Dual Core

The cart is working again.  From what I could tell, the issue was a timeout with PayPal.  Considering that the cart worked before this issue, and after, it seems that PayPal was the culprit.  It could have just as easily been maintenance on their end.  Please let me know if you run into any issues.

-eighty

Apologies for the outage earlier.  The good folks at our ISP went down to the data center and rebooted the server.  I am still uncertain as to the root cause for the outage.  Everything in the logs looks normal except for a few floods of DNS requests.  Those IPs (from .ru) have been blocked and I will continue to keep an eye on the box.  Remote 2.6 kernel 0day, anyone?  Along the lines of outages, I am still working on the cart to track down the problem.  Some people have used the cart fine, others are running into issues.  Please contact me [dualcoremusic] and let me know what your results with the cart are [at gmail dot com].

-eighty

I have been notified of some problems of the cart interfacing with PayPal.  I am currently elbow-deep in PHP code looking through stuff trying to figure out the root cause.  The cart seems to work alright for some people so if you run into an issue, you have a couple options, in no particular order:

1. Hit up Amazon or iTunes
2. Bribe a friend to give you a copy of our music that s/he owns
3. Grab it off of BitTorrent / What.cd
4. Email me to let me know

My email address is the first part of our domain name before .com (dualcoremusic) then suffix an at gmail dot com to that.

Thanks for your patience, and desire to pick up our music :]

-eighty

At long last, I (c64) am now true to eighty’s harsh, street-style battle lyrics. Yes, I have bought a laptop.

I’ve been holding off entering the portable computer world for a while, but finally caved in due to the demands of modern life. Well, more like the demands of a single computer in a  two person household.  So now I can now make sweet music on the bus, in the park, or on the toilet (insert ‘fresh sh*t’ joke here). Plus of course spend more time multi-tasking (watching TV and YouTube at the same time).

Many of our fans believe that our first 3 albums were produced using just a Commodore 64, a wooden block and a piece of string. Maybe they were right. This new portable setup is not cutting-edge, but will be more than capable of recording short bursts of inpiration when I’m not in the studio, or when there are no wooden blocks or pieces of string to hand.

For those interested in such geekery, technical specs are as follows.

The downside of this is that I have to make friends with Windows Vista. And possibly my head with the wall…

*Edit* I’ve now made friends with Vista, it has some good new features!

- c64

Today has been quite a day, we upgraded the server and everything seems almost back to normal now!  The previous server was an Athlon XP with just under 1GB of RAM donated by my college roommate’s girlfriend (thanks, Jenna).  The new server contains a whole slew of shiny armaments:  Q6600, SATA RAID1, and 8GB of RAM.

Here are a few things I learned:

1. Apache gets angry when it tries to read files from a directory whose parent several levels up has a mode of 700.
2. Apache does not tell you exactly why it is angry, instead the log file contains an error message which people have rectified several different ways — because that message is used for several different problems.
3. WordPress likes to do reverse DNS lookups.  After the server went in, the site was really slow.  Turns out I had my internal DNS server (RFC 1918) in /etc/resolv.conf.  Yeah, you can’t get there from the public internet.  Now that the resolv.conf uses the correct DNS server, the page is serving at fast speeds once again.

Well, I feel thoroughly challenged for the day.  Time to play some Left 4 Dead!

-eighty

Today I’m probably a bit over-excited, for two reasons;

1. This is my first post on the new dualcoremusic.com, and I think it’s excellent. So hello to anyone reading this, thanks to all our fans for buying/listening to Dual Core music and checking our shows, and ‘big ups’ of course to the man int eighty and our web developer friend Seth. You’re all great.

2. The reason I started to write this post – Adobe Creative Suite 4!

You may/may not know, but as well as being ‘c64′, I spend my days working as a Graphic Designer. More often than not, trying to help (battle) clients who are unhealthily in love with ‘Comic Sans‘. Anyway, late last week I received one of the most exciting gifts in the land of the designer – a copy of the brand new CS4 Design Premium package from Adobe. This was coupled with a shiny new PC to run it (sorry Mac lovers). Whoop! For years I’ve been using the first CS editions of Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop etc, with their primitive ape-like tool set (if apes had computers). Now I feel like Marty McFly, travelling 5 years into the future to an exciting new feature-packed world. Well…a meagre 5 years of time travel would make a pretty poor film, but you get the idea.

Without going into every detail, I can now unleash my creativity with such delights as tabbed documents (a la Firefox), collapsable palletes, multiple Illustrator artboards, transparency in gradients, and many other features I’ve yet to discover after a couple days use. Check Simon Yuen’s blog for more comprehensive breakdowns. It’s all very exciting (to me/designers!). I’m sure after a few days I’ll start to notice the “they’ve still not fixed that from 5 years ago, what the hell?!!” type bugs, but for now I’ll just enjoy figuring out suggestively-named features such as the ‘blob tool‘.

- c64