Click here to view the embedded video.

Mick Flannery – Goodbye
Lyrics

I lay in your arms
In the room where you had borne the scars.
It was late at night,
And the city lay asleep outside.
And the moon was in your hair,
And it all was so unfair, or was it, dear?
I said I’m leaving soon.
I must go and do what I must do.
You said you’d understand.
But I really don’t see how you can.
When I said Id make the time
And tomorrow Id call by, that was a lie.

I’m no ladies man,
And I never will be one of them.
I didn’t steal from you.
And what happened here was nothing new.
Not to make it all sound vain,
You lay the man, you lay his name, but lay no claim.

I cant explain no more.
Ah girl, come on, you knew before,
Before you took me home.
I can only work if I’m alone.
And when I said goodnight tonight,
When I said goodnight tonight, that meant goodbye.

For its ninth album, Pearl Jam chose to go back to working with producer Brendan O’Brien. The album was the group’s first album to be produced by O’Brien since the band’s 1998 album, Yield. “At this point, I think we’re willing to let somebody cut the songs up a little bit,” says lead vocalist Eddie Vedder. “In the past, Brendan would say, ‘It’s a great song, but I think you should do it in a different key’, and we’d say no. But now that we’ve heard Bruce [Springsteen] has listened to his suggestions, I think we will too.”  Bassist Jeff Ament said, “He brings a brutally honest approach to what he thinks is working and what isn’t, and it really moves things along… We don’t get weighted down with ideas that maybe aren’t even that good. He’s one of the few people outside of the band that we trust with our music, and we’re really, really looking forward to making this record.”

Muse – The Resistance – Listen To Full Album For Free… music player by Grooveshark

“Muse have made an album of genius, brilliance and beauty!” (The Sunday Times Culture)
“Too few bands have this level of ambition, this desire to explore new territory… life affirming” (Q Magazine)
“Berlioz meets Bowie.” (The Mirror)
“…a streak of utter brilliance.” (The Fly)

Muse are a multi award-winning English alternative rock band that formed in Teignmouth, Devon in 1994. Since their inception, the band has comprised of vocalist, guitarist and pianist Matthew Bellamy, bassist and backing vocalist Christopher Wolstenholme and drummer Dominic Howard. Muse are known for their energetic and extravagant live performances and their fusion of many music genres, including progressive rock, classical music and electronica.

Muse have released five studio albums – Showbiz (1999), Origin of Symmetry (2001), Absolution (2003), Black Holes and Revelations (2006) (which earned the band a Mercury Prize nomination and a third place finish in the NME Albums of the Year list for 2006)[6] and The Resistance (2009).

Grooveshark currently provide a useful search add-on, it installs Grooveshark search to your current list of search engines within Firefox. By searching for an artist or song you are directed to the Grooveshark website and results are displayed.

I re-coded their XML install file to include a live suggest feature pulling related words as you type from Yahoo to speed up your search query.

Examples:

1. The below image shows the default Grooveshark add-on, you have to type in the artist and song title and then click on the magnify button to complete a search:

2. And here is my improved version in action, as you type you will be prompted with relevant words speeding up your search, no need to click on magnify button. Just type, select, go.

Try It Out:

If you haven’t installed the Grooveshark search add-on for Firefox please try my version:
“Click here to install Firefox Grooveshark auto suggest search add-on”

Note* I would prefer you install it via my Firefox Official Plugin page: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/14319 this allow me to track downloads, installs and reviews etc.

How to uninstall:

To uninstall the add-on just select “Manage Search Engines” from your drop down list then select and remove it.

Hope it improves your search speed on Grooveshark

Note: This add-on will install to “Microsoft Internet Explorer” browser but the auto suggest feature is disabled.

What is Grooveshark ?

Grooveshark is a Rich Internet Application, (RIA) written in ActionScript using the Adobe Flex framework which runs in Adobe Flash. Its design implements various sliding panels to categorize and display lists of information, similar in style to that of the Apple iPhone. A right-aligned black modal window also slides in to display more information for songs, playlists, and users.

Grooveshark also lets users upload music to their online music library through a Java Web Start application. The upload program scans folders specified for mp3’s, uploading and adding them to the user’s online library on the service. The ID3 information of the uploaded song is linked to the user and the file is uploaded to Grooveshark which allows on-demand music playback. Collectively, each user’s uploaded library is available to any user of Grooveshark. All content on the service is user-sourced.

The website also allows users to upload music files on their hard drive to the search database, resulting in constant growth of its library.

Please note this fix worked for me on 2 upgrades but does not promise a fix for your own problem, these tips may help you but do so at your own risk! Before proceeding with any of the following please back up your site and database!

