The LeSession Miscellanea

The last man on Earth to join Facebook

2011-04-15T18:00:00.003+01:00

This blog will probably get updated (even more) infrequently from now on - the majority of my rantings, favourite links, gossip and tittle-tattle seems to have moved onto my Facebook account.

Yes I've finally succumbed to FB - I blame my smartphone, it makes FB so easy and alluring and before you know it you're hooked ...

So in the unlikely event that you're interested in the more frivolous side of this blog (e.g. everything other than the 'mekking it work in .Net' side), track me down on Facebook!

Delegation, that's what you need ....

2011-04-15T18:00:00.001+01:00

There's loads of documentation on how to do delegation in C#, but the vb.net version is just different enough for me to waste a heck of a lot of time before I got it working!

The scenario: a website project in VS2010, .Net 3.5, vb.net. The page contains an UpdatePanel which in turn contains a gridview control. Also on the page is a WebControl with a bunch of checkboxes, dropdownlists, and text boxes.

The task is to wire up the webcontrol so that changing any of the values of the controls in the webcontrol updates the contents of the gridview.

This is, of course, attempting to swim upstream against the tide of page drawing order and event execution order, and updatting parent controls with events on child controls, and all that! After a few minutes research it became obvious that Delegation was the way to go - but then the long haul started to get it going in vb.net .... I'll spare you the wailing and gnashing of teeth and cut straight to how it works.

The webcontrol is called RightMenu.ascx, and the main page is called ViewData.aspx. RightMenu.ascx contains a whole bunch of checkboxes called CB1, CB2, and so forth.

In RightMenu.ascx.vb, at class level, declare the following:

Public Delegate Sub delCBUpdate(ByVal sender As String, ByVal e As String)

Public Event evCbUpdate As delCBUpdate

Protected Sub OnCbUpdate(ByVal CBID As String, ByVal e As String)
RaiseEvent evCbUpdate(CBID, e)
End Sub

So that's a Delegate, an Event which exposes the Delegate, and a Sub which calls the Event using the RaiseEvent method. Having created the basic building blocks, you can now go ahead and add a call to OnCbUpdate to the CheckChanged handler of each one of your checkboxes as follows:

Protected Sub CB1_CheckedChanged(sender As Object, e As System.EventArgs) Handles CB1.CheckedChanged
OnCbUpdate("Cb1", CB1.Checked)
End Sub

Protected Sub CB2_CheckedChanged(sender As Object, e As System.EventArgs) Handles CB2.CheckedChanged
OnCbUpdate("Cb2", CB2.Checked)
End Sub

etc etc. You must set your checkboxes to AutoPostBack = True for the event to be triggered.

That's it for the control.

In the main page (DataView.aspx), if everything is set up right on the WebControl, you will find you can now create a handler for the RightMenu1.evCbUpdate event (assuming the control was aliased as RightMenu1 when you added it to the main page). Select that and the Visual Studio IDE will automatically create the event handler with the correct parameters to match evCbUpdate on the WebControl. This event handler will only need to contain one line of code - a call to the Update method of the UpdatePanel (which must be set to UpdateMode="Conditional").

Protected Sub RightMenu1_evCbUpdate(sender As String, e As String) Handles RightMenu1.evCbUpdate
upData.Update()
End Sub

Now create the Page_LoadComplete handler. Note that this is the LoadComplete handler, NOT the standard Page_Load. This is where we get round the issues surrounding the order the page and its child controls load in.

You are now, basically, home and dry. The Page_LoadComplete has access to the controls on the WebControl (by digging through the Controls collection of the Page), so you can loop through that deciding which checkboxes are checked and react accordingly (in my case by updating the SQL underlying the GridView according to which parameters have been set). What makes this special, though, is that things occur in the 'right' order - changing a checkbox triggers the event, the event calls the delegate, the delegate updates the parent page's UpdatePanel.

The above example shows how to do it with checkboxes, but from there it's easy to get the values of dropdowns, text boxes, and any other control on the WebControl. Hopefully this will save you the hours of frustration I had before I got it working.

Flute in space part deux

2011-03-21T14:55:00.001Z

Catherine Coleman, flight engineer on the International Space Station and wooden flute player, made this video to celebrate St Patrick's Day ...

Looking through old Windows

2011-03-09T18:00:00.000Z

The first version of Windows I used was 3.1 (although I subsequently came across an install of W2 on a machine at work), and I've used pretty much every iteration since.

So this video is a real trip down memory lane - starting with a machine running Windows 1.0 and upgrading through nearly every version right up to Windows 7.

It's amazing just how long some features and settings persist, and the things that survive right through to 7 - and the bits of previous interfaces that I'd forgotten about.

Being so interested in this is probably a little sad, I suppose - but hey!

One thing Charlie Booker and I agree on ...

2011-03-01T18:00:00.002Z

One thing Charlie Booker and I agree on is iTunes, although I actually think he's more moderate and conciliatory than me on the subject.

A great rant by Mr Booker, none the less, found in yesterday's Guardian - Apple zealots should look away now ...

Bluegrass rauschpfeife

2011-02-18T17:35:00.000Z

To the Heaton Mersey Sports & Social Club for a gig by our friends Michelle Holding & Bonz The Accompanist. This gig happened to coincide with the launch of their new CD, 'Family Values', with a splendid cover by Bonz and the funkiest CD-Rs I've ever seen.

A few weeks beforehand Michelle had asked me to take the rauschpfeife along, and to be ready to play some 'bluegrass rauschpfeife in G'.

So I did, and I did - two choruses of total improvisation in G over a bluegrass riff, in the middle of a Gillian Welch song. It seemed to work in a surreal sort of Renaissance / Down Home / Lancashire crossover style, and sadly I don't think anyone recorded this moment of musical history: great fun, real seat of the pants stuff on the part of all concerned.

I'm also optimistic that this blog post will quickly become the very first result when you Google the phrase 'bluegrass rauschpfeife'. Let's face I suspect I have the field pretty much to myself ...

Flutes in space

2011-02-13T13:37:00.000Z

Astronaut Catherine Coleman is whiling away the time on the International Space Station with a fine collection of flutes - two from members of The Chieftains, one from Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull, and one of her own ...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41496206/ns/technology_and_science-space/

Top E on fife

2011-02-11T12:46:00.000Z

Finding myself in need of the top E on the fife to play an entire tune in the upper octave, I am once again indebted to The Woodwind Fingering Guide and their excellent three-octave fingering guide for fife and tin whistle.

That's top E as in three ledger lines above the treble stave (and sounding an octave higher than that of course), or a tasty 2,637 Hz.

I should know the 3rd octave fingerings of course. It's 1 2 - | - 2 - by the way.

Plockton Traditional Music Centre under threat

2011-02-03T20:00:00.000Z

There's an online petition to attempt to save the Plockton National Centre for Excellence in Traditional Music : it's at http://www.gopetition.com/petition/42495.html and I urge you to sign it before the 10th February.

To quote from the petition site:

The Highland Council has targeted the National Centre for Excellence in Traditional Music, based at Plockton High School, in its proposed cuts package. http://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/Article.aspx/2115087

If the cuts are voted through at the Highland Council meeting on February 10, the Centre could close as soon as July next year. Director Dougie Pincock was interviewed on the BBC [ ... ] and said that while he expected the Centre to take its share of any cuts he 'hadn't anticipated it would be all of it.'

Plockton has been an integral part of Scottish Traditional Music for the past 10 years. It has started many of our best young musicians on the road to their career and provided training in traditional music and groupwork from some of Scotland's finest musicians. Our young folk could not have gained this level of training anywhere else.

We've been to Plockton more than once, have friends in the region, and know at first hand of the excellent work that the Plockton Centre do, both in terms of encouraging traditional musicians, and in the wider economic and cultural benefits of the Centre to the area.

Any fule kno that Cameron is just Thatcher in a Bullingdon Club boater, and that the ConDems would be slashing at the welfare state and any form of non-elitish arts provision even without being able to blame it on the bankers. Destroying the National Centre in Plockton fits in perfectly with this agenda of course, and the loss would not even register in the world view of our beloved leaders.

Oh, and, of course, the time for bankers' remorse is past, apparently.

So, please, sign the petition - close down the ConDems, not the National Centre!

Simon Thoumire plays The Mason's Apron

2011-01-26T17:48:00.000Z

Here's a great video from this year's Celtic Connections of Simon Thoumire (ably assisted by Ian Carr) setting a new All Comers Land Speed Record for playing the Mason's Apron on the English concertina.

Brilliant, awe-inspirting stuff. Whenever I'm feeling remotely self-satisfied about my own progress on playing the EC, ten seconds of watching Simon gives a reality check ...

The Mershawn Lynch 'earthquake'

2011-01-19T17:27:00.000Z

Following on from my previous post about Mershawn Lynch's excellent 67 yard run, it seems that the Seahawks fans got rather excited about it too - so much so, that it got picked up as a minor earthquake by the local seismograph ...

A run to be proud of

2011-01-12T17:39:00.000Z

I love the NFL - the spectacle, the larger-than-life characters, the tactics, the skill, and the sheer madness of a sport combining all-in wrestling and chess.

I'm generally a fan of the passing game - Montana to Rice and then Young to Rice was a huge part of why I settled on the 49ers as my team.

But the running game can be spectacular too - and in the Seattle v New Orleans playoff game last weekend, Mershawm Lynch came up with one of the best runs I have ever seen ...

HTML to Word Document, the easy(ish) way

2011-01-07T12:20:00.002Z

Ever wanted to write dynamic HTML and output it as a Word document? If not, I'd respectfully suggest you move on to another web page round about now ...

Still here? Great. The scenario is that I'm creating a large report in dynamically-written HTML (usual tool set of VB.Net/ASP.Net 3.5, SQL Server 2008); and I want to output it directly into a Word document.

I was previously converting the HTML into PDF, buut the third-party product we use for that grinds to a halt after about 2Mb of HTML data, and some of these reports are much bigger than that. The other thing everyone on our client base has on their machine is Office, so Word suddenly becomes an attractive output target.

It took a great deal of messing about and Googling, but it all boils down to

Write the various Word XML headers.
Write your HTML.
Write the footers and XML closing tags.
(And this is the crucial bit) Save the whole file out as a *.rtf.

