… I have added feeds for the pictures. Yes, feeds! And because two is better than one, you can follow either the most recently added pictures or the most recently shot pictures.

It just depends on whether you want to see fresh stuff and don’t care about older pictures which I occasionally add or not.

Or maybe you could subscribe to both ;-)

PD: I have tested the feeds with the feed validator. It is extremely happy with both of them. In the unlikely event that your feed reader isn’t happy, tell their programmers to fix it, since the feeds also work with google reader, netvibes and firefox’s reader.

I am enjoying my n-th 100% pure Barcelona’s cold¹ – have been all day sneezing and feeling pretty much annoyed by it, but it’s getting better, specially since my head is so full of ideas gathered during bcnparty that I can’t stop ignoring my throat ache and thinking of the best new plan for dominating the world.

Right now I’m learning to use cmake². I managed to automagically build my first Xcode project with cmake this morning. It’s so cool! (I hate setting project properties in Xcode). If it does the same for linux and windows (devcpp anyone?) the world will be a great place to be³.

I was going to write a report about the party but I’m not really focused on it right now. After I uploaded some pictures from the party, I kind of felt like if I had done my part, although that’s not entirely true. It’ll probably wait until the week-end, but in any case it was a great party, and I enjoyed it very much. Just so the organisers knew. For great justice and for the win (and fuck the what!!!111one) :-)

¹ It happens to me 90% of the times I stay in Barcelona. Surprisingly it doesn’t happen when I go to Valencia.

² That way I won’t scare Corsario again when saying that I’m creating makefiles manually.

³ Reasons for portability are a lot but basically preventing the code from being tied up to a certain system and thus having it clean of specific stuff, which allows us for running it in even more systems in the future, or put it simply, in the computers I may have in 10 years time.

I was firmly decided to leave everything ready for bcnparty today:

• pack the big compo entry (won’t give details so that it’s way more exciting!),
• decide which song should I enter in the high quality compo
• track a chiptune and
• track a multichannel

while the two first points are easy to do and it’s understandable to leave them for later while making room for some procrastination, it’s not normal to leave the two latter ones for later! Specially if I haven’t been seriously tracking like … in ages¹!

And instead of getting my IT skills back into work, I have spent some half of the evening browsing sites with midi files for my cellphone. Luckily I wasn’t in the mood for looking for themes and skins and so on. Otherwise I wouldn’t be even writing this :-D

Oh well… I’m going to try to decide about the high quality compo. I have around three songs and since all of them are so weird I don’t know which one would end last faster.

Does anybody dare to enter an extra official competition for ending last? HA!

Will voters surprise me once again and will the song rank better than other normal songs I released on previous editions?

The answer … in a few days!

¹ I think my one-pattern tests with Renoise and Reason can’t count as a serious attempt.

I have seen this repeatedly in looooooots of places and I find it will be very useful for all you guys which write templete and seperator instead of template and separator.

Templete is a shrine, the dictionary says. Seperator doesn’t exist. Don’t use them!

Well, not really. It was just a way of grabbing your attention. But maybe in the future I could upload pictures where I appear so that you could see them. Ahhh, what am I talking about? I’ll explain…

You most probably are reading this with your favorite feed reader, which is something I have nothing against (or I wouldn’t provide a feed). But obviously that won’t reveal you a link which is well above these lines and says pictures!

In other words, I finally managed to finish the first version of my little photogallery!! (now imagine people clapping and saying yes yes!). It’s quite drafty yet but I have lots of ideas in mind, one of these is providing a feed (which is something that the old reincarnation hadn’t).

Some little details about it, for my dear curious like a cat friends:

Its name (clyk) is a mix of the Spanish word for click, which is clic but with a touch of Icelandic, that is, replacing i’s with y’s and c’s with k’s. And there you have!

I began building it with rails and script.aculo.us, but then I learnt more about rails and script.aculo.us and decided to redo it, this time using jquery. Then I wasn’t satisfied with the general clunkiness of browser interfaces, and did another attempt at building it with ruby+cocoa, another one with cocoa only, where I began to realise that I was tying up myself to cocoa and objective C and I want my stuff to be portable and usable across different platforms, so then I gave up and went on holidays.

After those holidays came a couple more of months working on several different projects. Then I went on miniholidays again and had some time for putting in place all the ideas and thoughts that had been developing secretly in my mind. And there came the rebuilding of this site from rails to php. Yes, I went from rails to php and the reasons are sound and reasonable:

First, one can’t run a rails application in a shared host without having to keep an eye on the server constantly to make sure it’s still up and running. It has a very high probability of being slashed by the process killer -which makes sure that nobody’s processes eat up the whole cpu, and that’s good and bad at the same time. Good because that makes sure your hosting will always be responsive, but bad because RMagick (the software used for handling images in ruby) is a hungry memory eater. There was no way I could upload and resize a simple picture without having my rails process killed instantly. A solution for this is to get a better hosting plan, with a dedicated server or one of those accelerators or slices. That would make sense if I made a living of this website, but that’s not the case.

Second, I absolutely hate the application server way of deploying applications which is required in rails. Although mongrel is great, one of the reasons why I moved as far away as possible from java, Tomcat and company was that I liked the immediateness of php, and that’s something one loses when deploying rails apps.

Third, these aren’t good times for doing rails stuff unless you dedicate your full time to it. With the new rails 2.0 version approaching and all the changes that have been going on it, what you do today is outdated tomorrow. I personally prefer to do something and keep it current tomorrow while I’m making a new song, if you know what I mean. This should be recreation, not obligation.

And those are my reasons. If you don’t like them, go away!