new jersey metal and hardcore festival

By anders pearson 18 Nov 2003

my friend Angela and i took the train down to Asbury Park New Jersey over the weekend for the 2-day New Jersey Metal and Hardcore Festival.

pictures are up although i haven't gone through and labeled them yet. i think i got some pretty good ones considering how difficult it is to take pictures in low (and constantly shifting) lighting while avoiding being kicked in the head by crowd-surfing maniacs.

i have to say that the band lineup was better for this than at hellfest since it was much heavier on the metal side of things than hardcore and i'm just not that big a hardcore fan. highlights included: Black Dahlia Murder (we only caught the last song and a half of their set though), Children of Bodom, Nevermore, Dimmu Borgir, Morbid Angel, Superjoint Ritual, Danzig, the Devin Townsend Band, Strapping Young Lad, Scarlet, Moonspell, Daughters, the Red Chord, Watch Them Die, The End, Nora, Bleeding Through, Mastodon, Unearth, Deicide, Suffocation, Type O Negative, and Cradle of Filth.

Strapping Young Lad, Bleeding Through, and Children of Bodom, and Cradle of Filth were probably the best sets i saw (Scarlet, Moonspell, and the Devin Townsend Band also managed to kick an honoroble mention's worth of ass).

Cradle put on the most elaborate show by far. tuck and i saw them in august so i knew to expect great things from them. when we saw them before, they were the headliners and played for a full two hours. this time, they only played for 45 minutes, but they've totally raised the bar for over the top stage productions. they had some really creepy gargoyle's running around stage for a few songs. then, they brought out a woman riding the spider/stilt guy who proceeded to do cirque du soleil style acrobatics.

aside from the performances though, it was a pretty poor festival. the whole venue was freezing cold (people were buying shirts from the vendors just to stay warm), there weren't really any food vendors (we could have gone out somewhere for dinner, but angela and i didn't have a car and the nearest restaurants were too far away to walk to). plus, the hotel was really crappy and overpriced. $150/night for a tiny room with a broken lamp, a non-functional TV, peeling wallpaper, and almost no heat. plus they were severely understaffed for both check-in and check-out. we had to wait in line for 2 hours friday afternoon to check-in because they only had two people working the front desk.

validation

By anders pearson 16 Nov 2003

made a couple quick adjustments to the thraxil engine to help make sure that it generates <a href=”http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fthraxil.org%2F”>valid</a> markup.

the templates are valid by default, and i already had some logic to try to fix simple mistakes like missing end tags. the main thing that it was missing was the use of ‘&amp;’ for a seperator in urls. one quick regex later and that shouldn’t be a problem again.

i’m not sure it properly handles character encoding issues yet (like the stupid curly quotes that mac browsers seem to like to insert), but i’ll get to that later.

picking up the brush

By anders pearson 09 Nov 2003

never argue with your muse.

for the last couple years, my creative energies have been pretty much limited to programming and doodling in my sketchbook. lani even got me a nice new set of oil paints and brushes for my birthday the other year and ever since i’ve felt somewhat guilty about not doing anything with them.

yesterday, after a nice breakfast of eggs, rice, and beans, i had the sudden urge to paint something. so i stopped at the art supply store, picked up some canvases and headed home.

about nine paint-fume filled hours later, i had a new painting.

i’ll have to wait a few days for it to dry before i can scan it in (and i have to hope that i can find a scanner big enough to scan an 11x14 canvas…)

heavy duty mp3 managers shootout

By anders pearson 06 Nov 2003

i've mentioned several times that i've been working on an mp3 library management program called drachen that was specifically designed to handle enormous volumes of mp3s. i am now happy to announce that the project is dead and i'm abandoning it. ha! weren't expecting that were you!

really, this is a good thing. the reason i’m killing off drachen is because i’ve finally found another program that does what i need, can handle a library of over 20,000 songs without bringing my computer to its knees, and (most importantly) is maintained and improved on by someone else. i’m lazy. i’d much rather spend my time contributing bug reports and/or patches to someone else’s open source project than heading my own.

it wasn’t easy. i had to spend an inordinate amount of time trying out every linux mp3 player under the sun. finally though, i think my quest is over.