Word will then happily open your document and display it as if it was a native Word document.

Have a look at http://www.pbdr.com/ostips/wordfoot.htm for the basic tags (Including how you can specify a footer to appear on each printed page), then build on that with http://mvark.blogspot.com/2007/02/how-to-add-header-or-footer-to.html.

If you want to 'manually' insert page breaks, just add a <br style='page-break-before:always'> tag at the appropriate point (page-break-after is also valid BTW).

Fun for all the family!

Is traditional tin whistle playing under threat?

2011-01-04T13:20:00.001Z

Blogger Gordon suggests that

The living tradition of whistle playing is being gradually squeezed out of existence by a pincer action from music colleges and American Irish traditional musicians.

It's an interesting post, and certainly isn't a standard Mudcat-style 'I don't like the way the tradition is developing, therefore it's not traditional' argument.

I think he's being over-pessimistic, and I'm going to ponder some more before actually responding on Gordon's blog; however I thought I'd link it here in the interim.

How many parts in an English concertina?

2010-11-30T18:03:00.000Z

I was chatting to a friend over the weekend about instruments, and I confidently stated that an English concertina is made up of over 1000 individual parts (at the opposite end of the spectrum is my Angus fife, which is made of precisely 2 parts).

But I started to doubt that figure.

So I did a search, found this post on Cnet by Geoffrey Crabb, and actually I was wrong.

Geoff reckons it's more like 2,200 ...

iTunes rant #3

2010-11-17T18:00:00.001Z

I fancied trying out the Amazon Kindle e-reader application on my iPod Touch.

So I went to the iTunes store on my main Win7 computer, and downloaded the free Kindle app.

But when I come to get that onto my iPod ... iTunes strikes again.

Because I've previously downloaded some apps directly onto my iPod, my iTunes installation on Win7 is unaware of those applications' existence. Similarly because I downloaded the Kindle app on my Win7 box, the iPod doesn't recognise that.

I have one iPod, which I regularly dock with one computer, both registered with the same iTunes account. To me, that sounds like a fairly stable relationship, the sort of relationship that my work Windows 2000 machine used to manage with my work Dell PDA at least 5 years ago. I could move documents backwards and forwards, manage the PDA either from the screen of the PDA or from my PC, and it all just somehow worked.

Scroll forward to the present day, apply the same thought to my iPod ... I'm in an impasse. The only way I can see to deal with the dissyncronisity between the iPod and iTunes will be to either
(a) continue purely downloading any apps on the iPod, thereby denying myself the speed and convenience of using the Win7 browser
or
(b) I could, presumably, download all the exiting apps again, get the two 'images' of what I've got on my iPod back in sync, and then avoid getting into this bind again by always downloading apps on the Win7 box.

Or the polo-necked pony-tailed Cupertino morons who develop this crap (presumably by randomly pressing keys on their overdesigned translucent Apple keyboards until they get some monkeys-writing-Hamlet effect that actually compiles) could look up the real definition of the word 'sync', as implemented by Microsoft and Dell about 5 years ago, and implement a version of that.

Once again, the brilliant iPod hardware is let down by the appalling software. I may have mentioned that before.

Apple software lets down Apple hardware - again

2010-09-29T18:00:00.004+01:00

I recently updated my 3rd Gen iPod Touch to the new iOS 4 operating system ... and my battery life immediately dropped off a cliff. From recharging when the player was updating the podcasts about twice a week, I suddently found that I'd be charging it every other day.

The change was so sudden that it had to be the OS change, rather than the gradual tailing off you'd expect from rechargeable batteries.

So ... it turns out that in the new OS (a) Wifi is permanently on (which I think was the default in the previous version) but more importantly (b) a bug (not admitted by Apple of course) means that the WiFi is a huge drain on resources, leading to the problem with battery life.

The solution - put your Touch into Airplane Mode, via Settings, when you're not actually using the WiFi. Which is great when you're using a Touch ... but if you're using an iPhone, Airplane Mode has the minor disadvantage that it turns off the 3G ... so your phone doesn't work. Ah.

I suspect that an 'enhancement' update might be released in a few days or weeks ...

And by the way, some basic maths.

iPod Touch, £200. Digital camera, £100. Mobile phone, £50. So that's 200 + 100 + 50 = 350.

iPhone, £600.

Where does the extra £250 come from?

Morris - a life with bells on

2010-09-26T19:31:00.000+01:00

Isn't it nice when you've been waiting for something for ages, and then when it happens, it's every bit as good as you hoped it would be?

Thanks to the Peak Film Society we finally got to see Morris - a life with bells on last night. And it was worth the wait - it's very funny indeed, and sad and poignant in places, and well scripted and plotted, and probably some of the biggest laughs make no sense to anyone who isn't steeped in the morris, but that's their loss.

So now all there is to do is to recommend it to anyone who'll listen, and to see it again, to spot all the bits I didn't see the first time.

Midge

2010-08-27T18:00:00.000+01:00

I've not managed to verify this - but I so want it to be true.

The latin name for the midge is Culicoides impunctatus.

According to something I heard on a BBC Radio 4 natural history programme this week, Culicoides impunctatus translates as ....

Little Puncturing Bastard.

Which seems like a good opportunity to say hello to my friends in The Midge Bite Band ...

If Jimi Hendrix had played the whistle ...

2010-08-27T17:12:00.000+01:00

Have you ever wondered what Jimi Hendrix would have sounded like if he'd played the low whistle?

No, me neither.

However To2ndMars did, and the results can be seen and heard here ...

SQLBulkCopy - it's really good!

2010-08-18T18:00:00.003+01:00

So here I am - millions of rows of mission-critical data (nearly all text values, yes even the dates, integers and booleans) in about 30 tables: all stored in an antique database, literally from the 1970s, which we can only programatically query through ODBC.

The mission - to get the data into SQL Server 2005 through a combination of the usual tools (SQL and vb.net, .Net 3.5).

Which, after a fair bit of head-scratching and experimenting later, led me to the glorious sunlit uplands of ...

SqlBulkCopy.

System.Data.SqlClient.SqlBulkCopy to give its full name, and it's one of those .Net classes that does exactly what it says on the tin.

Get data from the source (I'm using a sqlDataReader but flat files, datatables, and various other options are also supported); set various parameters to define the batch size, the level of locking, any column mapping, the notification period, the timeout (very important); then call the WriteToServer property, and watch your data fly!

This article on sqlteam.com was my initial route in, but as usual it's well worth reading the relevant bits of MSDN and Technet, and doing some Googling on particular aspects and parameters.

SqlBulkCopy - the LeSession organisation salutes you!

Jerry Rice

2010-08-09T17:37:00.000+01:00

Jerry Rice has entered the NFL Hall of Fame at the first ballot he was eligible for; no more than he deserves.

I'll be there at Wembley in October cheering on the 2010-vintage Niners for all I'm worth, but it will be my battered old Jerry Rice No. 80 replica shirt that I'll be wearing.

Here's a link to his acceptance speech.

Mr Jerry Rice, the Lesession organisation salutes you!

Health advice for low whistle

2010-08-02T18:34:00.001+01:00

I've got a daily alert set up with Google for any new/updated web content using the phrase 'low whistle' - it's a great, easy way to keep up with all the latest news, and throws up some gems (the first I knew of Brian Finnegan's excellent new CD was through the daily alert, for example).

However, inevitably with an automated text-matching system, there's a bit of noise: every writer who can't think of an original way of explaining that their character was a little suprised insists on them giving a low whistle, to give just the most common example.

And then there's the occasional thing that's just plain bizarre.

Why, for example, would American online health advice site RightHealth have a page dedicated to 'References, Advice, News, Videos, Coping and Support' about the low whistle? Disappointingly there isn't a single bit of unseen footage of Michael McGoldrick, Cormac Breatnach or Brian Finnegan on the site, or any reviews of John McSherry's new CD.

Chiff and Fipple have identified WHOA: maybe it's related to that ...

VS2008: Request for System.Web.AspNetHostingPermission failed

2010-07-06T18:00:00.002+01:00

Scenario: I've got a lovely new Windows 7 machine at work, so I'm setting it up with Visual Studio 2008 and the SQL Server 2008 Management Tools.

All goes pretty well, until I come to do my first compile of one of our projects. Which fails to build with the error message

Request for the permission of type 'System.Web.AspNetHostingPermission, System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089' failed.

Off to Google I go, and discover in Pepepe's post here dated 09-04-2007, 11:29 AM that I'm getting the error because my project files are on a remote server rather than locally, and I need to change the permissions on my local Intranet settings. Suddenly the warning I blithely clicked through when I first loaded the project, that the project would not run with full trust, comes back to me :)

Job done? Not quite.

Because, you see, I haven't GOT the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Configuration tool in my Administrative Tools. That comes as part of the .Net Framework 2.0 SDK which you can download from Microsoft here.

So that's another download and install, and the problem is solved. So hopefully,as ever with these arcane 'HowTo' posts, I've gone through that pain so you won't have to ...

A rauschpfeife is not a vuvuzela

2010-07-06T18:00:00.001+01:00

Although I do suddenly have a burning desire to get all the world's rauschpfeife players together in a football stadium, blasting through some Susato Danserye pieces ... what a great gig that would be!

iTunes is the spawn of Satan, part 2

2010-06-18T18:00:00.017+01:00

So there I was trying to copy three MP3s from a CD to my iPod.

The MP3s, as it happens, were pre-release versions of podcasts from MorecambeAndWise.com, and jolly good they were too.

Sadly, as I have mentioned before, the act of putting anything onto my iPod, involves descending into a nightmare of interface frustration ... e.g. using the steaming pile of half-baked poo that is iTunes.

And oh dearie dearie me did I struggle.

It turns out that if your MP3s don't have the ID3 tags set properly, iTunes has the greatest of difficulty recognising the existence of your MP3 - it might, if you're lucky, eventually show up under the Music tab as Unknown Artist / Unknown Album, but woe betide you if you actually want to add that to your iPod.

I managed it eventually, but only by (somehow) adding the tracks to my On-The-Go playlist. And now, ooh look, I now have two identically titled On-The-Go playlists on my iPod, exactly the same, apart from one of them having the three extra MP3s in.

