The most common alternate tuning that is used these days is probably drop D tuning. Dropping the heavy E string to a D gives you two more notes (i.e. a D and a D#). It's the easiest tuning to to learn as there is only one note to change. The other five strings stay the same so most of the chords you know remain the same. All you have to remember is that you play notes on the lowest string two frets higher that you used to. So for example the low G is now fretted at the fifth fret. See the diagram for the most common chords - the others are all easy to figure out.

Have a go with Drop D and see what you think. The Beatles' "Let it Be" works really well in drop D and is probably as good a place to start as any. They played Dear Prudence with a drop D so try that too.

Some of my favourite singer songwriters use drop - D tuning e.g James Taylor and Steve Earle, though Steve often sings a song in E rather than D and will put a capo over the lower five strings, leaving the lower E open. This means he can play the D chord shape in the diagram sliding it up a whole step to E at the fifth and he still has an open E on the bottom. Effectively drop E without retuning the guitar! Check out Steve playing Copperhead road on guitar using this technique:

Venezuela seeks to regulate Internet with media bill | Reuters

Venezuela seeks to regulate Internet with media bill Reuters: Venezuela plans to include the Internet in a law that regulates the media, under a proposed bill presented to parliament on Thursday that the opposition claims will result in censorship.

Well that's not a surprise given that Chavez has closed down TV and radio stations that have showed any hint of opposition to him. I had hoped that this would be the first century without maniacle despots but guess I was wrong again.

Apparently the bill seeks to limit adult content on the Internet so that it is only available after midnight. Good insight there that the lawmakers have got no idea at all how to police the laws they are introducing. Watch this one - there is a story developing.

Ry Cooder - Vigilante Man (live)

Wow - Now this takes me back - loved the Old Grey Whistle test. Looking back on it Bob Harris shaped a generation! A lot of what I am is because of that programe!

What can I say about Ry Cooder that hasn't been said already. I've been a fan since the early seventies. When I first started to work for a living, buying vinyl records on a Saturday afternoon where's where a lot of my money went. Often I'd end up getting a Ry Cooder album because they were always being sold of in the bargain bin. Then one day I looked around and I had twenty Ry Cooder albums!

Anyway Ry Cooder is know for his slide playing and a lot of guys like me learned to play slide through listening and watching Ry play. He always plays in a open tuning, usually open 'G' so you have to tune the guitar like this: First tune both the E strings down one whole step to D. Then lower the fifth string (that's the thicker one - the second one down from the top) also a whole step down to A so the strings are now D G D G B D

The thing about playing in open G is that the sixth string is not the root of the tuning - the fifth string is. A lot of guys miss the point and avoid playing the sixth string but infact it gives you a lot of melodic options.

Hey I got straight into talking about open G and didn't even check whether this video of vigilante man is actually in that tuning - I think it is - check and let me know.

Take it from me though open G is the best tuning for playing Delta blues. The lowered sixth gives it a rich dominant sound. Anoth place you'll hear open G is on the Rolling's Stones tracks such as Honky Tonk Woman and Brown Sugar.

It's all in the detail

I thought the tiles in Spain were good - until I went to Morocco!

I was sitting in a restaurant enjoying a mint tea. All of a sudden I looked down and saw the tiles in the picture on the right just lying at my feet!

That's what gets you about Morocco though - it's still a place where everything is hand made so there is much more attention to detail than there is with mass produced items.

So come on DIY chains - copy these - I want them on my floor!

Oh how I miss u....

Last winter I was living in a house with this log burner - the kind with the lift up lid that you can cook with. Well you can get a good temperature in one of these things so it's good for pizzas or roasting things.

I found particularly good was roast chicken the way the spanish do it. Cut a whole chicken into pieces and place in a roasting pan. Add thickly cut potatoes - halved is normally about right. Then add some onions, garlic and tomatoes. Throw over some thyme, and season with sea salt and freshly milled black pepper. Then pour over a can or two or beer and a cup of olive oil.

Let it roast for an hour or so and stuff yourself silly!!!

PayPal suspends WikiLeaks donations account | Reuters

PayPal suspends WikiLeaks donations account Reuters: "(Reuters) - Online payment service PayPal said it has suspended the WikiLeaks' account that the organization used to collect donations.

U.S.-based PayPal said in a statement that WikiLeaks, which this week released thousands of secret U.S. diplomatic cables, had violated its policy. A posting on WikiLeaks' Twitter page said 'PayPal bans WikiLeaks after US government pressure.'"

Lol - I wonder if Paypal are going to suspend the accounts of American government officials engaged in illegal activities.

Property Set/Let/Get

Instead of assigning values to public properties in the class, you might want to declare values in the class as private. Then to alter the value you need the property set statement (well OK statement is a bad choice of words - Set is a method). This moves the assignment so that it takes place inside the class.

