I spent most of my day yesterday getting my new music recording PC set up (my new PC is a Mac Mini i5 2.3 Ghz running Windows 7 64-bit). After installing Cubase SX 3.1.1 on my PC, and installing all my most essential VST plugins, I discovered that the song that I have been working on most recently wouldn’t load. Cubase itself would start up just fine, but when I tried to load the song itself it would just hang for hours. Whenever this would happen, Process Explorer would show that the CPU was running at about 25%. The only way to get out of these hangs was to kill the process.

I did a lot of research on what might cause this sort of a problem.  A few other people had had similar issues in the forums, and responding posters had suggested that the problems might be related to one of the plug-ins they had running. I went into C:\Program Files (x86)\VstPlugins and removed all of my plugins, storing them in a folder on my desktop.

I started up Cubase, I loaded my project, and presto, it loaded up almost immediately.

One by one, I added the plugins back in. Each time I did, I would close Cubase, copy the plug-in back to the VstPlugins folder, and relaunch Cubase (ugh). Then I would open the project to see if it loaded.

Finally, when I got to Wurr Audio‘s fantastic TubeBooster plug-in the program began to hang. Uh oh. This plug-in is used *everywhere* in my projects. Like, maybe in every single project I’ve done for the past two or three years. It’s central to my vocal sound. I tried fooling with the settings in Cubase’s *Plug-in Information* window (the ones with names like “Old Host Behavior” and “Lock VST Automation”), but nothing worked.

Finally, after reading about people who had problems with running 32-bit plug-ins on 64-bit hosts, I discovered jBridge. jBridge is a program that allows you to run 32-bit plugins on 64-bit hosts and vice-versa. It does this by “wrapping” the plug-in in another plug-in. Now, bear in mind that while I am running 64-bit operating system, I am running a 32-bit version of Cubase and a 32-bit version of this plug-in. This should not be an issue. And yet…

I downloaded jBridge, wrapped TubeBooster, and it worked! My project loaded like charm. All the settings I had in TubeBooster were preserved as well. Without hesitation I paid the 15 euro fee for the full version jBridge.

Hope this helps somebody out there.

Cross-posted on dhilowitz.tumblr.com

So, I just installed Ubuntu Linux 10.04 on my trusty Toshiba Portege 3480CT8. (Yes, it works beautifully as a lightweight LAMP server.)

One of the first things I set out to do was make a disk image of my new server, so that if something goes awry, I can restore things later on.

Here’s what I did:

First, I plugged my external drive into the USB port. This got assigned to /dev/sdb.   I mounted the drive.

 sudo mkdir /media/backup_04 sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /media/backup_04 -t ntfs sudo mkdir /media/backup_04/portege-linux-backups

Next,  I installed dcfldd. This is just like dd, which comes with most Linux distributions, except that it can output time remaining (among other things).

 apt-get install dcfldd 

Finally, I started the backup:

 dcfldd if=/dev/sda of=/media/backup_04/portege-linux-backups/2011_11_28.img sizeprobe=if 

This produces an output that looks like this:

 [16% of 28615Mb] 155136 blocks (4848Mb) written. 01:17:37 remaining. 

–David

1. Install XCODE 4. This is actually trickier than it seems. You have to:a) download XCode; b) run the .dmg. c) quit iTunes, then go into Activity Monitor and force quit on anything iTunes related (iTunesHelper as well); d) go into the Applications folder and find the “Install XCode” app, and run that. (Yes, you have to run a second Install XCode app…and I had to run it twice. It failed the first time. If you want to watch it fail, drop into Terminal and type this: tail -f /var/log/install.log.

2. Install MacPorts.

3. Test MacPorts by installing joe. Type:

sudo bash

port install joe. Enter your password.

