a geeky shift of focus, temporarily (Patreon)

Busy times as ever, here... but I am still diligent about always spending at least a few hours per week on music theory things.

The past couple of weeks, I have not been working on the book; instead I've been doing the mundane chore of software maintenance. A lot of the scripts used on the website and in my analysis tools are kind of old, and adhere to the syntax of PHP7. That's been fine because the version on the webserver is also PHP7, I had PHP7 running on my local machine, and the whole environment was in harmony.

However there are some 3rd party libraries I needed to upgrade that require PHP8, and now when I run music analysis tools I get pages and pages of warnings and errors. I will eventually need to upgrade the version on the web server too. But if I did that today, you'd all see a lot of garbage on the screen.

Before I can upgrade the web server, I need to go through a few hundred (maybe a little over a thousand) files and make them PHP8 compatible. It's really not a big deal. Most of the changes are just to add public variable declarations at the beginning of a class, and a lot of public functions need to be declared "static" which previously didn't have to. And there are some sloppy coding around nulls and arrays, things that were formerly tolerated by PHP but now I have to do better.

I'll get all those things fixed before I push anything to the web server. I'll try not to break stuff. I am aware that being able to look up interval vectors is not a mission-critical resource for anyone (and if it is, perhaps one should re-examine their life priorities) but I understand that with a few thousand people hitting my site per month, it would be unbecoming of a professional web application developer to have broken stuff online.

Cheers
Ian