Hey guys, this week’s playlist has a rather indignant, rebellious tone to it…because I’m dedicating it to all the people in Iran right now protesting against Ahmadinejad and his crooked election. That being said, in the words of Chuck D., “Fight The Power!”
Oh and as always, leave comments guys!
Man what a rollercoaster of a week it’s been for me. I’ll spare you the sordid details though, and let this playlist give you an idea of how these last five days have gone. Big focus on Electronic stuff this week, from the dance-rock grooves of Kasabian to the sublimely somnambulant grooves of Thievery Corporation to the vitriolic, violent thrash-metal breakbeats of Atari Teenage Riot. Yeah, like I said…it’s been a hell of a week.
As always, feel free to leave a comment or two!
Well, here we are again. A day early perhaps. This time around, I wanted to do something a tiny bit different, and give you all a track-by-track rundown of sorts for this playlist; why I chose each song, and maybe a little about the song. Again, this playlist is EXTREMELY eclectic, so I don’t expect you to like EVERY song, and this week’s is a little longer than I intended but well…I had a lot of tunes kicking around in that ol’ jukebox brain o’ mine.
1. “Cry Little Sister” by Gerard McMann
This is here for two simple reasons: “The Lost Boys” is a favourite movie of mine, and I was watching it with my girlfriend last weekend.
2. “Bikini Girls With Machine Guns” by The Cramps
This is here because its the song that got Amanda, my girlfriend, into psychobilly. We listen to it almost every time we’re out for a drive.
3. “Bucky Done Gun” by M.I.A.
Yes, yes, I know…M.I.A. was on last week’s playlist too…I couldn’t choose last week which song to use off of her “Arular” album though…so this is a bit of personal vindication. I’m fickle, so sue me.
4. “Rockit Soul” by Funki Porcini
Ever hear one song and think “hmm, this song would really go well with that last song”? No? well, I’m a music nerd and get that a lot…I figured this song would pair well musically with the M.I.A. track before it, so that’s mainly why it’s here…that and it’s just a damn groovy track.
5. “Terminus” by Photek
I love the beginning synth percussion in this tune, I find myself drumming it idly all the time. Listen to it once, tell me it isn’t infectious…totally creepy track otherwise, but well, it’s Photek, what did you expect?
6. “Desert Search for Techno Allah” by Mr. Bungle
I kinda went on a bit of a Mike Patton kick this week, and ended up dredging this tune up out of an old mixtape a friend made for me back in grade 9. One of these days I might recreate said mixtape as a playlist for this blog…hmm…yes…I quite like that idea…
7. “Saturday Night” by The Misfits
Found myself idly humming this tune earlier today. Very silly song, if also very dark…think of what would happen if Michael Myers wrote a doo-wop song. See…told you…reeeediculous. But it’s The Misfits, you were expecting different from a band that thinks every day is Halloween?
8. “People Are Strange” by The Doors
Another Amanda pick. This one was covered by Echo and The Bunnymen for the Lost Boys Soundtrack…but I like the original better, and so does Amanda.
9. “House of The Rising Sun” by Woody Guthrie
I’m not big on Country, but Woody has my utmost respect. However, the real reason this is here is to PAY my respects to the late David Carradine, who committed suicide this week in a hotel room in Bangkok. Carradine played Guthrie in a biopic about his life and times called “Bound For Glory”.
10. “House of The Rising Sun” by The Animals
Yeah yeah, I know, you just heard this song…but this is my favourite version of it, Woody Guthrie notwithstanding.
11. “Friday, I’m In Love” by The Cure
Besides being one of my favourite Cure songs, someone on Twitter sent me a link to this shirt, and it reminded me of the song and got it stuck in my head.
12. “Who Do You Want To Be?” by Oingo Boingo
Love this tune a lot, heard it first on the soundtrack for a Tony Hawk game years ago. Besides that, I end up getting the chorus stuck in my head a lot.
