Well, my label XPOSURE RECORDS had it’s first full release and the 2nd just hit on promo. Please pop over there to have a very quick listen to what’s new!

Also here’s a new podcast entry for you… sorry for the slackness, and remember they are regularly updated on The Bassdrive Archive.

Right click, save as

And more to the point, how the hell do you get a list suitable for populating your online shop with shipping prices?

I sat on the Royal Mail site for more than half an hour today trying to find such a list and there simply is none. They have catered well for the case where you want to send a package and know where it’s going, but don’t seem to care about people who need to price stuff to anywhere. Google was not much help either!

I did come across this international shipping country world zone PDF - but what I needed were country codes in ISO format for CubeCart (that is, “GB” not “Great Britain”, “ES” not “Spain”, anyway you get the idea). And I’m most certainly not spending 4 hours guessing ISO codes and retyping them! No chance!! I’d rather spend 4 hours spreading bad publicity about Royal Mail’s complete and total failure to be of any help.

Anyway, In the end I found this: Big Royal Mail plugin for Zen Cart. Ok so all the definitions of what’s what are buried in the PHP code, but at least it’s in a useful format…!

Whoa is me. If only this was the USA: the USPS apparently has a web service API where you can just query prices from your software. Muuuch easier…

So, how do you get the Royal Mail International Zones and Prices into CubeCart?

1) Download Big Royal Mail plugin for Zen Cart and open the zip file

2) browse to includes/modules/shipping (yes it’s all burried away!)

3) open the file rmamsmallpacket.php in Notepad (I assume rmamsmallpacket is supposed to mean Royal Mail Air Mail Small Packet, which were the prices I wanted. You might need another file for a different set of prices).

4) about 3/4 of the way down the file, you will see some comma separated lists deep within a whole bunch of code. For example, “AL, AD, AM, AT, AZ, BA, BE, BG, BY, CY, CZ, …” (that’s the beginning of the Europe list). This is the list of ISO country codes that Cubecart wants! - and in the same format cubecart takes it, too! - although you will have to get rid of the spaces. So, open a 2nd copy of Notepad, and paste these in.

5) Search and replace all the spaces into nothings. CubeCart is agoraphobic.

6) Scroll down a little further and you will find a whole bunch of comma separated weight/price pairs which look like this: “0.1:1.19, 0.12:1.31, 0.14:1.44, …”. You will find about 5 of these for Europe. Copy and paste these into notepad one after the other and de-space-ify them as well. This is the list of PRICES that CubeCart wants!

7) Do steps 4 through 6 again for the World Zone 1 and 2 codes and prices.

Irritating Conclusion

Now… it’s very interesting to me that this Zen Cart plugin has the prices in essentially the same format as CubeCart’s plugin BUT THAT THEY’RE NOT IDENTICAL. What this tells me is that one of two things is true…

Either: a) the guy who wrote CubeCart’s plugin based it on Zen Cart’s. But if that’s true, why is there no reference to Zen Cart’s - or where to source the data - anywhere in the plugin? And why would he change the format?
Or: b) Both Cube Cart and Zen Cart’s plugins took their data from an officially provided source, such as a Royal Mail SDK. If there is such a thing, I can find no mention of it on their website, which is 99.5% developer-irrelevant. Google was almost no help at all. Why are they making it so difficult??

I’m off to the USA for 2 weeks - WMC here I come - but here’s some music to tide you over.

Right click, save as

00:00 Subfocus - Special Place (Ram)
02:32 Kiro vs Billy Lane - Only Here (XPOSURE)
05:55 Cold Jazz & Wezzler - Calling
09:10 Taxman - Too Bad VIP (Frontline)
11:03 Brian Abbey feat. Aaron Simpson - Never Far From Right (Subsonik Mix) (XPOSURE)
13:48 No Money - Rapid Recognition
15:41 Red Rat - Blaze The Rat (Bootleg)
18:48 Mingus - Curzon (Abstract Inc)
21:28 Wezzler - Frost (XPOSURE)
23:21 Tubby T - Ready She Ready (Photek Remix)
26:02 Break - The Truth (Symmetry)
28:10 Antiform - Crash
31:00 Fresh - Immortal (Breakbeat Kaos)
35:00 Pacific - Babymaker
38:16 L Plus & MG - Musik (XPOSURE)
41:30 Basic Ops & Doppler - Restless
43:13 Soma & Justin Todd - I Feel You (XPOSURE)
47:00 Futurebound, Matrix & Sylo - The Edge (Metro vs Viper)
50:38 Michael Jackson - Human Nature (Bootleg)
53:05 Contour - Masquerade (XPOSURE)
55:59 Brookes Bros - Mistakes (Breakbeat Kaos)
59:12 Subfocus - Druggy (Ram)
61:27 Shock One - Let Me Go VIP (Incite)
65:44 The Funktastics - Girls Say Haaaa (Spin)
67:52 TC - Rockstar (D-Style)

Sorry I don’t post here as much as I should. I post many of the things I have to say on my MySpace blog.

Having successfully returned from a little XPOSURE mastering trip to Heathmans studios, musical juices flowing… this is the show that let it all out. 3 hours of bad goodness and good badness. Enjoy!

Right click, save as

FINALLY - the launch of my label!

Add the label for fun and games (and marvel at the tricksy layout - that wasn’t easy): http://myspace.com/xposurednb .

Audio from the first 2 vinyl (more forthcoming) and links to all of the artists profiles!

(Skip straight to the bottom if you just want the plugin or patch and not the background).

