Sat, 18 Dec 2004
Hostcentric is cheap, but cheap might not mean good.
This page has been offline for a number of reasons. Mostly because the original server hosting it was
compromised by some script kiddie and we all freaked out and got some new hosting. More up to date,
cheaper with better hardware. Unfortunately the system the company, named
Hostcentric, uses this commercial package called
Plesk and explicitly states in their usage terms that we are
forbidden to get rid of it. I'd be happy with it if it worked, but it's quite broken. It has graphical
interface elements which directly conflict with the configuration files and compiled binaries it
claims to have control over. In my case it forbade me to execute the CGI script which
generates this blog even though I selected the "execute CGI" option.
So whatever, I'll be slowly getting back to writing copious amounts of rambling prose here in the
future. Things are changing quite a lot for me so I guess it's a good idea to document them in public
:)
-l
posted at: 15:48 | path:
/hacking |
permanent link to this entry
Fri, 10 Dec 2004
Wasting time?
I was watching a documentary of the tour of a band named Lightning Bolt. They
rock quite hard. Then I started falling asleep. Not because it was late, but
because the band was so good live it was just boring to see them recorded
since that meant I wasn't at the show. Then I started thinking about my small
obssesion with technology, especially of the free type. I started thinking
about all the people I want to step up to and just tell them to stop fronting
on the "I really agree with the principals but I'm not using it" style. Then
I thought, "who cares?"
So that's what this is about, who cares, personal expression, the ability to
freak out and not give a fuck so much...a sense of humor. I'm begining to tire
of people without humor in their life. Especially people who have such a grim
outlook on the world that their humor can make a cheery 6 year old want to die.
I say who cares because it's so easy to fall into the trap of alienation when
shit just gets real obscure. Interests go deeper and deeper into speciality
that the whole point of getting into that interest is lost. I'm begining to
think of not caring as a form of letting go. Giving up that power that comes
with feeling compeled to know everything and get involved in every aspect of
a project. That place where it feels better to abandon the whole thing if it's
not possible to understand everything.
Technology is great. People make wonderful, creative things with it but there's
a terminal velocity for technology. And when that speed is reached it's just
impossible to go any faster. Besides, is it even possible to get anything done
when you've reached the fastest speed you're capable of?
Capitalism moves fast. Capitalism brings commercialism. Commercialism brings convenience. Convenience
brings ease. Ease brings function to a form. How is it possible to take
Capitalism out of that equation? I think it's very possible but it's so deeply
rooted in American culture that any creation isn't taken seriously until it's
reached the level of commercialism. Especially with technology, which I'm
caring about less and less.
posted at: 02:29 | path:
/theory |
permanent link to this entry
This post was written from the corner of Delancy and Ludlow in NYC on a pda and uploaded through a public wifi node at a place called Alchemy 106. Nothing more special than the fact that it's possible. Deluxe.
posted at: 02:29 | path: /pda | permanent link to this entry
Scout Nibblet
Odd name. Something about Nottingham. She has a whole record and it sounds good. I've heard her play live three times. Each one made me elated. Here it is.
posted at: 02:26 | path:
/music |
permanent link to this entry
Getting back into the Macintosh.
The apartment had a yard sale this weekend. It was the first weekend without rain or bitter cold since last summer. The only things I could find to sell were some old computer equipment so I broke out the old Mac hardware and tried to start it up. Then I found the old software CD's and realized I still had a great graphics workstation and a MIDI sequencer. I'm not going to think too hard about it but I'm kind of excited.
So what does this all actually mean and is it just a geeky adventure in old skool electronic aesthetics? I say no and here's why:
The CPU is a 250MHZ G3 processor. Probably the slowest G3 upgrade card ever made. However this is far more processing power than needed for MIDI sequencing with Logic Audio and Max. Granted the Logic version is cracked, as is the Max version and both are obsolete at this point so I'm kinda on my own.
Most hardware MIDI sequencers don't have the features and programability of Logic/Max.
It has an external 2X cd burner so the two internal hard disks can be backed up.
MIDI files are small. The disks can hold thousands of sequences and data sets for messing with sounds.
