I was just messing around with the Virtual DJ for M(h)ac(k)intosh and made this in about 15 minutes…Link

I just fooled around with cue points…it’s a really nice program and has a cool plugin that you can use to make sort-of breakbeat stuff with, but sort of difficult to use without a MIDI controller (I haven’t tried to get my M-Audio Trigger Finger working on Mac yet).  The program also beatmatches really well and is very responsive…unless you try to drag-n-drop from a network share in OSX.  Maybe this works better in the windows version?

Anywho, check it out at http://www.virtualdj.com

http://www.amazon.com/Split-Bonus-CD-Thursday/dp/B001GJ2ZBG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1223244491&sr=8-1

In other news, Thursday is supposed to release a split with Envy on November 4th…I already have it, of course, but I’m glad that Geoff Rickly finally decided to put out an album that is a bit closer to real screamo.  This is not to say Thursday is a bad band, they are the closest thing to actual screamo that you will ever hear on the radio.  The album is going to be released on Temporary Residence Limited (of Explosions in the Sky, Grails, and Mono fame) will be a 12″+CD set, with both containing the same music.  It is rumored that they will also be releasing a hand-printed limited edition via their web store.  I’m really glad to see them break free of the BS relation with Island Records.

Geoff is also still involved in his side project, United Nations.  It’s really refreshing to see a band go from mainstream to playing more traditional-eqsue screamo, although they seem to want to call it “emo-power-violence”…which basically seems like real screamo.  “The band was started by Daryl Palumbo, vocalist of Glassjaw and Head Automatica, and Geoff Rickly, the vocalist/lyricist of the band Thursday. Other artists involved in the project possibly include Ben Koller, drummer for Converge; Christopher “Chree” Conger, former drummer of The Number 12 Looks Like You; bassist Eric Cooper of Made Out of Babies; and Jonah Bayer of The Lovekill. However, due to contract obligations of all members except Rickly, the official lineup isn’t well-known, with the exception of Rickly and Palumbo.^[3][4] Since Rickly is the only member whose primary band is currently not under contract, his name is the only one that can legally appear in press materials.^[5] Press photos of the band released in 2008 depict 4 people wearing Ronald Reagan masks.^[6]“

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_(band)

Hopefully other bands will follow in Thursday’s footsteps and break away from the mainstream.  The record companies forget that this is the age of technology and they can’t get away with selling a $15 cd with one hit single on it anymore…people will just download it or buy it on iTunes or some other online music store.  Also look into the latest release of Radiohead, Girl Talk, and Y.A.C.H.T.    — they all were involved in some form of digital release of an album, and I hope this trend of bands releasing their own material continues.

MySQL has become an important part of most Web servers, especially over the last few years. With all those databases, the risk of corruption, intrustion, data loss, hardware failure, and lots of other factors necessitate automated backups.

Luckily, backing up MySQL isn’t nearly as hard as it might sound. Actually, it’s only one command. But, not many people have only one MySQL DB, and dumping all of them to a single file can be hard to parse should you only need to import one. This is easily remedied by making a script run on cron to dump them all individually.

I set this script to run once a week, monday morning at 5am. It generates a logfile as well, info.txt.sl, which contains the date, a list of files, and their MD5Sum. Finally, it uses bzip2 to compress the files efficiently. MD5Sums are critical in determining the integrity of the archive and to ensure the database has not been corrupted or altered since the snapshot was taken.
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Source: engadget

Apple is now shipping (and probably has been shipping) iPhones and iPod Touches with a bit of extra software in firmware 2.0 in the form of a rootkit.

This is an outrage.  The fact that phone / device manufacturers get away with this kind of crap makes my blood boil.

It seems that Apple has finally taken things a step too far with the whole notion of “It’s still our device”.  When you buy a piece of electronic equipment, you are entitled to use it however you see fit; if that entails throwing it at a brick wall, flushing it down the toilet, using it for a sanding block, etc.

This also included hacking the living crap out of it, in my opinion.

When you buy a computer or build a computer, no one is there to tell you “don’t load Linux onto it or I’ll turn it off remotely from BigBoxHQ”, yet that is exactly what Apple is trying to do.  Some enterprising individual took apart an iPhone’s software only to discover that embedded deep within the core of the OS lies a “phone-home” rootkit.  It is a rootkit by the very definition of rootkit, and after the break we can examine the examples of how Apple ships your iPhone and possibly iPod Touch with a rootkit installed.