some background:

i currently have 20,527 mp3 and ogg vorbis files in my collection (almost entirely legal too, fwiw; i ripped my large CD collection and downloaded a lot from my emusic.com subscription). i store them on a fileserver machine and mount the directory over NFS. it comes out to just about 100GB in all.

when you have a collection that large, you face two main problems. one is the interface. just keeping them in directories for each artist and album doesn't really cut it. you really need some kind of database like interface to navigate them without going insane. OS X (and now windows) users can testify that the iTunes interface is pretty much the gold standard for mp3 management. so that's pretty much what i've been searching for.

the second problem is that with that kind of database like interface, you need some kind of database like backend to store the metadata so you can search it efficiently. doing this in a way that scales up to 20,000 tracks is difficult. the vast majority of players that i looked at just couldn't scale that well performance-wise. they would bog down the whole machine for several minutes and be completely unresponsive every time they had to perform a simple search. (iTunes, apparently even has this problem, so even if apple released a linux version it wouldn't do me much good). there seems to be some point probably around 10,000 songs that breaks their backs. on my machine at work, i have about 3,000 songs and every player i tried there handled that size library very well without any noticable performance problems from any of them.

my solution was to use a fullblown, hardcore, RDBMS for the backend. this worked pretty well and scaled quite nicely, but if anyone else was ever going to use it, requiring an end-user to install and admin a whole RDBMS just to listen to their music wouldn't really fly.

here's a quick rundown of all the linux mp3 players/managers i tried out and how they fared. (for reference, this is all on my dual 1GHz P3 w/ 256MB RAM running gentoo and a 2.4.20 kernel).

Zinf 2.2.4

it has a pretty nice library manager with an iTunes-esque interface. its musicbrainz integration is very convenient for fixing mistagged files. performance was abysmal. once the library was loaded, just starting zinf would take 20 to 30 minutes. editting any id3 tags would again take over the machine for 15 minutes with 100% CPU usage.

rhythmbox 0.5.3

the GNOME music player. it has the nicest interface of all the players i've tried. very much an iTunes clone and done with the minimalist style and focus on usability that makes GNOME so nice. performance unfortunately was only a little better than zinf. just selecting a new song would lock it up for several minutes.

Juk 2.0 beta 1

the KDE entry. decent interface. it loads faster and performs a little better than rythmbox (about 30-40 seconds of hang time following any action), but still slow enough to be unusable. it also had musicbrainz integration and a nice interface for editing id3 info.

madman 0.92rc1

the madman developers took a similar approach to what i was doing with drachen. madman is just a playlist editor and library manager and expects you to use another program to actually play the mp3s. the interface is a bit weird, but has a very powerful mini query language for searching. it performed so well on my work machine's smaller collection that i had high hopes for it. alas, it also choked on the massive home collection.

yammi 0.8.2

another playlist manager that piggybacks on XMMS for the actual playing of songs. the interface isn't very polished looking and it lacks some of the slicker features of the others (like the 'rating' feature, or musicbrainz integration), but it does have 'fuzzy' search which is nice if you can't type or spell and integrates nicely with k3b for CD burning. but none of that matters next to its performance. yammi is fast. whatever they did, they did it right. it's as fast with 20,000 tracks as any of the other players are with 20. it takes about 15 seconds to first load, but after that there isn't any noticable delay anywhere. we have a winner.

(musik also looks like it could be promising, but gentoo doesn't have an ebuild for it and i'm too lazy to install it manually.)

i'm a halloween costume

By anders pearson 31 Oct 2003

today, <a href=”http://www.ericmattes.com/“>eric</a> dressed up as me for his halloween costume. i’ll post pictures later.

i didn’t dress up or anything; i’m far too lazy. i had fleeting thoughts about dressing up as Rush Limbaugh (put on a suit, add a little extra padding around the waist, and carry around bottles of pills), but i couldn’t quite go through with it.

fun with SMTP

By anders pearson 30 Oct 2003

my email has been flakey lately. in particular, i was noticing that often, stuff sent from work, going through columbia’s <acronym title=”Simple Mail Transfer Protocol”>SMTP</acronym> server, was disappearing into the void.

