mrclay.org

6500 miles can’t stop the rock. Thursday, May 8th, a reunited Brittle Stars play Common Grounds as a part of Gainesville’s Pop Mayhem festival.

Hear songs such as, but not performed as well as, these:

• Falling Backwards
• Someplace (but not this place)
• This Trip
• So Unfair

Also that night: Ifwhen, the Buddy System, Giddy-Up Helicopter, and maybe one other band. Sorry to hear about Que Possum! :(

The show is $10 at the door/on tonevendor, or get the full pass to get in all the shows.

A whole six months after beta 1’s release, 9.5 beta 2 is finally out. At work I installed it over beta 1 and it works like a charm; the issues I was waiting on seem to have been fixed.

At home it’s a different story. I installed over beta 1 and the result was unusable. I got strange errors on HTTPS pages, and more cripplingly, Javascript files either don’t load completely (random bytes chopped off the end of the file) or don’t load at all. The error console tells me “Script not loaded!” Yeah I noticed!

I tried everything to get beta 2 working:

• deleted the main config file and restarted Opera (”resets” Opera, losing all my bookmarks and settings of course)
• uninstalled and reinstalled
• uninstalled, deleted all Opera stuff from Program Files, ~/Application Data, ~/Local Settings, and the registry before reinstalling
• did the above using both installers available

Each time I had the same Javascript and HTTPs problems.

Minify v2 is coming along, but it’s time to start getting some real-world testing, so last night I started serving this site’s Javascript and CSS (at least the 6 files in my WordPress templates) via a recent Minify snapshot.

As you can see below, I was serving 67K over 6 requests and was using some packed Javascript, which has a client-side decompression overhead.

Using Minify, this is down to 2 requests, 28K (58% reduction), and I’m no longer using any packed Javascript:

Getting it working

1. Exported Minify from svn (only the /lib tree is really needed).
2. Placed the contents of /lib in my PHP include path.
3. Determined where I wanted to store cache files (server-side caching is a must.)
4. Gathered a list of the JS/CSS files I wanted to serve.
5. Created “min.php” in the doc root:

   // load Minify
   require_once 'Minify.php';
   
   // setup caching
   Minify::useServerCache(realpath("{$_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']}/../tmp”));
   
   // controller options
   $options = array(
   	‘groups’ => array(
   		‘js’ => array(
   			‘//wp-content/chili/jquery-1.2.3.min.js’
   			,’//wp-content/chili/chili-1.8b.js’
   			,’//wp-content/chili/recipes.js’
   			,’//js/email.js’
   		)
   		,’css’ => array(
   			‘//wp-content/chili/recipes.css’
   			,’//wp-content/themes/orangesky/style.css’
   		)
   	)
   );
   
   // serve it!
   Minify::serve(’Groups’, $options);

   (note: The double solidi at the beginning of the filenames are shortcuts for $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].)

6. In HTML, replaced the 4 script elements with one:

   <script type="text/javascript" src="/min/js"></script>

   (note: Why not “min.php/js”? Since I use MultiViews, I can request min.php by just “min”.)

7. and replaced the 2 stylesheet links with one:

   <link rel="stylesheet" href="/min/css" type="text/css" media="screen" />

At this point Minify was doing its job, but there was a big problem: My theme’s CSS uses relative URIs to reference images. Thankfully Minify’s CSS minifier can rewrite these, but I needed to specify that option just for style.css.

I did that by giving a Minify_Source object in place of the filename:

// load Minify_Source
require_once 'Minify/Source.php';

// new controller options
$options = array(
	'groups' => array(
		'js' => array(
			'//wp-content/chili/jquery-1.2.3.min.js'
			,'//wp-content/chili/chili-1.8b.js'
			,'//wp-content/chili/recipes.js'
			,'//js/email.js'
		)
		,'css' => array(
			'//wp-content/chili/recipes.css'

			// style.css has some relative URIs we'll need to fix since
			// it will be served from a different URL
			,new Minify_Source(array(
				'filepath' => '//wp-content/themes/orangesky/style.css'
				,'minifyOptions' => array(
					'prependRelativePath' => '../wp-content/themes/orangesky/'
				)
			))
		)
	)
);

Now, during the minification of style.css, Minify prepends all relative URIs with ../wp-content/themes/orangesky/, which fixes all the image links.

What’s next

This is fine for now, but there’s one more step we can do: send far off Expires headers with our JS/CSS. This is tricky because whenever a change is made to a source file, the URL used to call it must change in order to force the browser to download the new version. As of this morning, Minify has an elegant way to handle this, but I’ll tackle this in a later post.

Aside from the horrors of Auto-tune, the tool changed the state-of-the-art dealing with monophonic sound. Well, competitor product Melodyne will soon be able to apply pitch adjustment to polyphonic sound. This is huge. Huge. The amazing video shows this advance and a taste of the amazing power this will bring to recordists. About 2/3rds way through, it effortlessly changes the whole scale of a piece of music from minor to major, then to “Spanish”. It’s freaking amazing. [Thanks, shek-e]

I’d never claim file sharing doesn’t hurt music sales, but there’s another simple reason why individual music releases will continue to sell more poorly over time: The continuous explosion of choice. Even if listeners spent as much on music as they did years ago, the chances of us buying the same releases drops constantly as “out-of-print” becomes meaningless.

Also it’s easier than ever to know about the “essential” albums and comps, and they’re reissued feverishly. Every indiepop band should make their music accessible as possible; you’re not just competing with Belle & Sebastian, but also Village Green, Odessey & Oracle, Field Mice reissues, awesome girl group comps, et al. Good luck!

Should I mention a Brittle Stars CD comp is in the works?

I’m a long-time Opera fan and flagwaver, but the pain of bugs in 9.5 beta finally forced me to switch to Firefox last week. I’ve been using 9.5 beta1 since the end of October. When do we get a new one? I see the weekly builds, but they’re all alphas (no thanks). The biggest problems I’ve had were with the rich text editor and Flash (which everyone incorrectly assumes to be a cross-browser development panacea), but, as a webdev, I’m now spoiled having instant access to Firebug.

Firefox now has closed tab access (though I miss ctrl-z) and session restore, but within a few minutes I had mouse gestures and wand back. This is petty, but a big reason I loved Opera is that it let me put the address bar, tabs and everything at the bottom. I haven’t found an easy way to do that in FF. FF is also noticeably slower in a lot of actions, but having everything actually work (including Google Docs) is really a breathe of fresh air.

I’ll continue to test Opera and give each beta/full release a whirl, but winning me back will require these to work:

• Rich text (”WYSIWYG”) editing in WordPress
• Switching songs in the MySpace music player
• Mvelopes
• NPR’s new music player