before Ohad left for warmer climes.

The gig was amazing - a tiny venue, about 30 people there and the band managed to rouse us into a frenzy by the end with a stunning Bob Marley cover. The band’s own songs were great and I’ve spent the last couple of years trying to get hold of the album they recorded whilst in London (you can only buy it in Australia). I’ve received a copy in the post today and I can’t wait to listen to it.

Anyway here’s the clip. It might give you the slightest clue as to what’s so special about this man and his music

This is a handy way to test sites that are in the process of being moved from one domain to another, or even to create your own “invisible” internet.
Normally when a user requests something from a web-based domain, their computer will connect to a Domain Name Server (DNS) and request the correct IP address for that domain. As you can see for everything that is requested on a web site you will have at least one and possibly two net requests (one for the domain translation to ip and one for the asset itself) taking place. This can slow the whole process down.

What you can do is log a set of special domains (frequently used, personal, etc) in your /etc/hosts file. This is a kind of static file DNS server if you like. This is always consulted first and you can in fact use this technique to override any web address. By creating a web site that responds to requests on a certain domain (even if it’s not registered to that server) and by “spoofing the host,” you can create extremely secret / secure web servers as they have no visible presence on the internet, except to those users who have manually set their host files up.

We’ll be using vim which is a slightly nicer version of vi the linux/unix text editor. It’s a little unwieldy at first - all keyboard commands and odd-shortcuts but it’s a doddle to use once you’re comfortable with it.

Anyway, here’s how to do it:

1. open Terminal

2. type

sudo vim /private/etc/hosts

3. press I (for Insert)

4. scroll to the bottom

5. hit return to enter a space

6. type the following line

# TEMPORARY SPOOFED IP FOR TESTING

7. hit return to enter a space

8. type the following line

123.456.789.101 www.example_domain.com

where the ip address and the example domain are those that you wish to use

9. hit return to enter another blank line

it should look like this

# SPOOFED HOST
123.456.789.101 www.example_domain.com

10. hit escape

11. type

!wq

to save the file

¡IMPORTANT! You will have to re-start your mac to refresh it’s internal dns

Windows Users: It’s pretty much the same process, with the hosts file living in c:\windows\system32\etc\ (on WinXP) usually and you can edit the file notepad.

If you do a lot of work with template based systems, as I sometimes do, you may find that Dreamweaver refuses to allow you to render some of the files in the Design view. This makes it incredibly difficult to find the correct template by loading it and viewing it.

The Dreamweaver documentation is not terribly clear on how to make the program recognise these files as HTML, or PHP type files. It seems to hint that you can go into your personal Library settings and edit a file called Extensions.txt - this will not work.

So here’s how to do it:

1) Browse to your ‘Applications’ folder

2) Open Adobe Dreamweaver CS3
3) Open Configuration / DocumentTypes

4) Edit the file MMDocumentTypes.xml

5) Find the section you wish to update - in my case it’s the PHP section

6) Edit this line:

documenttype id=”PHP_MySQL” servermodel=”PHP MySQL” internaltype=”Dynamic” winfileextension=”php,php3,php4,php5″ macfileextension=”php,php3,php4,php5,ihtml,pml” file=”Default.php” writebyteordermark=”false”

and add the other extensions that you wish Dreamweaver to interpret as displayable PHP files into the macfileextension section. I think it’s safe to assume that updating winfileextension will do the same for Windows Dreamweaver users.

7) Save the file

8) Restart Dreamweaver and voila!

Dashboard! What a cool app - there when you need it, gone when you don’t. That’s my idea of usefulness.

Now one of the Widgets I use the most is the Unit Converter widget. It’s very handy indeed and saves me having to browse through half a dozen Google results to find the conversion that I need.

However, for one reason or another, I was brought up to measure my weight in Stones - these don’t seem to relate to anything real except bodyweight and unfortunately I can only appreciate my weight in these terms (Kg mean nothing to me, though suffice it to say I have a lot of them!).

Unit Converter doesn’t have a facility for converting between Stones and Kilograms at present but actually adding one is very simple - all the information is contained in one script file that’s part of the widget and in fact the hardest part of the operation is changing the permissions on the file. This should work for any other type of conversion you wish to add as well.

Here’s how to do it:

This operation will require you to restart Dashboard (I think), which could mean you having to restart your mac. Ideally the best time to make this change is after you’ve booted up and before you start Dashboard up. That way, you can save your change, hit F12 and see it working straight away.

