Like others, I just cannot get around inquiring myself about what I achieved in the past year. I had the courage of finally publishing my music and made the experience that success is not the result of your creations, but the result of having influential acquaintances, who claim to be your friend and - dependent on your degree of submission to their power - constantly repeat their spin about person “x” being an important artist over and over again. These acquaintances may not be the brightest bulbs in the universe, but if there is one thing they learnt in life, then it is how people are opting for what they believe to be the safe majority. The majority does not have to be visible to them, it entirely suffices to have the illusion of it. And this can be accomplished by exposing these people with the same message over and over again until they finally believe it and automatically associate the desired message with person “x”.

Whenever someone is blathering about artist “x”’s significant achievements, it surely is a good idea to have a close look at the person making this assertion. What are the arguments, are there any hints that this person has the expertise to competently judge someone’s creation at all? Mind you, I am not trying to say that people shall not have their opinion, regardless how silly it might be. What I am trying to criticise is someone posing as knowledgable man and selling his own bias and prejudices as proven fact, by stating:
“A” is like that, because I say so
Trying to pose as someone who is authorised to speak for a majority with the goal of artificially inflating his view’s relevance. Let us not forget, everyone speaks about his own opinion in the first place. If you are lucky, you may accidentally speak about something that moves someone else, too. But does that make you the official spokesman of “the majority”? What is “the majority”?

My disappointment lies in trying hard to reach a level of professionalism and expertise that is satisfying my personal needs and then see how other, less gifted and intelligent people come to success just by cheating and posing. Obviously I have something backwards, as my logical fallacy lies in believing that if someone is trying hard enough and truly learns to master something, he will eventually be rewarded. That does not seem to be the case: Perhaps those who I consider dim are the smart ones, as they know they can get to the top because people do not care about their achievements, but the illusion about the latter. You are someone if a bunch of marketeers makes you appear significant to people. Repeat the lie until it becomes true.

So what can I do? Continue with what I am doing and not to care about opinion makers. Speaking up my mind and perhaps meeting people who feel similar about these things. The “great public” as such does not exist anyway. You will always wind up with a small, distorted segment consisting of your own preferences. If some people get together and share their views and can benefit from each other, what is more you could ask for? Thus my ideal achievement for 2008 is to find people sharing similar views and that my netlabel will become a platform for those people and together we could enjoy a good time. And of course I want to shoot better photos, finetune my composition principles, write better articles using the right wording, create better web pages and more appealing designs. But most of all, become wiser and discard some of my silly notions, just to get a better understanding of the world.

As already threatened yesterday, here comes the second blanc et noir batch:

Most likely I am not going to post more pictures tonight, so watch out for tomorrow, in case you are interested in it.

Here is the third batch of 8 photos (the first set in black and white) which I considered worth showing:

Some more blanc et noir pictures will follow tomorrow.

Here is a second batch of 8 photos which I considered worth showing:

More pictures during the course of the day.

This morning I was wondering about several 100KB peculiar log entries left by a MJ12bot variant that did not exactly seem to follow the nice behaviour of the original. Here is a sample entry as illustration:

82.245.176.52 - - [30/Dec/2007:06:50:57 +0100] "GET /dw041-formication-agnosia/
_title=%22%22%3E%20%3Cabbr%20title=%22%22%3E%20%3Cacronym%20title=%22%22%3E%20%3Cb%3E%20%3C
blockquote%20cite=%22%22%3E%20%3Ccode%3E%20%3Cem%3E%20%3Ci%3E%20%3Cstrike%3E%20%3C
strong%3E%20%3C/small/page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2/
/page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2/
/page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2/
/page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2/
/page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2/
/page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2/
/page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2/
/page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2//page/2/
/page/2/ HTTP/1.1" 404 39670 "-" "MJ12bot/v1.0.8 (http://majestic12.co.uk/bot.php?+)"

Whatever this broken botware was trying to accomplish, it did not work out, other than leaving some decent clutter in my server logs. A bit of research revealed that the original makers of this distributed search engine have been aware about these fake bots for a while:

20 Oct 2007 - in the last few days it has been brought to our attention that a number of fake MJ12bots appeared on the Net. These bots are not ours but they use fake MJ12bot user-agent - this is something we can’t do anything about just like with email spammers who fake email addresses so we all get spammed supposedly from our own emails or someone elses.

(source : http://www.majestic12.co.uk/projects/dsearch/mj12bot.php)

What impacts this crawl will have is something that remains to be seen, if I was lucky this was merely some distributed search for email addresses and at worst a search for “fresh” content to be displayed on doorway or made-for-Adsense pages or someone compiling his personal list of “spammable targets” to sell it to fellow bottom feeder spammers. In any case, the best defence is of course to not let this bot have access to one’s server in the first place and this is what I did to prevent this surprise from happening again:

Prerequisites: You need an Apache server.

