Sunday 29 April 2007

The Polyphonic Spree, Enmore Theatre, Sydney, 27 Jan 2005

Found this while archiving in Gmail. Don't think i ever sent this to anyone except the band. Added a few comments in [italics].

=============

Confused post-gig ramblings, which I'll reorder into coherence and post in the forums later:

I've just come back from their gig at the Enmore Theatre in Sydney. This has been the strangest, most uplifting, most ecstatic gig that I have ever been in.

I'd never actually heard their music before I got the tickets to the gig. I'd read some articles about them, and of all the post-Big Day Out shows - the Hives and Chemical Brothers also had gigs on the same night - decided this would have to be the most unique. Twenty-piece plus band, with guitars, drums, horns AND theremin, how could it fail? I asked a guy at the music store to describe what they sounded like - was it like choir music, 60s pop, or more like gospel? He had one word - "happy". I eventually managed to get a copy of the album, but had only listened to it a few times, and the most familiar ones have been the poppier tunes like Hold Me Now and Two Thousand Places. Unfortunately, I won't be able to give an accurate setlist, as the songs are still quite new to me, and I don't have the first album.

My friend and I arrived to see support act Sarah Blasko nearing the end of her set, to my regret. Damn. The last song was pretty good, with some layered vocal effects at the end that reminded me of recent Bjork. I wonder if this was a single. Sounds like it. Faster than the previous song.

I'm glad I didn't get any seated tickets. I originally wanted to get seats for the dress circle/balcony, but they only had General Admission, and Reserved Seating at the bottom. Since everyone was gonna stand up eventually, seats at the bottom would be useless anyway.

What does it all remind me of?

  • Sesame Street --- pampam, papap, papapam, papaman.. sunny days sweeping the clouds away...

  • Pokemon - because they're also cute

  • Sanrio - because it's the asian symbol for happy, hehehe...

  • The intro to the Velvet Underground's "Head Held High", which starts with these voices in harmony going "haaa..." then the drums kick, and you keep on jumping back to the start, so you can figure out which air drums to "play" when you're pretending to be Mo Tucker... did
    the kick drum come first, or was that a snare?

  • Speaking of "haa..." does anyone remember that Jim Henson animated movie from the 80s, the Dark Crystal? There was a part where all the turtle-like creatures come out and also go.. "haaa...", and it piles up, all these deep bassy tones converging...

  • Jesus Christ Superstar, though not as wide-eyed and funky. Hmm.. must be the robes and the hair then!

  • tibetan throat singing



Oh my god, I've got a crush on someone from the band! O gorgeous Lady of The Orange Robe, of the first row in the choir, standing beside the lady in Red robe, who was also looking extremely cool in her choreography. Love those head-shakes! Does anyone know all their names, and more importantly, *her* name? There's a list of names on the PS website, but no pictures to match the names to!

[I later found out her name: Apotsala Wilson]

We're all high, and we don't wanna come down!

There was one part of the gig where they're playing a song, and then it all goes quiet and everyone onstage was standing still in a pose, except for Tim, who got the audience to start singing this single note for what seemed like ages - ME: "Haaaa......" "Aaaaa......" "Aaaaa......" "Aaaaa......" "Aaaaa......"

They returned to the stage for their encore by coming through the theatre entrance, and going through the crowd.

Little kid in robes at the side of the stage on his little drum kit, sooo cute!! Later, the percussionist came to him and got him to play tambourine.

[This was lead singer Tim De Laughter's son]

Percussion guy comes out and lifts one of the drumkit cymbals and stand, and goes to the left speaker.. I think the's the same guy who went offstage and into the crowd with the cymbals.

Drummer comes out with drum hanging from his neck, like in a marching band

Songs played, in no order:

A Long Day Continues
Hold Me Now
Two Thousand Places
One Man Show
Suitcase Calling
When The Fool Becomes A King

I dont' have the prev. album, but this song -
"It's the sun... It's the sun.. " - must be from that one...

Short verse of "Oh what a night"
A bit of "You are my sunshine"... don't know if this was a request from someone in the audience, but I assume so, seeing Tim holding up a sheet of paper with "You are my sunshine" written in red marker.

Last song of the night - Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band (!) - main song and reprise.


[Best cover ever of Sgt Pepper! They played it regularly during this tour. My friend in San Francisco also heard it there.]

