Denmark Street in London is pretty much a haven for a guitarist so yesterday I jumped on the Northern Line and made my way to the newly reopened Tottenham Court Road station and went go get a cheap but decent set up.

I’ve been eternally pestering the staff at London Pro Audio Centre about cables and boxes that would allow me to program MIDI into my Gameboy so I headed there first and saw that they had a Alesis IO|2 on sale for £85 so decided to take advantage of the deal and while I was there I added a mic stand, XLR cable and Sennheiser e606 to complete my set up.

The Alesis IO|2 works like a charm, it has two ‘channels’ each offering XLR, line in and insert inputs. This means that when I get the money I could essentially have two mics running at once, reducing the need to keep playing my guitar over and over again.

The only downside I’m finding at the moment doesn’t lie with the hardware but with Logic 8. For some reason it allows a plethora of options when it comes to inputs and outputs inside the computer but only allows me to select either my IO|2 or my Griffin FireWave, this means that basically unless I use the phones socket on the IO|2 (I don’t have 3.5″ headphones yet, so I’m running my Gameboy cable into my iPod dock) I can’t playback the music I’m trying to play along to!

Some pics

Alesis IO|2

Sennheiser e606 hooked up to my amp

My XML parsing script comes from Jason Terhorst’s excellent NSXMLParser RSS feed tutorial, and I used the solution to creating the array from this stackoverflow post. With this working fine I suddenly noticed that when running NSLog(@"%@",item); to see how the array was being generated that It was returning something like this:


{
"phone_number" = (
"020 8725 0001\n",
" \n",
" \n",
"020 0002 0001\n",
" \n",
" \n",
" \n"
);
title = "Accident and Emergency\n";
}


NSXMLParser was parsing the indents and line breaks that I put in my XML document so I could read it easily when writing it. I’ve heard that NSXMLParser does this if there’s no DOCTYPE defined in the XML but I couldn’t get my head around the syntax for that. I then found this post which although removed the whitespace and line breaks still returned blank array entries for the line breaks, this led me to the solution I used.

My solution (included in foundCharacters so you can see what I’ve done):

- (void)parser:(NSXMLParser *)parser foundCharacters:(NSString *)string{
NSString *trimmedString = [string stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet:[NSCharacterSet whitespaceAndNewlineCharacterSet]];
if ([currentElement isEqualToString:@"title"]) {
[currentTitle appendString:trimmedString];
}
if([currentElement isEqualToString:@"phone_number"]){
if([trimmedString isEqualToString:@""]){
return;
}else{
[phoneNumbers addObject:trimmedString];
}
}
}

By returning when the string is nothing it doesn’t create blank array entries.

• Grab a screenshot of your profile with ‘timeline’ activated
• Make sure you have the images you need for the final product
• In GIMP create a marquee around the biggest block (the cover), color this in Black in a new layer
• Do the same for the smaller block (the profile pic) in a new layer
• Scale the image you want as ‘the cover’ down so that the main part of the image you want would be in the frame but ensure that there’s about 50px of the image under this line (we’ll use this as the background for the profile pic)
• Scale the image you want as the profile pic to fit in the box, then delete the background so the image’s focus is the only thing showing
• Now use the colour selection tool on the biggest block to select the entire block, change to the layer with the ‘cover’ image, hide all other layers and crop the image. Save this somewhere
• Use CTL/CMD + Z to go back a step so it’s not cropped
• Now use the colour selection tool on the smaller block, change to the layer with ‘profile’ image and then hide all other layers except the ‘cover’ image, as your now see that the profile image fits on the cover perfectly. Scale this image to 200px by 200px (Facebook won’t let you upload this otherwise). Crop this and save this somewhere
• Upload the images in the relevant places, make amendments if needed

Here’s mine

Fun with the new 'timeline' Facebook profile layout

Putting the blog in Tumblr allows us to also tap into other blogs on there and help to bring to light other people’s work about the game and it’s over arching franchise if there is one. We’ve been talking about doing the blog for a while now but finally getting ourselves together to make this idea a reality.

The first game we’ll be covering is Resistance 3, which we just completed today.

