« Archives in April, 2012

Putting up a new forum

I’m putting up a new forum for family and friends. After getting my head around MySQL administration, now the only choice comes down to which server software will fit my needs best:

* PhpBB3 – this is the end-all be-all everything on it option with a billion and a half knobs to turn
* SimpleMachines – this one seems pretty straightforward. Content might have to be hosted elsewhere though (uploaded pictures and the like).

What to do, what to do … oh yes. That’s right. Study for finals.

(get’s hooked offstage)

A Brief Introduction to my Musical World

I have been surfing youtube for music for a bit over two years now, and I’ve come across a *ton* of modern music that is absolutely wonderful (as well as a lot of crap – Sturgeon’s law applies, but the diamonds are worth the dross). The rabbit hole goes much deeper than just this, and there are other styles I’ve found that I have taken a liking to, but this is a sample of some of the music I’ve come to enjoy that may be unusual or hard to find for beginners.

The modern musical world online is extremely vibrant. One interesting aspect of this (Homestuck in particular) is that a lot of this music is made by independent music fans using nothing but a computer, contributing to a shared world.

Random Stuff

Trance Violin:
Pursuit of Truth:
Dark Epic Techno:
(A bit of a misnomer, I don’t find it particularly dark, or techno. It’s sort of relaxing. Ignore the crazy background pictures, and the voices in your head :-P)
Sea of Crystal:
DreamChasers:
Beethoven Virus:
Sky Titans
Timebomb

Homestuck:
Land of Light and Rain:
Land of Frost and Frogs:
Homefree:
Dance of Thorns:
Descend:

(an anime – a lot of anime music is *very* good, engrish/japanese aside)
.HACK: The World:
,HACK: Obsession:
Synchronicity:

Gooseworks: (This guy is apparently a game music composer, and has some good stuff)

Industrial Elegance:
Gruntilda:
(a very witchy battle theme)
Ming Co.:

Assorted Music from Video-games:

FF4 Epilogue
especially
FF4 Epilogue:
Within the Giant:
Leave Time for Love:
Can you Fly Sister?:
Castlevania: Tocatta:
(*This* is how you do vampires, Twilight. :-P)

The Lunar 2 Soundtrack: All of it:
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
6)
7)
(Seriously, just keep clicking!)

Trance:
1)
2)
3)
4)

Random Stuff

Keepalive …. keeeepalive!

I haven’t posted anything in ages. Graduate school has been eating *all* my time. But perhaps I should continue to post occasionally, even if it isn’t some epic or profound piece of deep insight, or the result of one of my never-ending projects (which seldom produce complete results :-P).

So, random fantasies as to what I might do eventually given time:

I’ve been thinking off and on of setting up my old POS dell server again. I started apache on my machine and was playing around with it, but it would be preferable to set up a gateway/server that could stay on all the time. I don’t like running my main machine constantly for two reasons:

1. Thunderstorms and brownouts – I don’t want my machine dying while I’m halfway across the city. I don’t care if the dell box fries.

2. Random suspicous port-scans from Russia – some dude in Russia keeps trying to connect to things. McAffee pitched a fit once when I had apache open and tried to connect to freenode on IRC. If somethings going to get hacked, I’d much rather it be my POS dell box.

The dell box is interesting. I bought it from a used computer store for $80 (and probably overpayed! :-P). It is a bit flaky in the way I wired the hard drive to the mother board (it’s a SATA drive going through a converter chip that occasionally shorts). On the other hand, it’s a perfect platform for messing around with esoteric server/gateway projects. I’ve currently got it running Fedora 10, and everything works well. I’ve got Apache set up and configured on it.

It would be nice to have it always connected to the internet, but I only have the one modem comcast gave me, and it only has one ethernet port. I would have to configure the dell box as a gateway, and set it up to forward traffic. Fortunately, linux apparently has all the stuff needed to do this. (Routers are internally usually linux/unix computers with certain software setups installed to boot on powerup). Unfortunately, this will require knowing more about networking than I probably do right now.

But to get me started in my pie in the sky project, the following FAQ provides some hints as to the steps required. http://www.stanford.edu/~fenn/linux/

Once I get this project done (read never) it should allow me to have an always-on internet “face” that I can log into remotely, use as a file and web-server, a platform to mess around with internet programming experiments, and forward all my traffic to my main machine which can be on or off half the day.