So why not make an ID3 tag editor available within iTunes? Or, even better, why not add a bit of functionality to the iTunes handling system to cope with MP3s that haven't been tagged properly?

But the fundamental problem, of course, returns to my previous post on the subject ... why, for a company that prides itself on the quality of its hardware and user interface design, is iTunes so completely brain-torsioningly morale-sapping weep-inducing utterly flipping hopeless?

Brian Blessed voice for satnav

2010-06-11T18:00:00.000+01:00

After years of being vaguely resistant to the idea, we've recently bought a satnav; so far we're using it on the default voice to be told to turn left in 300 metres by a fairly calm and soothing female voice.

However there's a campaign afoot to create an altogether more robust and projected alternative ... Brian Blessed! Sign up here, there's also a campaign video here; and it is said that if the petition reaches 250,000 votes, TomTom will set the relevant wheels in motion ...

Moving files out of sub-folders

2010-06-02T18:00:00.009+01:00

When you rip a CD in Windows Media Player, it creates a folder with the name of the artist, creates a sub-folder of that with the name of the album, then puts the individual ripped tracks into that.

So far so good. [Yes I know other CD rippers are available, that's not the point].

However our Brennan displays the folder names as the album name, which means that the artist name is not visible (or, at best, buried in the individual MP3 file names). I wanted to also display the artist names at top level, to aid in browsing through albums.

Some album names are instantly recognisable - 'Underneath The Stars', 'Kind Of Blue', 'Achtung Baby' and 'Lusignac' for example - but how many 'Best Of' and 'Greatest Hits' are there, let alone the great Scandinavian CDs I was buying a few years ago (Hoven Droven, Den Fule etc.) and can't even pronounce, let alone recognise by title alone.

The slow dull manual way would be

1) Rip the CD
2) Rename the album folder to 'artist - album'
3) Copy the album folder to the top-level directory
4) Delete the now-empty artist folder
5) Repeat from 1

I couldn't find any way of altering the folder structure that WMP creates at rip time. However, faced with a slow, dull, repetitive task? I feel a script coming on ....

This is in VbScript - javascript, powershell, PHP, perl etc would all also work of course. Now I just run this after ripping a bunch of CDs: I can't automate opening the jewel case, putting the CD in the drive, waiting for the album database to recognise the CD, and click the button to start ripping, sorry.

Save it as a .vbs file, run it from the directory the MP3s are in, and all the renaming and moving is done. When I get around to it I'll add a log file, so I can know which CDs have been ripped when, and therefore which box in the attic any particular CD is going to be in.

Dim fso
Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")

Dim folder

Dim mainFolder
Set mainFolder = fso.GetFolder("c:\temp\") ' this is the MP3s directory

Dim TLsf
Set TLsf = mainFolder.SubFolders

For Each folder in TLsf

Dim strArtist
strArtist = folder.Name

Dim sf
set sf = folder.subFolders

' This count stops the script processing CDs that have already been processed
If sf.Count > 0 then
Dim strAlbum
For Each strAlbum IN sf
   Dim strCdSub
   strCdSub = strArtist & " - " & strAlbum.name
   fso.movefolder strAlbum, strCdSub
Next
  fso.deletefolder(folder)
End If
Next

Of course it's your file system and you run this script against it entirely at your own risk ... but the same principle would work whenever you have a whole load of stuff in sub-folders that you want to bring higher up the directory chain. If you take out the If sf.Count > 0 Then check and make the script recursive, it will eventually bring every file to the top level directory (although then you need to check for duplicate file names etc.).

The monstrous carbuncle that is iTunes

2010-05-27T18:00:00.008+01:00

As regular readers, if there are any, will know, I'm a Microsoft developer and user: but I'm also a very happy iPod Touch owner. Fighting Talk, Danny Baker, Friday Night Comedy, and loads of other great BBC Radio podcasts make me a happy commuter, the Englitina satisfies those awkward no-concertina-to-hand moments (although I can't find, and would love, an equivalent iPod low whistle and/or wooden flute simulator), and the interface is intuitive and easy to use.

Everything that is good, and stylish, and swish, and oooh, lovely, about the iPod smashes straight into a brick wall when you are forced to update its contents using the unstable train-wreck that is the iTunes software.

It's a real blot on Apple's treasured reputation for stylishness and reliability that the one Apple product that many Windows users will knowingly have most contact with is such an utter bag of spanners - even if I was considering moving to a Mac, I'd certainly seriously rethink that on the basis of the appalling iTunes 'user experience'.

A few weeks ago a reader of IT site The Register had a call from someone senior in the development of iTunes for Windows after emailing the company about iTunes: It would be nice to think that the conversation will have some effect.

Last night was a classic example. We've just bought a Brennan JB7 (of which more anon) and I'm gradually loading it with all our CDs, by the slow-but-sure method of reripping them onto my HDD at 192 bits and batch copying them over to the Brennan. On finding one particular fondly-remembered CD completely unreadable I went off and bought the MP3 version from Amazon, and was downloading that whilst simultaneously ripping another disc through Windows Media Player.

As soon as iTunes detected the download it did it's usual thing of muscling in on any MP3 traffic, fired itself up, and promptly crashed (presumably because WMP had some audio codec open, or because the net connection was busy, or because it's sulking because it's not on my primary monitor, or probably just because it's unstable rubbish).

This is a common problem with iTunes - rather than check whether there's any other media software running as it tries to start up, it just blows up and takes as many other processes out as possible as it crashes and burns. In fact every single Windows 7 crash I have had is directly related to iTunes. Every, single, one.

Updates (a 90Mb download to update a media library app????) crash on running; leaving the iPod connected during a reboot or when the machine goes into power-saving mode is a sure-fire way to triple your reboot time and precipitate a trip into Task Manager to play Bat-A-Process; and every now and then it just decides that it hates one or other of my podcast subscriptions and stops downloading it. Don't you dare shut down iTunes whilst it's halfway through downloading a podcast - Microsoft, Firefox and Adobe have all cracked seamless interrupt-and-resume downloads, whilst iTunes just sets a flag to trash and slowly reindex your library next time you start the application.

And don't get me started on the interface. A feast of randomly-functioning buttons and icons and links and chevrons and some things that just look like they should do something but don't, all rendered in a font just that irritating bit too small to comfortably read at 1600 widescreen resolution, the whole shebang decked out in grey on a grey background with grey highlights and furniture. Our new Intranet at work is getting flak from some users because they think its colour palette is a bit grey, but our Intranet makes iTunes look like a Cirque du Soleil show painted by Roy Lichtenstein whilst trying out some new extra-bright acrylics by comparison.

iPod - pretty brilliant. iTunes - upper balls-up.

The fife and drum museum of Northern Ireland

2010-04-27T18:23:00.000+01:00

I'd not come across the Fife and Drum Museum of Northern Ireland before, and wish I had - more fife information than you can shake a, well, a fife at.

Photos, press cuttings, lore, histories, and more.

Fascinating stuff for fife nerds like me!

Listing server features with Powershell

2010-04-20T18:00:00.001+01:00

The scenario is this - you've got a machine running Windows 2008, and you want to check exactly what the machine's installed roles and services.

Two lines of Powershell are all you need:

import-module servermanager

get-windowsfeature

And that will give you a complete list. You can even redirect the output to a file (rather than the screen) by amending the 2nd line to read something like

get-windowsfeature >> c:\temp\output.txt

And where it really gets interesting is that you can run that on two servers and compare the results in your text-comparison tool of choice to see exactly what's different.

I love Powershell - it's effectively 21st Century QBasic, or DOS scripting on steroids ...

Folk The BNP

2010-04-10T16:19:00.000+01:00

You might not have noticed, but the UK is currently in the middle of an election campaign.

A timely moment for The Light to release Folk The BNP, a short video summarising the attempts the BNP are making to hijack folk music for its own racist agenda ...

UPDATE - Session at the New Inn, Buxton

2010-04-01T18:00:00.001+01:00

Contrary to my previous post about the new session at the New Inn in Buxton, I'm now told there won't be a session on Monday 5th April, because it's Easter Monday.

The next session will be on Monday 19th April starting about 8:30pm, and things will then settle down to proceed from there on the 1st and 3rd Monday of the month.

Duck joins 'Famous Belgians'

2010-04-01T17:15:00.000+01:00

Plucky the duck was hit by a van in Belgium. However when the driver stopped at services on the M1 back in England, it turned out that Plucky had survived the impact and travelled all that way lodged in the van grille.

He has a broken wing, but has been taken to an animal sanctuary and should make a full recovery. Whether he will try to get back to Belgium or take up residence in the UK is not recorded ...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7542508/Duck-survives-500-mile-journey-in-van-grille.html

New hosting

2010-03-28T17:36:00.002+01:00

I've changed to a new hosting package for the Lesession and Flash In The Pan websites - still with Easily, but on different (and of course hopefully better) terms.

The reason I mention this is that the change of package occasions a change of hosting server, which means uploading all my sites onto a bare machine from my local copy.

Which raises the question as to whether I really do have as complete local copy of my sites as I thought I did, and whether the offline/online versions really are in sync, or whether there's going to be some files I'd forgotten about or uploaded to the site on the fly and now don't appear in the new version ... so if you're reading this and you've just found a hole or gap in the site, please let me know!

Session in Buxton

2010-03-18T18:00:00.003Z

There is a new session getting going in Buxton in the High Peak.

The session is on the 1st and 3rd Mondays of the month, and the next date is Monday 5th April. Things get going about 8:30pm.

It's at the New Inn on the Market Place (http://www.beerintheevening.com/pubs/s/52/5287/New_Inn/Buxton).

There have been two sessions so far, each attracting about 5 - 10 musicians playing a mix of English, Irish, Scottish, French, and the usual anything-else-that-comes-to-mind.

An evening in an accommodating Robinsons pub with some good playing and side-chat to be had - so if, like any sensible person, you enjoy the Mobberley/Cross Keys session, you should like this one! If you need any further information you can contact me via the comments or my usual email contact addresses, or otherwise you can just turn up.

I'm also hoping to get a session started in the Whaley Bridge area come the autumn, so more news on that as and when.