The dials were always at 11. Not in terms of volume, but in how it made us all feel. Every song was played like it was the last song of the night.

You don't watch The Polyphonic Spree - you become one of them, if only for the hour and a half that you share the same room.

Friday 27 April 2007

The Story of E

"After hitting it big during the dot-com boom of the 90's, the tech
world's best-known letter comes out of seclusion for a rare
conversation with BidnessWeek's Steve Rosenblush."

http://www.cerado.com/web20-interview-with-e.htm

Current linkies

A link in an old "starred" email in Gmail led me on this 2 hour round
of click, click, click, following links that took me for a bit more
reading on this low-level web 2.0 goodness:

http://www.geobloggers.com/archives/

http://geobloggers.com/archives/2007/03/31/geonames-rdf-triplr-json-yahoo-pipes-and-the-semantic-web-oh-my/


* Triplr - online tool to transform feeds into different formats:

http://triplr.org/

"Form a URI in your head that is http://triplr.org/output format/input URI

Give that to a web browser or other application."

* geodata - free geographic data

http://www.geonames.org/

"About Geonames
The geonames.org geographical database is available for download free
of charge under a creative commons attribution license. It contains
over eight million geographical names and consists of 6.3 million
unique features whereof 2.2 million populated places and 1.8 million
alternate names. All features are categorized into one out of nine
feature classes and further subcategorized into one out of 645 feature
codes. (more statistics ...).

The data is accessible free of charge through a number of webservices
and a daily database export. Geonames.org is already serving up to
over 3 million web service requests per day."


* Comparison of JSON vs XML, and how with increasing complexity, both
of them start to look pretty.. well, complex:

http://www.megginson.com/blogs/quoderat/2007/01/03/all-markup-ends-up-looking-like-xml/


* More JSON goodies:

http://www.json.org/xml.html


* Yahoo Pipes - Just started playing around with this. Awesome stuff!

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/docs?doc=overview

http://www.hunlock.com/blogs/Yahoo_Pipes--RSS_without_Server_Side_Scripts

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/docs?doc=tutorials

Thursday 26 April 2007

changed MTU with DrTCP.exe --> MTU=1464

Used DrTcp.EXE to change MTU settings in winxp to 1464.

Why this value?

Because of this:

-- 1464 seems to be the biggest value I can set for the ping without
getting the "Packet neesd to be defragmented but DF set" message from
ping.

-- how this relates to the MTU I have set in my modem. I don't know.
Currently set to 1492 but changed it to MTU=1500 because it is now
back to using PPPoA


C:\>ping -f -l 1472 www.broadbandreports.com

Pinging broadbandreports.com [209.123.109.175] with 1472 bytes of data:

Reply from 192.168.1.254: Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.
Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.
Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.
Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.

Ping statistics for 209.123.109.175:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 1, Lost = 3 (75% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 0ms, Average = 0ms

C:\>ping -f -l 1500 www.broadbandreports.com

Pinging broadbandreports.com [209.123.109.175] with 1500 bytes of data:

Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.
Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.
Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.
Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.

Ping statistics for 209.123.109.175:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss),


C:\>ping -f -l 1500 www.broadbandreports.com

Pinging broadbandreports.com [209.123.109.175] with 1500 bytes of data:

Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.
Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.
Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.
Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.

Ping statistics for 209.123.109.175:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss),

C:\>ping -f -l 1472 www.broadbandreports.com

Pinging broadbandreports.com [209.123.109.175] with 1472 bytes of data:

Reply from 192.168.1.254: Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.
Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.
Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.
Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.

Ping statistics for 209.123.109.175:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 1, Lost = 3 (75% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 0ms, Average = 0ms

C:\>ping -f -l 1200 www.broadbandreports.com

Pinging broadbandreports.com [209.123.109.175] with 1200 bytes of data:

Reply from 209.123.109.175: bytes=1200 time=261ms TTL=51
Reply from 209.123.109.175: bytes=1200 time=264ms TTL=51
Reply from 209.123.109.175: bytes=1200 time=279ms TTL=51

Ping statistics for 209.123.109.175:
Packets: Sent = 3, Received = 3, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 261ms, Maximum = 279ms, Average = 268ms

C:>ping -f -l 1300 www.broadbandreports.com

Pinging broadbandreports.com [209.123.109.175] with 1300 bytes of data:

