arctica convinced me to take part in project 52 (and anmut also tried to convince me to do something like this, to give proper credit :-) ). every week, a topic will be released and everyone participating is supposed to shoot a photo with respect to this topic. the first topic is “snapshop”. expect something the next days…

when mary asked for more at the end of the music video series, i spent some time thinking about how to continue this. eventually, i got an idea: create another blog, the musikwiese. (isn’t it a perfect name for this?)

the aim of the musikwiese is to present another artist every few days. the beginnings were made with lacuna coil and capricorns, and my todo list features 89 more bands. this will be a rather long term project, and the todo list will probably not only shrink during that time.

this project is also not necessarily a one man project for all its lifetime. if someone is interested in contributing something, please contact me.

anyway, i hope you enjoy the musikwiese! :-)

today i had to shuffle the lines of a text file. the last time i tried to do this in the bash i only found the hint to use sort -R. this actually produced the somehow strange order of the music video series. today i found out that there’s another way to do this, namely by using the command shuf. it works the same way as sort. i just wanted to write this down so i won’t forget :-)

some people like me have the problem of having several wordpress installations at the same time; people like me and some others i know. i have one wordpress running for this blog, one for my math blog, one for a hidden, password protected project which might or might not ever see the light of the world, and anther one for another music related project showing up soon.
whenever a new wordpress version comes out, a question bugs me: how to update all of these installations without doing it manually for every one? of course, there’s the automatic update, but i don’t really trust it. and i don’t have an ftp server installed, so i’m not sure if it would work at all. so i need another solution.
a first idea was to use symbolic links. have one wordpress installation in a directory outside the web tree, and link these files into all wordpress directories in the web tree, so for updating i only need to change one directory, and i only have to touch the others when the configuration file has to be changed.
unfortunately, this doesn’t work, thanks to php and wordpress. wordpress determines the path to the config file by the path names of the files, and since the files are symbolic links, the paths of the files pointed to are used. but in that directory, no config file is available, and wordpress fails. too bad.
now i got another idea. namely, have a wordpress directory outside the web tree, and put it into subversion. then, in all other wordpress directories, drop in the files using subversion, except the configuration file, uploads, latex caches, etc. so to update an installation, i have to go into its directory and type svn up. that’s it. there’s one thing left to do: namely hide the .svn directories from the web server. i didn’t found the perfect method yet, but adding this to the apache configuration makes them forbidden:

<DirectoryMatch “^/.*/\.svn/”>
  Order deny,allow
  Deny from all
</DirectoryMatch>

then every access to something in an .svn directory results in an access denied error:

Forbidden
You don’t have permission to access /.svn/ on this server.

a happy new year to all of you!

some time ago, i wrote a small plugin which logs the most recent user activity (for users having an account) and presents them sorted by their last access to the admins. the plugin only stores timestamps, and refrains from doing so while the user is in the admin area. users not logged in are ignored.
i’ve now polished it up, i.e. made the output a bit more fancy. in case someone else is interested in this as well, i decided to put it online. you can download it here if you are interested. to install it, just extract the zip archive into your wordpress plugin directory.
be warned: i don’t take any responsibility for the use of this plugin. do with it whatever you want. if it breaks your system, that’s your problem. especially if you have many user accounts, make sure you understand what the plugin is doing before trying it out.

this is the end of my project, the my favorite music video series. this series contained 35 videos from various bands in various genres. i hope you enjoyed it! and maybe even found something you like which you didn’t knew before!
anyway. feel free to post a short list of videos / tunes you liked most of these, and which surprised you most :)

the thirtyfifth video is i am the city by abba. the lyrics can be found here.

this is pop. you can listen to it.

(this is an unofficial video.)

i like it because… it’s a really nice song.

today i did a walk outside, enjoying the beautiful snowscape with a litte bit of sun.

the thirtyforth video is besides you in time by nine inch nails. i just love this song. the lyrics can be found here.

this is industrial rock. you might like it.

(the sound quality at the end is very bad due to clipping. here‘s a studio version which sounds much better.)

i like it because… it is intense, heavy, catchy. it makes me feel better, feeling less alone. similar to enslaved‘s ascension.