Tag Archives: music

Indulgence

Posted by on 2013/08/04 No comments

This is not a technical post. Nor anything of any consequential substance. I just felt like telling a story.

As mentioned before, I run a little project called Earnoms, which was started to find a place for people to share music, but (if I had to blurb it) in ways that are more social than the “social” music sites. Tonight was a mellow music night. Ended up with over 100 new URLs in the LinkDB just between a couple of people. Not bad, all things considered.

There’s an Afrikaans song called Lisa Se Klavier. I’m not sure if it was Koos Kombuis or Laurika Rauch who wrote it, and I’m sure a quick trip over via Google could answer the question, but I don’t actually care all that much right now. The best online version that I know of is this one. I should note that the statement is somewhat subjective, since I don’t like it when people go full-on drumkit with songs. Almost always it spoils the feeling. If that’s your thing, there’s another version on grooveshark that’ll suit you. There were a couple of other ones mentioned too, such as this track by aKING, and the version of Hallelujah by Karen Zoid which I discovered tonight.

But my story is more of history. Of a couple of years ago when I used to be in choir, at a time when choir was one of the few things of my life that I don’t want to rewrite (or at least, don’t consider wasted, unlike much else of the time then). Of a time when I knew three girls, all whose names started with L. All who could play piano (to varying extents), all who were in choir with me. All who were friends with each other, and loved to song. And I mean loved to sing. I don’t think I ever saw any of them sing without a smile on their faces. It was them who introduced me to some of my first tastes of slightly-specific musical appreciation, even way back then, entirely unintentionally. Unintentionally, because they were just singing to sing. But all things considered, it’s their version of Lisa Se Klavier that is my all-time favourite. Because between the three of them they covered soprano, alto, and contralto. Their version had them picking up the rises and falls from each other, toying with the sound, making it all the more playful (which, if you look at the lyrics, are oddly fitting in some ways). All the while still following on perfectly with each other, all the while smiling. That’s probably one of the memories I’ll carry with me for a very long time. Because it stands out brightly, lightly, and oh so very pleasantly.

All that waffled, I’ll leave you with this: Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong singing Summertime.

Rage About Dinosaurs

Posted by on 2012/12/14 No comments

This text snippet from a colleague, although I’m fairly sure I’ll get my copy of the announcement soon as well:

“Up until now, Last.fm radio has been a subscription only feature in your country. However, unfortunately, from Tuesday 15 January 2013 we are no longer able to provide radio streaming to you due to licensing restrictions, and you will no longer be able to listen to Last.fm radio.”

I honestly wish all these dinosaur media companies and committees and agencies and whatever would just die already. Earlier today I was speaking to a friend of mine, one who also happens to be an artist. She’s currently raising money for her new album, and is just running it entirely by herself. Not that any of this is new to anyone sensible, of course. All of this licensing crap is just ridiculously frustrating, and at a guess I’m fairly sure it doesn’t actually end up helping all that many artists.

Ah well….hopefully time brings some useful change. At least the antiquated ITU seems to have been sent a decent message about how things should work.

Timejumps

Posted by on 2012/06/30 No comments

So today/tonight/sometime is leap second day. I’m not too sure when it is, exactly. Why? Because I don’t need to:

Jun 30 14:43:09 stratum1 lantime[1850]: Normal Operation  
Jun 30 14:43:17 stratum1 lantime[1850]: Leap second announced  
Jun 30 14:44:12 stratum1 ntpd[2172]: synchronized to PPS(0), stratum 0
Jun 30 14:44:13 stratum1 lantime[1467]: NTP sync to PPS

My timeserver knows. Firmware updates applied, leap seconds announced, music festivals to go to.

Crescendo!

Posted by on 2012/06/25 No comments

So I decided to, instead of spamming people up through my blog and IRC and jabber and …. each time I find something cool, rather make a concentrated little project for it.