I have two pieces of MIDI gear that make sound plus some controllers and a fast Linux box with a big hard disk and DSP software.
So I'm thinking of this thing as something that'll never play audio...ever. The problem before was I tried to make it use all the fancy DSP features of newer software. I think I'll find out if it's useful anymore by hooking it up as the primary MIDI brain in the studio and syncing the Linux box to record tracks. Could be fun. Of course I'll have to live with any bugs.
posted at: 02:23 | path:
/music |
permanent link to this entry
Tuning the audio system for hard disk recording.
So I got the old Mac running as a MIDI sequencer with Logic Audio 4.8 and I'm not interested in ever updating it. Now it's time to tune the old Linux box to record with low latency. Here's what I'm doing right now (writing this while the kernel compiles [too bad my CPU is all fast n'shit because it just finished before I could])
And the moral of the story is that the 2.6 kernel reboots my computer when it gets started. Boo. Fuck.
posted at: 02:21 | path:
/music |
permanent link to this entry
My home desktop computer is named Angry-boomer
update: I got a portable, so angry-boomer's sound card is
offline. If you're curious, the portable is an iRiver HP-140 and has a 40 gig
hard disk, 15 hour battery live and is the same size as the iPod. It does cool
shit.
This is an ogg
stream of any sound that comes out of my sound card. Whatever I'm hearing, you're hearing. It's kind of like a webcam but for sound only.
This wouldn't have been possible without the excellent Jack Audio Connection Kit available
for Linux and OS X and Karl Heyes's ices streaming
client, Jan Gerber's jack plugin for ices and the venerable Icecast.posted at: 02:12 | path:
/music |
permanent link to this entry
The PD delay sampler adventure continues
So my initial
4 channel looping delay is stable and useable with both the computer
keyboard and my pile of MIDI gear. It's alright but it's weird.
The tempo is fixed and each loop doesn't really give a good idea of how
long it is. There's a fill button but it doesn't really care how much silence
goes on the end, it'll just keep the silence there until the buffer's at the end.
After talking to a guitar player I met at this great punk show at
Asterisk gallery in Brooklyn,
he said what I was describing sounds like this guitar pedal called the Boomerang.
Sure enough,
here it is. It's a
pertty lofty goal but I'm up for the challenge. I'm putting the delay line
concept away for a bit and using good old arrays. Press record and it starts
filling up the buffer. Stop recording and it snaps back to the begining of the
buffer and starts playing back. This patch is really gross so I'm not even
trying to post anything public yet.
What'll be cool about doing this in software is the playback control can get
all crazy-like. The speed is variable and the buffer is just an array of
samples. Things like loop point markers and wiki-wiki scratching are just
a few possibilities. With MIDI CC's and aftertouch this can get really cool.
posted at: 02:12 | path:
/music |
permanent link to this entry
My First PD Patch
Well, this is the first
PD patch I've made that I think is functional enough to share with others. It's a 4 channel looping delay bank and it only uses
internal objects!
Download it here.
I've been listening to a lot of live music where the performer uses multi-channel delay lines to construct a song. Perhaps the most amazing performer who can do this is
Tyondai Braxton. I don't know what brand of gear he uses but I know whatever it is the delay buffers are huge, sometimes as long as 45 seconds to a minute. He'll sample an entire verse of a song (that he's playing live on a guitar), loop it, and start adding more channels. Its kind of fucking amazing.
The other inspiration for this patch is
Don Caballero, and specifically,
this record which I listen to a lot and think is totally rad.
Not surprisingly, Ty Braxton and Ian Williams (the guitarist from Don Cab) have joined a band named
Battles (amusingly enough searching for nothing more than the word "battles" on google returns their site as number two, below American Civil War battle stories) along with John Stanier, the drummer from Helmet and Dave Konopka, the bass player from Lynx.
So yeah, listen to all this music, go see all these folks play live. They are awesome. If you want to make music like them but don't have mad money for the phatty delay gear (but for some reason have money for a computer) use this PD patch and you can do the same. Email me if you're putting it to good use or make some improvements.
posted at: 01:54 | path:
/music/pd |
permanent link to this entry
One part of the open source community.
