Month: November 2011

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Skype 5 strikes again

It’s been thoroughly documented that Mac Skype 5 is an utter piece of junk, but it just keeps getting ‘better’!

Today it informed me that there had been a minor update to the current beta release (5.4).

Skype update notification

Being wary of what Skype considers an ‘upgrade’, I clicked the ‘what’s new’ button that it offered to see the changes. This took me to a page all about Skype 5.3, with no hint or link of any release notes. A bit of googling for the new version number led me to some release notes. I thought this sounded fair enough, so clicked ‘update’. It downloaded the new version like this:

Skype downloading

but then presented me with this:

Skype install fail

That’s a very strange error. It’s telling me that it accidentally downloaded the wrong version, and didn’t check that it was the right one, it just assumed it was. Doesn’t bode well for security. On top of that the reason it can’t install is because it’s not fat enough?? Are they trying to suggest that code bloat is mandatory? Clicking ‘Manual update’ took me to the Skype 5.3 page again. Sigh.

To their credit, this IS a beta version, but given that only bug fix mentioned for the last 2 months work on this release is “Skypenames ending with period do not work properly”, I’m not holding my breath for a stable release.

Skype used to be a beautiful (well…), elegant, Mac-like app. It’s now a pig in a dress. With lipstick.

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NASA Space Sounds for EXS-24

I saw that NASA released a load of audio clips from various historic space missions – from Sputnik to the final flight of Atlantis, via the moon! Space sounds have long been used musical contexts – SpaceOddity, Telstar, Pulsar, Lemon Jelly’s “Space Walk” to name but a few. I felt I had to make these more musically useful that the ‘ringtone’ MP3s available on NASA’s site, so I wrapped them up as a library for the EXS-24 sampler (appears in Apple’s Logic and Logic Express DAWs). The sounds will work straight away in Logic, but the sounds are accessible in the archive as AIFF files so you can easily convert them to other formats. I split up the sounds into the same historical categories as on the NASA site so you’re not loading up all the samples at once. Keyboard mapping isn’t anything particular (white notes starting at C1), but I did clean up the samples a little and edited down some shorter clips of the more familiar or musical sounds (“Houston, we have a problem”, “The Eagle has landed”, “That’s one small step” etc).

The original sounds are mostly mono with low bandwidth, resolution and sample rate, but many are supplied as stereo 44.1KHz 16-bit files, so I’ve converted them all to that as EXS-24 doesn’t seem to like mixing sample rates in one instrument.

So, go ahead and download the NASA sample library! (70Mb zip)

Obviously I have no rights to these samples; NASA is encouraging people to download and use them at will, and I assume it’s being published under their open-source license.

I wrote this entry a while ago but forgot to post it, duh.

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Subversion 1.7 to 1.6 downgrade with MacPorts

MacPorts told me that there had been a subversion update (1.7.1), which I went ahead and installed. Woo! Huge speed improvements for everything I tried with the CLI client, great stuff. A short time later my IDE (PHPStorm) fell over screaming. It doesn’t like 1.7 yet, and it’s a bit stuck until SVNKit supports it. I should have checked really.

So how to downgrade? Fortunately this post makes it very easy. So I just did:

sudo port deactivate subversion @1.7.0_1
sudo port activate subversion @1.6.17_1

But now I’m stuck with a working copy in 1.7 format with uncommitted changes, and there is no tool to convert it back to 1.6 format. This is easily worked around; check out a new working copy (using svn 1.6) and sync across the changes, ignoring the .svn folders, like this:


rsync -av --update --exclude=".svn/***" ~/Sites/myproject1.7/ ~/Sites/myproject1.6

All happy now.