I’m currently in the process of making a mobile app for work, the hope is that I can use my new phone to create an Android version of the app side by side with the one we’ll be releasing for the iPhone. Yesterday I set about trying to get my HTC Sensation working with the Android Debug Bridge (adb), after reading a few tutorials on the web (listed at the end of this post) I was quite stumped. I eventually mixed and matched a few and managed to get all working. My face lit up when ?????????? No Permissions turned into HT17******* device.

First step – Make sure your computer can see the phone

This tutorial will assume that you are running Ubuntu Natty Narwhal, you have the Android SDK running already, you know the directory it’s in and you know a little about using the terminal, I’ll try and keep it as un-technical as I can.

First things first plug your HTC Sensation into your computer using it’s USB lead. Go to settings > Applications > Debugging and tick the top two boxes. Now press the home button and make sure you don’t look your phone. We’ll start off running adb to see if it finds the device. Open up the terminal and type ‘~/android-sdk-linux_x86/platform-tools/adb devices‘, I’ve set my Android SDK in my home folder, if you’ve placed yours else where replaces the ~ with that directory. Running this command should show all the connnected Android devices, if you see a bunch of question marks it means that it’s not recognising the device. If you see a serial number then you don’t need to do anything as it recognises it. If for some reason it doesn’t say anything type ‘lsusb‘ into the terminal and look for ‘Bus 001 Device 008: ID 0bb4:0c86 High Tech Computer Corp.‘ The bus and Device aren’t important but the other bits are. If you don’t see this then your USB lead may not be working.

Second step – setting up the udev files

Linux uses a thing called udev to define what devices plugged into the system do and can be used for. To get adb to use the HTC Sensation for debugging we need to create some rules for it. First let’s see if there’s any Android rules already set up. Type ‘ls /etc/udev/rules.d/‘ into the terminal this will list the contents of the folder where the Android udev rules would sit. If it prints out the following ‘51-android.rules‘ or ‘99-android.rules‘ then skip the next paragraph.

If there wasn’t either of those files then we need to create the rules for the android devices. I’m not entirely sure if 99 or 51 is the correct name for the file (the Android Dev documents says 51, this tutorial says 99) so to ensure that it works I’m going to create both. Type ‘ sudo touch /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules‘ and ‘ sudo touch /etc/udev/rules.d/99-android.rules‘ into the terminal, this creates both files (touch creates files).

Now we need to add rules for the device into these files. Smakked on the XDA-developer’s forum put up this awesome little snippet which I’ve been using.

#HTC Sensation
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", SYSFS{idVendor}=="[0bb4]", MODE="0666"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb",ATTR{idVendor}=="[0bb4]",ATTR{idProduct}=="[0c86]",SYMLINK+="android_adb"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb",ATTR{idVendor}=="[0bb4]",ATTR{idProduct}=="[0c86]",SYMLINK+="android_fastboot"

Copy this code and then type ‘ sudo gedit /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules‘ into the terminal, this will open the 51-android file. Paste the code at the end of the document and save it. Now type ‘ sudo gedit /etc/udev/rules.d/99-android.rules‘ into the terminal, this opens the 99-android file, again paste the code and save the file.

Finally we need to set the permissions for the files. Type ‘sudo chmod a+r /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules‘ and ‘sudo chmod a+r /etc/udev/rules.d/99-android.rules‘ into the terminal. This will allow the system to use the files properly.

Third step – Restart adb and check the device settings again

So now the udev files are in place we now need to reset adb so we can use them. Type ‘~/android-sdk-linux_x86/platform-tools/adb kill-server‘ into the terminal. This will stop the adb daemon from running. Now unplug your HTC Sensation, I found that it didn’t find my phone until I plugged it in again. After unplugging you phone type ‘~/android-sdk-linux_x86/platform-tools/adb start-server‘ into the terminal, this will start the adb daemon again. Plug your phone in again, make sure it’s not locked and then type ‘~/android-sdk-linux_x86/platform-tools/adb devices‘ into the terminal. Hopefully you’ll see a list of numbers instead of a lot of question marks. If not maybe try restarting the computer and once it’s restarted type ‘~/android-sdk-linux_x86/platform-tools/adb devices‘ into the terminal again.

