Sunset to dusk
Sunset to dusk, 360 degree panorama preview of Phoenix, Arizona from my 3rd story roof. 129 images, -2,0,+2 bracketed exposures taken in Februrary 11th, 2010 by a Canon EOS 450D created with Hugin.
This may take a while to load depending on your connection.
I love to show people the view of the mountains and the city from my 3 story home south of downtown Phoenix, Arizona. Soon I’ll be able to show everyone what it is like to be on the roof… it is beautiful! I’ll spend time working on the HDR panoramas, so in the meantime here’s a silly video of me climbing my roof set to a song I created. I took my pictures in style, wearing a Fedora and gathering the attention of passerbys and neighbors! This video was sped up 1000% as to not waste your time and I put a part of a song I created as the soundtrack.
I’ve just made a few ‘test’ HDR shots from not ideal circumstances. I had dual plane gas filled windows, which refracted light. I climbed to the roof of my 3 story home to take an 3 shots each to create a set of HDR Panoramic pictures.
I’m trying to see if I can make multi-dimensional todo lists by hand. If I have a master plan for every alternate universe I might get sucked into, I just might make it back alive.
Sunset viewed from the big Ramada at South Mountain at a recent park party. Testing out a new posting method… 
, originally uploaded by .
Had a fantastic time taking pictures at Huntington Beach with friends. , .
Also updated my PixelPost Photoblog @ pixel.rayrayisforever.com and RaymondAbril.com. Enjoy!
I took special interest in as it is similar to in giving you the ability to remotely synchronize securely your Firefox Bookmarks and Passwords, except integrated much more tightly with Firefox. Every browser has its strengths, and Firefox has a plethora of plugins that make the internet either more fun or more tedious… depending on how you look at it. Firefox stable is at 3.5.5 currently, however the and are a vision of the future to come. Minefield is the codename for upcoming, bleeding edge developer builds for Firefox, just as Webkit is a bleeding edge Safari. Unfortunately, unlike having Webkit and Safari installed at the same time, you can only run one Firefox at a time. Worse yet, when you run Minefield, most of your extensions are disabled as they are not tested to work with that high of a version.
Personally, I love having the ability to run both and Safari simultaneously. Webkit downloads daily updates, a small annoyance every day for having two browsers running in their own processes. Firefox feels slow once you start adding plug-ins and extensions into it. I believe Chrome has a great idea, running each tab and window in a separate process. Since Firefox of whichever versions runs as one process, it becomes sluggish even when on a multi-core Xeon there is plenty of free CPU and RAM. Sadly, not even the bookmark manager works in the .
The beauty of Weave is that as opposed to or , it is a Mozilla created project and is compatible with bleeding edge versions of Firefox. That means that all of the same bookmarks and passwords are seamlessly synchronized between the two. With one account, no exporting/importing your files constantly.
On a side note, Xmarks promises to work with Safari, Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Firefox. I thought about synchronizing all of my bookmarks, but that is what my delicious account is for. In addition, there appear to be downsides to installing the Safari extension. Currently there are very few plugins available for Safari that will run in 64-bit mode. Safari and Webkit are amazing enough that I don’t mind not having ad blocking installed. Plus, I’m using to show me all of my bookmarks for every browser. The Firefox plugin does add some neat features, but it is bloated for this purpose.
First, install the and setup an account. Synchronize your bookmarks and passwords.
Use Finder or Spotlight and open up Terminal.app in /Applications/Utilities/
Paste this into Terminal and hit enter: /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -Profilemanager
Create a second profile. I just called mine “Minefield” for simplicity.
Once your second profile is created, start with your default so your regular Firefox.app will continue to use it. Retry the Terminal command if you are taken into the Minefield profile instead, as you will be able to just re-select the default again.
Mount the .dmg & drag to your Applications folder.
There are more than two ways of running Minefield with the new profile. You simply need to setup an easy way to pass command line arguments to its firefox-bin. Here is how to do it in Automator, although could be superior. Just depends on how much time you want to spend on it. I’ll assume if prefer Script Editor, I don’t need to explain anything to you
Use Finder and open Automator.app in /Applications/
Select new Workflow and simply select from the Library > Utilities > Run Shell Script
Here you can paste in /Applications/Minefield.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -P Minefield &
(Replace the Minefield after -P for Profile with whatever name you called the new Profile.) I should mention that I have my Terminal.app default settings set to close the shell if it exits cleanly. This is a simple preference in Terminal.app that will prevent a window from staying open after passing the arguments to Minefield.
Now all you have to do is save the Automator action as an Application into /Applications. You can even give it the Minefield icon. This is basically just a shortcut to run Minefield with a different profile without using the command line.
Install Mozilla Weave, synchronize, and enjoy having a Firefox with loads of speed and a Firefox with loads of features.
I was rather surprised that Microsoft actually made a client for Windows Live Mesh for Mac OSX Snow Leopard! This is especially surprising since Ubuntu One is Ubuntu only. At least Dropbox lets me synchronize across all platforms. Previously I was using MacFUSE/FUSE Userland sshfs mounting for my Dreamhost backup space.