In praise of Microvox

2010-03-14T10:23:00.004Z

For years (and years and years) I've been a big fan and constant user of the Microvox instrument microphone system. I've used them on my flutes and whistles through all sorts of PA, from a basic 4-channel amp & two speaker rigs through to high-end professional festival rigs, and have always had consistently excellent results and very speedy soundchecks.

For a few years I've just invested in a pair of concertina mics (having nonsensically resisted the idea of sticking bits of velcro to the 'tina for a long time, and therefore struggled with inappropriate mic-ing systems and poor sound as a consequence) - and I should have known better and bought the Microvox concertina mics years ago.

Yes, the sound quality isn't quite as high definition as you'd get from a pair of SM58s, but Shure M58s can't be attached to the two ends of the instrument and therefore move with the bellows, and the sound is plenty good enough for playing ceilidhs on the most demanding of PAs. And yes there are high-end solutions like the swan-necked rig Jon Boden uses, but compare the prices of those with the Microvox solution.

Dead easy to use, and you don't notice them on the instrument while you're playing.

A completely unsolicited testimonial from a very satisfied customer!

Wise words from John Kirkpatrick

2010-03-13T13:51:00.003Z

John Kirkpatrick, legendary squeezebox wrangler and a central pillar of my love of folk music ever since I discovered him and it in the late 70s, was recently awarded Musician Of The Year at the Radio 2 Folk Awards - and well done him.

His acceptance speech is now available on his website and is notable for his

honourable mention to the thousands of dancers - and all the musicians and bands associated with them.

Dutch department store website

2010-03-10T18:00:00.000Z

The web team at Dutch department store HEMA has obviously got way too much time on their hands - after you've followed the link below, don't click on any of the products, just wait a few seconds ...

http://producten.hema.nl/

32-bit odbc on 64-bit Windows

2010-03-09T18:00:00.000Z

Scenario - our new web cluster is running 64-bit version of Windows Server 2008, and I want to set up a 32-bit ODBC driver (Intersystems Cache since you ask).

However after I'd installed the ODBC driver software, it still wasn't showing up in the Data Sources (ODBC) app.

However in the %systemroot%\syswow64 directory there is the 32-bit version of the ODBC setup application ODBCAD32.exe - and that allowed me to set up the 32-bit driver successfully.

Once again proving the bizarre fact on 64-bit Windows that you need to look in the syswow64 directory to find any legacy 32 bit programmes you might need.

Rules for dancing

2010-03-04T18:00:00.001Z

The Boston Weekly Magazine of October 29, 1803, published a handy list of rules for dancing.

With the May bank holiday not many weeks away, marking the start of the Summer dancing seasion, it would be fun to have 'Two old ladies ... provided to examine all who enter' at the ceilidh tent at Sidmouth, refusing entry to all gentlemen who have been wearing a cravat for more than a week or a fortnight ...

Thanks to LDT from the Concertina.Net forums for pointing us all in the direction of this one.

Searching for the % symbol in T-SQL

2010-02-18T17:30:00.002Z

T-SQL will let you search for characters within a text field using LIKE and the % wildcards - so to find 'test' in the field TestText in the table tblTest, you go

SELECT * FROM tblTest WHERE TestText LIKE '%test%'

which will find test, testing, protest, and so forth. So far, so straightforward.

But what if you want to find the % character itself?

SELECT * FROM tblTest WHERE TestText LIKE '%%%'

returns all rows, which is SQL for 'try again'.

The answer is to escape the %, using [ and ] brackets :

SELECT * FROM tblTest WHERE TestText LIKE '%[%]%'

The extra-good news is that the same works for _, *, and no doubt other special characters.

Sorting a datatable

2009-10-07T18:30:00.002+01:00

Here's another of my series of 'How To Do Things In .Net That Took A Bit Of Finding' ....

You have some data in a datatable, and you want to re-sort it.

Usually, of course, you would order your original data extract in SQL using the ORDER BY clause; but there are circumstances in which that either isn't practical or possible.

Not a problem: if dt is your datatable, and Surname, Forename, and RecordID are all columns in your datatable, just go

dt.DefaultView.Sort() = "Surname, Forename, RecordID"

or even specify the sort direction

dt.DefaultView.Sort() = "Surname, Forename, RecordID DESC"

Simples!

Goldie Whistles

2009-09-22T13:28:00.003+01:00

After years of making gorgeous low whistles under the Overton name (and following Bernard Overton's design), Colin Goldie has now switched to marking the instruments he makes with his own name.

I've got a low D Overton / Goldie, and it is the absolute bees knees - I've played lots of low whistles, owned a few, and nothing comes close to the quality, tone, expressiveness and feel of an Overton/Goldie.

Colin's website is at http://www.colingoldie.de and is well worth a look. Bernard Overton was a true pioneer, but it is now only right that these excellent, top-quality musical instruments should be sold under their maker's own name.

Wise Words

2009-08-27T19:15:00.000+01:00

If everything you wanted a program to do already existed ready-made, it wouldn't be called programming any more. It would be called shopping.

Raymond Chen, The Old New Thing, 4th August 2009

Ducks with sandals and musical elephants

2009-08-14T19:00:00.001+01:00

The average duckling faces a short future if they're unlucky enough to break a leg - however Lucky the duckling has had a much happier outcome ...

Meanwhile Five the mouth-organ-playing elephant is regularly playing gigs for the crowds at the West Midlands Safari Park ...

A Concertina Sang In Trafalgar Square

2009-07-30T18:34:00.002+01:00

As part of Anthony Gormley's One And Other artwork, Derbyshire concertina wizard Dave Ball recently spent an hour on the 4th plinth of Trafalgar Square, playing his concertina.

The hour is archived here, and very good it is too.

How they do the pre-game flypast

2009-07-19T14:23:00.003+01:00

It's one of the iconic moments in the build-up to any major sporting event. As the final note of the national anthem rings out, a close formation of aircraft swoops low over the stadium, flashing across the open sky in a split second.

You'd have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by the theatre and drama of it - it certainly gets me every time.

This video on NFL Films shows you how it's done to such split-second timing and such emotional effect.

35,000 years of flute music ....

2009-06-26T17:05:00.002+01:00

Archeologists in Germany have discovered the remains of a notch-flute, made from an ostrich leg bone, which has been carbon-dated to c.35,000 years ago.

The flute has five finger-holes and a notch end - the barrel has snapped below the fifth hole and the rest of the instrument is missing, although apparently the original bone could have been up to 3 inches longer.

The New York Times has a good article about the flute including a sound sample of a replica. The article also links to the original announcement in Nature magazine (a subscription site).

This find extends the known age of instruments we would all recognise as flutes back to 35000 years ago - odd to think that I'm following in quite such a long tradition ...

More duck news

2009-06-22T18:13:00.002+01:00

The latest duck to hit the headlines is the one who has become a regular at a restaurant in Aylesbury: regulars have been known to change their booking date depending on whether she will be around or not.

And how do the restaurant show their appreciation? By calling her Crispie ...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/hampshire/8108319.stm

Lituus - a revived instrument

2009-06-02T18:48:00.000+01:00

Researchers at the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council have recreated the lituus, a long-lost instrument from Bach's time.

Working with the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, and with the benefits of acoustic software modelling, they have created this 2.5m long monster, and played it (or, rather, them, for they have built two) in a performance of Bach's 'O Jesu Christ, meins lebens licht’ (BWV 118) from 1736 or 1737.

I admit that at first glance I was expecting something more shawm or rauschpfeife-like, but it's always nice to see another lost instrument making a return.

The BBC news item I first saw is here, the EPSRC press release is here, and there's even a video up on YouTube showing the [re]creation of the lituus and the instrument in action.

Ducks palace

2009-05-22T17:27:00.002+01:00

The story of Sir Peter Viggers and his £1,645 floating duck palace has been so widely covered in the media that it hardly needs me to mention it here.

But it's a story that's got two of my favourite things - Tory grandees make complete arses of themselves, and ducks.

So here's a link to the original Telegraph article, and here's a follow-up article about the disappearance of the duck palace.

So once again, the moral is beware of annoying a duck - take away their palace, and they'll shop you to the papers ...

A fine day for duck news

2009-05-20T13:25:00.003+01:00

Not one, but two, bits of duck-related news today.

The Guardian newspaper reports that Oxford University researchers spent £300,000 and three years proving ... that ducks like water!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/may/20/research-proves-ducks-like-water

No doubt the ducks enjoyed it though, which isn't something you can often say about animal research.

The Duck Man of Washington State

2009-05-20T10:06:00.002+01:00

Joel Armstrong, the Lesession organisation salutes you: when a duck decided that the best place to raise her brood of ducklings was on a ledge above a pavement in the middle of a city, Joel was there to catch the ducklings and guide them to water ....

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8058221.stm

Double contrabass flute

2009-05-10T16:48:00.003+01:00

The Florida State Flute Orchestra have got a double contrabass flute, said to be one of only four in the world.

It's made up of over 18 feet of tubing, stands eight feet tall, and sounds great! The flute features in this Fox News video here.

Happy anniversary Henry VIII

2009-04-21T08:00:00.000+01:00

Today is the 500th anniversary of the accession to the throne of King Henry VIII on 21st April 1509.

Amongst his lesser-known attributes was a great love of rauschpfeifes - the story is told that he would take any opportunity to hear the instrument, was an accomplished player hinmself, and even kept a group of players on standby to entertain him at short notice.

So he may have been a ruthless tyrant, a serial wife-murderer, and generally a not very nice person to be around: but Happy Anniversary Henry, probably the most noble member ever of the Worshipful Company of Rauschpfeifers.

Mudcat, E-Ceilidh, and Mud-e-ceilidh

2009-03-27T10:24:00.003Z

I'm a denizen of the discussion forums on Mudcat: wonderful forums which do, however, sometimes seem to be dedicated to personal insults and bitching with the occasional mention of traditional music thrown in by mistake.

You can find my witterings there under the name 'sfmans' if you're really that interested.

Recently an excellent parody site has appeared, Mud-e-ceilidh. This has been created by Lawrence Heath, the man behind Borfolk (the cartoon series that used to run in Southern Rag and then Foal Cruets back when I were a lad), and neatly and affectionately takes off Mudcat.

