August 25, 2006
5% Album - Lord Jamaar
Some of you know that I've been a devout hip-hop/b-boy kid since day zero. I've never been ashamed of it. The culture has fed me on occasion (physically and mentally) and also helped me remove cultural barriers. In other words, it was not uncommon for me to meet someone who may have been from the barren wastelands of the midwest, or dirty south, but we could talk about hiphop and instantly become neighbors.
This will be the first commentary on album that I actually purchased for safekeeping, I've resisted doing the common 'heavy rotation' entry. Anyway, for the unaware, Lord Jamaar is a member of Brand Nubian. Certainly Brand Nubian should be considered as pioneers in hiphop culture, due in large part to their work in the late 80's and early 90's. While other NY based artists were seeking phat ropes and materialism. They were speaking culture and survival, street knowledge and overall knowledge of self. Perhaps the most interesting contribution was the unabashed delivery of the teachings of Clarence 13X, or 5% Nation of Gods & Earths.
As a youth in BK, I remember clearly the profound affect 5% Nation had on many HS kids. Hell, if it wasn't the Decepticons it was the 5% Nation running the halls of BTHS. I did have my physical battles with 'Fives', as we used to call them. Perhaps it was because, I was deaf, dumb and blind ;)
Regardless of all of that, I was always intrigued with the Lessons, or the Mathematics.
The album brought everything I'd remembered back into focus. I'm not going to front and say that I used to hang out on forty-deuce (42nd St - 7thAve), and build in a cipher with the older Gods, certainly I was much too young. However, my older brothers became instant converts, much to the chagrin of Pops. All I'd hear were 120 lessons..
It's arguable whether the Zulu Nation or the 5% Nation had the greater influence on the hiphop culture. Nonetheless, it is clear that hiphop would be much less insightful, without Brand Nubian, Wu-Tang, Nas, Rakim and others who espoused lessons on vinyl.
Back to the album, it certainly is not short on messages subtle or otherwise. Beats and production are tight. Collaboration from Wu and each member of the Brand Nubian. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to produce music of such content, since it isn't considered mainstream. If it were not produced for artists who have longevity in the business, it is likely that there would be a 5% album.
Definitely, a good buy. You won't find it on mainstream radio.
If you haven't peeped last.fm... What are you waiting for? There are tons of mash-ups abound. Wikipedia, Amazon, and more to come. If your media player (I use amaroK), is last.fm aware, you can immediately, get access to the album art and lyrics and other goodies that are made possible by these clever mash-ups.. Gotta love opensource.
If you're interested in good music also check out WeFunk Radio.
August 23, 2006
links for 2006-08-23
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Python talks
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Python Programming for the Absolute Beginner
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Trying my hand at Python
August 22, 2006
links for 2006-08-22
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Lots of talk about Sun Open Sourcing Java. Waiting to exhale.. Redmond's thinking on Mono Project
August 21, 2006
links for 2006-08-21
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Comprehensive template to the various tools and levels of security penetration.
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Audacity and podcasting goodness.
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Drupal modules listed in chronological order
August 20, 2006
Boston Massacre
Yep all the ingredients of the historical New England slaying.. Well, there was no Crispus Attackus, but there was a Coco Crisp. I guess that doesn't count ;)
Absolutely estatic by the way my squad played during a crucial five game set. Awesome sweep. Though, I know that there is plenty of baseball left, it is clear that the Bombers are headed in the right direction. The RSN seems to be scuffling at the worst time. The recent domination is reminiscent of the way the dynasty Yanks played during the 96-01 magical run.
An excellent blend of farm system talent (ie Philips, Wang, Cabrera, and Cano), coupled with seasoned veterans (ie Jeter, Posada, Damon, A-Rod, etc), it is going to be very difficult to deny this team in October. Our pitching has been stingy when needed. The difference between this year and last, is that the bridge between starters and Mariano Rivera was sufficiently bolstered by Proctor, Villone, Myers, and Farnsworth. They have absolutely been getting the job done.
As I look at the Bosox demise, it's clear that the absence of Pedro Martinez, aging Schilling and Wells is taking a huge toll on the club. Perhaps most telling is their very abysmal bullpen, as it was completed shredded by the thunderous Yankee lineup. I've heard alot about young Papelbon, and I realize he has Rivera aspirations of greatness. Nonetheless, you can't get to the Hall of Fame by having a pretty good month. To be mentioned in the same breath of Mariano Rivera, you have got to close out games year after year in very big spots. Papelbon has much to learn.
I'm sure RSN apologists will point to the injuries that beset their club immediately before the trading deadline. I don't have much sympathy, as the Yanks were able to overcome injuries to more key players. Besides Yankee General Manager, Cashman made the right moves to improve the club without giving up any of our young talent. Very textbook and again reminiscent of the dynasty years.
Clearly, that 2004 ALCS Bosox comeback down 0-3 was an abberation ushered in by the silly wildcard and poor Yankee pitching. Yeah, the curse may be over but the torment continues.
August 19, 2006
links for 2006-08-19
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Pretty good customization of the trusty /etc/smb.conf
August 14, 2006
Virtual Friendships
Often the subject of 'e-pals' comes up. I have always enjoyed surveying the blogosphere and tapping the various stories therein. I strongly believe that the Internet can actually bring people closer together, not separate as some would argue. Actually, I have physically met and virtually met some very interesting people through blogging and other social networking mediums.