Below are a list of tutorials that helped me work this out:

• Android developers documentation
• Eddie Ringle’s udev on Natty Narwhal post
• Dimitar Darazhanski’s blog
• Smakked’s udev snippet for HTC Sensation

If this didn’t work and you found a solution please put it in the comments.

Update – 26/08/2011

So since writing this tutorial I’ve found that the rules weren’t as permanent as I’d hoped. If you’re having issues with ADB after rebooting or generally go to the Terminal and type in “~/android-sdk-linux_x86/platform-tools/adb kill-server” and then use sudo to restart the server by typing “sudo ~/android-sdk-linux_x86/platform-tools/adb start-server“. This should hopefully make it work again as it had before.

To get this solution working on your WordPress theme you need to firstly know a little HTML and PHP. WordPress uses a thing called ‘The Loop’, this spits out your posts on the page. You should see a while loop like this <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>. Inside this while loop is your post template, I decided to put them at the end of my posts so I added it right before the end of the while loop (which looks like this: <?php endwhile; ?>). The code is below, the PHP tags generate the URL and title for you so you can just drop it straight into your templates.


<ul class="addthis_toolbox addthis_default_style" addthis:url="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" addthis:title="<?php the_title(); ?>">
<li><a class="addthis_button_tweet" tw:via="colinwren"></a></li>
<li><a class="addthis_button_google_plusone"></a></li>
<li><a class="addthis_button_facebook_like" fb:like:layout="button_count"></a></li>
<li><a class="addthis_counter addthis_pill_style"></a></li>
</ul>


You’ll need to change the tw:via attribute value to your own Twitter account name and if you don’t like the layout I use you can use the AddThis API reference for more information on layouts.

I found when making my app that there wasn’t a lot of resources on making a Foursquare powered app. I’m hoping my series on making a Foursquare app will help those looking for information on how to get started.

Setting up your app on Foursquare’s dev site

Foursquare uses OAuth for it’s authentication. This means that before you can get your hands on the Foursquare user’s data, your app needs to send the user to Foursquare so they can authorise that the app has access to their data.

First step is to head over to the Foursquare developer hub and have a look at the V2 API documentation. This will give you an insight into what we’re going to be going over in this series. On the Authentication page you’ll see some information on the OAuth protocol used, but I’ll go over this in this post. To set up a new app you’ll need to click on the link in step 1 or go to https://foursquare.com/oauth/

To set up a new app press the ‘Register a new consumer’ button. This will then take you to a form that you need to fill out to set the app up. You can edit all the information at a later date so don’t worry if there’s any errors.

The all important app setup form

There are three boxes in the form. The first is the name of the app your making; the second is the website address of the app, whereas the last is the callback URL. The callback URL is the page that the user is taken to after authorising your app and must be the URL of the file (not the directory). You can use your index file or a special page for this.

Once registered it will display your credentials under the headings, use these in your code

Once you’ve submitted the form you’ll have registered your app with Foursquare and you’ll see below your app’s name there are some long strings. These are your app’s credentials that are passed to the Foursquare server in order for you to get the data you need.

Using your app’s credentials to get the user’s data

So now your app is all set up on Foursquare’s servers it’s time to put them to use. For this tutorial I’m going to be using PHP but thanks to the OAuth protocol you can use pretty much any language you want. The app I set up had one page that introduced the user to the app and another page for the callback that would then process the data. I’ll now go over each page separately as it will be easier to see the pages function. You can see a working version of the code on my projects page.

The index page

The main job of this page in my app is to introduce the app and what it does and then prompt the user to sign into Foursquare to use it.

This page is pretty much a standard HTML page, I’ve added the credentials for getting the data as PHP variables so you can add your own easily. You can view the source code below.

As you can see above the credentials are spit out into a link. This link presents the credentials to the Foursquare server. Once the user has approved your app to have access it then sends the user to the callback page.