2GB Free – – Mac OSX, Linux, Windows
5GB Free – – Windows & Mac OSX, however the icon stays in the dock which is rather annoying. The menubar icon is the control for Mesh, so the dock icon is extraneous.
2GB Free – – Ubuntu only, but integrated with Ubuntu 9.10+’s file manager. Since I was reformatting my laptop quite often to try new variants, this let me save important things such as bookmarks or how to get the proprietary Nvidia drivers to work with the Xorg.conf.
I because it works on the three platforms I use the most and is often easier than setting up a shared folder on the network.
Watching my kittens grow up to be beautiful cats has been a humbling experience. I have been awake since early this morning because Locke wanted to snuggle on me, next to me, under the blanket, and then against my neck all morning. His meow is quaint, like a gentlemanly “mew.” He cries when I leave, and is an absolute daddy’s boy. To think that I almost did not adopt him:
When I first bought my house, I really wanted two kittens so that they would be able to play with eachother if I was not around. I was so excited and overwhelmed when I first saw their litter. There, on one of the last steps of the staircase, was a clump of fur made up of patches of different designs. All but one of the tiny kittens were sleeping together. The first one to catch my eye was the white cat that was chasing imaginary butterflies and jumping around completely crazy while the others slept. I knew I had to have him.
Next, I wanted a girl. There were two calicos and I decided to get the warmest and fluffiest of the two. As I picked her up, she melted in my arms and into my heart.
I had my two choices, but there was something that caught my eye. A cat with a fur coat that looked like he was wearing a tuxedo. I thought to myself that 3 cats would simply be too much, but he was handsome and I had to ask… can I have three? I would later tell people that it is because I have three floors in my house and so I could have one cat per floor, but honestly I’m not sure why I couldn’t leave him. He was just charming, sleeping there. Perhaps I liked the idea of balance – one crazy cat and one sleeping cat. Plus, since I was getting the ADHD kitten then I was sure that he would need a boy to play with. I was right.
The first night was so awkward. I thought to myself, what if they don’t like me and spend their time hiding somewhere? I had never had a cat before, and so many of my friend’s cats were loners when I was around. In order to get the white cat to calm down, I had to put him under the covers of my bed. The calico slept right next to me. The black cat slept at my feet. I was worried that he wouldn’t be fond of me… How surprised I would be.
I named them after Final Fantasy VI characters. Kupo is the white, hyperactive cat. Locke is the black gentleman cat. Celes is my calico, self appointed princess of the house.
Since I have such a huge house, we spent the first few weeks we getting to know it one floor at a time. Every night they slept on top of me. I would later count this as a mistake because now, two years later, they still sleep on top of me at times and I will wake up with a large weight crushing my chest and a fluffy tail in my face! After they became used to the whole house, they still did not like to be away from eachother and would meow when they became separated from eachother… or me!
Oh how they got in the way of my work! Sometimes I had to put them in a bedroom that was full of boxes just to get anything done. They were climbing on everything, and always sitting on my keyboard as I type.
Yet I have changed because of them. To have three cats follow me down 3 stories when I was just getting some water and then all the way up is love. To have them all cuddle up next to me as I lay down and purr at once is love. To be waken up 6 hours early because they just want my attention is selfish, but it is still love. And I love them back.
These days they give me a little more beathing room and as they grow up, they have relaxed. Still, Kupo is quite the attention getter and every visitor falls for him and so many people have wanted to take him for themselves! If only they knew how much of a pain he is!
I’m sure I would have amazing sleep, unscratched furniture, and a very quiet house if it wasn’t for their habits yet I am not sure that I would want to live a life without them. I’m not sure I was truly living life before they came into it. I know that I am now. They are my children and family, and I cannot live without them.
Anyways, I’m always on the lookout for great quality mixes to post, so if you are a DJ with a 1) Mix 2) Tracklist and 3) are fine with not including annoying voiceovers promoting yourself every 5 minutes, hit us up at or our !
And thanks for for the shoutout!
RayRay DJing at Hookah Bass 2005
I wanted to share a picture of me DJing at one of the pivotal events that I had the pleasure of playing at. Hookah Bass was held at the Red Sea Lounge in Tempe, Az and put together by a good friend named Brice. Here, I got to play for 4 full hours anything that I wanted to a room full of happy, bubbly, hookah smoking people. The lounge was redecorated with blacklight posters and phosphorous paints. What was absolutely divine about this gig was that I brought enough vinyl for 8 hours and had been frustrated with the 1 hour DJ sets that most DJs have grown accustomed to. I was prepared for everything – even as far as to breakdown the crowd from the intense, high energy driven music that had been playing for 4 full hours before me and explore any style of electronica and dance music that I wished. It was finally a time to see what it was like to be the shaman of a tribe.