Presumably the name is also a dig at E-ceilidh, which is an email list dedicated to narrowing the definition of ceilidh dancing to as few bands and callers as is humanly possible, and attempting (and largely succeeding) to outdo even the old checked-shirts-and-nylon-trousers EFDSS D4D dancers in their exclusivity and resentment of newbies and offcomers.

One of my few and insignificant contributions to traditional music in England is that I claim responsibility for rechristening e-ceilidh e-coli, shortly before I unsubscribed and flounced off in a huff.

Where things are starting to get a bit weird, though, is that the fake Mud-e-ceilidh now links back to the real thread on Mudcat where some people are complaining about how disgraceful it is that Mud-e-ceilidh is parodying Mudcat ...

Transferring Outlook Express emails to Vista

2009-03-10T16:40:00.002Z

Time for another instalment in the occasional series 'How To Do Things On Your Computer'.

A nice simple one this time, but it's a bit counter-intuitive so worth mentioning.

The scenario is this - you want to import your old Outlook Express emails into the new Vista Microsoft Mail programme.

We have a new machine with Vista on it, and a hard drive from the old (Win2K) computer containing all the DBX files from Outlook Express. In this particular case it was actually a backup secondary drive, which had spent years faithfully copying all that day's data from the primary HDD at shutdown, and was now sitting in an external disc caddy I'd borrowed, but this will work equally well for

the primary HDD from the old computer
a DVD with all the DBX files on.

Just as an aside, you have got regular backups, haven't you.

Open Microsoft Mail and set up your email account. I'm assuming you know how to do that. Now go to File >> Import, select Messages, select Outlook Express 6, select Messages, and you are invited to browse to the folder that contains your messages.

If you go do into the directory itself and click OK you get a 'Directory is empty' message. This is, of course, very irritating because you know it isn't empty at all. Browse to the folder (in my case it was F:\DataFromOldMachine\EmailBackup) but - here's the crucial bit - don't browse into the folder, just click OK when you have the folder itself highlighted.

And that's all there is to it. Assuming your DBX files are OK the animated progress bar will pulsate away whilst the import routine does its thing, and pretty soon all your words of wisdom will be safely imported. If your DBX files themselves are corrupted and/or knackered, that's a whole different kettle of fish of course ...

Phoenix Ceilidhs website updated

2009-03-03T18:15:00.003Z

The Phoenix Ceilidhs of Horwich, near Bolton, in Lancashire, stage monthly ceilidhs with the best dance bands in the country (and occasionally from other countries too).

AS well as the remaining dances in this season the 2009 - 2010 season is now on the website, starting with our old friends All Blacked Up in October.

So please take a trip to http://www.lesession.co.uk/phoenix to have a look!

Equal Temperament in a nutshell

2009-02-25T18:12:00.001Z

Joining in a discussion on Equal Temperament on the concertina.net forums, I wrote a brief introductory summary of what Equal Temperament is and where it came from.

And, vast over-simplification and compression of the topic though it was, nobody shot it down in flames or was too rude about it: so here it is!

There are two central 'natural' harmonies, which are the octave, and the fifth: the fifth is the interval C >> G in C major, D >> A in D major etc.

Those two intervals sound so 'right' because the speed of the different vibrations that make up the two notes fit together perfectly, and that is because they are perfect ratios to each other: the octave is 2:1, the fifth is 3:2.

The problem is that if you use perfect fifths to tune something like a piano, the octaves eventually end up out of tune! If you tune by fifths you go

C >> G >> D >> A >> E >> B >> F# >> C# >> G# >> D# >> A# >> E# >> B#.

But there isn't a B# - that's C. And if you've tuned by perfect fifths, the C at the start and the B# a.k.a. C at the end are out of tune with each other. But out-of-tune octaves are horrible and very obvious - so a whole raft of compromises and carefully calculated fudges were devised down the years, whereby the octaves were pulled back in tune with each other, and the 'gap' (actually called the 'comma') was, instead, split up and added to various other notes in the scale instead.

So we end up with the notes we have today: many of them are subtly out-of-tune from where they 'should' be, to the greater goal of being roughly in tune no matter where you start on the scale and whatever key you play in.

And this still affects you no matter what instrument you play, because if my concertina was tuned to a different set of compromises to your concertina, or my flute was tuned to a different tuning system than Ian's melodeon, they'd be out of tune with each other.

Result - pretty much what actually did happen in the Renaissance: where instruments were made in matched consorts, played together, and woe betide anyone who tried to use a shawm made in York in a pub session with a bunch of waits from Winchester because they were very out of tune with each other (and also probably didn't even agree on what note A was, but that's whole other kettle of worms and can of fish).

Morris a life with bells on

2009-02-15T12:06:00.002Z

I'm following (and indeed participating in) the growing clamour to get the film Morris - A Life With Bells On shown in every multiplex across the land, or at the very least somewhere I can see it.

There's a good article about the story so far in today's Observer, whilst the website for the film can be found at www.morrismovie.com, which in itself has a link to the petition to get the film shown all over the UK if not the world.

Move over Slumdog Millionaire (although only after winning many extremely well-deserved Oscars of course), the morris are coming!

Stomping Duck - it's back!

2009-02-05T17:26:00.001Z

Nearly thirty years after its inception as the house band of the Sheffield University Folk Dance Society, and nearly twenty-five years since our last dance, my very first ceilidh band Stomping Duck is reuniting (for the proverbial One Night Only) to help celebrate Peter & Joanna Mackey's 25th Wedding Anniversary in September.

We've managed to track down an excellent core to be able to definitely do the evening, but we, and Peter & Joanna, would be delighted to track down other old faces.

So if by some serendipitous quirk of Google and t'Internet you are reading this thinking 'crikey, that's me they're trying to get in touch with, that is' ... please get in touch!

Great concertina resource

2009-01-28T19:12:00.000Z

Just a quick grateful mention for the Concertina FAQ from the rec.music.makers.squeezebox newsgroup: loads of interesting and useful stuff about our hexagonal (and of course octagonal and dodecahedronal) friends.

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/music/squeezebox/concertina-faq/

Preserving the original file date when copying files

2009-01-28T17:00:00.002Z

Let joy be unconfined, it's time for another in my occasional public service series of 'techie things that were a bit hard to find on Google' .....

I wanted to copy a whole bunch of files from drive D: to drive E:, but I wanted to preserve the original file dates so that I still knew when the files were created.

So off to Google, and there are all sorts of solutions on offer, all of them involving downloading some replacement or enhanced file handling app. However it struck me that xcopy might do the job every bit as well, and so it proves.

By default xcopy preserves the file dates (but not directory creation dates), the /K switch will preserve all file attributes, and you can even copy all files created after a certain date with the /D switch (in the American date format format /D:m-d-y).

Job's a good one, all built in to Windows for the price of opening a command line session. xcopy /? as usual gives you all the options, and Google xcopy for further support and example command lines.

I refer of course to Windows, results on other operating systems may vary.

Queen's Award For Music

2009-01-20T13:00:00.001Z

The Queen's Medal for Music is awarded annually, and rewards an individual who has had a major influence on the musical life of the nation.

This year's recipient is none other than Kathryn Tickell, so congratulations to her!

Ceird an Cheoil

2009-01-16T18:10:00.004Z

Last year a series of TV programmes on musical instruments and musical instrument making were made in Northern Ireland, and made a brief and welcome appearence on the BBC iPlayer. Thanks to the excellent Irish Bouzouki blog I've just found that several of the programmes are also still available on Google Videos. The Irish bouzouki programme is here, while the programme on the low whistle is here.

Wonderful stuff, great music and interesting discussion in both programmes, well worth watching again and again! There are also programmes on the guitar, mouth organ, and piano amongst others.

Shawm enchanted evening

2009-01-06T18:00:00.000Z

I'm now the very proud owner of a soprano shawm - a beautiful instrument in English maple, made by Eric Moulder who also made my rauschpfeife. Progress on getting the reed embouchure is slow but steady, and it'll be a while before I'm ready to consider myself a shawmer (shawmist?) worthy of public performance, but hopefully in a few months all will be well.

It is a hard and fast rule of mine that my instruments do not go out of the house until they have some form of decent protective case or bag. This started when I took the bouzouki out on its very first gig in its brand-new fibreglass shell case, and put it in the back of the van we were using for the day. About 5 minutes into the journey to the next pickup the driver had to do a full emergency stop and the bouzouki, which had been at the back of the otherwise empty van, was very suddenly sliding the length of the van and crashed quite hard against the back of the seats. Ouch, the case has just paid for itself, I thought.

Which is the purpose of this post. [The thing about cases, that is, not the topic of bouzouki abuse]. It was fine by the way.

The good people of Calumet (also available from them via Amazon) sell a medium tripod case which could have been purpose-made as a soprano shawm case. It is only a soft padded case, so it's not suitable for putting the shawm in aircraft holds and it won't survive someone standing on it - but as a gig bag it's absolutely perfect, and it's even got a side pocket for your reeds and other assorted cruft. I generally find tripod cases are great for transporting my menagerie of wind instruments, but this really is the best fit yet!

Under One Sky videos

2008-12-18T18:04:00.003Z

Just to follow up on the previous post: here are links to the Scottish TV website, showing an interview with John McCusker, and a performance of Hush A Bye. Oooh, lovely stuff.

Under One Sky concert review

2008-12-03T13:34:00.003Z

To The Lowry in Salford for a performance of John McCusker's 'Under One Sky'.

Originally commissioned by the Cambridge Folk Festival and Celtic Connections, the piece went so well that it is currently on a short tour with much the same cast-list: regular McCusker collaborators such as Ian Carr, Andy Cutting, and Ewan Vernal, other renowned folk names such as Julie Fowlis, Jim Causley and John Tams, and even a smattering of pop stars in the shapes of Roddy Woomble and Graham Coxon. All in all twelve top-class musicians were snugly fitted onto the stage of the Quays Theatre and enthusiastically welcomed by a near-full house.