I guess
this one puts me on the map. For better or for worse.
The above press release is my third foray into a professional services limited company. The first two were fly by night dot coms and didn't leave many traces on the web. The first two times I was always in awe of the guys in the back room with the five workstations and three monitors and crazy graphical desktops I couldn't recognize even though I spent 8+ hours a day using a Macintosh and I was certian I knew how a GUI functioned. I was doing shitty front end programming and never touched the knowledge they lived in. One co-worker went on to write
a big inspiring weblog that gets
international acclaim. Andy is rad. He clued me into the wonders of Perl and Linux. I never knew what the fuck he was doing. Then there was Daniel Ceregatti, who was doing shit
I still can't even dream of. But the day Kick Media went bankrupt I knew I had to get to that back room.
It's funny what Google remembers about Kickmedia. Most of the entries are people who worked there who were posting to email lists or web forums. Everything else are broken links or old press releases.
The first foray into front end web programming was so unremarkable the company hardly even exists andymore except for an office in Hong Kong. They provide "web services" for email and name registration or something like that.
Fast forward to 2004. After some time spent doing technical work with a
print and video artist I ended up at
Democracy Now! as a full time unix sysadmin.
Openflows is an impressive organization. One part hosting company, one part technology consulting company, one part software development company, and above all open source philosophy evangelists.
Openflows Networks Ltd. is the company that put the Democracy Now! website on the map. The Ltd is defined
here as "Limited to any security or purpose." It's a distinction that's really important. The moral of the press release and the Openflows relationship is that building an Internet infrastructure is hard, and working with open source software to do it is also hard, but like
Larry Wall says about the Perl programming language, "easy things should be easy and hard things should be possible." It's a phrase that translates to so many things.
Working with UNIX systems and open source software isn't easy if you want to do hard things with what's readily available. It's still sinking in.
posted at: 01:53 | path:
/media |
permanent link to this entry
Linux can be pretty cool sometimes.
6:09pm up 227 days, 14:15, 9 users, load average: 0.71, 1.29, 1.93
Boo-ya!
posted at: 01:43 | path:
/hacking |
permanent link to this entry
OpenBSD and old skool unix systems
I installed OpenBSD on a development server yesterday. I've been hanging out in #openbsd on irc.freenode.net and chatting it up with the locals. I'm starting to feel the strong sense of enlightenment surrounding this operating system.
On the user level it's probably one of the the least functional base installations I have ever used. For example, the default shell is csh, which doesn't even do tab completion or save a command history. But on the system level it's probably the most functional. I won't enumerate the wonderful admin-friendliness of it's default installation. Or it's delicate placement of services any good Internet serving citizen should be granted as a right. Linux distros's defaults pale in comparison.
OpenBSD was the origin of the OpenSSH protocol, which is the absolute standard for secure remote access for UNIX systems as well as tons of other swiss army knife applications involving remotely accessing a computer securely. This pride of creating one of the Internet's most fundamental systems really shows in the whole project. It assumes you want to do things well if you are going to do them at all. And it doesn't hold back if you're doing them wrong.
It's funny, but I think it made me feel that UNIX isn't scary at all. Everything is right there. The whole history of the Internet. Apple's choice to use BSD as the basis for Darwin was a good one but they have a lot of catching up to do. I think they'll get there but as long as their marketing monkeys are out there pimping iLife and the lot, their default 1.5 GB installation will pale in comparison the OpenBSD's 100 MB one (and that includes X Windows, SSH and Sendmail configured and running by default).
Chatting today with some new acquaintances, we got to talking about what OpenBSD "is". Being the n00b that I am, I have absolutely no claim to it's origins or definitions but I ended up saying this mistake:
<lee> I don't think
any operating system is about doing anything. Isn't that the point?"
<lee> wait, that didn't make sense at all
<lee> s/anything/one thing/
<salan> lee, I so get you. openbsd is my anything.