finally i started looking at my mail logs and noticed that columbia was rejecting messages. so i poke around on the website and notice that they’ve started <a href=”http://www.columbia.edu/acis/email/authsmtp/“>requiring authentication</a> for sending to addresses outside columbia.edu. argh. i use mutt, which doesn’t do any of the SMTP stuff itself, in true unix fashion, it expects another dedicated <acronym title=”Mail Transport Agent”>MTA</acronym> to do the work for it. i’ve used sSMTP for that since it is extremely small, fast, and doesn’t do anything fancy that i don’t need it to do. unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to support authenticated SMTP. i even followed <a href=”http://people.ac.upc.es/aramirez/mutt.html”>these instructions</a>, but it still was a no go.

so i’ve gotten rid of sSMTP and replaced it with <a href=”http://www.postfix.org/“>postfix</a> and now it seems to work. i’m not totally happy because postfix is a relatively large program and does far more than i really need it to. i prefer simplicity when possible.

i guess now the next step is to start grepping my logs to try to figure out which of the messages i thought i sent actually vanished off into the abyss, try to find copies in my sent-mail folder and resend then if they were important.

anyway, if you sent me email in the last couple months and never got a reply, this may be why.

(weird though, according to columbia’s docs, <em>none</em> of the emails sent through columbia’s SMTP server to outside addresses should have gotten through, but i know that some did.)

Mindless wanderings...

By Miguel Diaz 28 Oct 2003

So I’m apparently in the midst of one of my rather infrequent MSSM nostalgia kicks and somehow ended up here (wherever “here” really is). Definitely notice a lot of names on here that haven’t crossed my mind in years (as I’m sure mine hasn’t crossed theirs).

<p>&#8230;Kicking Anders since 1995&#8230;</p>

austin

By anders pearson 27 Oct 2003

finally made it down to austin to visit <a href=”http://www.livejournal.com/users/kpilo/“>lani</a> for the weekend.

my primary mission was to spend as much quality time as possible with lani. my secondary mission was to get a little bit of a feel for austin.

primary mission accomplished.

the secondary mission probably required more than a weekend, but we made a valiant attempt. lani’s been busy with classes so much of the exploration was into new territory for her as well.

soon after arriving, we wandered around her neighborhood and found a great vegetarian/vegan restaurant about 3 blocks from her house that she had never been to before. later, we wandered around downtown austin. i have no strong desire to return to the downtown. austin is very much a college town; the streets on a friday night were teeming with drunken idiot UT students and SUVs (occasionally hitting the students, apparently).

saturday we had some pancakes and breakfast tacos and wandered her neighborhood some more. we found possibly the greatest book store i’ve ever been to. it was huge and everything was used or heavily discounted. if i hadn’t been limited by what i could carry home on the plane, i could have bought half the store.

saturday night, we managed to find our way to an <a href=”http://www.asylumstreetspankers.com/“>Asylum Street Spankers</a> show at a little coffee shop, caf&eacute; type place. they were playing outside on the patio with no amplification. they were fantastic. after the show i even got to talk to <a href=”http://www.wammolovesme.com/“>wammo</a>, who is a personal hero of mine, for a few minutes, which totally made my day. (he’s a really nice guy, i’m happy to report). if you ever get the chance, you must go see the Spankers; they are a riot.

other than that, i got to sample plenty of <a href=”http://www.puretexanbeer.com/homepage.htm”>Lone Star beer</a> (“The <em>National</em> Beer of Texas” (emphasis mine)), and play with lani’s house’s 3-legged cat, Gimpy.

and, to add to lani’s <a href=”http://www.livejournal.com/users/kpilo/81654.html”>list of things we didn’t do</a>:

  • see an armadillo
  • get lani's ibook on the wireless network. i made an attempt but was eventually foiled by my complete lack of knowledge about anything having anything to do with wireless networking (i got it to find the network, put in the WEP key, dhcp seemed to work, giving me a valid looking routing table and filling in DNS info and everything, but it refused to actually connect to anything)
  • take very many pictures. dammit, what's the point of having a tiny camera if i can never remember to use it.