OK it's the last day of 2009 so I thought I'd share a few albums (well mp3 downloads) that I'd discovered over the last year...

One of our favorite events of the whole year here in Phoenix is "Las Noches de las Luminarias" at Papago Park's Desert Botanical Garden. This year was a little different to previous years as they had re-designed parts of the park since we were last there, and added some new features specially for the event like a fake ice skating rink. A lot of the old stuff was there too - like the thrill of walking around in the desert, pathways lit only by luminarias - small paper bags with tea-light candles in them - and listening to a lot of great music from the bands dotted around the gardens. 

I got all excited yesterday about the inclusion of Web Sockets in Google Chrome, and even more excited today when I noticed the latest version of Google Go now has a server side implementation of Web Sockets. Naturally I had to write a quick test to check it out :-) Here's the Google Go server implementation:

package main
import ( "http"; "io"; "websocket"; )
func EchoServer(ws *websocket.Conn) {
  io.Copy(ws, ws);
}
func main() {
  http.Handle("/echo", websocket.Handler(EchoServer));
  err := http.ListenAndServe(":12345", nil);
}

And here's the client side javascript that updates the contents of a DIV named 'banner'...

if ("WebSocket" in window) {
  var ws = new WebSocket("ws://localhost:12345/echo");
  ws.onopen = function(){ws.send("My first WebSocket worked!");};
  ws.onmessage = function(evt){document.getElementById('banner').innerText=evt.data;};
  ws.onclose = function(){};
}

Easily add blank spacers to your dock by using the following in Terminal...

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add '{tile-data={}; tile-type="spacer-tile";}'
killall Dock

This adds a blank space to the right side of your dock. You can then click on this blank space to drag it anywhere in the dock, or out of the dock to remove it.

Lately I've been selling off a lot of my old music gear from the Mellotone days, and using the money to set up a new minimal solo recording rig. The sound I'm getting is great so I thought I'd stick out a quick demo mp3 :-) This is a mexican made Fender Strat going through an Apogee One into Ableton Live 8 running on a quad core 27" iMac. All amps modeled by Native Instruments Guitar Rig... I'm hoping this will turn into a song at some point, but for now it's a nice little sound montage.