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First of all, I’m writing this when the most recent firmware version is 1.22. It is important as you may guess from version to version things change, and in case of TC, not necessarily to good.

If you are hearing drop-outs, glitches and crackles working with Konnekt 8 or Konnekt 24D on your Mac, there are several things to check and take note of:

• Try switching rate from 44.1 kHz up to 96 kHz and back to the lower number. It helps with glitches.
• Under heavy CPU load try using 48 kHz instead of 44.1 kHz. I don’t know the reason, but it helps. Theoretically the effect should be opposite, but on practice it works.
• If you hear drop-outs or glitches and your buffer setting is already at it’s maximum — 1024 buffers — drop the value to 512 or 256 buffers. It sounds insane, but it worked for me.

It seems internally the driver doesn’t work well when either 44.1 kHz or 1024 buffers are selected. Try to avoid them and see if helps.

These are pieces of advice I collected while making either my Konnekt 8 or Konnekt 24D of my friend work with Mac OS X 10.4.10. The heart of both Macs is the PowerPC processor in case it is important. I have an iBook G4, my friend — PowerBook.

Drop me a line if you find any other reason that really helped.

My suggestions for Konnekt users on PC can be found in my other post.

The default Rails framework seems not support the foreign keys in database migrations and that’s a big omission. You are bound to deal with raw SQL to add these or end up with complex (and often ugly) code to emulate them.

Recently I found a very nice plug-in that adds foreign keys functionality to the migration classes. The syntax looks native and doesn’t stand out prominently. It is also clever enough to recognize some basic intentions, like ‘user_id’ being a reference to the ‘users’ table etc.

Check their other rails works too. They look handy!

If you developed your application with WebBrick, deployed it to Apache and seeing something like below in your web server error log, make sure to check that you don’t have any output to console (like ‘puts’) left in the code.

Whatever you output goes to the header section of the response and most probably the web server won’t understand it.

So you bought one of these Firewire audio-interfaces and tried them with your PC, but you can hear crackles, drop-outs (pauses) and all that unpleasant stuff. Let me show some possible reasons, and see if your setup has similar problems.

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It appears Skypecasts aren’t dying, but having some tough times there. Yesterday I had some great fun in one general chat room: met a few new people, showed some of my urban photography works, shared views on modern music influences. Today, I wasn’t able to stay in a room for more than 14 seconds; it simply kicked me out of it and dropped the call all the time.

It said my Skype required an upgrade. I did that, and it didn’t make it any better. Let’s hope these are temporary problems. After all, it’s a great invention and a great tool for English learners, like me.

The second issue is that it seems they don’t have a Skypecast support in Mac clients. Is that correct? I can see that the Mac version of Skype is currently at 2.6.0.something and it’s definitely not enough. There’s no such feature in it, and clicking on a “join the skypecast link” brings up a please upgrade now message, but the upgrade itself doesn’t bring all necessary functionality. Does anyone have success with this?

You know I hate politics and even try to avoid monitoring what’s going on there on the big scene. I don’t have any bias towards any races or religions, but what I’m going to say really makes me think something isn’t right. Look, it can’t be a coincidence. I joined two or three rooms yesterday and always, I mean it — always, there was some Arab guy who joined the group and turned his Arab music to outloud everyone. Needless to say that was clearly the end of all conversations and made people upset. I’ll leave it to your own judgment now…

Have a nice day and let me know if you have any answers to my questions or comments. I would love to hear from anyone of you.

I can’t get an idea of what’s going on there with Skypecasts. Can somebody enlighten me? I have recently got a headset and decided to have some fun with public chat rooms in Skype, but what I saw didn’t please me at all. There are four to six rooms running at any given moment with almost all of them having no participants. I mean half of these rooms never responded to my call, and the other half had a host user only, which isn’t fun, is it?

Some time in the evening yesterday I finally managed to connect to a group of English learners (they appear to be the only active users of Skypcast these days if I get it right), but after five minutes of me sitting there some weird talkative aussie broke in and scared all the participants off by making fun of them and asking stupid questions. I like one part though… Here’s the short script:

• aussie: … yeah, that’s my name “… Dandy”. You know that Crocodile Dandy? I’m his brother. I wrestle crocodiles.
• one Canadian: well, that’s cool. *I* wrestle polar bears.

The point is made. Am I missing something or this appears to be a dead branch and isn’t worth monitoring?