Is this cool or what? I have for a long time been interested in the historic revival of bagpipe music, and when checking in to Julian Goodacre’s website about a month ago, I saw that one of his replica sets was available for immediate sale. Normally there’s a two years waiting period. Said and done, I announced my interest and a little while ago I made a trip to Scotland to check them out and maybe make a purchase. After playing a few hours and pondering a bit, I decided to buy. So, now I am a member of the elect club of heretics who tries to perform on an instrument which is not a set of modern great highland bagpipes.

It has been a good day! Not only did I get an answer to my gracenote spacing problem, I also got the beamlet gap separation issue resolved. This was important for piobaireachd cadences, and those now look great! Have a look in the Piobaireachd section of the site to see the excellent output.

Hallelujah! After several years of futile searching I have finally found the correct tweak to make gracenotes non-stretchable in Lilypond. Yesss!!

To celebrate this great discovery, I have regenerated all of the tunes in the Sheet music section of the site. Because of the new and improved spacing this gets me, I have also been able to reinsert a bunch of line breaks that were removed previously to make the layout suck less. Now it doesn’t suck at all!

This is possibly the funniest thing ever! A parody of The Bible by Sean Kelly and Tony Hendra, written in good old 1983. The excerpt of the first few chapters below originates here: http://www.palmyria.co.uk/humour/genesis.htm

Chapter 1

1. In the beginning God created Dates.
2. And the date was Monday, July 4, 4004 BC.
3. And God said, let there be light; and there was light. And when there was Light, God saw the Date, that it was Monday, and he got down to work; for verily, he had a Big Job to do.
4. And God made pottery shards and Silurian mollusks and pre-Cambrian limestone strata; and flints and Jurassic Mastodon tusks and Picanthopus erectus skulls and Cretaceous placentals made he; and those cave paintings at Lasceaux. And that was that, for the first Work Day.

The internet is a funny place. After bringing the new site online, it just took a few minutes until spam robots started trying to sign up. Comment spam on private web sites, that will never be read by anybody, what is the point? Well, I had forgotten how common this was, so for a little while I allowed unchecked signups (but moderated by me of course).

But I quickly got bored of deleting the phony sign-ups, so I installed the excellent CAPTCHA module available for Drupal. Sofar none of the spam robots have gotten past that, so I’m happy.

There we go! Now I have most things configured the way I want it, and all old contents restored that I want to keep. I’m pretty happy with the way the site turned out, and Drupal 6 is nicer to work with than the old version 4 that the previous site was using.

It took a little while to port the Sheet music module to version 6, but nothing too bad. So there! Go enjoy the new and improved site!

I still have to code a new sheet music module for my bagpipe tunes. I’ll try to get around doing that this weekend. Shouldn’t be too hard.

OK, that wasn’t too hard. A default Drupal site with most of the same functionality and contents as my old site is now in place. I will probably keep this set-up around, since it is pretty easy to maintain. But I still intend to do a Ruby on Rails site too.