November 2009
Monthly Archive
“Getting in touch with your Joomla’s inner database”
Posted by Jim DeLaHunt on 30 Nov 2009 | Tagged as: Joomla, meetings and conferences, Vancouver, web technology
I’m giving another talk at the coordinates:
Getting in touch with your Joomla’s inner database
Monday, 30. November 2009, 18:30-20:30h. At The Network Hub, 422 Richards Street, 3rd floor, Vancouver, BC V6B 2Z3. tel +1 604 767 8778.
A monthly meeting of the Vancouver Joomla User Group. Admission free. All people interested in learning more about the content management system, and helping others learn more, are welcome.
Agenda
- Introductions.
- Featured topic: Getting in touch with your Joomla’s inner database, by Jim DeLaHunt.
- Q&A.
- Door prize drawing.
- Networking.
Copyright, Competition, and Investment
Posted by Jim DeLaHunt on 30 Nov 2009 | Tagged as: Canada, culture, politics
During July-Sept 2009, the Government of Canada held public copyright consultations, with an eye to writing new copyright law. They asked for submissions addressing five topics. Here’s one of my submissions, on “Competition and Investment“. It’s hard to tell what will become of these consultations. My submission did eventually show up on the official submissions page, but I still want to publish it for the record on my own blog. I have two more submissions, “Copyright and you (me)” and “Copyright and the test of time“, which I published in recent weeks.
Q: What sorts of copyright changes do you believe would best foster competition and investment in Canada?
A: Three changes:
- relinquish Crown Copyright
- create legal structures for free culture, and industries based on it
- don’t take on the job of defending obsolete business models
How to resolve “File Creation Error !” from Exact Audio Copy 0.99pb5
Posted by Jim DeLaHunt on 10 Nov 2009 | Tagged as: robobait
I just figured out a solution for a problem setting up a piece of Windows freeware on my computer, and I’m recording it here as robobait so that others can benefit from it.
I use the wonderful Exact Audio Copy (EAC) software to rip my CDs to FLAC files, as part of moving our music collection onto a media server. I had just uninstalled version 0.99pb3 (this thing has been “pre-beta” and version 0.99 for years!) and installed version 0.99pb5. I set the directory to which EAC writes its extracted files to be on my Samba file server. When I tried 0.99pb5, though, I observed that whenever I tried to copy tracks from the CD, an “Error Message” alert box would pop up, saying “File Creation Error !” What I expected, and what I recalled from using 0.99pb3, was that EAC would write the compressed files happily to the server directory.
The minimal test case to produce the error was to select one track from the CD, and then select the menu item “Action“… “Copy selected tracks” “Uncompressed“. The Windows system in question is a virtual machine running Windows XP on my Macbook Pro laptop. I had set up EAC’s “Standard directory for extraction” to a UNC server path, let’s call it “\\samba\media\Music\untagged_flac\“. I observed, by the way, that when I changed the destination directory to be something on my Windows C:\ drive, then EAC wrote the file with no problem. And interestingly, EAC had no trouble writing log files and cue files to the server directory using the UNC path, but it refused to write audio data files.
The workaround which succeeded for me was to map a drive letter to the UNC path. In my case, I mapped the letter “Z:\” to “\\samba\media\Music\“. Then, I set EAC’s “Standard directory for extraction” (under “EAC“… “EAC options“… “Directories” tab…) to “Z:\untagged_flac\“. Then EAC happily wrote compressed music files to my network directory.
I think this write failure is a regression from 0.99pb3; I recall the UNC path working then. But I haven’t reinstalled 0.99pb3 to prove the point. If you try that experiment, please leave me a comment and tell me what you found.
There are other possible causes for the “File Creation Error !” alert box. A couple I found were:
- Unpermitted leading “\” character in EAC’s “naming scheme” option (under “Filename” tab), per a hydrogenaudio thread “EAC: File Creation Error on first CD track”
- Filename or total file path too long (I don’t know the operative limit), per a hydrogenaudio thread “EAC pb5 directory problem causes File Creation Error”
May no-one else have to spend the time I spent diagnosing this problem! Happy exact audio copying!
P.S. my thanks to the developers of EAC, and of FLAC.exe, and all the other pieces of software in this marvelous free tool chain.