Brandon's Blog

4/9/2005 #

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EDIT: Just realized I had “Gentoo” instead of “Ubuntu”. BIG difference there. Fixed all occurrences of Gentoo to Ubuntu.

Just read a review of Ubuntu Linux, okay Stallman, “GNU/Linux”, and they had a series of thoughts in there that ran:

For security purposes, Ubuntu does not have root login enabled by default
To allow yourself to login as root, type `sudo passwd’ and create a root password
Now remember to login to GNOME with your root account now

groan

Okay, a distro actually does something unique (viz., disabling the superuser to prevent system file deletion, symlink mangling, and other n3wb mistakes) and the first thing that comes out is how to disable the feature…AND to do something that’s globally unrecommended in the first place (you should never run X as superuser; the X binaries directory is not even in the Slackware superuser’s PATH variable…THAT’S anti-newb security).

Don’t get me wrong. I like enabling root access. I’ve test-driven Ubuntu and not having root was hacking me off after a few minutes when I needed to modify a file in /etc or something (probably Xorg.conf). `sudo passwd’ is the correct command for the job (sudo [wordplay based upon su, or superuser, actually] bypasses the login mechanism for root, so it’s about the only thing you can do under Ubuntu’s setup), but then misinforming people about running everything as root is just a crime.

Ugh.

4/9/2005 #

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So, I picked up Straylight Run’s debut album today. I considered it a hedged crapshoot, meaning that at a $11.95-style bargain CD rate, I’m looking at just over $1 a song, and I have preobtained knowledge that one of the songs (“Existentialism on Prom Night”) is probably worth $5 of that. Straylight Run is “emo”, but a little better than what we currently have to hold back vomit over on MTV lately. It’s harder for the most part, and more personal (less whiny and manufactured “California-style” vocals that Blink 182 popularized over the last painful few years).

The goal here, then, is that at least five songs need to be worth about $1 apiece. The loftier goal, we might say, is to see if Straylight defines a movement in music to rival, or at least palely imitate, the revolution that true 90’s alt rock waged against the glam rock and death metal of the extended 80’s period (which reached into the early 90’s).

My perspective on the issue of alternative rock bears some extra enumeration before I go into my opinion of Straylight. Alt rock was beautiful in its ugliness, and successful for its broadness. At one end was grunge, the king of which was Alice in Chains. This opinion is given some extra credibility by the fact that I’m not a big AiC fan. Grunge was dirty and didn’t care what you thought about it. Grunge was going on in Seattle. AiC was great at what they did, but Pearl Jam (also a Pacific Northwest band) did it right. They were a showered up Alice in Chains, and they dominated a “college rock” kind of scene, while not being sellouts. Lots of hemp necklaces in their crowds. Awesome band, great fan base.

The other end was an evolved form of purist rock. I feel Stone Temple Pilots was the picture of this side (or at least a prime example of it, my STP bias is notably more pro than my bias for Alice in Chains). This side was an answer to Guns n’ Roses. Candlebox was also here, as was Soundgarden. This was hard rock (I believe some don’t even consider this stuff alternative), but it wasn’t self-centered. There was emotion, and not just raw anger. Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun” is a beautiful example of this. Candlebox (which even followed the guitar solo format of an 80’s rock song) captured hearts and minds with “Far Behind,” which is a sort of power ballad / lament that typifies how a fairly retarted 80’s concept like “power ballad” could turn into a beautiful form of hard rock expression. Smashing Pumpkins came in and did…Smashing Pumpkins stuff. They were unique and beautiful.

The fountainhead of all this was Nirvana. Not really saying I’m a big Kurt Cobain fan, but they started the entire movement. Watch the video to “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” It was a big F-You to the class system of American schools. Headbanging to “Teen Spirit” wasn’t about devil worship or playing loud music. It was nonconformist.

Of course, if you get enough nonconformers in the room they will start conforming to each other. This happened, and bastard children of the movement were born. Mostly poorly-constructed parodies of successes like Green Day’s 1994 Dookie album put together to exploit the format laid down by creative forces. Nirvana was hard to imitate, but Green Day wasn’t. Neither was Matchbox 20. Or the Wallflowers. Or Oasis. Or 311.

Blink 182 came from Green Day. The pop-friendly voice of Rob Thomas of Matchbox 20 started showing up everywhere. Everybody else got copied, too.

Green Day was really to blame here, because they brought in a sort of skateboard punk thing that ended up getting really perverted. This strikes me as when Mountain Dew started with their “extreme” stuff. 311 started the alt rock style of rap rock, a la Beastie Boys. This spawned all kinds of morons, most notably Limp Bizkit. Luckily, we got Linkin Park out of the deal, but it was a painful birthing.