The Problem

On previous occasions I used the easy”upgrade automatically” button option with no problem but this time around I kept getting this error in the below image:

I then de-activated all plugins and re-tried the auto upgrade but still got the same error as the above image, this was not making any sense to me so I searched through the Wordpress Forum querying terms such as: Installation Failed, Could not copy file, upgrade failed etc. There was one interesting reply on this thread http://wordpress.org/support/topic/277858?replies=10 that suggested accessing your database using phpMyAdmin and repair your tables.

The Fix

Here’s what that user suggested :

use phpmyadmin,

Check:

1. Login to phpMyAdmin.
2. Select the database and click on ‘Structure‘ tab.
3. Right under the list of table there is a “Check All” link. Click on it to select all tables.
4. From a “With selected:” drop-down menu right next to it, choose “Check table“.

Repair:

1. Login to phpMyAdmin
2. Choose the affected database. If you only have one database, it should choose it by default so you don’t need to do anything.
3. In the main panel, you should see a list of your database tables. Check the boxes by the tables that need repair.
4. At the bottom of the window just below the list of tables, there is a drop down menu. Choose “Repair Table”

The Result

I did follow the above instructions and with all of my plugins still disabled proceeded to use the “upgrade automatically” button again and the result was successful!  The resulting image of the fix is below:

I then re-activated my plugins and all seems to be fine for now.

Summary

For me it seemed that my database table or tables needed to be repaired for some reason beyond my skill set but however on other wordpress upgrades I do remember being asked to upgrade the database after the upgrade finished but this time around with 2.8 that did not happen. Is this a glitch or other? time will tell…

Comments or suggestions appreciated…

Wordpress 2.8 Video

Having had a few problems with my upgrade was only a few fixes away but I want to take the opportunity to thank all of the Wordpress team for bringing us new tools and releases. The following video is from Wordpress and shows you some of those great features with this release.

My Dell Inspiron 1720 Laptop recently was me giving trouble where by it started to hang for no apparent reason. One minute I’d be working away contently with very few applications running, next “Bang!” it would freeze with a constant (Vista) spinning icon and a screen that turned opaque white. Nothing I could do to rectify it only to wait… and wait… and wait… by running Windows Task Manager I noticed the CPU Usage was running at a near constant 90% all the time which was pretty high. I tried all sorts of tips from registry defrag to killing unnecessary startup processes even being suspect of Firefox sucking up resources but no luck to be had.

It finally ground to a halt and would not boot up so with the laptop still in warranty I called Dell to arrange a repair, strangely enough they sent out a repair tech a few days later who discovered the problem was a screwed up motherboard which was replaced. It was also recommended that I format my hard drive and re-install Windows (Bloody) Vista. At this point I decided to back up my laptop data to an external hard drive via USB. I left it transferring all files overnight and presumed all was ok with no error messages that anything went wrong with the transfer, having backed up I was happy to prepare for formatting the drive and re-installing.

Dell arranged a phone call and a talk through of the reinstall. All went well and at last the laptop is back to peak performance so tonight it was time to hook up my external drive and transfer my stuff back . BUMP! nothing there! yes there was a c: drive backed up with full windows directory etc. but no “My Music” – “My Videos” and worst of all no “My Pictures” aaaaahhhhhhh!!!!!!!

No pictures!!!  over a years worth of photos… nowhere to be found. Family snaps, birthdays, events, creative pics… all gone… thank f**k I had uploaded a few of those pics to my flickr account…. and all for the sake of a couple of backup DVD’s!

Lesson learned? shit happens… (note to self)  from now on always check an test your Back Up, Back Up, Back Up!

1,570 viewers accessed the webcast over the hour with traffic coming mainly from Ireland, UK, USA, Netherlands, & Australia. We had a chat box enabled on the site and at one stage there was 144 active users chatting . Below is a screen shot of the Ustream Metrics for the broadcast.

Getting the Traffic

Part of the success of this webcast lay in pre-planning. A  group of the people involved in this project posted the gig details on social networks such as Facebook, MySpace & Bebo also SMS Text, Forums, Email and traditional word of mouth. I also created a YoughalOnline.com Facebook group and also a Facebook App for people to install so they could watch the webcast from within Facebook.

Why not check out these links:
YoughalOnline.com Facebook Group
YoughalOnline.com – Live Web Cast – Facebook App

The Facebook traffic was very good with a lot of app installs and a good community to inform of the upcoming broadcast. It’s become a lot clearer  that you have got to use the social networks  in order to reach wider audience.

Watch The Playback

Un-edited playback as it was broadcast on the night. Time 57 min 32 secs watch it all or scrub through.

Pre-recorded playback of “Little Big Man” webcast

Originally recorded 29th January 2009

Conclusion

*Note to self: Aim for better results next time, always try harder and always learn from the past

The Hotel opened by then Taoiseach Bertie Ahern in 2007 and closed its doors December 2008. This is a short documentary about that time, it was created by Supplevideo On YouTube…

Click here to view the embedded video.