It was very poetic. I'll never forget it.
posted at: 01:43 | path:
/hacking |
permanent link to this entry
Internet security is a scary place
So is getting your apartment broken into. They stole my laptop and
my roomate's DV camera. It got me into full-on paranoid hacker security
mode. I had trouble leaving the house today cause I thought shit would
get broken into again. One of my reactions was to take a look at
wireless security. Even though the physical break in had nothing to do
with the Internet, a strange coincidence let me pinpoint exactly when
the break in happened. Looking at the last post here, you'll find that I
recently started broadcasting all the music on my hard disk to the
Interenet via an Icecast server. It's a nice way to listen to my 10 gig
music collection while I'm at work. It's the next best thing to having a
portable player but kind of cooler cause it's public. I noticed the
connection got dropped at 12:30. When I got home I noticed that the
power strip the cable modem was attached to was switched off. Since none
of my roomates were home at that hour I got suspicious. One thing led to
an other and the next thing I knew I was calling the cops telling them
I had a log file of the exact time the break in happened.
Unfortunately nothing came of it. The boneheads got away clean, no
one saw them and they left no prints despite touching lots of plastic
stuff in some pretty targeted places. TV fans take note, dusting for
prints is hard and rarely yields any useful data, especially for petty
theft cause the cops don't really give it much time. It ain't like the
movies.
Then I almost fell for this fraudulent email appearing to come
from Ebay. The Internet is really freaking me out at this point on both
good and bad levels. Now that I'm laptop-less, I'm rediscovering my
Linux based PDA, the sharp Zaurus. I spent all day learning how to run
Kismet. Since it runs on my
PDA and NYC is such a compact place, I decided to take the wardriving
metaphor to a more eco-friendly level and did some "warwalking" as I
left work, intentionally bypassing two subway stops so I can see what
the Wi-Fi spectrum was like between an area of roughly 20 city blocks.
The results were staggering. In 30 minute walk Kismet found 228
wireless networks, most were real access points and were active. A high
number were not using a password, some even had factory default
settings.
So the combination of the Ebay fraud and the number of open
networks got me inspired. I'm doing research now, looking first for any
blogs dedicated to publishing any wardriving/warwalking information for
the public. Next I found a nice program named
KLV that takes Kismet's results
file and formats it in nice HTML for easy browsing. Then I'm looking for
any clearinghouse websites keeping information about email fraud and
which catalogs the story of the scam. I managed to use some unix tools
to trace back the source of the Ebay fraud to a South Korean
corporation's network where a Windows box was compromised and used as a
relay to log people's personal data for later identity theft. I'm sure
they didn't have a clue and I can't really do anything because I don't
speak Korean.
I'm in the zone, excited at the new world of wireless. I'm trying
to turn this blatant violation of my personal space and property into
something good, for the benefit of everyone.
posted at: 01:43 | path:
/hacking |
permanent link to this entry
Hacking the Columbia University computer lab part II
It's a shame that I have to describe these actions as hacking when they can be better described as "use". The line isn't so fine, really. Although the difference should be quite clear, other's don't seem to agree.
So here's the challenge. You have a server on the Internet with sshd running. Someone has sent you an email with an attached file that you need to copy from your email box to the server in question. You are nowhere near your own computer but there's a university computer lab within eyeshot. Word, just jump onto one of the workstations and remotely copy that file.
The first computer is running some version of Windows but you can't tell because there's been an attempt to lock it down by the University administration. The only menu options in the Start bar are two applications, Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. Pressing the "Run program..." key command pops up a box saying "this function has been disabled by the administrator." In fact, any key command using the Windows meta key has been disabled. Right clicking is also disabled...system-wide.
Believe it or not, this is where windows gets really cool. Open up Internet Explorer. If you paid attention to Microsoft's first anti-trust trial you'll remember that Internet Explorer isn't only for the Internet, it has a full-featured filesystem browser built-in! Try typing in the address bar "C:/". Again, "this function is disabled by the administrator." Fuck. Now choose to "view folders" from the menu. If all is good, a sidebar of your local filesystem should appear. Fresh, you got to the C drive! Security by obscurity means more fun for you. Travel to the system folder and find the cmd.exe program. Double click on it. Fuck, again "this function has been disabled by the administrator." This administrator is really annoying. Mind you we haven't even gone on the Internet yet. Just for kicks, find the explorer.exe program and double click on it. This one runs. Not a surprise since it's basically Internet Explorer with more bells and whistles. Word, now we can see the entire filesystem and all removable media.