Rap rock and punk bridged, offshot, and merged into emo. Staind was (and maybe still is?) hard emo. Emo has really sucked, because frankly I don’t care about your girl problems. I don’t need to hear about them. I also don’t need to hear that your parents were abusive. If you want to package those feelings into useful songs that have a beat and melody to them that I enjoy, I might open up to you and enjoy your music.

Which is why I bought the Straylight album. I had a feeling, based upon my prior hearing of “Existentialism on Prom Night”, that they were doing something with the genre, that they were packaging their girl problems into a form that was artful.

I was correct. I’m not going to be purchasing any Straylight Run t-shirts or anything, but it’s good. Appreciably good. They have a piano-playing female in the group, which was a great pick. She has a great, personal voice. I wish she would replace the chick in Caedmon’s Call, though I don’t know if she would want to be in a Christian band. Songwriting isn’t on par with early Dave Matthews or other great writers from last decade, but at this point I will take what I can get.

It’s my opinion that the day we see good songwriting in emo it will stop being emo. When your music is named for its expression of emotion, it must not have good lyrics. Emotional content in rock music should be a reliable, unstated assumption. Unfortunately, we have left the realm of unstated assumptions. The fact is, music keeps getting worse, and there is no hope in sight.

Straylight is a good execution of a bad format. But I’m glad I bought the album.

4/8/2005 #

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I just got pwned on the guitar by a Christian song. This is not a common occurrence.

4/5/2005 #

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Unfortunately, I don’t have enough time to do this right, so I’m going to have to move quickly.

Read this article:
(Article Link)

Now, as a conservative, I’m going to explain why this article shows exactly why we can’t stand the treatment FNC gets in liberal and “mainstream” outfits. Before I get started, I’d like to say I love David Foster Wallace, who this article is “based” upon, and I don’t speak anything against him. In fact, the few times he was actually quoted in this article the quotes were right on the dot true and insightful.

1. Conservatives were called “Joe Sixpacks”

2. The author called Shepard Smith, a regular news reporter on FNC, a “tabloid” journalist and compared him with opinion-based hosts like Greta and O’Reilly

3. The author blatantly confused statistics. He compared the PRIME TIME performance of one cable channel against the NEWS TIME performance of three network channels (cough, cough not everyone has cable) and deemed the one-channel performance sub-par. FNC’s prime time competes against the networks’ CSI and Bachelor-whatever. The network news shows compete against reruns of The Parkers and the general cable news shows. Who’s biased and who reports the facts straight up?

4. There’s a reason Wallace didn’t make the link to FNC and the author did. It’s because the information I saw quoted from Wallace’s work did not indict FNC. It indicted the personalities of some people on the prime time lineup, but they don’t pretend to be reporters. They’re commentary. If you watch Greta or O’Reilly as a mainline news show you need to have your head examined. Wallace is a real journalist (I’ve read a fairly large body of his other work, including journalism), and he wouldn’t make a false connection like that.

5. Actually, O’Reilly (in my opinion) wouldn’t “damn” the mainstream media for analysis. In fact, FNC would probably welcome seeing more analysis in mainstream news. What conservatives hate about the MSM is that it FILTERS content. You don’t hear about the Oil-For-Food scandal on CNN until the last minute because they don’t want it to be the story. FNC actually IS criticized by the MSM for HAVING COMMENTARY. If FNC is guilty of filtering (I’m sure it happens), they should be harshly criticized, but their complaint against the MSM should not be mischaracterized like this.

Anyway, rant over for now. That really hacked me off.

3/21/2005 #

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As far as the Schiavo thing goes, I completely disagree with what Congress did last night. I do agree with Bush’s quote: “It is always better to err on the side of life.” I think most of the Congressmen who voted for the bill last night agreed with President Bush as well, but they went about their lawmaking in the wrong way.

The way I see it, the legal problem here was one of guardianship, not of stopping the court system from working. The court system was enforcing a valid law: the doctors and the legal guardian of Ms. Schiavo agreed to pull the plug. Nothing should stop that from happening.

What should happen is some entity needs to step in and alter the guardianship situation. There is some minor evidence of possible abuse against Terri by her husband. This abuse could possibly have brought about the injury that placed her in her current state. While this evidence would certainly not hold up in a criminal case, should it not be grounds for a transfer of custodianship or at least a dual custodianship? It seems to me the way to “err on the side of life” is to make sure the proper guardian is in place.

This way that Congress is taking seems like cheating the system to me.

3/18/2005 #

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Why I like Slackware or Why Patrick Volkerding Is My Daddy

So, I started this webserver/mailserver/appserver project a while back, Slack 10 and 10.1 as base systems in two separate installation trials. I started both runs with a vanilla system (basic system utilities, stock kernel, the development/compiler packages, and the standard TCP/IP services). I left off Apache 1.3 and Sendmail, figuring on upgrading to higher version numbers for various reasons to be described later in this post. I left off MySQL because I wasn’t sure what would happen there.

