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mashcloud.net – mashup soundcloud audio tracks

mashcloud.net is an experiment on collaborative realtime audio editing and music creation.
I did the project within the frame of  my BA thesis in audio production last year.

As I moved the code to github this week, I wanted to give a quick overview of the project and its technical underlyings, just in case someone might be interested :)

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[Symfony 2][Assetic] Sass, CompassFilter + Foundation Responsive Front-end Framework

Did you ever wonder how to enable 3rd party plugins (or so called “frameworks“) within the great compass toolset managed by assetic in your edgy symfony 2.1 project?

(If there is more extensive documentation available concerning assetic + CompassFilter, please stop reading on and let me know!)

If you take a look at the filter class itself (it is CompassFilter in the generic Assetic\Filter namespace), you should recognise several option values that you can use in your application wide config.yml file.

But first you have to install the framework plugin following these instructions.

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javascript benchmarking with jsperf

I might be a bit late (yeaikno it exist over a year now and a bunch of blogs had it covered) but nevertheless i would like to point out a very helpful online tool i recently ran into:

jsPerf

Its basically a online benchmark tool for testing different approaches in javascript.
It covers some important aspects of benchmarking, that your homemade bench probably wont have like milliseconds accuracy & statistical analysis.
The tests are run on your browser and the results will feed the “browserscope”. A graph of the “highest known results” for the participating browsers.
So we can see some kind of comparison.
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Expeditions in the Cloud

Caution: Scepticism ahead!

So i’d like to share some of my experiences in the cloud since i am still trying to figure out if it its worth for me or if i am better suited with an VPS.
Maybe somebody feels like feedbackin.

I tried PHPFog for PHP and no.de by joyent for node.js.
First i have to admit: yes i only tried the free models and of course they are limited and because its free you cant expect to get it all, right?
Yes and thats true.

With PHPFog i set up an app based on symfony 1.4. After some inital problems due to some bugs on PHPFog side, i got it running.
I really like to mention the kind and immediate chat support by PHPFog. It really made me feel like dealin with humans and not only machines. Big up!
By then everything felt really smooth with git deploy, configurations, mysql setup etc.
But i had to shut down the app again, because there are restrictions to PHP which killed the app like disabling “file_get_contents for remote URLS”, probably only in the free model. But that killed it for me at that point.
So read this carefully before going to cloud: http://docs.phpfog.com/index.php/features/article/shared_vs_dedicated
I guess with dedicated hosting you get more power, sure.

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Sending invalid Unicode via socket.io

Well you can try to, but it will end up almost probably in an disconnect which is caused by the browser.
As i have learned here.

Given you have a string which contains invalid unicode like:


This will trouble the browser and the socket connection.

If you prepare your json with PHP and  json_encode the Unicode will be escaped to some strings like these:

\ud83d\ude31\ud83d\ude31\ud83d\ude04\ud83d\ude04\ud83d\udc9c\ud83d\udc9c\ud83d\udc4a

But on clientside it will still result in invalid Unicode.
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