The first half of the concert was a session of 'floor spots' by members of the ensemble. The constant coming and going of personnel made the first half (and indeed some parts of the second half) a little bitty and lacking in stagecraft, but there were some glittering gems on offer. After a rousing initial tune set by the whole band, Emma Reid played a spellbinding fiddle solo combining a complex polska with a open-string-heavy jig; Jim Causley sang a richly melancholy Ralph McTell song (no, not that one); and John Tams, despite battling a combination of man-flu and stage-fright, sang a beautiful version of his own 'Hold Back The Tide' with a rich textural backing from the band. The only [literally] off note was Graham Coxon, who Foghorn Leghorned his way through an otherwise faithful cover of the Shirley Collins/Albion Band arrangement of 'Just As The Tide Was A-Flowing' whilst never getting much closer than a semitone to the rest of the band, or indeed showing the fainted sign of interest in the proceedings; but he none the less seemed to delight a small vocal contingent of his fans, whilst everyone else applauded the fact that he'd finished and the real musicians could start playing again.

The second half was the 'Under One Sky' suite itself, and displayed all of the sonorous and complex arrangements you would expect from a John McCusker piece. Songs from Messrs Fowlis, Tams, Causley, Woomble and Coxon (the latter slightly improved from his first-half showing) were all given arrangements, by turns lush and sensitive. The stand-out song for me was Jim Causley's, written by John Tams and beautifully and emotionally delivered.

The instrumental forces at McCusker's disposal were used to great, varied, and sumptuous effect: I have failed to mention the splendid presence of piper and flutist Iain MacDonald, and also top marks to the stand-in percussionist [name, sadly, missed/forgotten] who skilfully and sensitively drove the complex arrangements whilst discreetly reading some parts from sheet music and following Ian Carr's guidance through the rest. The soundscape was very similar to that heard on John McCusker's CDs (and possibly most widely known through his erstwhile arrangements for Kate Rusby); the freedom of having longer instrumental sections, plus the sheer amount of willing musical talent available to play the pieces, took the music to new peaks of excitement and beauty that words alone cannot capture. Hopefully the CD, on sale on the night (but as-yet unplayed) and not officially released until March *will* capture some of those heights!

Criticisms? As mentioned, Graham Coxon seemed out of place and rather out of his depth, whilst Roddy Woomble also seemed a little detached: however I must admit that a section of the audience seemed to regard their contributions as the highlights and presumably got bored during the John McCusker bits. The constant comings and goings were rather distracting at times, especially in the middle of some of the longer numbers, and a bit more attention to presentation wouldn't have gone amiss - only the two Johns seemed comfortable interacting with the audience, and we didn't get a single recipe from Andy Cutting. From where we were sitting, dead centre and near the front, the wind instruments seemed a little low in the mix and the guitars a little high, but that could well be partly my personal wind instrument bias / preference; apart from a brief pre-concert burst of feedback the sound was very clear, well-balanced, sympathetic to the wide range of instruments on stage, and in that lovely live concert volume range where it's loud but not overpowering.

All minor points which in no way take away from a top-rate evening of music and musicianship.

So good, in fact, that I think I may even have enjoyed it, in its own way, more than the recent roof-raising barn-storming all-conquering resistance-is-futile Bellowhead gig in Buxton.

See the Under One Sky tour if you can on the few remaining dates, or hope that the experience is repeated in the future!

Music as terrorism

2008-11-12T17:41:00.002Z

In my sillier moments I've always fancied getting a band together under the name Extreme Folk Terror (in homage to Extreme Noise Terror of course).

It now turns out that the Brown government has anticipated this move by using the War on ~~Oceania~~ Terror legislation against music venues. First Icelandic banks, now pub rockers, who knows where else our beloved leaders will turn with these sweeping powers to ~~do what the hell they like~~ protect us from evil?

I would of course play nothing but rauschpfeife in Extreme Folk Terror ...

More on the RoboFlautist

2008-11-09T15:56:00.003Z

More on the robotic flute-player here:

http://www.takanishi.mech.waseda.ac.jp/research/index.htm

Apparently the eyes are actually cameras, which would allow the robot to adjust tempo to fit in with other players. However, more sinisterly, it is also suggested that the RoboFlautist could be programmed to use the eyes to evaluate and even criticise other players.

They say this is as a teaching aid, but what if it has a particularly bad day and doesn't feel like following the 3 laws of robotics?

What if an endless stream of hideously overblown attempts at Frere Jacques finally drive it over the edge?

You have played four bum notes in the last 8 bars - you will be EXTERMINATED ....

Robot flute-player

2008-11-07T18:37:00.003Z

Robotics experts have unveiled a robot flute-player.

This raises the prospect of a flute-player who

never makes mistakes
always starts the tune at exactly the right speed for the dancers
never gets drunk or argumentative
never says 'sorry, I don't know that one'
never stands on one leg (in homage to a certain famous folk flautist)

And where's the fun in that?

Football crazy, (American) football mad ...

2008-09-21T17:21:00.001+01:00

A Bears fan from London called Adam has set himself the task of visiting every NFL stadium in one season: things have been made slightly more complicated by the Chargers / Saints game at Wembley and the Dolphins / Bills game in Toronto, making 35 stadia to get round.

He's blogging all the way, and this week Adam is at Candlestick for the 49ers against the Lions.

The URL is http://www.adamsfootballtrip.com/ and I'm looking forward to following it through the season.

It's alive

2008-09-07T16:09:00.000+01:00

The Flash In The Pan website is now live at http://www.flashinthepan.org.uk. There's more stuff to come as the site grows, but there's enough of a basic design and content to make it worth putting up, so there it is!

Concertina repair strategy

2008-09-02T18:02:00.005+01:00

My English concertina has had a couple of minor problems recently. First the B above middle C on the push packed in completely: that fixed itself after a night out with Flash In The Pan. Then the F# push on the same side developed a weird 'bubbling' tone - that sorted itself out down at the splendid Exmoor Border Morris 10th Birthday weekend.

In both cases I'd made moves to get it repaired only a few days beforehand, and lo and behold the problem clears up. It must be like when you book a doctor's appointment and immediately start feeling better.

I've now bought a copy of David Elliotts' Concertina Maintenance Manual, so maybe I'll be able to do it myself next time ... or maybe I'll still chicken out and get a professional in!

Prague Folklore Days

2008-08-08T18:06:00.003+01:00

July 18th - 20th saw The Powderkegs in Prague for the Prague Folklore Days festival - nearly 50 folk dance groups from all over Europe.

We had an excellent time and (briefly) got onto Czech TV: the rauschpfeife also got a run-out in Wenceslas Square in the shadow of the National Museum, the museum where one of the original instruments Eric Moulder studied to create my rauschpfeife is kept. Sadly I didn't get the chance to see the original, maybe next time.

Videos from the festival are starting to appear on YouTube:

This compilation by a member of Whitehorn Morris gives a good flavour of the weekend, and includes both my rauschpfeife and some excellent Catalan shawms at the Saturday night hootenanny.

The wonderful sound of the massed Alpen Horns of the Alphornblaser-Vereinigung.

More highlights as they appear ...

Rock stars + Sesame Street =

2008-07-16T18:00:00.002+01:00

There's a great thread running on the Guardian newspaper's blog about the numerous musical guests who have appeared on the Muppets and Sesame Street to perform new versions of their songs.

Feist counting to 4, REM singing 'Shiny Happy Monsters', Pee Wee Hermann singing 'Put Down The Duckie', and my personal favourite so far is James Blunt's 'My Triangle' ...

More rauschpfeifing on YouTube

2008-07-12T17:25:00.002+01:00

There's another video of The Powderkegs up on YouTube, and it also increases the YouTube rauschpfeife content by one item: it's at http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=biHws2cS7Io.

Shortly after this dance Greta's saxophone reed cover was thrown into the River Cam as an attempt to appease the rain gods, and that had ... absolutely no effect whatsoever and it kept raining!

Wrong date format on your IIS website?

2008-07-03T12:37:00.005+01:00

Another in my occasional public service series of 'techie things that were a bit hard to find on Google' .....

The scenario is as follows:
You are developing a website and it works fine on your local machine: however when you put it onto an IIS server, all the dates suddenly displaying in the wrong format (e.g. in my case I am developing in the UK, and on deploying the app it suddenly started showing dates in the American mm/dd/yyyy format).

The regional settings on the server are set correctly, there are no special date format commands in your code that might be causing problems, and all in all you're in search of a solution.

This is the solution that worked for me (W2003, IIS 6):

Log onto the server with admin rights.Go into IIS and open the Application Pools directory.
Right-click the application pool for the affected app and select Properties
Select the 'Identity' tab
Set the 'Predefined' drop down to 'Local System'. You get a security warning at this stage - whether you agree to that risk described in the warning is, of course, entirely your decision, and the LeSession organisation accepts no liability whatsoever for anything whatsoever, but this fix isn't going to work if you say 'no' at this stage ...
Do an iisreset.

And if fortune is smiling, your date format issue is a thing of the past.

The original solution was found [naturally] on Google, http://www.techexams.net/forums/viewtopic.php?p=106278 so virtual beer goes to SWM for that.

Swearing - sometimes it is clever

2008-04-19T17:42:00.002+01:00

Justin Missingham, the LeSession organisation salutes you.

His letter in today's Guardian could have been a fairly dull explanation of why he's not going to Glastonbury this year: but add a masterly demonstration of the act of deploying rude words, and it becomes a small thing of pure genius.

Usher maiden aunts and sensitive pets out of the room and then read his letter, here.

Sometimes, in the right hands, it is both big and clever.

Steve's top 10 (OK, 12) top race-day tips

2008-04-17T09:45:00.004+01:00

I wrote this a couple of years ago for a work colleague about to run their very first 10K in the Great Manchester Run.

Clearing out my machine before leaving my current job I came across it, and, well, here it is!

1. BEFORE THE START

Don't do anything new on the day
Be comfortable with all of your kit - new clothes can rub, pinch, blister or just turn out to look good in the shop but be horrible to run in. Shoes should have at least 20 miles on them, and everything on you should be tried and tested.

Keep to your usual warm-up regime; if you see another runner doing a stretch or exercise you think might be useful, remember it to try out in the future, don't try it now.

The other aspect of that is to run the full distance beforehand at least once - that way you know that you can do it!