First thing I did was compile Apache 2.0.x. This was pretty easy. I used Apache 2.0.x instead of Pat’s recommended 1.3.x because I figured my installation of Mono/XSP/mod_mono [the way to get ASP.net to work under Apache…one of the major reasons for starting this project] would require Apache 2.0. Point 1 for The Man: Apache 1.3 is suitable for mod_mono.

Mono was reluctant to install from source, so I dropped on the binary package painlessly. mod_mono started serving ASP pages from Linux…hooray!

Now for e-mail. Recompiled Sendmail 8.13 from source to get SMTP AUTH support (how you keep from setting up an open [spammer-friendly] SMTP relay when you aren’t an ISP issuing IP addresses to clients. Used Pat’s site.config.mc compile configuration file (That’s another point for Mr. Volkerding), just adding on the recommended options for SMTP AUTH from the README. Successful compile and painful-but-successful configuration.

Now for the fun part: compiling PHP4. More ./configure options than I have ever seen anywhere else (including compiling the C standard library from source). Nasty job, but I had to do it because I was using a custom build of Apache 2.0. Also, I had a special webmail application that looked like it needed a custom install of PHP. Ick.

Installed the webmail application, and realized it sucked because it was too powerful. “Downgraded” eventually to SquirrelMail, which certainly doesn’t suck. Also doesn’t require anything but vanilla PHP (not even MySQL).

Used Pat’s MySQL (Score another for The Man), because like Bacardi and Cola, it gets the job done. Set it up, no problem. Learned the command line tools and got some databases going for phpBB, Wordpress and CMS Made Simple.

Got all that stuff working, used Pat’s config of BIND to be a local caching-only nameserver out of the box (Pat, how I love you. One more point). vsftpd is included out of the box as of 10.1, so that’s cool (haven’t bothered setting it up because it’s easy like that).

Pat’s IMAP server is great with no config, runs right out the box. I “upgraded” the POP3 server from popa3d (Slack POP3 daemon) to ipop3d (the University of Washington POP3 server) because UW’s stuff works better with IMAP than do normal POP3 clients. For the morbidly curious, IMAP throws a dummy e-mail in everybody’s account, and “dumb” POP servers tend to report this as a legit message to the user. UW’s server doesn’t do this because UW is actually famous for its IMAP work. Whatever.

All that being said, what I realize now is that I started out custom compiling almost all of the major components. Now, I’m left with compiling only a tiny POP server and adding two lines to Pat’s compile config on Sendmail.

This tracks my prior experiences with Slackware quite well. Basically, what tends to happen is you decide you know better what you need than Pat does. You do your own thing, which works but isn’t just great. You then realize that your ideas sucked and that Pat’s default config will do 99.9% of what you were looking for. This is why I’m still a Slacker even after being impressed by Ubuntu.

3/17/2005 #

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Some wisdom to be found here

If all of this applies to you, you are in big trouble. However, it’s interesting from a cynical perspective.

3/9/2005 #

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OASIS Docbook SGML/XML is a great format. I’m using it to do some write-up work on the server (software-side) I was building a while back.

LaTeX is also great for many things (although I am seeing that small, one-off projects are complex and simple in all the wrong places for LaTeX to gain the advantage). I created an award application in LaTeX a while back that looked simply beautiful: perfect typesetting, perfect margins, nice intercharacter spacing even on a full justify, clear graphics.

DocBook certainly isn’t a typesetting tool (at least natively, it will export to TeX), but it’s great for busting things up into chapters and putting them on the web (a la Linux Documentation Project and the Gentoo handbook).

What really amazes me is that the Windows world pulls up Word for dang near everything. I’ve seen entire books, order forms, and presentations kludged into a .doc file. In the Linux world (at least among the folks who know enough to realize that Linus Torvalds didn’t write GNOME and KDE), I perceive a general reluctance to use word processors for everything. In fact, the only time a LaTeX/DocBook/Text Editor person would use a word processor would be if WYSIWYG and extensive visual formatting are both necessary.

I think it comes from the Windows world’s general reluctance to learn programming languages. Because, as much as I argue it is only barely a programming language, HTML looks a heck of a lot like a programming language to the uninitiated. It’s actually more like “Reveal Codes” in Word Perfect, but that’s not a battle I can win.

XML certainly isn’t a programming language in my opinion (as it doesn’t give the computer any instructions about anything…XML parsers contain all the “programming” information), but I really doubt most people would be willing to learn DocBook for any reason. The sad thing is, DocBook would be perfect for a lab report if professors would agree to accept it.

Anyway… Food for thought.