In truth, I'd be in favor of participating in more meet-ups and such, as it always great to actually talk to people. Taking a page from the Nuwere text..
August 13, 2006
Pardon the Interruption
The site was down for roughly 50hrs, due to an attack on my trackback system. I have since disabled this feature. Once I've upgraded my MT publishing engine, I will again activate this feature.
// Begin Rant:
While we're on the subject of site management, I have not had very many outages, nonetheless, they are very frustrating. I suppose the rub is the idea of zero notification of an issue.. As it often said, communication is paramount. It would be nice if the datacenter admins would communicate directly with the patron or at least alert the third-party reseller of a potential server load issue before simply suspending an account.
After the twenty-four hours, and chasing down a third-party below is the rationale for account suspension. While I know that when you manage several accounts on a disk whose server hosts several virtual domains, you can ill-afford a rogue process consuming precious resources. Obviously, it could bring the server to its knees. All I would ask is a courtesy msg, to empower the user to take the appropriate action to resolve the matter.
End Rant //
At the time of suspension our servers load average was a very unstable: 20.0. After suspending the account the servers load average dropped quickly to its normal, stable range of 1.0-4.0.Please work with the script providers and/or website developers to make the scripts more shared-resource server friendly. Until then the site will continue to have its web access disabled.
Processes snippet:
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
31375 x 16 0 17976 14m 1912 D 99.9 0.4 0:01.57 /usr/bin/perl -w mt-tb.cgi
31376 x 18 0 17032 13m 1780 R 99.9 0.3 0:01.58 /usr/bin/perl -w mt-tb.cgi
31377 x 18 0 17700 13m 1812 R 99.9 0.3 0:01.56 /usr/bin/perl -w mt-tb.cgi
August 4, 2006
Understanding the OSS model (revisited)
Why are people still worried that the FOSS will obliterate the monetization of software development? If you believe this theory then you probably have never heard of Red Hat, SuSE, or IBM for that matter. Certainly, the allure and market share for the proprietary model has marginalized to a certain degree, but I assert that the Software as a Service (SAAS) will allow people to make money.
I believe IBM has really increased its value by partnering with the open source community. In fact, their fastest growing revenue stream probably is coming from their services model that was built around FOSS. Yes, they have software developers, and technical people working in this arena too.
So I don't buy the theory that FOSS takes food out of the honest software developers mouth.
August 3, 2006
Intelligent Design - Revisited
Were it not for the random or as of late, infrequent clients who ask for desktop support for M$ stuff... I would be very happy to become functionally windoze illiterate ;)
A couple weeks ago, I spent many cycles repairing corrupted registries on two notebook computers.
Both machines were running XP Pro SP1 and were overcome with adware . Well, actually I was only able to to access one of the hard drives by conventional means. That is utilizing the Repair console, and copying the appropriate files to repair the hive.
After restoring the appropriate files to c:\windows\system32\.. I then had to go through the laborious task of installing the required updates and SpyBot S&D to prevent further registry corruption. The entire process took roughly and 2.5 hrs. Now, as I discussed earlier the second notebook could not be repaired by this method due to an unexplained error. I didn't really want to find out why the BSOD kernel HEX kernel errors kept interrupting the boot process.
Though, I don't profess to be operating systems architect, I've never understood why M$ decided to make their kernel and userspace one entity. When you're talking about intelligent design, that would be very haphazard at best. More on this later.
I simply formated the disk and restaged the machine. However, there was only one small problem of legacy data that had to be salvaged. No network services and legacy data on the hard disk.
Heh, time to unfurl the open source banner and reach into the trusty toolkit.
Enter Knoppix LiveCD.. For those of you who are not familiar, I would call it the ginzu knife for any PC tech. It reminds me of the earlier Linuxcare wallet mini-CDs. Yes, it should as they are both from the Debian family. These tools make data recovery quite easy, regardless of the underlying OS.
Essentially, you load the CD and make sure the BIOS is set to boot from CDROM drive. Knoppix easily identifies hardware. If you've only got one HD, then /dev/hda is the partition you'll need to mount.
Once I mounted the appropriate partition, I then setup the network services. As root run 'ifconfig eth0 IP up' and voila your then able to talk to your LAN. I copied all of the important docs from c:\
Afterwards, I blasted away the contents on the drive and installed XP SP2 (Don't ask me why).
I also took the opportunity to install 'clamwin' and 'OpenOffice' on the clients machine, as I didn't really feel like hunting around for licenses.
The last notebook, took much longer to resolve, as I was initially hell bent of fooling around with the stupid Registry and Repair Console.
Now regarding intelligent design.. If your OS has an extremely high vulnerability to trojans, virii and adware.. Why would you closely couple the userspace and kernel (Registry Hive)? I know there are tons of very wise people at Redmond (much smarter than I), but apparently this was overlooked. I suppose this one reason that Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OSX really shine. Sure it is very possible for you write a rogue script aimed specifically for Sendmail or some other FOSS application, but it is unlikely that you can subvert the entire kernel from that one script. In other words, there is no direct pipe from the userspace layer to the kernel layer. M$ adopts a very different model, which explains why the Registry (kernel) is so fragile and easily corrupted by random, illicit programs. When will they learn? Who knows. Maybe Vista (aka Longhorn) is a total rewrite. Only time will tell.