TheNitai

I just got home from a very impressive Massive Attack concert. I have to say that this show totally blew me away. The sound quality, the light show, the paragraphs on the LED wall, the band and all was an extremely uplifting experience. They played, among the older classic song, a couple of new ones from their Splitting the Atom EP and some very new ones. Some I never heard before, but they are simply amazing. More groovy then the older ones.

Also, the live versions of Teardrop and Angel are amazing and I really do wish that they make a live DVD of this tour. This is definitely a live band. I love when a band does not play the songs as on their records. I think just about every song at the concert was different then from the record. Psyche was very slow but at the same time you heard this underlining beat that made you want to move faster then her singing, if you know what I mean.

For this year, this was the last show. They are on tour again on February 8th. If you can, go see them, you won’t be disappointed. Here are some images from tonight and of their tour in general. Sorry, for the bad quality, but the iPhone does not have the best camera… (the images on the bottom are from their website). Update: This blog has some more high quality images.

I had to spent way too much time the last time to set up ImageMagick and Ghostscript together that I simply jump right in so you don’t have to waste time on this, like I did.

Creating thumbnails and images from a PDF is one of the most used features within Razuna. But the other day, when we run the normal convert command we were faced with an error message within our web application of:

Error: Uncaught exception ‘ImagickException’ with message ‘Postscript delegate failed....: No such file or directory

Of course, the first thing I did was to see if we have a error in the shell. Strangely, there was NO error when running the same command in the shell! Needless to say, I spent many hours looking for a solution, trying out different things from reinstalling ImageMagick and Ghostscript to looking all over the web for an answer.

In the end, it boiled down to that web applications (be it CFML, PHP, etc.), are looking for a different executable path then when you run command from the shell. Since Ghostscript installed the executable in the “/usr/local/bin/gs” path the web application could not find it. So the solution to “hours of pain” was to simply create a symbolic link to the “gs” library in the “/usr/bin” directory with:

ln -s /usr/local/bin/gs /usr/bin/gs

Hope this helps the next seeker!