This is a good trick I use on the Jands Echelon and the Hog 2 when I don’t know how a rig’s been patched. The problem is to find out where individual lanterns have been plugged in without having to think about it too hard. To start with I create a group of all dimmer channels, called ‘All Dimmers’. If I’m feeling nice I’ll fade the group up to around 15% for a while to let the fixtures warm up. Then I’ll select the group and press <Highlight>. Next up I’ll step through the individual lanterns using the <Next> button. When I find one that’s a Source 4 I press <@> <Full>. Once I’ve stepped though all the fixtures all the Source 4s are on at full blast. I then press <Active> <@> <Full>. This loads all fixtures at 100% into the programmer. I can then save a new group called ‘All S4s’.
Now that I’ve found all the Source 4’s, I can then find all the Par Cans, Pin Spots and whatever else is lurking in the rig. To select the lights I’ll use 'All Dimmers' <-> 'All S4s'. This selects everything but the Source 4s, I can then find all the Par Cans and save that as a group....
Lucky Soul played their biggest headline gig to date at Bush Hall, London on 16th May, 2007. Starlight Design generously provided 2 Mac 550s, some pealights, an Echelon and various other bits and bobs for me to light them with. I also used the house rig.
I didn’t have time to take any photos, but there are loads on Flickr. The lighting was very ‘photographer friendly’ as the band were hoping for some press interest, which seems to have worked out. The pealights worked well at the time, as they gave a nice backdrop for the band. Most of the photos seem to have been taken from the front looking up at the remarkable Bush Hall ceiling which I lit using the Mac 550s.
Having seen the band in some smaller venues I was interested to see how they’d cope with something bigger. With a better PA and a bigger room and audience they seemed to move up a gear and they played a blinder. The whole show had more kick, and they seemed to grow to fill the space. Hopefully they’ll be counting Bush Hall as a small gig soon enough…...
This website used to be a mix of PHP scripts and XHTML files generated by some big, complicated XSL documents, Java programs and Python scripts, all co-ordinated by an Ant script. In short it was a mess. I’ve replaced the whole lot with a Ruby on Rails application backed by a Postgresql database. All pages are generated dynamically from the database. By keeping everything in the database I hope to make backing up a lot simpler.
The ‘static’ pages, such as the index and the site info pages are created using Comatose while the blog, photos and moving light pages are home grown. The site relies on a number of other plugins to get stuff done, mixed with an awful lot of my own code. The blog is home made, after seeing so many examples of how easy it is to make a blog using RoR on the Web I thought I’d try to do it myself. IIt turns out that it’s not quite so straightforward in real life. I may yet switch over to Mephisto, or something similer. I still prefer to host my own photos etc, rather than putting them on Flickr or suchlike. I have a lot more control over how they are laid out and displayed....
While I was building this website, I thought it would be nice to put a contents page on pages that have multiple sections, such as this one. This would allow people to jump directly to the section that they were interested in, as well as providing a summary of the page. Updating the contents page manually soon became a chore, and I would often forget, or make spelling mistakes that stopped it from working. What was needed was a way of creating contents pages automatically. As I was already using XSLT to create the pages to a standard template it seemed the best way to create the contents list would be to use XSLT.
What I wanted to do was to take a document that was structured like this…
<h3>Heading 1</h3> <p>Text</p> <p>More text</p> <h3>Heading 2</h3> <p>Text</p> <p>More text</p>
...and transform it into something like this…...
I created this XSL document for my old website to display various XML and XSL files that I had created. It effectively adds markup to the document so that the various parts appear in different styles, governed by an external stylesheet. I have stuck to just changing the colours. The layout of the document is roughly preserved. The <?xml ?> line at the beginning is lost, as is the DOCTYPE declaration. Also lost are any text nodes outside the root element. These are added in by the stylesheet. The XSL1 specification does not allow for the creation of ‘identity’ templates, as all entites are resolved by the XML processor before they reach the XSL template.
The initial template matches the document node. It first looks for comments, using the prolog mode comment template, which adds a newline after every comment. Thus any comments at the bottom of the source will appear at the top. It then selects either the root element, or any processing instructions....