the echothis blog

Since I’m always on the lookout for better music systems, I played with Google Music Beta a bit over the last week.

Pros:

1. The interface is pretty clean, but it’s a pain to make your own playlists (like it is with most jukeboxes).
2. They have an “instant mix” button which makes a playlist based on the song and seems to work well enough; can’t tell if it’s better than MongoMusic was (back in the day) or not.
3. It’s free (for now at least)
4. Supports unprotected WMA in addition to MP3 and M4A (neither Amazon Music, nor Apple iCloud support WMA)

Cons:

1. You have to upload your music (Apple got a license to do fingerprint matching which would be much faster). So far for me it looks like it will take more than a week, to do the 20K songs.
2. Website doesn’t really work on my iPad or iPhone. This is a touchscreen UI issue, not a technical one (since their web UI uses HTML5 not Flash), so this can get fixed when they want to.
3. I couldn’t get the Google Music app to work on my cheapo Android phone. Didn’t try to find out why, so this is probably user error.
4. It’s capped at 20K songs which is enough for most people (but not me).

So basically Google Music is going to be the best option (better than Apple or Amazon), with a little work on their end. I’d even pay an annual fee to use it, if they fix the points above.

With Firefox 4 being just out, the Selenium team hasn’t had a chance to update their Add-on packaging for the release Firefox version (although I see it’s been tested on the beta version).

So I manually hacked the RDF files for the v1.0.10 IDE and PHP formatter, to get up and running. You’ll need to unzip the attached file, then manually install each of the two XPI Add-on files by going to the Add-ons Manager and choosing “Install Add-on From File…” – click the button to the left of the search box to get the menu.

No ill effects I can tell, but use with caution. I assume this will be fixed in 1.0.11 in the coming weeks, but this should work in the meantime.

hacked_selenium_ide_and_php_xpis.zip

I ran across this today, when upgrading from CakePHP 1.2 to 1.3 on a CentOS box. Since the bug didn’t appear on Windows, after a bit of debugging I realized it was actually caused by a misconfiguration in the PCRE library that ships with RedHat and thus CentOS 5.x. It’s been reported to CakePHP but it’s not their fault, it just surfaces in View::element() because that uses Inflector::slug(), which in turn relies on PCRE. I guess this codepath has changed since 1.2, hence it showed up during the migration.

Fixing it was not difficult though, based on this blog post and these directions. Then rebuild PHP, bounce Apache, and you’re fixed.

Update 2/8/11: If you’re on 64-bit, change the RPM upgrade line to be

rpm -Uvh /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/x86_64/pcre-6.6-2.7.x86_64.rpm /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/x86_64/pcre-devel-6.6-2.7.x86_64.rpm

Update 1/30/2012: See updated instructions for CakePHP 2.0.

This took me an awfully long time to debug, but if you happen to be using both the CakePHP Facebook Plugin and FirePHP version 0.3.2 Server Library, you will get “redeclaration” errors if you try to include both FirePHP and the Facebook Connect component. This is because they both declare a FB() class.

Eventually the solution was simple, just rename all instances of the FB class in the FirePHP code, to “FireBug”. I did this for the PHP5 version only, since I didn’t care about PHP4. Zipped and attached if you’d like to use it.

FirePHPCore-patched.zip

As might be expected, deploying a Titanium app to an iPhone was pretty easy. For the most part, just follow this video. However, there were these gotchas:

Disabled Install Now button

As per this post, it wasn’t obvious why the Install Now button was disabled. But clicking the “Upload” link next to the Upload Development Provisioning Profile line brought up a file dialog, where you navigate to your Mobile Provisioning file. By following the directions in the video, mine went to ~/Downloads/ when previously downloaded from Safari. Upload this file, quit and restart Titanium Developer, and you should see that it’s now detected the WWDR certificate and the Install Now button is enabled. After waiting a bit, the application will be pushed to iTunes.

iTunes needs to be able to sync to the phone

In my case, I use iTunes on my PC to sync ordinarily. So the Mac install of iTunes didn’t recognize my phone. So I had to do the following:

1. First I wanted to ensure it wouldn’t try to sync anything automatically.
2. Then I had to Authorize the Mac
3. Use iTunes to back up the phone, specifically the applications since I don’t want or need it to sync the music, movies, etc..
4. Then take a deep breath and click Sync – it will sync the apps now.
5. Check your new app (which will not have been synced by default), and sync again.

You’ll now see the new app on your Home screen. Of course all the other apps will be out of order but that’s a minor problem…

“Test & Package” tab can go AWOL

I have no idea what caused this but at some point this tab completely disappeared from Titanium Developer, from all projects. I tried launching it with the –debug flag, but nothing untoward appeared in the log. So eventually I deleted the contents of /Library/Application Support/Titanium/modules/ and relaunched Titanium Developer. This triggered a reload of the modules it needed from the Appcelerator website, and after doing so the “Test & Package” tab mysteriously returned. If you do this, you’ll have to reinstall any 3rd-party modules you have to /Library/Application Support/Titanium/modules so it’s a good idea to back those up first.