I am an internet socialite, as most of you reading this probably know. Internet communication comes in many forms, from email to forums to Usenet. Some people live their life on the end of a telephone; I’m usually on the end of a message window, and have been for over ten years.

I grew up on IRC, which I still use. But the most gratifying, the easiest and the most rewarding type of communication is instant messaging, and always has been. Your friends, foes, associates, colleagues, family, acquaintances and partners are just there and then there are all the people who don’t know you, and all the people you don’t know who come knocking on your door at all hours… anyway.

The Problem

Without effective communication I feel like I’m wasting my time trying to get my point across. Without being accessible, I feel unreachable; like I’m trying to speak a foreign language. That’s why I’m on most of the messaging services out there: there’s always a friend who uses “the other one”. I started off using ICQ, off the back of Usenet, almost 10 years ago. Most of my UK friends are on MSN, and likely always will be, including my parents and sister. Most of my US friends are on AIM - drum’n'bass seems to revolve around AIM. Most of my european and Russian friends on ICQ. And then there are those odd few who stick by Yahoo messenger… anyway.

There’s only one way to keep in touch with them all: use all of them. But the programs vary wildly, some (*cough* ICQ) are buggy as hell, some (*cough* AIM) are very user unfriendly, or have limitations such as not being able to have more than 200 names on your buddy list. I have more than 200 listeners to my radio show, so that’s nowhere near enough. And you can’t open 2 copies of AIM without some serious messing about (although they have recently changed it so you can link screen names and avoid this problem). Most of them don’t even log properly.

The Program

Having 4 or 5 messengers open at once - all of which think they are gods gift to you - is a serious pain in the ass, not to mention a great way to make your computer crawl.

I thought my problems had been solved when Trillian came along: here’s a program that lets me add 5 AIM names, 2 ICQ names, 2 MSN names and my Yahoo name all at once and they all look and work the same! And happy I would stay for a while, but unfortunately Trillian is buggy: it’s VERY VERY slow with a buddy list the size of mine (over 1500 names).

Nobody is writing software to deal with my situation. I use my messenger like an address book, and it’s business oriented. Fortunately there is another option, one that isn’t slow, and crashes less: Gaim. Gaim does the same sort of thing as Trillian, and actually has a few features Trilly doesn’t (such as vertical tabbing!!! A god send during my radio show when I have 40 messages waiting!)

The Problem (again)

Gaim has one flaw that’s almost a show stopper for me: no auto-accept.

I am a DJ. DJs and musicians send each other music they’ve written - for promotion, for the web sites I run, for the radio show, for feedback, for playing in clubs. I rely on the music. I really, really want it. But with Gaim, if I’m not there to accept it, I simply won’t get a second chance. That was the one thing Trillian had going for it.

For the last few months, Gaim has actually had something that looks somewhat like an autoaccept plugin - but it’s not. All it does is let you pick specific people who you want to auto-accept from. As the unsigned artists sending me music are not usually on my buddy list, and they send me stuff at all hours of the day, that’s no good at all.

In fact, the Gaim developers seem almost bloody-mindedly stubborn over this issue. Apparently, auto-accept is a security risk. Not only do the developers think this, though, but everyone who’s ever read their mailing list appears to blindly regurgitate this line without thinking about it. I’ve heard the same excuse time and time again and argued it until blue in the face.

The Argument

The points raised are always the same. “It’s a security risk” because:

• Allowing people you don’t know to send you files is “always” a security risk.
• An attacker could send you a virus, and you might double click on it.
• An attacker could eat up all your bandwidth, creating a denial of service.
• An attacker could eat up all your disk space, creating a different denial of service.
• What happens if the attacker sends you a file with the same name as something important?

It is easy to counter every single one of these irrational fears. The first isn’t even a real complaint, it’s hear-say. The last isn’t either: auto-accepted downloads go into a folder with the name of the sender, so it’s impossible. The middle 3 are all true, but the first is mitigated by a virus checker and the same common sense you use when dealing with email attachments, and the last 2 are low risk and easily solved with the block button and the delete key.

Unfortunately, sense doesn’t permeate the heads of the paranoid without the voice of authority and an army of yes men to back it up. What (*always*) happens next is that rather than being presented with a good counter argument - which I’ve yet to hear - the following points are thrown at me.

• Yes, but users are too stupid to be safe so we have to be safe for them, and we’re not going to be responsible for mass IM hacking.
  (Anyone would think I’d suggested this should be turned on by default!)
• You should be using FTP to receive large files, not AIM.
  (Spot the irony. If I need to accept files from “stupid users”, I can’t expect them to know how to use FTP; and who are you to say what I “should be” doing?)
• Nobody uses the internet like you do.
  (Apart from all the other hundred or so people I know who rely on this for their business.)

What a bunch of crap.

The Solution

Well, I finally did it. I fixed Gaim. I made a version of the auto-accept plugin that just accepts. Automatically. Like it ought to be doing!

Here’s a copy of the fixed plugin for Gaim 2.0.0beta6.

Finally I’m one step closer to IM bliss…

This show was not to be sniffed at; all your favorites and more! Beats for 2007 and beyond. What a cliché!

DJ XO - Mental A Sharp (161Mb)

But I am still alive and well. Haha!

So, let’s treat you to a few goodies. Most of them are on my myspace blog so if you’re interested in a little more than just my music (philosophy, internet funnies and photodiaries on the whole) that is where you should go.
Next up (very shortly) this week’s radio show, which was damn excellent if I do say so myself.

Hot beats and heavy tunes? Are you sure? You better be sure…

Hammer, Stirrup, Syrup! (Right click, save-as)

I’m playing at SOLID Open Air in Okres Prievidza near Bratislava on the 26th!