UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

Yeah, I know. Big news. But I was just reminded of it again.

I was listening to one of my favorite new albums, Ray Guns Are Not Just the Future by The Bird and the Bee. In particular, I was listening to the song “Witch,” a song that is extremely evocative of the music of classic James Bond movies (and not just because I’ve been watching Moonraker on my iPhone over the past couple of nights). So I decided to google “The Bird and the Bee” Witch “James Bond” to see if anyone had discussed this correlation.

The first result back was the Rolling Stone review of the album, which I was disappointed to see had only received a 2-star rating. The review is scornfully dismissive of the blatant influence of Burt Bacharach, bossa nova and the Bee Gees. So imagine my surprise when I read Rolling Stone’s 3-and-a-half-star review of their first album, which mentioned, in a far more appreciative tone, the blatant influence of Burt Bacharach, bossa nova and the Beach Boys.

Granted, the Beach Boys are probably a more enduringly worthy influence than the Bee Gees. But I happen to really like “How Deep Is Your Love” (which The Bird and the Bee covered on an EP a couple years ago and which, I have read, but I hasten to note I would not know from personal experience, was also included in the Sex and the City movie soundtrack), and I doubt that the influence of the Beach Boys vs. the influence of the Bee Gees would, on its own, make a star-and-a-half difference in the quality of the two albums.

I have not actually heard The Bird and the Bee’s first album (yet), but if their second is only a 2-star effort, then the first must be a 3-and-a-half-star masterpiece beyond anything in the known world of music.

The real problem here is that musical tastes are highly subjective, even among music reviewers who work for the same publication. But although the reviewers in Rolling Stone get a byline, RS still presents a monolithic face as the voice of popular music criticism, and as such it would be nice if they could maintain a little continuity in their treatment of individual artists from one album to the next, at least to the extent that the star ratings should not be applied as subjectively as the commentary within the reviews themselves… or, the star ratings should never be presented out of context without noting the name of the reviewer who assigned an album its rating.

For example:

I downloaded and began using the new Safari 4 Beta the day Apple released it. I’ve complained (mostly on Twitter) about various aspects of it, things that I’ve now (more or less) gotten used to: most significantly the still-awkward title bar tabs.

But one thing I haven’t gotten used to is the ridiculous amount of time Safari 4 Beta takes to get up and running, at least for me. The window appears promptly after clicking on the icon, but then I’m visited by the dreaded spinning beach ball of death. This situation endures for at least a minute or two (if anything, I am exaggerating that time down), and then things proceed as normal.

At first I thought maybe it was something peculiar about my own site (even though it loads just fine in other browsers, including Safari 3), which I have set to load as the home page. But I just waited out Safari’s ridiculous start-up time, then went into the preferences and set it to load with a blank page. And it still took just as long, not even loading anything from the Internet. So clearly it’s just something in the internal workings of the app itself.

I have not seen anything anywhere about this issue. Everyone seems to love Safari to death, and says nothing about its speed other than how blazing fast it is. I guess it’s pretty snappy once it gets going, but for me all I can think about is this ridiculous load time at the beginning.

And so, this humble blog post shall serve as a beacon in the darkness, calling out to all those who suffer as I do (oh, such suffering) from an inexcusable lag at the start-up of Safari 4 Beta.

For what it’s worth, I’m running a stock black MacBook purchased just last August (right before Apple retired them, of course), 2 GB of RAM, Mac OS X 10.5.6. In other words, this should not be happening.

Also, for what it’s worth, once Safari has gotten going, my site loads very fast… less than a second on my cable connection. So it’s definitely not something with my site (thankfully, since I can’t imagine what it would have been).

What is scrobbling, you ask? Here’s your answer.

Now this probably seems like exactly the kind of privacy invasion that would make me totally paranoid, and you’re right. I’ve known about Last.fm for years, but I’ve avoided it like the plague, mainly because I was afraid it was either a trick by the RIAA to collect data on music pirates (which I shouldn’t really worry about, because 99% of my music is legit, and I don’t use P2P networks) or it was spyware.

Well, OK, it is spyware in a sense, I suppose, but I realize now that it’s a bit different if you know you’re being spied on, and you have total control over what the spy can see.

Mainly, I have wanted for ages to have a way to automatically display on my website what music I’ve been listening to, and with Last.fm’s scrobbling, and an RSS feed, it is now possible. So you will note that in the right column on all of my pages, in addition to my Twitter feed, I now also have “What I’m Listening To.” Dangling participles aside, it’s exactly what I had been hoping for.