4. A bunch of things will be preinstalled with the wrong architecture. We’re trying to get ruby as an x86_64 architecture. So…uninstall libiconv and zlib (you may have to tinker with this a bit because it will ask you which version you want to uninstall — the answer is “all of them”)

sudo port uninstall -f libiconv @1.13.1_0
sudo port uninstall -f libiconv @1.14_0
sudo port uninstall -f zlib
port uninstall -f readline
port uninstall -f openssl
port uninstall -f ncurses @5.8_1
port uninstall -f ncurses @5.9_0
port uninstall -f ncurses @5.9_1
port uninstall -f gdbm

5 Install ruby by doing:

port install ruby

7. Update your gems:

gem update —system

8. And, finally, install Rails:

gem install rails —pre

Useful links:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2916229/how-can-i-install-ruby-on-rails-3-on-osx

http://beginrescueend.com/rvm/install/

To make .htaccess files work as expected, you need to edit /etc/apache2/sites-available/default. Look for a section that looks like this:

        <Directory /var/www/>
                Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
                AllowOverride None
                Order allow,deny
                allow from all
                # Uncomment this directive is you want to see apache2's
                # default start page (in /apache2-default) when you go to /
                #RedirectMatch ^/$ /apache2-default/
        </Directory>

You need to modify the line containing AllowOverride None to read AllowOverride All. This tells Apache that it’s okay to allow.htaccess files to over-ride previous directives. You must reload Apache before this change will have an effect:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

I’ve been developing a JavaScript module for some graphing work I’m doing. I’ve been using Safari’s built in profiler to figure out which functions are wasting the most CPU. It’s a great tool:

For the longest time, I was running up against this one problem: some of my member functions were being listed simply as “(anonymous function)” in the Profiler function list (see highlighted row above). Not cool. (Luckily for me, the Profiler also lists the .js file and the line number, so it wasn’t that hard to figure things out, but certainly annoying nonetheless.)

Anyway, I’ve finally found a solution. You see, I was declaring my class functions as follows:

Grafsz.prototype.ClearCanvas = function() 
{
    ...
}

…notice how I’m not giving my function a name? I’m basically assigning an anonymous function to a member variable of the class. All I had to do was change it to

Grafsz.prototype.ClearCanvas = function ClearCanvas()
{
 ...
}

That’s it. Check it out:

Do you use Google Reader?

Well, I can’t start my day without it.  Every morning as my first order of business I log in and read a couple local news stories while I’m drinking my coffee. After that I check out what’s going on with the art blogs I follow, then the gadget blogs, etc. Invariably, I’ll see at least five things that are simply too arresting to pass up. For those I’ll spawn new tabs and windows and I’ll keep them open for browsing later in the day. This ritual has become such a part of my life that Google Reader has now eclipsed StumbleUpon, which was previously my number one way of finding out about new stuff on the internet.

This being the state of things, it was with great pleasure that I happened across the “Google Reader :: Next >>” bookmarklet. This little button at the top of my browser solves two problems I never realized I had. First off, it allows me to view my RSS feeds in the context in which they were originally intended to be seen, i.e. on the blogs from whence they originated. Second off, because I have such a wide breadth of different blogs, I have a nasty habit of going through my RSS feeds and picking and choosing content based on the titles and first few words of each posts.  This leads me to ignore things that would be interesting to me in favor things that I think will interest me . Often the two are not the same. (For example, I don’t think of myself as someone who is particularly interested in features having to do with Google Reader although, yet here I am writing to you about one right now.) Clicking the “Next” button forces me to see content that I would otherwise have filtered out and in so doing it allows us to once again experience the joys of random, StumbleUpon-style browsing.

So that’s it. Easy to install (just drag the link from your Google Reader Settings page to your browser’s Favorites bar), a pleasure to use, without further ado I give you the Google Reader “Next >>” Button.

We frequently use Google Analytics to track the readership of the blogs we design and create. Fed up of having to configure Google Analytics tracking code over and over again for each new theme we create (and we’ve done this for a lot of themes over the years), we finally decided to search for aWordPress plug-in to do it for us.

In comes “Google Analyticator.”

Not only does it add the Google tracking code to the bottom of your posts, but it also has a ton of other features like outbound link tracking, download tracking, turning itself off for Admin users, etc. A lot of these features are things we actually developed custom solutions for back in the day so it will definitely be interesting to see how they stack up.

Check it out: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analyticator/

This is an iPhone Programming tip. Say you want to find  the full URL of a file within your Application’s Bundle (mainBundle), here’s how you would do it. Example: This would return the full URL of a file named “Sound2.caf”:

CFURLRef fileURL;
NSString *path;
path = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"Sound2" ofType:@"caf"];
fileURL = (CFURLRef)[NSURL fileURLWithPath:path];