And I had a useful domain for it around from 2010 as well. So, presenting Earnoms!

Check out the about page for a summary of the project, but definitely keep those music links coming :)

Musical Interlude

Posted by on 2012/06/20 No comments

After a few days of flu-sourced incapacitation, I’m back onto sorta being alive. Here’s a nice chilled track on some cool instruments:

Read more about this funky little instrument here.

Hai, can I hav sum intergnats plox?

Posted by on 2012/05/31 No comments

Alternative post title: IPv6 all up in hurr

Some years ago, before the age of cheap international access on local ISPs arrived here, dual-homing (or n-homing, depending on how pimp you were) on your residential connection was quite the fashion among .za tech-heads. But not the fancy sort with BGP and decent best-route selection, just a really grubby sort: two accounts, one local (as in .za routing table) and one international. You can read up about the full setup over here on Stefano’s site.

Due to the nature of the split, there was some fun. Fun in the order which things might come up, fun in which session’s routing is ready first, fun in DNS server overwriting, that sort of thing. Of course, I mean fun tongue-in-cheek, since it was mostly an annoyance. Especially when ddclient picks the wrong PPP session (“the config says ppp1, why are you using ppp0?”), or doesn’t want to ignore its cachefile (forcing you to wrap it in another script and delete the cache yourself), or when your line flaps and all pppd instances go into this weird race condition where they suddenly all acquire the same IP, or ….. well, I guess you get the idea. It was painful.

Thankfully times have progressed, and now it’s possible to get IPv6. Hell, if you’re in the right place you can even get a static allocation of v6. Working for AS37105, this is of course one of the work perks, since we (the tech team on the v6 deployment) dogfood it ourselves to make sure we know that things are actually working. Things we usually note are the following:

  • explosions in HE.net’s v6 core – hey, it happens
  • client apps misbehaving – surprisingly, chrome on my desktop is one of these
  • “mixed” support – mikrotik, for instance. you can telnet/ssh it on v6, but not winbox to a v6 address (I don’t recall if I’ve tested whether it connects if a hostname resolves to v6 address..mental note)

Personally, the best part for me is not having to ever deal with broken dyndns anymore, or having to maintain lots of funky NATs, or having to tunnel home and route traffic via the tunnel. If I just quickly want to ssh to my desktop, it has a hostname in DNS and it works. If I quickly want to check up on my traffic stats or anything else, I browse to yariman (my gateway/home store). It’s great, and makes my life that much nicer.

All of this said, World IPv6 Day next week! Are you all ready for your few days of carnage as other shitty ISPs run around unprepared? Bring on the future!

One other thing, props to PH.Fat for another good track. The track alone is cool enough for me to share it, but then I saw that the album (available on their website) is creative commons, and that just wins a bit harder. Nicely done, guys :)

P.S. Fuck you, WordPress content editor, and your stupidity in paragraph designation flow after bulletpoints.

Theoretically Monday

Posted by on 2012/04/10 No comments

Every now and then I wake up to a good Monday, but they’re few and far between. Thankfully, today is only a theoretical Monday (it is, in fact, a Tuesday, due to the holidays from Easter weekend), but nonetheless it’s actually doing well so far.

Part of what makes it good is that unlike the recent trend in my life, nothing of any ridiculous consequence has happened over the weekend. Another part is to wake up to some great reading. Many who know me would know that I’m no great fan of PHP (probably the world’s most famous dinky toy language), although any verbal argument about it is likely to be futile because of a variety of reasons. Thus it’s quite great to find this post that articulates all sorts of issues I often encounter on random occasions when I have to deal with PHP. Link via Jeremy.

Another for fun/schadenfreude. And this wikiquote page about the author of PHP is pretty great.

Lastly, I discovered Emika‘s music over the last few days via her latest mix on Rob Booth’s site.

Here’s to hoping for a fairly sane week!

P.S. Bashing? Who, me? Nevaaaaar.