UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

Now here’s something interesting. Apparently a (now deceased) pianist released a series of CDs under her own name that were actually identical to other previously released CDs by other artists!

I’ve had it happen a few times that I would put a rather obscure CD into my computer and CDDB would incorrectly identify it as something else. This is because their key to identifying a CD is the number and length of all of the tracks, which generally is unique, but of course it’s not impossible for two CDs to have the same number of tracks, and for their respective lengths all to match. Out of the 700 or so CDs in my collection, I’d say 10 to 15 of them had this happen when I ripped them in iTunes.

Usually the false matches are so obviously wrong that there’s little room for confusion, but in this case things were different!

Alas, the woes of using open source software rear their heads. WordPress abounds with undocumented, or at least very poorly documented, features.

My dilemma: the default function for displaying a list of page links (used on this site to populate the Points of Interest panel in the sidebar) sorts links alphabetically, and there isn’t any obvious way to make it sort by the database’s menu_order field, which logically, to me at least, should be the default especially given that this is how they’re sorted in the admin tool.

Finding little help in the documentation or by my usual means (Google), I decided it couldn’t be done without modification. In my previous installation of WordPress I actually modified the core code itself to change the sort order, but when I upgraded to version 2.1.1 today, it overwrote that change. This time I decided to try the plug-in approach, so my changes would actually stick through version changes, and so I could get familiar with the powerful but arcane plug-in system WordPress uses for extensibility.

After poking around futilely trying to get my plug-in to work (to the point where it was sorting all of my blog posts the way I wanted the pages to be, but not the page list), I stumbled upon a relevant post in the WordPress forums, where a snide jab at “theme designers” (which seemed to be such a broad swipe that it included me) happened to mention an input parameter in the function that calls the page list!

Silly me… the system has built right in a very simple way to sort the list by whatever field you want, and all you have to do is pass in the right parameters in your theme files. The change couldn’t have been simpler… but learning that it was possible certainly could have!

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!

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 ]

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!