13. “Legs” by Art of Noise
“In Visible Silence” is possibly one of the greatest albums in any genre of all time, in my opinion. Surely it’s one of the foundations of Electronic Music as we know and love it today. Back when I worked downtown, I used to listen to it constantly, this album was always great walking music, especially for an urban setting, and especially this song.
14. “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” by Jimmy Kennedy & Nat Simon
Grooveshark kinda flubbed the song tag on this one. This came off of a compilation series from Putomayo called “Ska Cubano”. It is what it claims, all that laid-back ska swagger paired with hot-as-hell cuban big-band jazz and a bit of calypso for the sake of being a tiny bit recursive. This Cuban Ska thing could become a trend and to be honest, I wouldn’t mind at all…amazing stuff, seek this compilation out if you can.
15. “L’estasi Dell’oro (Bandini Remix)” by Ennio Morricone
I don’t know who was doing remix duties on this classic, but it got Mr. Morricone’s blessing enough to show up on a compilation of his remixed material that he himself helped compile, so well, it’s pretty damn epic. And it’d have to be, given that it was a song on the soundtrack to one of the greatest movies of all time, “The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly”.
So, that wraps up the summary, hope you enjoyed the songs as much as I do. If you didn’t (or summarily if you did), gimme a shout, leave comments. I loves me some feedback on these things, tell me what songs you liked or didn’t, I’m doing this ‘cos I wanna share some of the crazy tunes I hear.
Till next week kiddies!
May 29
So I’m starting something new as of this week. I’m experimenting with Grooveshark’s new wordpress plugin. So now, every Friday, you’ll get a playlist from me of indeterminate length that is comprised of whatever songs I happen to have had kicking around in my head over the course of the week. With my musical tastes, this proves to be interesting, and this week’s playlist is proof of what I mean. It’s got everything from Devo to CCR to The Cramps….ENJOY! and feel free to comment!
Ever had a program on Debian or Ubuntu that you REALLY want to install, but can’t find a package that will work due to dependency problems, and don’t feel like compiling it yourself? I come across this all the time.
Oftentimes, the situation is that you do in fact have the correct dependencies installed already, but since the package was built for another version or distro, it calls the dependency something just slightly different. In this case, it’s perfectly safe, once you’ve determined that you do in fact have the correct dependencies, to actually edit the package and change its dependencies to either match that of your distro, or negate the problem dependencies altogether.
So, bearing that in mind, I will show you just how you can edit DEB packages in order to change their dependencies. In this example, I will use a graphical frontend for OpenVPN called openvpn-admin.
The first thing to do is make a folder to do all your work in, call it say, “debdump” or something. This isn’t necessary, but it just helps keep things neat and tidy.
Next, you need to extract the package’s contents as you would any other archive file
ar xv openvpn-admin.deb
dpkg has tools to do something similar, but they didn’t seem to work for me.
If you’ve never seen the contents of a deb package before, it’s actually surprisingly simple. You have three main files: control.tar.gz, data.tar.gz, and debian-binary. Control.tar.gz contains scripts and other files that tell the package where to put everything, and what the package depends on, while data.tar.gz is just as its name suggests; it’s the actual program files. Debian-binary just tells dpkg what version of dpkg was used to build the package.
So, since in our case, we have a broken dependency, we need to extract the contents of control.tar.gz.
However, due to how dpkg works regarding BUILDING packages, first we need to create a folder called DEBIAN (this is case-sensitive, it MUST be all-caps).
Now extract control.tar.gz into the DEBIAN folder and move data.tar.gz and debian-binary into that folder as well.
once in the DEBIAN folder, you’ll see a bunch of files. We’re interested in one called “control”. Open control in a text editor, and scroll through to the following section:
Depends: mono-runtime (>= 1.0), libglade2.0-cil (>= 2.7.90), libglib2.0-cil (>= 2.7.90), libgtk2.0-cil (>= 2.7.90), libmono-corlib1.0-cil (>= 1.0), libmono-system1.0-cil (>= 1.0), libmono1.0-cil (>= 1.1.17.1), libx11-6, openssl (>= 0.9.8a-5), mono (>= 1.1.10-1), openvpn (>= 2.0.5-1)
The dependency we want to remove, is mono (>= 1.1.10-1), so delete it, save the file, and close the text editor.