Lubricate (1)
At the very least go for Vaseline on all rubbing bits (crotch, heels, any calluses on the feet) and micropore tape over the nipples. Deep Heat is not a lubricant.

Keys?
If you've not got a partner / friend as non-running support crew, any decent sports shop will sell little wrist-bags with Velcro straps, perfect for the car keys. Don't rely on those pockets they have in shorts.

2. AT THE START

Be ready to run
No, really. Get to the start area in good time, with all your kit in place including your race number and any timing chip device, your water level comfortable, and you're ready to concentrate on running the course and enjoying the day. Crucially, get the car parked good and early (I try to park an hour before the start and get to the line 10 - 20 minutes before the off). Have spare safety pins, Vaseline, and micropore with you.

Raining?
Oh well, it'll help cool you down later. Wear a bin-bag with appropriately-placed holes as a disposable poncho, and then ditch it just before the start. Ditch it to one side, not in the middle of the road for someone behind you to fall over!

3. IN THE RACE

Run your own race
Run at your comfortable speed and run your own race, rather than getting into competing with or pacing against individuals. Be particularly careful of starting too fast in the crush and excitement. Remember that the guy you overheard saying he was after the same time as you might be wrong or bullshitting, and the woman in the full Bertie Bassett costume might be a three hour marathoner doing this race in fancy dress as a dare. Don't get stuck behind a slower runner; don't be embarrassed to overtake (but look out for kerbs, lampposts, spectators and other runners).

Lubricate: Use the water stations
Take on some water at each station, just a few sips will do. Don't go for the very first person holding a cup / bottle out: aim about halfway down the line, and go in and out on a gentle curve or you'll either cause, or be involved in, a pile-up. Keep moving at and after the water station. Don't ever pour water over your head - you'll wash all the sweat into your eyes.

Don't stop
If you are feeling half-dead when you're halfway round, that means you're going to make it! Blood injuries, heart attacks and brain heamorrhages excepted, don't stop, it's just harder to get started again - if you need to ease up, drop your forward speed by shortening your pace but keep the stride rhythm going (the same technique as going uphill). Don't clench your fists: that creates tension in the arms and shoulders and, even worse, makes your toes curl, so you end up banging the end of your toes into the sole of your shoe with every stride - keep your hands flat and open. Swing your arms the way you want to, not the way you think you ought to from seeing other runners (within reason of course, the runners around you have got teeth and chins that they don't want you hitting).

If after all that you really really do need to stop, get to one side of the road so you don't mess anyone else's race up. Try to grind to a halt near a race marshall, they will probably be very nice and sympathetic, and if not at least it will give them a good laugh.

Enjoy it
Look at the scenery from a new angle, appreciate the applause, enjoy the whole day. Be proud of whatever run you do - worrying about positions and PBs and splits can come with experience. Smile - it eases all sorts of tensions in the face and neck.

4. AT THE FINISH

Attack the line
No, really. Even a minor acceleration at the end can knock seconds off your time, turning a 40 minute time into a 39 minute time, an hour into 59 minutes, etc. You've got the rest of your life to recover the extra effort and then the rest of your life to feel good about the improved time.

Keep going
Go through the line and on into the finish funnels. By keeping moving you will both make the race marshals' life a bit easier, and make sure that the runners behind you get the same decent finish that you just got. If you are really going to collapse find an St John's Ambulance person and do it in front of them, it'll make their day.

Lubricate - Lurid is good
In the finish area, if offered a choice of water or some vile-coloured chemical slop, go for the vile colour - it'll restore your body salts and help recovery, even if it tastes like distilled turpentine and you wouldn't ever usually touch that sort of stuff with a bargepole. Then go for water and lots of it - have a bottle with a supporter or back at the car.

And finally: you deserve it, but don't touch a drop of alcohol until you've eaten something and your wee is back to a normal clear colour, or else you'll very quickly get the mother of all hangovers as the alcohol soaks straight into your muscles.

Firefox version in BgInfo

2008-04-10T11:34:00.004+01:00

If you like to know what your computer is up to, and like having various settings close at hand on the desktop, there's nothing better than the BgInfo utility from the good folks at Winternals (was SysInternals and now part of Microsoft).

BgInfo reads various environment variables at boot (or on demand), and displays them on your desktop. If that doesn't sound like your idea of a good thing, I'd stop reading now to be honest.

When I decided that I wanted to add a line to display the current version of Firefox, it took a fair bit of Googling and head-scratching before I found the correct registry key to look at.

So, that key is ....

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Mozilla\Mozilla Firefox\CurrentVersion

and so if you set up a User Defined field in your BgInfo pointing at that key, Firefox versioning information shall be yours for the viewing whenever you want.

Phoenix ceilidhs website redecorated

2008-04-05T17:48:00.005+01:00

Not before time, I've had a thorough overhaul of the look and feel of the Phoenix ceilidhs website and made the new version live today - have a look at http://www.lesession.co.uk/phoenix for the new look. So that's the BBC, Amazon, and Phoenix ceilidhs sites all redecorated in the last few days, it must be Spring in the air.

The entire 2009 Phoenix season is now confirmed by the way, so you can check the latest listings while you're there.

Crystal Reports printing from web page

2008-03-14T12:06:00.004Z

Another one in my occasional series of posts detailing the solution to a programming problem that took a bit of finding ....

Problem:

It's a web project developed in Visual Studio 2005, C# / ASP.Net with a SQL Server 2005 back-end.

The project generates reports using the Crystal Reports engine supplied with VS2005: the reports are designed using the built-in designer and data tools, and included in the install package as resources. The setup project also includes the Crystal resources as detailed in the VS2005_Walkthroughs PDF on the Crystal tech support website.

A crystalreportsviewer control sits on the aspx page with some connection and parameter code behind.

Run locally on the development machine, the reports worked fine: but when the app is deployed, the toolbar icons for the Crystal viewer don't always display, and the popup print and export windows show 'Page Not Found'.

Solution:

Copy the

WINDOWS_DIRECTORY\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\
ASP.NETClientFiles\CrystalReportWebFormViewer3

directory (with all sub-directories of course) to the root of your production website: e.g. for a standard install of IIS that would put it at

C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\aspnet_client\system_web\2_0_50727\CrystalReportWebFormViewer3

That was in place on my production server, and is set up, presumably, the first time you run the application MSI with the Crystal MSMs built in.

However if your IIS webroot is redirected to a different location, the Crystal setup still installs the files in C:\Inetpub\wwwroot. Which is fine and dandy, right up until the application uses relative pathnames to point at the resources as if they were in a directory relative to your relocated webroot directory, and of course they are not there.

So if you are redirecting your wwwroot, make sure you copy the CrystalReportWebFormViewer3 directory to there as well, e.g.

WEBROOT\aspnet_client\system_web\2_0_50727\CrystalReportWebFormViewer3

This took me a long time to track down, and I finally got the vital clue from this post by dmcphun on the Business Objects website, so a goodly supply of LeSession virtual beer tokens go to him/her.

Hopefully posting this will make the search easier for the next developer banging their head against this one.

Incidentally this problem illustrates the complexity of creating good Google searches: sometimes the act of including the word or words that you think will produce millions of rogue hits will actually crack the problem wide open.

I'd done lots of Google searches on this one, but it wasn't until I included the phrase "page not found" that I found the post from dmcphun. I'd assumed that 'page not found' would muddy the waters - instead the correct answer was the second hit for crystalreportviewer "page not found" .

Other search engines are of course also available, albeit not all of them with fireman's poles, free-roaming staff dogs, and retired ski-lift gondolas as phone boxes.

Best use of a banjo

2008-03-08T12:38:00.005Z

Not, actually, an anti-banjo tirade, or even the cue for a stream of 'what do you call perfect pitch / which do you run over first / how do you get two in tune' comments: more of an Oscar nomination (the Award For Best Use Of A Banjo In An English Ceilidh Band perhaps).

I'm referring to the Gloworms CD 'Running Joak', which has been out for a few months but only really came onto my radar as a result of the Worms Meet Moths track on the Imagined Village (by far the best track on that CD for my money incidentally, but there you go).

I confess that at first I thought it was something of the mando-bouzouko-cittern-ist family doing the rhythm duties, there's a lot of similarities in the percussive, choppy, driving sound to the playing of fine people like Ian Luff, Simon Dew, Paul Martin, and of course the great Donal Lunny (although sadly Mr Lunny is not primarily renowned for his work in e-ceilidh bands) - but Blimey O'Reilly, it's listed on the cover as a tenor banjo.

Not only that but the instrument which I thought was a melodeon is actually a piano accordion.

The fiddle I did manage to correctly identify though :)

I'd seen The Gloworms a few years ago and was, frankly, underwhelmed, but revisiting them now they are a completely different kettle of fish.

For a CD which features no wind instruments or concertinas to even make it onto my repeat playlist is a rare event - for me to be raving (to anyone who'll listen or read) about a CD by a trio of banjo, piano box, and fiddle is unheard of.

And if you haven't already, hear it and marvel!

Whistle-stop tour of Da Hall

2008-02-13T12:17:00.003Z

That's Roots Hall of course, home of the mighty Shrimpers: Ron Martin recently gave Sky Sports' Soccer AM a quick tour of the place, and the video is online here.

Of course I remember the South Stand when it was open to the elements and (to a 15-year-old at least) seemed much higher, a concrete and crash barrier mountain stretching up the hill for ever ... they used to launch the firework from there on the Rotary Club Guy Fawkes night firework display. Try that in the Muddy Fox stand and there'd be bother!

Display Excel data on Google Earth

2008-02-09T15:34:00.001Z

Yet another cool application for Google Earth: this one allows you to import data held in Excel format files. Points, routes and GPS are all supported, and while the baseline is just latitude, longitude and a title, far more complexity can be introduced. See http://www.earthpoint.us/ExcelToKml.aspx for full instructions and a demo file. Excellent stuff!

John Of The Green - The Cheshire Way

2008-02-02T14:38:00.000Z

At long last the reissue of this wonderful tune book has been published, and my copy landed on the doormat this morning. A4 portrait format, very nicely produced with paperback-style perfect binding, very clear notation, and good supporting material.