Reply from 209.123.109.175: bytes=1300 time=262ms TTL=51

Ping statistics for 209.123.109.175:
Packets: Sent = 1, Received = 1, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 262ms, Maximum = 262ms, Average = 262ms

C:\>ping -f -l 1400 www.broadbandreports.com

Pinging broadbandreports.com [209.123.109.175] with 1400 bytes of data:

Reply from 209.123.109.175: bytes=1400 time=273ms TTL=51
Reply from 209.123.109.175: bytes=1400 time=269ms TTL=51

Ping statistics for 209.123.109.175:
Packets: Sent = 2, Received = 2, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 269ms, Maximum = 273ms, Average = 271ms

C:\>ping -f -l 1450 www.broadbandreports.com

Pinging broadbandreports.com [209.123.109.175] with 1450 bytes of data:

Reply from 209.123.109.175: bytes=1450 time=272ms TTL=51

Ping statistics for 209.123.109.175:
Packets: Sent = 1, Received = 1, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 272ms, Maximum = 272ms, Average = 272ms

C:\>ping -f -l 1472 www.broadbandreports.com

Pinging broadbandreports.com [209.123.109.175] with 1472 bytes of data:

Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.
Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.

Ping statistics for 209.123.109.175:
Packets: Sent = 2, Received = 0, Lost = 2 (100% loss),

C:\>ping -f -l 1470 www.broadbandreports.com

Pinging broadbandreports.com [209.123.109.175] with 1470 bytes of data:

Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.
Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.

Ping statistics for 209.123.109.175:
Packets: Sent = 2, Received = 0, Lost = 2 (100% loss),

C:\>ping -f -l 1460 www.broadbandreports.com

Pinging broadbandreports.com [209.123.109.175] with 1460 bytes of data:

Reply from 209.123.109.175: bytes=1460 time=263ms TTL=51
Reply from 209.123.109.175: bytes=1460 time=263ms TTL=51

Ping statistics for 209.123.109.175:
Packets: Sent = 2, Received = 2, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 263ms, Maximum = 263ms, Average = 263ms

C:\>ping -f -l 1465 www.broadbandreports.com

Pinging broadbandreports.com [209.123.109.175] with 1465 bytes of data:

Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.
Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.

Ping statistics for 209.123.109.175:
Packets: Sent = 2, Received = 0, Lost = 2 (100% loss),

C:\>ping -f -l 1463 www.broadbandreports.com

Pinging broadbandreports.com [209.123.109.175] with 1463 bytes of data:

Reply from 209.123.109.175: bytes=1463 time=264ms TTL=51
Reply from 209.123.109.175: bytes=1463 time=267ms TTL=51

Ping statistics for 209.123.109.175:
Packets: Sent = 2, Received = 2, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 264ms, Maximum = 267ms, Average = 265ms

C:\>ping -f -l 1464 www.broadbandreports.com

Pinging broadbandreports.com [209.123.109.175] with 1464 bytes of data:

Reply from 209.123.109.175: bytes=1464 time=262ms TTL=51
Reply from 209.123.109.175: bytes=1464 time=266ms TTL=51
Reply from 209.123.109.175: bytes=1464 time=264ms TTL=51
Reply from 209.123.109.175: bytes=1464 time=263ms TTL=51

Ping statistics for 209.123.109.175:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 262ms, Maximum = 266ms, Average = 263ms

C:\>ping -f -l 1465 www.broadbandreports.com

Pinging broadbandreports.com [209.123.109.175] with 1465 bytes of data:

Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.
Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.

Ping statistics for 209.123.109.175:
Packets: Sent = 2, Received = 0, Lost = 2 (100% loss),
Control-C

C:\>ping -f -l 1464 www.broadbandreports.com

Pinging broadbandreports.com [209.123.109.175] with 1464 bytes of data:

Reply from 209.123.109.175: bytes=1464 time=273ms TTL=51
Reply from 209.123.109.175: bytes=1464 time=262ms TTL=51
Reply from 209.123.109.175: bytes=1464 time=263ms TTL=51

Ping statistics for 209.123.109.175:
Packets: Sent = 3, Received = 3, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 262ms, Maximum = 273ms, Average = 266ms

Setting up Airport Extreme to use WPA-Personal on a Powerbook G4

I've been trying for quite a while, but not really hard enough, to set up my Powerbook to use WPA instead of WEP for its wi-fi connection. I finally got it working!