Now we move on to the fun part, building the package.
cd back up to the folder just above “debdump” or whatever you called your work directory, and issue the following command (as root).
dpkg -b debdump openvpn-admin.deb
dpkg will then build the package and now all you have to do is dpkg -i openvpn-admin.deb, and you’re in business. No dependency errors, nothing.
All right my fellow Canucks…there’s been a lot of experimentation with Twitter since it’s boom of a month ago. So, I’ve decided to throw my hat into the ring as well.
Here’s the experiment, It’s actually quite simple…
As any good Canadian knows, it’s that time of year again…when Tim Horton’s does their famous “Rrroll Up The Rim” promotion. So what I want all of you to do, is tweet what you’re winning on Roll Up The Rim, and include the hashtag #rolluptherim at the end of the tweet. However, I plan on indexing these tags and the prizes won, so the tweets have to be simple, as follows, using my Twitter username, TuxOtaku, as an example:
TuxOtaku: Free Donut #rolluptherim
If you’ve won nothing, here’s what to tweet, as an example:
TuxOtaku: Play Again #rolluptherim
Let’s see how many people are ACTUALLY winning something more than a free coffee or donut. 
Feb 25
So it looks like, after years of being a tool for the Silicon Alley elite and those who keep up with tech trends, Twitter has finally broken into the mainstream. Celebrities far and wide are beginning to use Twitter, and I don’t just mean LeVar Burton, MC Hammer and Wil Wheaton…as awesome as they are, they’re not noteworthy celebrities (at least, as Hollywood defines the term “noteworthy”). Ashton Kutcher is on Twitter, in fact he brought his wife and stepdaughter along with him so is Shaquille O’Neal, as are Sean Combs (I refuse to call you “Diddy”, okay?), John Mayer, Dave Navarro, Trent Reznor, Greg Grunberg, Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Fry, John Cleese and even Jane Fonda. The list goes on I’m sure…there are undoubtedly tons more that we just haven’t heard about yet, especially given the fact that not only are celebrities ON Twitter, they’re TALKING about being on Twitter.
And not just Hollywood has jumped on the Twitter bandwagon, many authors have started using Twitter as well, Felicia Day has a full list on her blog of all the known Twitter accounts being used by well-known authors
So what does this mean for just normal people like us? Well, here’s the interesting part. We forget, no, we rarely even give thought, to the fact that all these celebrities, these people we see on TV, in movies, in magazines…we forget that they are just normal people like us too. They just happen to live a different lifestyle. The point I am trying to make, is that Twitter is going to level the playing field. It’s going to make us reconsider the nature of celebrity, because suddenly, all these famous people that we idolize, and have been so far away from us for so long, are now just an @reply away. We can talk to them whenever we want.
Also, as Ashton Kutcher put it himself upon hearing that Diddy was on Twitter, “We are taking over our own tabloid media”. Twitter is going to give celebrities an immense amount of spin control, and take that ability away from gossip purveyors like TMZ, Perez Hilton and Entertainment Tonight, or if not take it away, diminish it considerably.
The word has finally gotten out, and now we’re going to see truly crazy, exciting things happen with what is undoubtedly going to become the most powerful tool that the Web 2.0 boom ever birthed.
For anyone looking to follow their favourite celebrities on Twitter, CelebrityTweet has a pretty decent list.
Feb 18
This week, the Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) began what will no doubt be a long, exhaustive bout of hearings into regulating a certain amount of Canadian Content over the Internet. For those of you outside of Canada, let me explain what is going on here.
Part of the CRTC’s mandate (or at least they CLAIM it’s part of their mandate), is to ensure that Canadian culture does not get watered down or washed out by the rest of the world stage, so to speak. Basically, they want to shove Canadian content (can-con to those of us following the issue) down the throats of Canadians to make sure we all still realize that we are in fact Canadian (as if we needed a reminder in the first place). While I am all for keeping our cultural heritage strong, I believe this concept to be entirely wrongheaded, and I will tell you why.