Of course there is no SSH client on this computer so you have to download one from the Internet unless you planed ahead and have a CD-ROM with some SSH clients on it. You think to yourself, "one of those USB keychain things would be pretty l33t right now." Wrong again, this thing is bolted to the desk and all the USB ports are blocked by wood or iron. The only removable media drives are CD-ROM and floppy. Go to google and search for "putty download". Click on the first hit...
...oh double fuck! A proxy error. Somehow this site is blocked on the campus network. Travel to other random Internet nodes. Hmmm, all blocked by the proxy, but google wasn't. Try Yahoo. It loads...alright, they whitelisted some sites and blacklisted everything else. We just have to turn off the proxy setting in IE (this is getting ridiculous, how do these people use the Internet? Like a television?) under the "Internet Options" find the LAN setting option. But lo and behold, "this functions had been disabled by the administrator." It's time to give up.
This was a fun exercise in trying to use a computer that ended up as hacking that computer only to find out that whoever configured it wasn't interested in anyone actually using it in the first place. I was totally stumped about that Internet proxy thing. That was some uber fascist shit. Totally against the whole point of the Internet. Then, my best gal once again dropped the gem of knowledge that made it all work. Fucking Yahoo Briefcase. 30 megs of storage if you register for free with a fake name! Put your ssh clients in there, get though the proxy because it's a yahoo site then run the program from the My Documents folder on the PC. Word up.
posted at: 01:43 | path: /hacking | permanent link to this entry
An IRC transcript of mine I find particularily ammusing and insightful
[16:23] *BOFH1* I'm going to enable packet filters on the server now
[16:24] ->*BOFH2* aight
[16:26] *BOFH1* ok so the server is in full bofh mode
[16:26] ->*BOFH2* yeah!
[16:26] *BOFH1* you can't do shit on it
[16:26] ->*BOFH2* excellent
Sometimes the opposite of what's expected is the best thing.
posted at: 01:43 | path:
/hacking |
permanent link to this entry
Crazy Computer Person.
I was just described to a young adult getting a tour of the control room as
a "computer person who does the crazy things with computers." What kind of
response do I give to that? For comparison, what if somone is getting a tour of a mental hospital to dertimine if they would like to send their insane child there. The tour guide points to a person working on a computer and says
"that is our computer person, he's crazy and he works with computers." Not too
different, these two things are.
i don't really know what other metaphor to use here. something like "would you call a doctor a crazy medical person" is way too pretentious. mood is an easy thing to pass off
as insanity, so that makes it sound even more ridiculous. I think I am trying to express the feeling of alienation by others. When I started all this programming/computer aproachability madness the point was to help people understand that using a computer for useful things is
simple if you just get over the initial fear. When things start to click and you're working faster you should feel less confused, not more.
I'm begining to feel the pressure of technological fear in others. I'm starting to see popular technology as an alienating artifact. It goes far deeper
than ignorance. In fact I don't believe it has anything to do with ignorance
in most cases, since the people who depend on computer technology usually do
some sort of intellectual work, which would imply that they have some
analitical skills. I believe it's a psychological condition. A refusal to
explore something unknown because it is
so very unknown.
I also attribute this alienation to Capitalist sales tactics. Capitalism has transformed into a method of alienating individuals from their own culture. By
comparison, University computer users are much more accepting of change. Those
working within "The Free Market" however, are accustomed to all their products
being handed to them in convienient simple packages. They are also acustomed to highly specific objects that perform simple functions in extrordinary ways, ways that make them feel superior with the least amount of effort. This is what technology is all about, right? Due to the extreme care
and sensitivity of all the expectations in this model, there is no incentive
to learn a new system if the one you already have pleases you and is free of
any visible shortcomings.
