I’ve spent a lot of time on the ‘net over the past month or so reading, watching, and listening to tutorials on how to play the guitar.  I though that I’d post these “How to play the guitar” links for others out there that may be searching.  Let me know what you think.

Videos

Marty Schwartz from Guitarjams.com has a great channel on Youtube.  He goes over how to play songs of all levels and he updates frequently.  Check him out here.

Aaron Gallagher is almost entirely self taught (and he’s not even been playing all that long) he runs a great site called Free and Easy Guitar that has a HUGE how to video library.  Pick a song from the drop down list, and Aaron will teach you how to play it.

Justin Sandercoe is a London based guitarist who runs the site justinguitar.com.  His site differs from the others in that he has highly structured lessons that you can follow along with.  The site is donation based.  I’ve been spending a good bit of time making my way through his Basics Course.

I also just stumbled upon a site called Guitar Noise.  I’ve not used it too much yet, but it has many tutorials as well as guitar related news.

Tabs

The best site i have found for guitar tabs is hands down Ultimate Guitar their index seems to be near bottomless, so much so that I feel no need to reference any other.

Other Resources

• Online metronome
• Guitar Scales & More Scales
• Guitar chords & More Chords
• All about the fret board

And just to humble everyone out there – remember kids – John Mayer plays better than you with only one hand.

things i’ve used recently: tar -zxvf file.tar.gz

mysql -u username -p password database_name < filename.sql

http://kb.mediatemple.net/questions/129/How+can+I+Backup+and+Restore+a+MySQL+database%3F

So I accidentally let a TV fall on my MacBook Pro last night – and not a light, modern, flat-panel TV, but a heavy ass old-school CRT TV.  When I tried to boot it after gravity played her evil trick on me, all i got was a flashing folder icon with a question mark in it.  I tried some tricks to get the machine to recognize the hard drive, all to no avail. I could hear the drive clicking but not spinning, and the TV did fall on the portion of the laptop where the hard drive lies, so I decided to try my hand at replacing the hard drive.  A trip to Best Buy and I had a 320GB hard drive in hand and a quick viewing of this video…and things seem to be on track. Ignore the awful music selection. If you’re crunched for time, watch this video instead…http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhNPchwhQoc&NR=1

Tomorrow I will try and re-install the OS, but the computer recognized the drive and allowed me to partition it, so I am not overly concerned. I anticipate that the re-install will go fairly smoothly – but I will post updates. This new drive will give me 200GB more space so maybe once this is all over with it will end up being a good thing.

For quite a while now I have been using the following script to show sub navigation on Wordpress Sidebars. It utilizes the built in wp_list_pages function to show parent and child relationships on a sidebar (or where ever you choose to use it for that matter).

<?php

if($post->post_parent)
$children = wp_list_pages("title_li=&child_of=".$post->post_parent."&echo=0");
else $children = wp_list_pages("title_li=&child_of=".$post->ID."&echo=0"); if ($children) { ?>  <ul> <?php echo $children; ?> </ul> <?php } ?>

I like that it is simple, and that it can be re-written to show items only if they are child pages of a specific parent, ie:

<?php
// find out what the top level page is

global $post;
if($post->post_parent) $parentPG = $post->post_parent; // page is a child
else $parentPG = $post->ID; // page has children
?>

<?php

// marketing

if($parentPG==7){

// show items if the parent id is 7
}elseif($parentPG==8){
// show items if the parent id is 8
}
?>

This works great when you only need to make it work with parent and child pages. Recently, however, I had the need to utilize this type of functionality on a project that required pages 3 levels deep (grandchildren?). After a bit of Googling, and searching through the Wordpress Codex I realized that I was going to have to “roll my own” on this one. So here you go – there are probably better ways of doing this. If you know of one please let me know, but maybe this will help someone else searching for “wordpress list grandchildren”

<?php
// find out what the top level page is
global $post;
if($post->post_parent){
$parentPG = $post->post_parent; // page is a child

// check for grand children
$sql = "SELECT * FROM `".$wpdb->prefix."posts` WHERE ID=$parentPG";
$data = $wpdb->get_results($sql,ARRAY_A);

if(!empty($data[0][post_parent])) $parentPG=$data[0][post_parent];
}
else $parentPG = $post->ID; // page has children
?>

<?php

// marketing
if($parentPG==7){
// show stuff for parent 7
}elseif($parentPG==8){
// show stuff for parent 8
}
?>

At Invisible Window we have been hosting our client sites in addition to our own with Media Temple for quite some time. Media Temple’s service and support has been top-notch. There are a few things that we’ve had to figure out along the way and I hope that these links help someone else out there.

1. Disable root ssh access: instructions for disabling the root user and allowing another user to assume the root users permissions. This adds a layer of security requiring an additional username and password to be entered before gaining root user privileges.
   Media Temple Knowledge Base Article
2. Performance Tuning: This article summarizes ways to optimize your (dv) to run with less memory / resources, increase stability, and to ensure higher availability under heavier loads.
   Media Temple Knowledge Base Article
3. Raise Courier-IMAP Connections: Seeing this message when accessing your email? “Unable to connect to your IMAP server. You may have exceeded the maximum number of connections to this server.”By default, Plesk and the Courier-IMAP e-mail server drastically limit the number of inbound connections to prevent users from opening up too many concurrent sessions. Unfortunately, this restriction can impact legitimate users who have multiple computers connecting to the Courier-IMAP server.
   Media Temple Knowledge Base Article