The first problem with this is that while yes you can most certainly assert your will over closed mediums like TV, Radio and Print Media, this is far from possible on the Internet. The Internet is the wild west, it cannot be governed, it cannot be controlled. So by nature this very concept of trying to regulate a certain amount of can-con across the the entire Internet is rather a silly concept.
My real problem with this though, is much deeper rooted, and will take some time to explain. So, before I do, a little background info is necessary.
In Canada, as you may or may not know, we live under a Telecommunications duopoly. There are but two corporations here who own the entire industry, more or less. These two companies are Rogers Communications, and Bell Canada. While Rogers does have it’s own brand of stranglehold in a corporate sense (they basically buy out anyone who tries to compete), the underlying problem is with Bell. The problem with Bell, is more of a “we were here first” situation. You see, Bell Canada basically built Canada’s entire Telecom infrastructure all on their lonesome…that means Fibre lines, old copper lines, EVERYTHING. And they have laid express claim to these lines, and also charge obscene amounts of money to anyone who wants to lay down their own top-tier telecom service, thus making it impractical to compete.
Now, bearing this woeful situation in mind, the true purpose of the CRTC originally, was to regulate the telecommunications infrastructure here in Canada, and to make sure that this sort of anti-competitive scenario never came to pass. Instead, they have disregarded this, and instead have focused on lesser issues, effectively turning a blind eye to what this duopoly was doing to our Country’s telecom infrastructure.
So what HAVE Bell and Rogers wrought with their little tag-team chokehold? To put it simply, it has stifled progress. It has kept us stuck in 3rd gear, with a monkey wrench in the clutch, and it has also left Canadians paying ridiculous amounts for their Telecom services, while our neighbours to the south and even in Europe fly past us with cheaper, faster Internet access, and stronger infrastructure.
But no, it’s better to ensure that we Canadians have the chance to watch every single season of “Anne of Green Gables” on CBC, even if it’s too bloody boring to stomach, but hell, it’s Canadian, so we better protect it, or else someone might cancel it. And that right there is another problem with this forced can-con issue. If you’re mandating X amount of Canadian content MUST be made available through major media streams, that means then that producers don’t necessarily have to work as hard, and therefore can just put out sub-par content and get a paycheck for it anyway. Ironically then, you could say that the CRTC not only have stopped caring about Telecommunications monopolies, they have effectively become one themselves.
Feb 16
Facebook has become an essential web service over the course of the last few years. Recently, they have changed their Terms of Service in such a way as to allow them complete control over ANY content YOU, the user, post to YOUR Facebook profile. The new changes can be found outlined in an article featured recently on The Consumerist which can be found here: http://is.gd/jDf4.
Thus, I, the undersigned, ask you to sign my petition. My hope with this petition is that we can present a list of signatures to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and have them represent us in a case against Facebook, an injunction that would force them to either change their Terms of Service or face a class action lawsuit.
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for real.
John F,
Yair Silbermintz,
My content is mine.
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Trina Zeiler,
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Thom Mills,
A bit over the top isn't it? Why should you get MY photos, videos etc??
Richard Holekamp,
Kayce Lee,
Diane McKinney,
Our CHILDREN'S PICTURES are up here. They are NOT your property!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Natalie Stegall,
I feel its your right to change your tos I just feel we should have been notified before hand and given an chance to leave before the new tos took effect.
Burney,
Don't sell out.This was and still be a great sight for friends to stay in touch.If it's not FB, we'll find somthing else and give them our traffic.
Lindsey Smith,
Facebook needs to respect the privacy of its users or they will lose them. They have no legitimate justification for keeping our pictures, information or any other record of anything else we divulge once we, as users, opt to delete it from our account.
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BACK TO THE OLD!
Peter,
if i take the picture or make the video I AM THE ONLY PERSON THAT SHOULD HAVE RIGHTS TO IT UNLESS I SAY SO.
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