But of course the proof of any tune book is in the tunes, and what these are, from the very top drawer of the English tradition. The core (and the first three quarters) of the book is of course the 3/2 time hornpipes, but there is also a selection of other fine 'country dance tunes from the Baroque era', many of them I had not previously come across.

This is a very welcome and important release and I'd heartly recommend anyone with an interest in the music to support John Offord's fine publication by buying at least one copy. Order details can be found at http://www.johnofthegreen.co.uk

Phoenix ceilidhs plan well ahead

2008-01-12T17:18:00.000Z

Nobody is more suprised than the organisers of the Phoenix ceilidhs that they have already booked all of the bands for the first half of 2009. But they have, so I've updated the website with all the details!

I was planning to give the site a much-needed redesign before putting any more dates up on it, but, well, there you go.

Bagpipe Trees

2008-01-08T18:35:00.000Z

Forget goats and taps and water wheels etc., the ethical goods website Good Gifts are offering us all the opportunity to send 'bagpipe trees' as a gift.

The Mpingo, a.k.a. African blackwood, tree is the favoured wood for Great Highland Bagpipe chanters, clarinets, and other fine instruments such as my Ormiston flute, but deforestation is severely affecting supplies. By buying a friend or relation a set of bagpipe trees

you´ll be helping to rebuild the forests, conserve water, reduce soil erosion, generate income and keep scores of musicians puffing.

An appreciative LeSession nod to The Scotsman newspaper, who headlined its story on the subject with the splendid title Bagpipes a threat to the environment (and we're not talking noise pollution)

On the first day of Christmas

2007-12-30T16:29:00.000Z

my true love gave to me
a David Angus stainless steel fife in D.

It's a real corker of a fife, loud and clear straight from the first blow and a pleasure to play, and will be making its live debut tonight at the Powderkegs Christmas party.

The intention is that this will become my main 'workhorse' fife, enabling me to retire my rather battle-scarred and careworn Sweet D piccolo which has been the faithful mainstay since 1996.

In that time the Sweet D will have performed over 400 public stands with Chorlton Green, Shake The Dice, Freaks In The Peaks, Rumworth Morris, and Powderkegs (the piccolo never made a niche for itself in the Trebuchet repertoire for no particular reason), not to mention innumerable practises and sessions.

The thread lapping has been rewound several times, there are at least three noticeable dents in the bodywork, and the varnish has completely worn away around the mouth hole and the edges of several finger holes. I've been looking for a replacement for a while and hopefully this Angus fife will do the business!

Rauschpfeifery

2007-12-22T12:59:00.000Z

You wait ages for a blog update and then two come at once ...

I've updated the images section of my rauschpfeife mini-website, to include Richard Peach's cartoon of me assisting in the search for Osama Bin Laden - http://www.lesession.co.uk/rauschpfeife/images.htm

Goyt Valley Mummers at Glossop Labour Club

2007-12-22T12:30:00.000Z

A new mummers team is born - after weeks of frantic preparation (well, a couple of practises anyway) the Goyt Valley Mummers made their debut at the Glossop Labour Club last night to wild acclaim, booing, hissing and general amusement.

Photos are up on Picacsaweb at http://picasaweb.google.com/sfmans/GoytValleyMummersAtGlossopLabourClub.

The next performance will be at the Dog and Partridge, Bridgemont (near Whaley Bridge) on Boxing Day, as a part of the first annual Powderkegs lunchtime dance-out there.

Cruft and Detritus

2007-12-03T19:30:00.000Z

Mentioning cruft and detritus in my previous post lead me to look up Verity Stob's splendid Beaufort Scale Of Cruft.

Although XP seems a lot more resistant than previous strains of Windows, it still holds true. You can find it here.

131068Mbs? I don't think so

2007-12-02T15:27:00.001Z

After a hard disk failure (easy to diagnose, it went meep, meep, fizz), unfortunately coupled with a dodgy Ghost backup DVD, I've ended up completely rebuilding my system - probably a good thing to get rid of all the cruft and detritus.

I had to start from my original XP disk, pre-SP2: I'd always meant to do a slipstreamed disk but, well, never got round to it.

So I fire up the box booting from the XP disk and ... it could only see the hard drives as 131068Mb. That's considerably less than I've got! What? What What?

I had forgotten, but before XP SP2, Microsoft couldn't cope with drives bigger than 130Gb. The trick is therefore to create a partition in the 130Gb that you can see, install XP and then SP2, and once SP2 is in place all your disk space is recognised and available. Easy when you know how - see this KB article for more details.

Origami CD and DVD case

2007-11-15T19:20:00.001Z

I needed to send a DVD to a supplier in a padded bag, and didn't have a plastic wallet handy to put the DVD in.

So I paid a visit to Mr Google's Electronic Emporium Of Eccentrically Educational Ephemera, did a search for 'Origami CD case', and the first one I tried did the job perfectly.

I confess I did cheat slightly!

Rather than
(a) finding out what the Fujimoto approximation technique was and then
(b) rigorously applying it in search of inner fulfillment,
I simply creased the A4 sheet to give me a mid-line, lined the centre of the DVD up with that, and folded the edges in to fit the edges of the DVD. Job's a good-un.

Chromaticism Competition

2007-11-15T19:15:00.001Z

When I'm out playing ceilidhs or concerts I carry a huge selection of flutes, fifes, whistles, recorders, the rauschpfeife, the concertina, the gob-iron, and there's probably a few other bits and pieces I've forgotten to mention.

On occasions when I don't know in advance what I'll be called upon to play, or for recording, I've been known to pack three low D whistles - the Susato for the harder recorder-like tone, the Howard for the breathy 'Swirling Celtic Mists Of Olde Erin' bottom end, and the Overton ... because it's the Overton and I wouldn't go out to play a note without it.

But a lot of the time that's complete overkill and impractical.

So I've got into the habit of having a single whistle-bag for sessions, days out with Powderkegs, and the like. Into that bag goes the fife, the high Harper and low Overton D whistles, the rauschpfeife .. and I'd like one other instrument to go in there.

The job description of this other instrument is as follows:
1) It needs to be chromatic, or if not fully chromatic at least capable of playing in flat and sharp keys for French and Swedish music.
2) It needs to be a wind instrument of the flute family.
3) It needs to be loud enough to be played outdoors and in sessions.
4) It's got to have that indefinable X factor. (That's X Factor as in 'possessing qualities that makes that instrument something I want to play and am happy playing', obviously, not the crappy Simon Cowell lowest-common- denominator individuality-crushing transatlantic-pop-chart-sausage-factory TV programme).

The contenders I can pull out of the box of instruments I've accrued down the years are

a Skip Healy 10-hole fife (by far the coolest solution, but somehow my brain and fingers just don't do that fingering system on the F naturals and G#s)
a Yamaha Boehm-system piccolo (the obvious contender in some ways, but the embouchure is soooo different from my wooden flutes, and I just can't rid myself of Ciaran Carson's quote in his superb book Last Night's Fun, about Boehm system flutes being 'a kind of typewriter')
a plastic Yamaha fife (suprisingly good, but loses tons in the X factor stakes by being hideous-toy-looking cream ABS plastic [but not quite as bad-looking as the Aulos equivalent, which I wouldn't be seen dead playing in public for money])
a G tin whistle (rather squeaky and, actually, not chromatic either, other than by some gnarly cross-fingerings, and if I wanted that I'd continue to do that on the wooden piccolo)
a sopranino recorder (fairly low on X Factor, and a bit too weak in the bottom octave)
and
a garklein recorder (fun so high X factor, tiny so high portability, but Rose hates the garklein, and I have to admit it is only audible to small yappy dogs and ultrasonic alarm sensors).

I'll probably write about this again as the winnowing process continues, I'm in a right old state of indecision about this one (far more than the subject warrants, I readily admit).

And just to disrupt the process completely, what was I lent yesterday by my fellow Powderkegs musician Greta, on the interesting rationale of "I'm not getting a chance to play with this, so why don't you see what you can do with it"?

A bassoon ....

Trebuchet news

2007-11-13T15:20:00.000Z

I have parted company with Trebuchet.

I'm pleased to say this has been achieved on the very best of personal terms with the minimum of angst, crockery-throwing and general recrimination, in fact none of that at all.

We sat down over a pint or several in the Bulls Head in Mobberley (appropriately enough, as that's where the whole project started in late 2002), talked about the past and the future, and agreed on how things would go forward.

It's been a great band to be part of, with some of the best music I've ever been involved in playing, and some real golden career highlights (The gig in the foyer of the Bridgewater Hall, the music for the production of As You Like It, and of course the splendid CD Salvo), and you couldn't wish for two finer musicians and all-round generous and splendid people to be in a band with than Keith & Mark.

As time's gone on, though, we'd all come to realise that they were looking to move in musical directions I wasn't as keen on going, and now is a good time for me to step aside and give them that opportunity.

Yes, it's that old cliche, 'musical differences', only in this case it's true rather than a convenient euphemism.

Keith & Mark will retain the name Trebuchet and the website http://www.trebuchetmusic.co.uk, pending a decision as to whether they continue under that name or create a new identity. I look forward keenly to hearing what they produce. Control of the mailing list will also pass to Keith & Mark, so they'll be in touch via that to keep us all abreast of future developments.

We had a couple of ceilidh gigs booked in 2008, and the promoters of those will be contacted individually to discuss options.

I, meanwhile, will continue to be be active with flutes, whistles and rauschpfeife for the Powderkegs and at sessions, will continue to try to reduce the signal / noise ratio in my concertina playing, and generally see what my musical future holds!

If thy scripture offends thee ... change it!

2007-11-09T18:01:00.000Z

Fun fact of the week: the divorce rate amongst evangelical christians is higher than the United States national average!

The article also raises the intriguing prospect of the paramilitary wing of the god-botherers having to relax their stance on homosexuality as the years roll by - I look forward to the spectacle of the righteous ones squirming on that one.

So next time someone starts making crucial decisions about matters that affect us all, such as wars or education, on the basis of their holier-than-thou living-by-the-word-of-the-lord mindset, just remember the divorce rate.

Thanks to Pap on an otherwise fairly unremarkable thread on The Daily WTF for that one.

Other fun fact of the week: eating mince pies on Christmas Day is illegal!