I also have all of my recent (original) music up on Last.fm, including free downloads. Check it out!

And finally, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge Last.fm for WordPress, the excellent WordPress plugin I’m using for the feat of syndication you see on these pages. I futzed for an hour or so last night with various RSS feed plugins for WordPress, was disappointed with them all, and then I decided to just check and see if someone had written a plugin for this specific purpose. This plugin is fantastic — it does exactly what I wanted, and is a complete no-brainer to set up. Nice!

First, rid your mind of the idea that government = evil.

Government is neither good nor evil; it depends on what government does. The same goes for corporations. Both have done a fair amount of what might be called “evil” over the past couple of decades.

There’s a great article on The Daily Beast today that reinforces an idea that’s pretty common around here in Minnesota: good government is worth paying for. In other words, if you get something of value from your taxes (or you know that other people do, and you’re not a self-centered bastard), it doesn’t feel so painful to pay them.

Now, in some parts of the country it’s pretty hard to come by the kind of generally honest, public-serving government that we Minnesotans tend to take for granted. But President Obama (who seems more Minnesotan than Illinoisan when it comes to the integrity and vision of his politics) is on the cusp of delivering this vision to the nation.

Let’s hope it takes hold. Reaganomics has just about driven us into the ground but I think it may not be too late.

I’m in the midst of my second big CakePHP-based project for a client, still loving CakePHP and the MVC concept overall, but I am definitely having some headaches with CakePHP this time around.

First off, I ran into some issues early on in the project that were attributable to CakePHP’s caching mechanism. Not sure why though, because caching was off by default (in fact, I was only even vaguely aware of its existence) on the first project I did; this one is building on that one; and I didn’t change any settings for caching in the core.php configuration file.

Caching is nice in a production environment, but it is a pain in the butt, to say the least, in a development environment. At least now I have it turned off. One less thing to worry about.

Today I’ve been struggling with some other frustrations that have nothing, really, to do with what I’m working on. What I’m working on would be frustrating enough, trying to wrap my brain around the intricacies of hasAndBelongsToMany relationships. But I can’t even get to that because of a pair of other issues.

First up, something I think I’ve finally got figured out. I’m writing my admin tool right now, so all of the pages I’m working on are using admin routing. Again, it should just be working; this is building upon stuff I already wrote for the first big project, which is working great and has been live for over a month now. And, for the most part, the admin routing has been working, but every once in a while I’ll click on a page that tries to load in the default template, and when it does, I get this:

Notice (8): Undefined variable: javascript [APP/views/themed/neutral/layouts/default.ctp, line 23]

OK, first off, I have the JavaScript helper defined in my controller. Second, why is it trying to load the default page layout instead of the admin layout? Well, that second question is probably irrelevant, because I viewed source on the page and found what the real error is, and what is apparently triggering CakePHP to load the default layout: there was a missing controller. And that was just because I had copied one of my other controllers as a starting point for this new one, and had not yet edited any of the code within it. In other words, I just shouldn’t click that link yet.

Fine, I can handle that. But when I was clicking on some pages that should be working, they just wouldn’t load, triggering the browser’s “server unavailable” error page, which I recognized as being the result of a segmentation fault error in Apache. So what within my PHP code, or in CakePHP, is crashing Apache? That was my real problem, and the reason for this blog post.

I googled “segmentation fault PHP” and got my answer in the form of the following:

Apache Segmentation Fault from CakePHP 1.2 Caused by Zend Optimizer

Thank you very much! This problem is happening for me in my local development environment, running MAMP. So I dug into MAMP’s php.ini file, and sure enough, Zend Optimizer was configured. I commented out all of the pertinent lines, bounced Apache, and we’re in business!

Well, sort of. The page still isn’t working, of course. It’s just now that its not working is not causing Zend Optimizer to crash Apache. Fortunately, I can see CakePHP’s error messages now, and it looks like I’ve got some problems in my model that are generating MySQL errors. Fair enough. At least I know what’s wrong now and can do something about it!

This is not a rant against CakePHP. Its error messaging is generally very useful, and its stack trace functionality rocks. Most of the time. Unfortunately it was a dangerous confluence of unrelated issues in my application today that caused the system to break down. But ultimately it was the result of issues with Zend Optimizer. I’m extremely thankful to “One Insightful M*******cker” for saving my sanity, and I just wanted to return the favor with a link back.