I remember the order of almost every song that I played. I lowered the tempo through a steady 45 hours and dropped in Rabbit In The Moon – Deeper. I had always wanted to play this vinyl live, and the predicted few people came up to me asking for faster. I remember saying that this is just a new beginning and that all will be revealed soon!
After the set was over, my back killing me with pain for not moving from the turntables, a crowd of people swarmed me. One guy told me that I had changed his life – his girlfriend left him, his dog died, his truck got stolen, and in one night I had given him the hope he needed to live. This was the first time, and definitely not the last time from this point forward that I would receive these kinds of kudos. A few more pictures from Hookah Bass can be found in a new album in the gallery.
I made an album with the best pictures that I took with my Sony Cybershot DSC-W7. Here is a preview:
You can also view it on Picasa:
I really need to stop signing up for every social network out there :p
from
TranceDesign.net is a DJ Mix podcast that was the idea of my friend and . We have been running the podcast for a few years, and although originally I wanted to record my own DJ Mix weekly to add in, life got busier and it was hard to maintain. At first we built the RSS XML and HTML files by hand when a new mix was uploaded. This got boring for me, so I put up a Drupal 6 site with the Audio modules and custom views to take care of things automatically. So far it has been pretty nice to be able to upload everything and organize data within Drupal, however I often wondered how many subscribers we had. I could estimate how many after posting a new mix, but after a recent mix the number started to fall. I’ll get to that later, though.
I decided it was time to redirect the feed to Feedburner so we could use their fun widgets and stats. In order to save CPU, I would often wget the files from Drupal so that Apache just had to serve a static file. This also takes care of that.
There are some important exemptions that need to be taken into consideration. For one, the iTunes store caches data and Feedburner checks every 30 minutes. I wanted the iTunes store to also have the raw XML feed, since Feedburner has a 550K limit on how much of a feed it carries. There are actually two feeds. that just has the podcast media enclosure, summary, and details. The second is an as they appear on the site for use in readers. I decided that I also wanted the take the feed from the server, since it is quite slow to update and this lets me tier the notifications. Facebook also sends the note to automatically, so the sooner the better. It is actually quite nice to have a landing page at Feedburner so anyone can see their choice of reader in order to subscribe. For the easy-going, there has always been a where one may subscribe.
So here are my mod_rewrite rules for the .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner/* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedValidator* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !iTMS* [OR]
RewriteRule ^trancedesign\.xml$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/TranceDesign [R=302,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedValidator* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FacebookFeedParser* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner/*
RewriteRule ^rss\.xml$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/trancedesign-full [R=302,L]
Finding the user agent for Apple’s iTunes Music Store required some log grepping, and the user agent iTMS comes from Apple’s IP block range. That out of the way, I was then able to use FeedBurner’s Optimize tab and enable BrowserFriendly’s redirection option. This places the original URL in the list for subscriptions, and lets me use FeedBurner to count how many unique subscribers we have while not permanently redirecting the traffic away from the site. Since FeedBurner is not redirected to itself, it will have the most up to date feed from the site.
Now I get some fun widgets to display on the page:
Regular subscribers:
Full Tracklisting subscribers:
It has only been a day since I made the change, and some issues I’ve been having with the site on the new host have made the download URLs sometimes return a 404. I’ve been tracking this down and it seems to have to do with having caching enabled.
I was seeing in my error_log: Premature end of script headers: and in my database log.
Hopefully this fixes the problem, as it has surely been frustrating when somebody tries to download a file and then unsubscribes. I was fairly certain we had at least 600+ subscribers, but since I’ve been putting up mixes of different genres, this could also turn some people off from the podcast entirely. Still, it is nice to have a place to post mixes when I find good ones or when I can get around to publishing a mix.
blog that also helps to see the analog statistics they provide that Drupal and other sites that use rewrite rules prohibit you from seeing.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/stats/(.*)$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/failed_auth.html$
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [L]
I got the gist of this idea from a , however since Feedburner’s user agent is FeedBurner/1.0 adding wildcards to the RewriteCond was necessary to make it work. Otherwise, Feedburner just pulled the feed from itself.
Taken on a recent trip to Huntington Beach, CA. The thunderstorm was moving on while the sun set over the ocean. It was really cold, compared to what I’m used to, so it took a lot of will power to take this without being blurry.. even at ISO 1600. I wasn’t able to take pictures of surfers at the beach this time due to the tsunami warning and high waves that reached quite high on the pier. When I was packing to leave the next morning, I noticed that there were no surfers in the water and they were all lined up… maybe waiting to get in.
There is an ‘experimental walnut orchard’ next to my neighborhood, and the clouds were really pleasant today with the light rain. I couldn’t get it all in one exposure, so I tone mapped these three.
Been working on this panorama in my spare time. It is stitched together from 129 images from my roof.
I’m enjoying making fractals now, and I’m looking to find other ways to be creative.
[Cowboy Bebop is] like my environment of what I’d love life to be. Chasing across the solar system as a bounty hunter with cool jazz music in the background and film noir feel.Me.
Podcast New Albums