So I can only conclude that these are times of great expectations with a more selfish and cynical twist. It is not, "how can I assist this great creation?" but "give me my great creation, it might work out."
posted at: 01:43 | path:
/hacking |
permanent link to this entry
Listening test for very low bit rate Ogg Vorbis encodings
The source is Democracy Now from July 20th 2004. It's the first two minutes of the show. It's a decent real-world test because there's music, speech from a studio mic, speech from a telephone and speech/music coming off tape, so you can A-B with a good spectrum of sound. For kicks I posted the times each encode took on my system.
System specs:
AMD Athlon XP 1600 @ 1400 Mhz
1000 MB DDR RAM
ATA 100 disk with aprox. 41 MB/sec throughput
Linux 2.4.26 Fedora Core 1
Original uncompressed recording (mono, 44100khz, 16 bit)
Ogg Quality 3
[lee@vorbis tmp]$ oggenc -q 3 dn2004-0720-listening_test.wav
File length: 2m 00.0s
Elapsed time: 0m 09.4s
Rate: 12.8233
Average bitrate: 73.9 kb/s
Ogg quality 0
[lee@vorbis tmp]$ oggenc -q 0 dn2004-0720-listening_test.wav
File length: 2m 00.0s
Elapsed time: 0m 08.3s
Rate: 14.4509
Average bitrate: 48.3 kb/s
Ogg quality 0, resampled to 22050khz
[lee@vorbis tmp]$ oggenc -q 0 --resample 22050 dn2004-0720-listening_test.wav
File length: 2m 00.0s
Elapsed time: 0m 05.1s
Rate: 23.4608
Average bitrate: 30.7 kb/s
Ogg quality 0, resampled to 11025khz
[lee@vorbis tmp]$ oggenc -q 0 --resample 11025 dn2004-0720-listening_test.wav
File length: 2m 00.0s
Elapsed time: 0m 03.6s
Rate: 33.2143
Average bitrate: 20.6 kb/s
Ogg quality -1
[lee@vorbis tmp]$ oggenc -q -1 dn2004-0720-listening_test.wav
File length: 2m 00.0s
Elapsed time: 0m 07.4s
Rate: 16.1914
Average bitrate: 37.1 kb/s
Ogg quality -1, resampled to 22050
[lee@vorbis tmp]$ oggenc -q -1 --resample 22050 dn2004-0720-listening_test.wav
File length: 2m 00.0s
Elapsed time: 0m 05.1s
Rate: 23.3804
Average bitrate: 23.6 kb/s
Ogg quality -1, resampled to 11025
[lee@vorbis tmp]$ oggenc -q -1 --resample 11025 dn2004-0720-listening_test.wav
File length: 2m 00.0s
Elapsed time: 0m 03.5s
Rate: 34.0317
Average bitrate: 16.4 kb/s
My conslusions are that compared to the original, the -1 qualities sound
just as acceptable as the 0 qualities. Since we are shooting for nothing more than intellegibility here, I'd say that the lowest possible quality is recommended for targeting a modem audience in a live stream.
The quality 3 sounds exactly the same as the original to my ears, so I'd say that's a good setting for targeting a broadband audience.
posted at: 01:42 | path:
/hacking/audio |
permanent link to this entry
This is the first real post in my new blog. While personal, I'm also going to make some guidelines for it, so it doesn't spiral into the common tone of most blogs, which may look nice and professional at first but aren't that interesting when you get to the reading part.
So here's my guidelines:
- Post at least once a day.
- Write about technology but don't repeat the same crap that's on the web already.
- Stick to free software, because that' when things get interesting. Don't ignore commercial software, but don't take it too seriously either.
- Write about music more and give props to the homies.
- No gossip
This should be interesting to look at in a year or so.
For those interested, this was typed in the OS X program called TextEdit and uploaded to a server running Linux. It was displayed in your web browser using a Perl script called Blosxom.
posted at: 01:22 | path:
|
permanent link to this entry
This is a post to show Taryn that it is easy to update a Blosxom page.
pshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh :P
posted at: 01:22 | path: /goofy | permanent link to this entry
