Mason Proper

Listen to Mason Proper – Lock and Key @ The Sixty One

Some of the earliest Mason Proper songs can be traced back to the 2003 release of the split Sunday Sampler EP, a collaboration between independent hip hop artist Jawnrah and singer/songwriter Jonathan Visger’s solo Mason Proper predecessor, Jonathan Apples. Shortly after the release of The Sunday Sampler, Jonathan joined up with Matt Thompson and Brian Konicek to form Mason Proper, with fellow Alpena natives Pat Stafford and Victor Kahn, founding member of the local act Honesty In The Auto Industry. They performed erratically in the Great Lakes area, while working to record their full length debut album.

The band continued to record over 2004. During this period the band went through a series of personnel changes in the process of finishing their debut album, recording with Alpena drummer Matt Davis. It was around this time when they met Zac Fineberg, who joined the band. Finally, on 17 January 2006, the band released There Is A Moth In Your Chest on their own Mang Chung label. Cover art was provided by Grandaddy drummer Aaron Burtch, while the inside of the package was designed by Rick Boven, who later went on to direct several music videos for the band as part of the production duo Hott Garbage.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mason_Proper

Links:
http://masonproper.com
http://www.myspace.com/masonproper
http://www.last.fm/music/Mason+Proper

SRAM XX

Well after riding SRAM XO for the better part of 3 years, through mud and grime. I have been very pleased with its performance. The only issues I experienced were during the subarctic temperatures of -40c when my shifting would not work. That being said my hydraulic brakes did not work so good either for that matter I didn’t work that well.

SRAM has a new line up coming out called XX, not only does it look HOT, it is also 10sp. one more gear for smooth riding action! They managed to beat Shimano to the punch as well.

Links:
SRAM XX
Mountain Bike Action

Chaos in Haiti

I learned last night that my brother in law is headed to Haiti to help and aid in the search and rescue efforts, with other 1.7 million homeless and over 200 000 dead chaos is starting to form.

The people of Haiti need help. And after looking at some of the photos from the Boston Globe’s Big Picture I hope he remains safe.

The people have started looting and fighting amongst them selves turning a bad situation worse. Desperation makes people do bad things.

Please help by donating.

From the Dead Level: Malcolm X and Me

Many years ago I found a rare and antique book called “From the Dead Level: Malcolm X and Me”. I read the book and was interested to learn more about the author Hakim Jamal a 20th century black revolutionary. But was not able to find much more than the book already told me.

The book its self has some what of a mystery around it. I know its from the Niagara falls Public Library, first signed out June 6th 1972 and was last singed out February 23rd 1988. I have no idea how the book traveled halfway across the country over the past 20 plus years.

Hakim a. Jamal (1937-1973) was a cousin of Malcolm X. He joined the Nation of Islam when Malcolm was with it. He followed Malcolm out into The Organization of Afro-American Unity. Jamal shares many of his childhood experience of growing up in Boston with Malcolm. His experiences with Malcolm in the Nation and his brief encounter afterwords. I recommend this anyone who wants to learn more about Macolm X.

Source: Amazon

I recently watched a movie called “The_Bank_Job”>The Bank Job”. In this movie was a parallel story involving Hakim Jamal.

The movie “The_Bank_Job”>The Bank Job” is based on a true story, and since the book “From the Dead Level: Malcolm X and Me” was based on true events. I now have more questions about Malcolm X, The Revolutionary’s and Hakim Jamal.

The book was great, the movie was great. Now for more research!

The Bank Job
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_X

ProtoKit Was my Idea, Well not really.

I had this idea to make a tool kit that would allow for rapid development of a website prototype while creating a working site complete with documentation and wireframes.

Well Yesterday I some how stumbled across ProtoKit from Konigi.

Protokit is a toolkit for creating HTML prototypes. It uses the following open source libraries and plugins: Blueprint, jQuery, jQuery UI, jQuery Templates, and iXEdit. More information about the included libraries and their licensing agreements can be found in theREADME file.

I must say that looking at it (not having used it yet) is exactly what my plans entailed. I look forward to an afternoon and some exploratory time.

http://konigi.com/project/protokit

Running PHP5 in the Dreamhost CLI

Some times a PHP framework might include a command line interface, this might be Cake PHP or Symfony and many others.

This interesting thing that I learned while attempting to use Symfony (php 5 only) compared to Cake PHP (php 4+) was that the command line environment is not the same as the web environment.

When I tested the version of php on the front end I got 5.2.4 and figured I’m good to go.

While after running the Symfony command line tool to build my project I was getting a php error.

My knowledge of the command line is just enough to do damage.

As the Symfony documentation stated I checked the CLI php version and found it to be 4.4.9 and that the configuration would not work with Symfony.

I had a look in the DreamHost Wiki and found this could be fixed!

DreamHost by default has PHP installed with the option to run php 5.

• PHP 4 – /usr/local/bin/php
• PHP 5 – /usr/local/php5/bin/php

All hope was not lost.

So I am spreading the word, as well as making a mental note for me self.

Open your .alias file using FTP or command line.

Add the following alias to the bottom of the file.

alias 'php=/usr/local/php5/bin/php'

This will work for other servers as well, but the path will be different.

Axure for Mac… Finally!

I used to use Axure RP a decent amount over the past years, but one thing that interrupted my work flow was having a Mac in one location and a PC in the other. Not to mention that I really enjoyed using OmniGraffle over Microsoft Visio.

The alpha was announced December 22nd 2009 and will be valid until February 28th 2010 when the beta is released.

Axure RP is the leading tool for rapidly creating wireframes, prototypes and specifications for applications and web sites.

Download now

New in WordPress 2.9: Post Thumbnails!

With the latest update to Wordpress 2.9 you now have access to a few new functions to handle thumbnails for blog posts.

I will keep this quick as it is a simple process.

You will need to let wordpress know that your theme supports thumbnails. For this we need to open functions.php and declare thumbnail support. For this we add the following line of code.

add_theme_support( 'post-thumbnails' );

We will need to set the thumbnail dimensions now.

set_post_thumbnail_size( 80, 80);

It should be noted that this method of resizing will produce an image no larger than 80×80 and will not distort the image.

If you choose to crop for square thumbnails then you would enable Hard-Cropping. This way your image is exactly the size you want. This method will crop the image center out.

To enable Hard-Cropping you would use the following line of code.

set_post_thumbnail_size( 80, 80, TRUE);

My functions.php now looks like this.

if ( function_exists( 'add_theme_support' ) ) {
	    add_theme_support( 'post-thumbnails' );
	    set_post_thumbnail_size( 80, 80, true );
	}

Read on..

Wolfram Alpha

Old news by now on the Woldfram Alpha computational knowledge engine, but a few other developments have occurred since this service has arrived.

They are now on the iPhone/Touch. The app is built on their new API, With support for Java, .NET, Python, Ruby, PHP, Perl, and Mathematica.

Their should be some interesting resources made based on the great information available.

Maybe some day I will finally know how much wood could a wood chuck chuck or how many seashells sally sells by the sea shore.

http://www.wolframalpha.com