BulkDump

So Orion Platinum was released couple of days ago. All went pretty nicely considering the size of the upgrade. Few small issues already reported, but nothing serious what couldn’t wait for next release. One user had problems with Wine (that is Linux) and Orion, but I was able to fix that problem and provide a patch for him. If someone has crash problems when starting Orion and preventing Orion startup, I can provide the same patch, but otherwise the fix will be on next release.

Next will be the Orion Pro 7.1. All of the fixes Platinum 7.1 upgrade should be in Pro too (except for the things not already in Pro of course).

What’s after that someone might ask. Infact we have created list of all requested and insane ideas and that list needs to be sorted out. Most likely next upgrade will address the long due Midiout and handling of Midi devices for better support of hardware synthesizers and different midi controllers (ie. motorized controllers). Atleast those are important for me personally. After all I do have 10 hardware synthesizers and that Tascam US-2400 controller here.

As in my earlier post I told I was installing Virtual PC and Windows 98. Luckily I was able to sort out the problems with some Windows 98 driver reinstallations. Orion works great, although maybe slightly slow, but that’s understandable. Now the problem Orion was having was that we updated the ReWire installer on Orion installer (people have been having problems on ReWire not working - but now it should). Seems the latest ReWire 1.7 doesn’t work with Windows 98 and crashes right away when ReWire host is initialized. It’s been solved now by the installer so that it will use older ReWire.dll for those legacy Windows’.

Orion 7.1 getting closer

Seems there’s some problems with Orion and Windows 98SE. Honestly people should already forget those old Windows’. Those just don’t cut anymore on driver support and are very problematic for programmer, especially if you’d want to use new features of Windows XP and later. I don’t know if WDM works that well on 98SE, ie. the DirectMIDI interfaces in DirectX for better MIDI.

Officially Orion Platinum/Pro doesn’t support Windows 95/98/Me anymore, but right now the problem is probably just something small. So, I downloaded the free Microsoft Virtual PC and I’m installing now Windows 98SE into it. I didn’t remember how horrible the installation was.. having tons of problems. First it didn’t work at all with larger virtual harddisk and then it lost the installation CD-rom and couldn’t install all dlls and files, so several errors when starting up the Windows. I just hope I can solve those quickly or this experiment takes too much time

Overall must say it’s very pervertic to see Windows 98 running in a window.

Good news is that beta team hasn’t reported any bigger problems with 7.1 beta (except for few problems which might not be put to 7.1 if I can’t get them fixed soon), so it maybe out sooner you think … !

I recently ordered Tascam US-2400 from Thomann. It came alright within a week, but to my disappointment the power adapter was broken so I couldn’t really use the US-2400.

I wrote email to Teac/Tascam (Tascam’s European service) about my problem and Dirk Born (he’s Technical Marketing Manager according his signature) replied promptly to me. He said he was sorry and asked me to send the broken PSU to him for replacement. So I did and yesterday UPS delivery guy brought new working PSU for my US-2400.

What’s best is that all this service was done in one week to Finland from Germany. Great service from Tascam/Teac. Big thanks to them again

Coffee break at work and I thought I could share some experience with Ruby on Rails to_json while consuming the liquids. My collegue experienced problem with following kind of code:

update_page do |page|
    page.replace_html('content_div', :partial => 'content')
end

There’s nothing special in this code, except the fact that our partial returns javascript to update other elements (in this case it was few buttons which were within the partial itself). The problem is that the replace_html renders the partial into a string, which in return gets transformed into javascript string argument with Rails’ String.to_json and that method does not perform correct escaping when the string contains </script> tag.

Even though such tag normally wouldn’t need escaping the problem appears within the browser. I’m sure there are differences in browsers, but we are using Firefox which intepretes the literal </script> within the javascript string as being the end of the script block. That results incorrect behavior for evaluating (or infact not doing any evaluating of remaining) javascript.

We could have moved the javascript separate from the partial, but it would break a lot of other code and make things less easy to manage when the context specific javascript would need to be outputted separately from the partial. Instead my collegue and I did some XP programming and dug up how the to_json works and implemented replacement for the to_json to do correct escaping for browser’s parser. Here’s the code we inserted into our enviroment.rb file (that’s the place at the moment we keep our class extensions):

class String
    alias original_to_json to_json
    def to_json
        original_to_json.gsub('</script>', '\<\/script>')
    end
end

It’s a pretty simple piece of code calling the original to_json and doing additional escaping for the script tag. After booting mongrel, everything worked as it was supposed to work. This is something I could really see to be fixed within the Ruby on Rails core itself because such flaw in escaping could easily open security holes for javascript injection hacks and it doesn’t break anything as being just javascript string escaping.

I have never been kind of person who writes diaries. It has always felt too hard to keep steadly writing sometime what nobody would ever read besides me. Maybe blogging will be different. Could you prove me wrong?

I just installed WordPress (obviously) and got it’s basic configuration done. I’m not too happy with the default looks of it, but it’ll do till I have time to make my own theme for it. That’ll be sometime around when this blog becomes a success

To go directly into business about work for Synapse Audio I could start telling that I’m setting up Subversion repository for me and Richard to share installer files. It’s quite a big bunch of binary files and takes it’s own good share of time to upload the initial import. Not really a SVN’s primary usage, but works rather well when separated to it’s own repository out of source code. Better than manual uploading and sharing the files between two persons.

SVN is invaluable tool for our work. It would be nearly impossible to do paraller development over distance and SVN allows creating of quick patch releases for customers without the need of waiting next release. Well that patch part is still something to be done even though I recently created test patch of Orion Platinum 7.01 fixing the annoying Rewire issue in 7.00 (if you really can’t wait for 7.1 I can provide the patch for you). This all while source code is already at stage of beta testing of 7.1 release.

I don’t expect this to be anything new for hardcore version control users, but if you’re not using version control yet, I really recommend it even for personal projects. SVN is very easy to take into use and under Windows you can always use TortoiseSVN as your SVN client.
The Orion Platinum 7.1 (and possibly soon after Pro 7.1) release aren’t too far away and following my blog will keep you posted..