1) Launch Finder and browse to the Library folder on your hard disk

2) Browse to the Widgets folder

3) Ctrl-click the Unit Converter widget and choose Show Package Contents from the options

4) Now make a copy of Conversions.js to be on the safe side (you will need to enter your password to do this)

5) Highlight Conversions.js and Get Info on it

6) Here you will need to change the Ownership & Permissions on the file so that you can Read & Write it. You will need to enter your password again

OK, here’s the fun bit

7) Open up Conversions.js in a text editor.
You will see it’s made up of blocks for each of the conversion types, which look something like this
[js]var Weight = [
{name:'Short Ton (US)', toBase:linearForm(907.18474), fromBase:invLinForm(907.18474)},
{name:'Pound (US)', toBase:invLinForm(2.204622622), fromBase:linearForm(2.204622622)},
{name:'Ounce (US)', toBase:invLinForm(35.2739619), fromBase:linearForm(35.2739619)},
{name:'Long Ton (UK)', toBase:linearForm(1016.0469088), fromBase:invLinForm(1016.0469088)},
{name:'Metric Ton', toBase:linearForm(1000), fromBase:invLinForm(1000)},
{name:'Kilogram', toBase:linearForm(1.0), fromBase:invLinForm(1.0)},
{name:'Gram', toBase:invLinForm(1000), fromBase:linearForm(1000)}
];
[/js]
so you can see, all we need to do is add another line in there with our conversion in it. Now the way that the Unit Converter appears to work is that for each set of units, it has a base unit - in this case it is Kilograms and you can see that the conversion ratio for Kilograms is 1.0. Whenever a conversion is made, the unit is first converted to the base unit, and then converted to the required unit.

Looking at an entry, for example

{name: ‘Gram’, toBase:invLinForm(1000), fromBase:linearForm(1000)}

you can see that the key information we need to put in to create a new entry is a name and a single figure, that being the amount of the new unit (Gram) per one of the base unit (Kilogram), that is, 1000.

To create a new conversion, we need to get that ratio. I went here and retrieved the following information:

1 kilogram is equal to 0.15747304441777 stones.

so all we have to do now, is go to the bottom of the weights block and:

1) Add a comma, after the final conversion (Grams), so the end of the line looks like this

… fromBase:linearFrom(1000)},

2) Put in the following line after the last entry but before the closing square bracket
{name:’Stones’, toBase:invLinForm(0.15747304441777), fromBase:linearForm(0.15747304441777)}

3) Save the file and fire up Dashboard

Here’s a copy of the complete and working file:

Conversions script updated to include Stones

Troubleshooting

You will know if it has worked because Unit Converter will run the way it always does and Stones will now be an option to choose from. If you find that you can’t select any units and the image across the top does not look right, then there’s something wrong with your update to the script: you’ve missed a comma, a quote or a bracket or brace or square bracket. Go back and look at it. In the worst case scenario, you can copy your original backup of conversions.js over the new one but you will need to restart Dashboard and possibly your Mac for it to work again.

Lately I’ve been thinking about simple ways to make a difference to our collective impact on this earth. I’ve come up with a short list here…

• Holiday in your home country
• Fix things when they break
• Stop boiling the kettle
• Carry a bag instead of carrier bags
• Sell your car
• Buy local produce (it tastes better anyway)
• Switch things off
• Don’t buy bottled water

Wow!

The Gingers have landed a gig - on a rooftop in Covent Garden. We’re going to be playing to around 80 people, most of whom haven’t heard us before, so it’s going to be a hell of a show. We’ve also lost our drummer, Grant, for the day because he’s the best man at his best mates wedding, so James Cope is filling in for us.

We’ve got one more rehearsal before Friday…

Read this and then quit your job!

I found this on the internet about a decade ago - someone had OCR’d it in from the original book by Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty. It sat around on an old floppy in a dusty cupboard for a few years until I stumbled over it again the other week.

I re-read it and was really surprised at just how well-written it was. Clear, incisive commentary on the British music industry circa 1988, funny anecdotes about the rocky road to success and just what it takes to walk it. The “Golden Rules” section is pure magic.

Anyway, I decided that it’s no good keeping it to myself and - in the true spirit of the Kopyright Liberation Front* - I’m gonna share it with the rest of the world. It’s too good to hide away…

get it here (right-click to save the file)

Wow! what a night and what a great line-up: couple of acoustic artists, The Gingers, Bloutered! and National Snack.

I took to National Snack straight away, ‘cos their bassist kept dropping Cure basslines in the sound check (always a good sign if you ask me!) and they were great - really lively and entertaining.

The highlight for me was always going to be our performance - we’ve been looking forward to this one for a while, ever since we found out it was the Clash’s old stomping ground - and it didn’t let us down. Just turning up in Camden was eye-opening, so many people and so much life around.

We had a fantastic turnout - 38 people came to see us, all of them good friends - even my lil Sis came along with her fella and that made the show even more special. Playing to this crowd packed into a great pub and having people smiling and dancing in front of the stage was the best feeling ever. I loved every minute of it - I’d play the gig over again right now if someone put a bass in my hands and said “get on with it”.

On to the next one…

Finally, after six months of me and Dan wading through reams of content, arguing the toss over logos and colourways, meticulously hand-crafting the XHTML (strict of course!) and CSS to be just so everso browser compliant, we now have a web site.

you can see it over at http://www.karyx.co.uk/

We’ve put a lot of work into getting it just right and had a lot of fun trying to manage the borders, page filling and the overhanging motif images.

I’m sure there’s still a couple of weeks’ tinkering and fiddling and general polishing of the content and presentation still to go but I’m very proud of what we’ve got so far.

Now we’ve just got to go build some sites for our clients and we’ll be laughing…