The callback page

This is the page where we take those credentials and put them to good use. We first use the credentials to get an access token, then we use the access token to ask for information from Foursquare. The source code is below.

All the data we get from Foursquare is in JSON format. Luckily PHP has an awesome JSON decoder. JSON is basically a series of arrays, so to access the information we need we just access how we would a PHP array. For the arrays received from Foursquare check out: Foursquare’s endpoint browser.

I decided to just spit out the name of the user, as it’s a similar process for getting the user’s checkins. In part two I’ll go over getting the checkin data and adding it to a Google Map.

I hooked my PSEye up to my Linux box and to position it put the lead through my amps top handle and supported it with a Wiimote (sorry Kallum), I wasn’t able to utilise all 4 mics but I think if I was able that would be epic. BTW those using Audacity to record using a PSEye you need to set it to USB (sounds obvious but just a tip).

The NS-50 I got for a steal, only £42 including packaging, for a ‘pro’ noise gate I think this is pretty damn awesome. Of course I’m sure there’s someone out there that will disagree with this. I normally have an issue with software noise gates as I feel they take too much sustain out of the guitar but I’m not having any of these issues even with the decay turned all the way down. My only worry is that as it’s a half rack that it’s a bit bulky but it doesn’t seem that bad.

The MT-2 I got about £45, which compared to retail is dirt cheap. Comparing this to the DS-1 I’ve been using for ages I noticed a distinct difference. The MT-2 is awesome! The amount of chuggage I get it ridiculous and playing any metal suddenly sounds like there was a whole chunk of the sound missing when using the DS-1. I’ve got an audio clip below of my mucking about with it all. You’ll notice the tasty stuff is the MT-2.

Here’s a panorama of the set up, you can see that it’s quite a small set up but it does it’s job. Putting both the DS-1 and the MT-2 on makes a really interesting noise, there’s the odd envelope thing that going on.

Here’s my ‘jam’ also:

Testing my PSEye setup by #include <music .h>
For some reason this player’s not loading properly, reload the page and it will appear.

And some pics of my setup:






Not the best you’ve probably seen but it’s not bad for an amateur like myself.

This leads to my recent string of music players for my Ubuntu box. I’ve been through Amarok, Rhythmbox, Audacious, Banshee and Clementine. My needs from a music player are one that let’s me view by Artist and breaks that down to albums (The album is still a very important aspect of my musical experience), from here I like to play the album all the way through. I’m not a big fan of the play queue aspect of most Linux players. So with all this in mind I can safely say Audacious is off the list, although the logo looks nice it’s very basic and the music is displayed in a list only.

I’ve used Rhythmbox before when it was included with Ubuntu so I have a little bit of experience with the way it works. It is a good player but the one drawback for me it has is the way it displays the artist-album side of things, there’s one view which when I first used iTunes I used to hate so I quickly decided to move on from it. As I said though it is a very good player.

Amarok was my next choice, one fail to start off was the fact it didn’t integrate with the Unity theme on Natty although it did appear in the sound menu before launching. Plus there was no last.fm / other music services integration like on some of the other players. One thing that Amarok has in it’s favour though is the fact the UI looks very nice.

Banshee was my next choice and was working well until I got pissed off with it’s way of handling compliations (I download a lot of chiptune compliations so I need this feature), it orders it all by artist, which is great until you get 30 different artists clogging up your library all with the same album art and you can’t (bar starting a play queue) play the tracks in the order on the compliation. The integration on this play was very good and the Last.fm plugin was excellent (top 50 artists is a good idea).

Finally I’m now sticking with Clementine. It has a very good way of sorting the library, kind of reminds me of the iPhone’s iPod list. This breaks down into Artist, Album, tracks (finding this a smidge annoying, try opening up Minutemen’s Double nickels on the Dime for instance) but it’s doing a better job than the others so far. The Wiki based song info and artist info is also awesome, meaning that when I’m in a learning mood I can have a quick read up on the bands I’m listening to. Another plus is the fact that it doesn’t show up on the Unity ‘dock’ when it’s playing so it doesn’t clog that up.

Of course time will tell whether or not I stick with this player and move on but for now I’m happy.