Tania Maria live

Submitted by Frederic Marand on

Following JP's suggestion, the whole band went to see Tania Maria in Palaiseau yesterday.

Now, I had heard lots of praise about her in the late 80s, notably from Isabelle, who used to sing and play drums in one of my former bands, but I had not been enthused by what I had heard, so I went to the concert ready to be disappointed : after all, I've never liked latin music *that* much.

The stage layout brought the first surprise : instead of the traditional band we had expected to see, based on her previous work, were just a grand piano and a mammoth percussion set. The concert itself was indeed a revelation, although not really about Tania Maria herself.

Nodify, Objectify, CRUDify

Submitted by Frederic Marand on

Funnily enough, my recent post about wishes for Drupal happened just before discussion started afresh on the recurring "everything-as-a-node" theme, in which I seem to have been played the re-animator part this time.

Thinking deeper upon this issue, I figured it would be interesting to see where Drupal stands currently (in D5) regarding the reularity and orthogonality of the hook system and most visible content-related entities: nodes, comments, terms, vocabularies, and node types.

The resulting table is attached to this post (OpenDocument format), and shows some interesting results:

A time for Drupal Wishes

Submitted by Frederic Marand on

The release of Drupal 5 today comes at a time of the year where one makes wishes, and obviously I wish the best for Drupal, be it for our new production workhorse Drupal 5, or its hardly conceived descendant Drupal 6.

So while there's still time for wishes in Drupal 6, here is a selection of three grand wishes :

Updating drupal without file access

Submitted by Frederic Marand on

A few days ago, it was brought to my attention that something had been broken on the PHP-GTK community site during the 5.0 RC2 upgrade. The problem was easily identified as being codefilter.module having been removed during the upgrade and not reinstalled. Of course, not being at my office, I did not have access to the FTP passwords, but just to my admin account, and I did not want to leave the community members in the cold, so I used this small trick.

Minor chords and heavy distortion (Muse live in Paris)

Submitted by Frederic Marand on

Muse Live in Paris Bercy 2006While attending the Muse concert in Paris Bercy on 2006-12-14, I took particular notice of something rather specific in the sound of the band: their ability to bring out a mix of major and minor chords with full distortion on the bass or guitar, sometimes even superimposed with crystal clear keyboards.

Now, if you've ever tried to play a minor chord with half the distortion Muse actually uses, you've certainly noticed how awful this can sound. I sure did, and hearing this sound great at the distortion and amplification levels of Muse was intriguing. What was going on ?

Customizing the Internet Keyboard 350 multimedia player key

Submitted by Frederic Marand on

After drowning my faithful old keyboard with my morning coffee, I had to replace it and, after taking some time to find a corded keyboard without a zillion useless keys, without shiny platic, with cursor keys in their standard location, and a reasonable touch feeling, I bought an OEM version of the Logitech Internet Keyboard 350 USB and am indeed quite satisfied with the keyboard look and touch.

No driver

Now, minimal though that keyboard is, it still has these small multimedia keys on top, and under XP they're handled by default. Most choices were just fine, but the media player defaulting to RealPlayer didn't fit my wishes: I'd rather run VLC in these cases to show FreeTV. But the keyboard isn't supplied with a driver, and installing Logitech's setpoint™ actually removes functionality to these keys when compared with the XP default driver. So exit SetPoint and back to the default driver.