Another new track, in its early stages

I’m working on a new tune for Hors d’Oeuvreture. It’s a little goofy, and at 176 BPM, it’s probably the fastest track I’ve ever recorded. The tempo also inspired its title, “Morgantown Expressway.”

Note: To conserve server space, I’m clearing out older versions of the Hors d’Oeuvreture songs. Visit the album page to hear the latest available version of each track!

A fix for a fix in WordPress 2.1

One thing that surprised me when I started using WordPress again is that its search function only searches on blog posts, not on static pages. I suppose if most WordPress sites are 99.9% blog posts, then it probably makes sense, but I have enough static pages on my site that I’d like to make searchable to warrant changing this.

Fortunately, someone has. Unfortunately this “Search Pages” plug-in is out of date and no longer works with current versions of WordPress. I dug in a bit and figured out why: the plug-in alters the SQL query that performs the search, but the substring it replaces in the query no longer exists! So I hunted down the place where the query occurs in the WordPress core, adjusted the plug-in as needed, and it works!

Here, then, is my hack of the Search Pages plug-in, modified to work with WordPress 2.1. (I’m not sure which other versions of WordPress it will or will not work with.)

[ search_pages.php.tar.gz ] [ search_pages.php.zip ]

How about a fresh Hors d’Oeuvreture?

I’ve continued to tweak the two tracks I’ve been working on for the new album. I just posted a major update to “Heavy Water,” which you can listen to here or on the “official” page for the album.

I also posted minor updates to both tracks yesterday, in place of the earlier versions that were there. I didn’t bother to draw attention to them though, as they were basically just tweaks to the masters.

In addition to the current projects, I have a 16:18 ambient track I recorded last year, called “1.618” (because it’s based on the golden ratio… the length of the track is a deliberate play on that number), that I’m planning to add as the final track on the CD. It needs some clean up back over in Pro Tools (because I discovered GarageBand buckles under the stress of loading a pair of 16-minute waveform tracks) and a new master. I got a new computer since I worked on it, and all I seem to have backed up are the Pro Tools project and an MP3, but no CD-quality mixdown. More on that later.

Note: To conserve server space, I’m clearing out older versions of the Hors d’Oeuvreture songs. Visit the album page to hear the latest available version of each track!

The 6000-year hug…

SkeletonsI’m fascinated by this. Apparently these skeletons have been unearthed in Italy during excavation for a new construction project. There’s just something incredibly compelling about this photo.