1. Enable ESSID Broadcast on your wireless modem. Restrict the clients that can connect to your network by setting up a list of allowed MAC addresses.

On the modem's Wireless settings, the "ESSID Broadcast" field must be set to "Enable". I found that whenever this was Disabled, I would get the error on my Powerbook when I tried to create a new Network entry:

"The wireless network [network name] does not support the requested encryption method."

This error occurs even if I entered the correct WPA key.

If you really want to turn ESSID Broadcast off, you can still do so by first connecting from your Powerbook while ESSID Broadcast is enabled. Then after that, you can go into your modem's settings and set it back to Disabled.

However, if you turn Airport off, or lose the connection to the network, you won't be able to go back unless you re-enable ESSID Broadcast.

A better way of ensuring no one else connects to your wireless network is to set up a list of allowed clients. In my modem, I went into Wireless Client Filter settings and put in the MAC address of my Powerbook's Airport card. Set the "Filter Action" to "Allowed".

In OS X, you get this value by using Network Utility. Click on the Info tab, then copy the values listed in the Hardware Address field.

Note that my modem is a Billion - BIPAC-743GE. I don't know if this fault/feature is specific to Billion modems or my model. For any other modems, YMMV.

2. On your Powerbook, ,make sure you WPA key is in ASCII and is 63 characters long

I'd previously tried creating Network entry using a shorter WPA key and it didn't work. I kept getting a message "There was an error joining the Airport Network [network name]"

(2.5 hours later)

Shit. I went into my modem settings and tested the above statement, and entered a shorter phrase for testing. I then entered the same values in my Powerbook. Tried to connect and it failed.

I then entered the original values in the modem, saved the settings, then restarted it. Did the same on the Powerbook, changing the password in KeyChain. Didn't work. Network Utility crashed continuously. Re-entered the values a couple of times. No dice.

Then I connected the Powerbook via Ethernet cable, and turned Airport off. Browsed a few pages. I disconnected the cable, then turned Airport back on. It was working, and selected the default network that I had set up.

So what was the actual problem? I have no idea. Maybe some magic gremlin in OS X feels happier when it detects an internet connection via Ethernet, then decides to let WPA work. Aaaargh!

I could have saved two and a half hours of my life by just disabling security or going back to using WEP, since I'd already restricted the wireless clients anyway.

Saturday 21 April 2007

Getting problems with Taiyo Yuden

How ironic. I've started burning a backup set of my photos using my newly-opened stack of Taiyo Yuden DVD-R discs bought from MSY, the discs that are supposedly the best brand in the business, and I've already had 3 coasters, out of the 9 I've used so far.  I'm still checking if it's related to the speed that I'm using... previously I could only burn at 4x, even though the TDK case says 1-16x, and have rarely had issues.  But this time Nero displayed the 8x option as default, but it failed during verification.  I then tried burning at 6x but only got one disc fine,  then the second one also failed. I'll try using 4x for the next ones, after I finish with the TDK disc I'm using as "control" for my test.  Arrrgh.

So possible causes:

1. Burning speed - previously only burnt using 4x so I should try doing the TY discs at 4x
2. Hardware problem - forum posts I've seen have mentioned that sometimes the lens getting dirty can cause this, so I should try burning using the TDK DVD-R blanks I still have. 
3. The Taiyo Yuden DVDs I have are either fake or a bad batch.   (I'd like to think MSY only source from genuine dealers, but at those prices, kinda makes you wonder -- $53 for 100 Taiyo Yuden DVD-Rs)

Not happy! >:(



Thursday 12 April 2007

Copy del.icio.us bookmarks to Google bookmarks

Ever wanted to be able to just restrict a Google search to only go
across the ones you've already bookmarked? Google can do it by
searching only sites in your Google bookmarks. Unfortunately, I don't
use Google bookmarks, as all my bookmarking is done in del.icio.us.
You can do it by going to this site that has a script which uploads
your del.icio.us bookmarks and puts it in Google.

http://blog.persistent.info/2006/10/import-your-delicious-bookmarks-into.html

Warning though: you will have to log in with your del.icio.us login. To be safe, just change your password before using this utility, then change it back to the original once the import process has finished.

Wednesday 11 April 2007

Cat with 26 toes



Found this on my PC, dated 23 Feb 2007. Better blog it before I forget again.