You might think this is a waste of time at first glance, after all, at the end of the day you are just setting a value in the class - public, private - you still get to change the value from outside.

But look at it like this - now you can write validation code to check that the assignment is legal and all that code can be hidden inside the class. If you use a public variable and you send in a duff value, there is nothing much the code inside the class can do to defend itself against your idiocy, so you would really have to do valdition in the code that is instantiating the class - that would mean copies of validation code all over the place. With property set you can do that validation once and it will always work. But there is another thing - and I find this is even more useful...You can use the property set statement to set more than one variable inside your class. Also you can have a write-only property by defining a Property Let procedure without a corresponding Property Get procedure. Write-only properties, however, are comparatively rare, and are used primarily to prevent access to sensitive information such as passwords.

Set is used for objects while Let and Get are used for Values

Extending our persona class described in the previous post, here is an example of using the property let/get statements:

As before save this in an include file:

Class Persona

Private ftelephone

Public age

Public gender

public property let telephone(ptelephone)

ftelephone = ptelephone

end property

public property get telephone()

telephone = ftelephone

end property

End Class

Then use this class by instantiating a copy of it in your classic ASP page:

Set Freda = New persona

With Freda

.age = 23

.gender = "female"

.telephone ="995129993"

End With

response.write("Freda is a " & Freda.age & " year old " & Freda.gender & " phone: " & Freda.telephone)

 

 

Object ASP

I often hear other programmers saying classic ASP isn't object oriented. This is a mistake. ASP requires you to use a scripting language and both vbscript and javascript which a the languages of choice under ASP are oop enabled.

The problem I think is that for most purposes, ASP is a quick and dirty solution to getting a website up and running that doesn't lend itself to oop which requires a bit more thought and planning. Purists might be wagging their academic fingers at this point but these are people who have probably never had a quote accepted on elance!

It's worth looking at the advantages that a little oop can bring to Classic Active Server Pages.

These include:

• code reuse


• the ability to add and alter functionality without breaking the applications using the classes


• encapsulation - hiding complex functionality

Here then I will show how to produce classes with properties that can be used multiple applications.

Creating a Simple VBScript Class in ASP

A class in VBScript is defined by using the Class...End Class key words, e.g:

Class Persona

End Class

This creates a empty class, but is not of much used yet. We need to add properties to it that define exactly what the class is meant to be modelling:

Class Persona

public age

public gender

End Class

You should be aware that elements of the class can be either:

•public - available to all users of the class

•private - only available within the class itself

It's also worth storing the class in its own server side include file at this point so that it can be reused again and again in different web sites. So, for example the code above could be stored in the file "persona.inc" and it's then ready for use.

Using VBScript Classes

Now the class is in it's own file it can be accessed in an ASP page using a server side include e.g:

The class can then be instantiated as an object by using the "new" method:

Set Freda = New persona

Set Petra = New persona

Here two persona objects (Freda and Petra - O.K. I used to watch Blue Peter!!) have been created, and so their properties can be set:

With Fred

.age = 21

.gender = "male"

End With

With Mary

.age = 22

.gender = "female"

End With

Now these properties can be used elsewhere in the web page:

response.write("Freda is a " & Freda.age & " year old " & Freda.gender)

response.write("
;Petra is a " & Petra.age & " year old " & Petra.gender)

Save the web page and the include and then view the page. The output should look something like this:

Freda is a 23 year old female

Petra is a 19 year old female

Spain declares state of emergency over strike | Reuters

Spain declares state of emergency over strike Reuters: "(Reuters) - Spain declared a state of emergency on Saturday as a wildcat strike by air traffic controllers paralysed airports for a second day."

Bumped into my mates Nigel and Chris this morning. They were due to fly back to the UK from Malaga airport but got a text from Easyjet just 30mins before they were going to leave! Good on Easyjet for the text but really what are the Spanish air traffic controllers playing at? Being bloody minded is what it is. They left jumbo jets in mid flight across the Atlantic with no where to go!

Apparently the government is accusing the air traffic controllers of breaking the law but what I heard was they're not officially on strike - they've all phoned in sick, thus technically not being illegally off work. All I can say is I hope they get this sorted out before I go on holiday myself in a few weeks time.

Limewire says to close December 31 after legal battle | Reuters

Limewire says to close December 31 after legal battle Reuters:

"Limewire says to close December 31 after legal battle"

Bit of a shame for me as Limewire was the first P2P application I really got into - and I love Lime's.

I ditched it in the end because of an attrocious memory leak in one of the java libraries. Found out these were used by several other P2P applications as Limewire source was available and used by other developers. Anyway that aside Limewire was great and I'll remember it as the application/site that got me into the world of peer downloading.

How to make shedloads of money these days: Develop a P2P application that works under the radar, along the lines of Tor so these bastard law makers can go and shit in their hats!