WOW! There is tons of free guitar software out there… Even a handful of apps that can open GuitarPro files (prolly do a better job than the POS mac version of guitarpro). (These are either osx apps, LINUX apps that can run on OSX, or Web/Java apps). [All are usable at least under OSX, though at levels of functionality that I can't yet say]
Found via Sourceforge.net
**TabView:”TabView makes it possible to view and print PowerTab tablatures. PowerTab is a well-known and widely adopted tablature editor for Windows systems. You can easily find thousands of song transcriptions in this format on the net. (OSX App)”
**DGuitar Pro: Views, Prints and Plays Guitar Pro (*.GP4,*.GP3,GTP) files!!
**TuxGuitar: A multitrack guitar tablature editor and player written in Java-SWT, Opens GP3,GP4 and GP5 files! Works!! And made “Images” by Cacaphony sound awesome, since it changed a few of the instruments from the GP4 file… (Electronic drums! haha!) And is much smoother working than the official GP for Mac (< a href="http://apoc.buildtolearn.net/wordpress/2006/08/07/guitar-pro-5-for-mac/">blech). Yay!
Hendrix “trains your chords switching skill, in guitar or piano or any other harmonic tool. Hendrix includes metronome and guitar chords dictionary. JavaScript only!”
Tuners:
Instrument Tuner in Java
Untested/Whack:
Tablature is a Java program that lets you author guitar and bass tablatures graphically, playback the songs and publish them into the Web !” (Works, but is awkward and not so useful…)
KGuitar: Untested guitar tab editor for KDE (might work in X11, but don’t have the time to test right now). Can open GP4 files!
Some smart guys from Sun Microsystems on the future of the web (happy 15th birthday, Web!):
- P2P won’t be a deciding factor
- Centralized registration sites will be
The fake restaurant selling fake DVDs. By Henry Blodget
This, of course, reveals one of the two fallacies in the media industry’s assertion that file-sharing and DVD piracy are the same as “stealing”: Some of the supposed damages from “lost sales” would never have been sales in the first place. The other fallacy is that the “theft” of digital property is the same as the theft of physical property—which it isn’t. When someone steals a physical product—a car, say, or a DVD from the shelves of Blockbuster—the owner has lost more than a potential sale; he or she has lost inventory. When someone buys a copy of a digital product, however, for which the owner of the copyright has paid nothing, the owner has lost only a potential sale. This doesn’t make file-sharing or DVD piracy OK—there must be some way for producers and packagers to get paid—but it does explain, in part, why millions of people who would never shoplift are so eager to collect pirated DVDs.
Right on.
Here is my first attempt at a ruby script. Ugly? Probably. Functional? Absolutely! Hoorayy!
Also see: Watir @ Sourceforge
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
#--------------------------------------------------------------#
# ShortCodeSearch v1.0 by Alex Yule
# USShortcodes.com Shortcode Search Automator written by Alex Yule on 6/29/06
#
# Adapted from Simple Google test written by Jonathan Kohl 10/10/04
# Purpose: to test availability of shortcodes at usshortcodes.com
# * entering text into a text field
# * clicking a button
# * checking to see if a page contains text.
#----------------------------------------------------------------#
require 'watir' # the watir controller
#define test_code method--takes a code
def test_code(code)
# set a variable
test_site = 'http://www.usshortcodes.com'
# open the IE browser
ie = Watir::IE.new
# print some comments
# puts "## Beginning of #{code} test"
#puts "Step 1: go to the test site: " + test_site
ie.goto(test_site)
#puts "Action: entered " + test_site + " in the address bar."
ie.text_field(:name, "shortcode").set(code) # shortcode is the name of the search field
#puts "Action: entered #{code} in the search field"
ie.button(:name, "single").click # "single" is the name of the Search button
if ie.contains_text("Login to BUY NOW.") #Test for availability
puts "Shortcode #{code} Available!!!"
ie.close
else
puts "Shortcode #{code} taken..."
ie.close
end
end
s = ""
while s != "end" #conditional loop
print "enter code: "
s = gets.chomp #take code input
if s != "end" #check to see if program should end
test_code(s) #check the code
end
end
More on the Long Tail…
business2blog: B2Day : Questioning the Long Tail
In other words, by eliminating the costs of inventory and allowing unlimited choice over the Internet, how niche can a product get and still be economic to produce and sell? The answer is you can now go a lot further down that curve.And because there is now economic life further down the curve, niche products can turn into nichebusters and travel up the curve more easily than in the past.
UPDATE: YAY! Everything should look normal now…
UPDATE: The formatting is all frigged up cause of the percent signs, but no time to fix it now…
So, I wrote this nifty little script that automatically tars and bzips a file on a remote (shared locally) volume (that is mounted as a mapped network drive) and names the file with the current date. The backups are stored in the shared directory, but the script doesn’t include past backup files in the archive. (Why are my backups 500mb? Ohhhhh….). It then copies the remote backup to a backups folder on my machine for extra safety. I was very proud when this worked!
Just modify the file with the directories you want backed up and where and save it as a .bat file. Then double click it and voila!
So here it is, shared under GNU Open Source license or whatever:
set DATESTR=%DATE:~-10%
bsdtar -c -j -f Z:\Backups\backup_%DATESTR:/=-%.bz2 --exclude backup_* Z:\
copy Z:\Backups\backup_%DATESTR:/=-%.bz2 C:\Backups\
The script makes an archive of everything in the Z:\ drive (which is a mapped remote volume) excluding files beginning with backup_. The archive is made in the Z:\Backups directory with the name backup_mo-da-yr.bz2 where mo-da-yr is the date in the indicated format. Then the archive is copied to the C:\Backups\ folder.
Any suggestions on how to improve it, or praises for my ingenuity would be welcomed with open ears.
Well, I’m very proud of myself… after having downloaded the source code for gdbm (needed to build the Rhyming Dictionary, @freshmeat), I received an error during installation:
/usr/bin/install -c -m 644 -o bin -g bin gdbm.h \
/usr/local/include/gdbm.h
install: bin: Invalid argument
make: *** [install] Error 67
So a quick look inside the makefile and some fiddling around later, I got everything working! All you have to do is change the BINOWN and BINGRP values from bin to the following:
# File ownership and group
BINOWN = root
BINGRP = wheel
Works like a charm!
Yayyyy!
Now time to install the rest of the dictionary…
Alright, problem number 2 came when doing “make install” for the rhyming dictionary itself:
install –mode=755 rhyme /usr/local/bin
install: illegal option — -
Is this just the result of Rhyme not using autoconf? Anyways, I went into the makefile and edited the lines under “install: all” from install –mode=755 rhyme $(BINPATH) to install -m 755 rhyme $(BINPATH)
Worked again! I’m on a rollll!
Daring Fireball: Magic 8-Ball Answers Your Questions Regarding Microsoft’s ‘Zune’
Gotta love the M$-bashing
Always a fan of sarcasm used carefully