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I recently installed Ubuntu for the first time in a while, since version 6 actually.  My normal laptop runs Debian Etch and hasn´t been updated in about 9 months due to the samba update breaking smbclient on my laptop and thus forcing me to not care too much about updates, but I recently acquired a 1000mhz PIII laptop with 384mb ram, wifi, DVD-ROM, 1400×1050 screen 15¨ LCD (!)  and 30GB of hdd.  Not bad for free.  Anywho, I have this insatiable urge to run bleeding edge software (see openSUSE being always updated / broken on my web server and the deafault ubuntu software repos, although being some of the largest out of all the linux distros (debian probably coming in second) they still don´t have things like Adobe Flash Player.  Let´s fix that:
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Unlike Debian which uses the standard /var/log/sshd style logfile, OpenSuse uses the newer syslog-ng facility and is generally more annoying when trying to just parse a log file for some useful info.  However, it is not impossible, and it seems many users (including myself) were having a hard time finding where failed sshd login attempts get logged.  Webmin was not of much assistance in this area, nor was google.  I however did manage to eventually find, by using my grip function that I posted about earlier in /var/log to find this little nugget:
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As lead technician at my IT firm that specializes in service, I have to deal with a lot of printers.  It seems that one thing all Windows printing systems have a hard time with is the infamous “Stuck Print Queue”.  You go to print a document and that cute little printer pops up in the corner.  Then you get hit with the Red X Of DOOM!  and an indescript message about how your document failed to print.  Well fret no more, me laddy!  With this simple batch script, you can be up and printing again in a jiffy.  I have to deal with this problem at least twice a week, so I now just refer people to this to fix it.
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I’ve had my aluminum iMac keyboard for quite some time now and the only real drawback to using it in windows is the lack of print screen and scroll lock, especially for someone who does a lot of remote work on *nix in their windows session.

Why Apple didn’t just whip up a fix themselves is beyond me,  as this keyboard really could have mass market appeal in much the same way iPods do.  For those new to the game, iPods such as mine had to be tricked into working with a Windows PC, and even then you had to have firewire.  Your reward was the best MP3 player at the time…no one said bleeding edge is easy.

The same holds true for the new iMac keyboards.  Is it too much to expect a keyboard to “just work”, considering the company behind it?  Apparently, yes.  Luckily, there are people around to sort these kind of things out and fix problems that manufacturers artificially create in a vain attempt to move product.  This goes against my methodology that if a person possesses “oppressed” hardware that is purposely crippled, that person will, with enough community and knowledge, un-cripple and enhance a product beyond the manufacturer’s wildest dreams.

References?  See:  RockBox Sansa e200R series (Crippled Real Rhapsody), PodZilla on early iPods (more formats, ogg support, etc.), WRT54G v5 (and the earlier versions, although the v5 was made to get buyers to fork over a premium for a router that could be hacked and have its warranty voided, the WRT54GL…the L stands for Linux, but ironically enough loading Linux onto it will void the warranty).

Worthy of honorable mention is Cisco, because what would the world come to if, lord forbid, you used a NON CISCO GBIC IN A CISCO ROUTER???  IOS has its chips on apocalypse.

But alas, slash rant.

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If you’re like me and easily forget exact syntax of commands and don’t really feel like dedicating the necessary block of brain space reserved for the root user to memorization of exact syntax, I offer you these simple bash functions.  Toss them into your ~/.bashrc file for instant fun (protip: type bash to reload bash after you have added these to load them up without re-logging) or put them into /etc/bash.bashrc to apply them to all users using bash on your system.

The first function searches through the text of all the files in your current directory.  Very useful for, say, debugging a PHP script you didn’t write and can’t track down where that damn MySQL connect string actually is.

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Let me qualify this by saying that lately I have been enjoying a lot of MSTRKRFT’s stuff espescially the remix of Death From Above 1979’s Sexy Results and Justice’s D.A.N.C.E, but I think I finally figured these guys out.  At live performances they just use a standard DJ set with two turntables, MacBook Pro for Serato Scratch Live, and a DJ mixer.  In the studio, they use probably a lot more stuff, but most notably:

• very similar drum beats that are usually a variation of, or exact replica of kick, hat, snare, hat with some occasional fills.  Don’t get me wrong, it usually fits in very nicely, but it is seriously used in just about all their songs.
• usually has a simple driving loop on an analog synth, usually Moog-ish in tone, sometimes arpeggiated, sometimes not.
• short clips of sampled vocals, if any.

And yes, I do realize the above describes a fairly large quantity of music, but damn if MSTRKRFT hasn’t taken this formula and ran with it.  In fact, I am currently planning a track based around this formula, however many times it has already been done.

Old Forever Ending fansite is up again over at seanp2k.com/fe.

Ahh, my first real site…brings back memmories.

If anyone needs anything from my old site (seanp2k.com), I have all of it still, or at least most of it, as my old hosting provider screwed me and deleted my account a few days after I didn’t renew a few years back, and I lost the MySQL database for the image gallery I had up there which a few people used quite a bit.  So, if you do need anything, shoot me an email (dot com [ÀT} seanp2k.end junk.c o m) or leave a comment here.