1. Detection rule for User Agent
For less complicated stuff that does not require checking for multiple conditions at once I prefer using Mod SetEnvIf. As we know from the MJ12bot page, the recent versions of this bot are in the 1.2.x range. Thus we can conclude that anything older than this can be safely discarded as a fake without any grave side effects. You can place the following line in either your .htaccess or httpd.conf file:

# deny fake bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^MJ12bot/v?1\.[01]\.[0-9]{1,2}" block

What does this entry do? It checks for any User-Agent header that matches a pre 1.2.x version independent from the presence of the preceeding “v” in the version string. If there is a match, an environmental variable called “block” will be set. This “block” variable can then be used for further actions, in our case that would be denying access, of course.

2. Deny the bot from crawling our site
Now that we have the variable we need to look for, we can block any User-Agent that matches our regular expression from above:

Deny from env=block

In case you want to use it in .htaccess, this line merely needs to be placed after the SetEnvIfRule, but those who want to include it in httpd.conf, have to take care of placing it within their VirtualHost section, preferably in within a Directory or Location directive. An example as illustration:

<VirtualHost 192.168.0.1>
[...]
  # Directory permissions
  <Directory "/home/web/example.com/html">
    Options Indexes FollowSymlinks MultiViews
    AllowOverride All
    Order deny,allow
    # apply SetEnvIfRule here
    Deny from env=block
[...]

That should take care of the problem for a while. Do not forget to reload (Linux) or restart (FreeBSD) apache after having applied changes to httpd.conf, so that these changes actually take effect. Those who put it into .htaccess are already done, as this file is read each time Apache is trying to access a directory.

Here is a first batch of 8 photos which I considered worth showing:

I try to post another batch as soon as time allows.

One feature I really like is Ip aliasing, which makes it possible to assign a bunch of ip addresses to the same network interface. This comes in quite handy once you want to have separated ip addresses for virtual hosts on an Apache server or simply separated ip addresses for services you offer in your network. This feature is supported on both FreeBSD and Linux. In this article I would like to describe how this feature works on FreeBSD, a description for Linux will follow soon.

Aliases can be specified by two ways:
1. at runtime

ifconfig rl0 inet 192.168.5.23 netmask 255.255.255.255 alias up

This would use the first Realtek card with the specified ip address and bring the alias up immediately. Note, that 255.255.255.255 is intentionally chosen to avoid conflicts with the base ip address. If the address is no longer needed you would simply replace “up” with “down”:

ifconfig rl0 inet 192.168.5.23 netmask 255.255.255.255 alias down

While typing this on the console at runtime is suitable for testing purposes or as temporary measure (in case of an outage of the machine normally using the alias address), we’d certainly prefer to bring our aliases up…

2. on bootup

In this case /etc/rc.conf would be the location to add these aliases. Note, that there’s a pitfall, as the alias syntax is different from adding normal interfaces to.

ifconfig_rl0_alias0="inet 192.168.5.23 netmask 255.255.255.255"

The first alias gets number zero. So for each additional alias you’d like to have you needed to increment this value accordingly:

(still file /etc/rc.conf)

ifconfig_rl0_alias0="inet 192.168.5.23 netmask 255.255.255.255"
ifconfig_rl0_alias1="inet 192.168.7.24 netmask 255.255.255.255"

A second note: Before adding aliases you must already have assigned a base address to this interface with a reasonable subnet mask:

ifconfig_rl0="inet 192.168.7.1 netmask 255.255.255.0"

When I set up a new box I usually group base addresses and aliases separated to avoid naming conflicts. Also note, that unlike Linux FreeBSD has a different naming convention: interface names are derived from the driver, therefore 3com or Intel cards have different names. Here’s an Intel card as example:

ifconfig_fxp0="inet 192.168.5.23 netmask 255.255.255.255"

If things went well, you should see the aliases after a reboot:

tabidachi# ifconfig rl0
rl0: flags=8843<up ,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
        options=8<vlan_mtu>
        inet6 fe80::200:e8ff:fe85:dbb0%rl0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x2
        inet 192.168.0.1 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.0.255
        inet 192.168.0.2 netmask 0xffffffff broadcast 192.168.0.2
        inet 192.168.0.3 netmask 0xffffffff broadcast 192.168.0.3
        inet 192.168.0.4 netmask 0xffffffff broadcast 192.168.0.4
        inet 192.168.0.5 netmask 0xffffffff broadcast 192.168.0.5
        inet 192.168.0.6 netmask 0xffffffff broadcast 192.168.0.6
        inet 192.168.0.7 netmask 0xffffffff broadcast 192.168.0.7
        inet 192.168.0.8 netmask 0xffffffff broadcast 192.168.0.8
        inet 192.168.0.9 netmask 0xffffffff broadcast 192.168.0.9
        inet 192.168.0.10 netmask 0xffffffff broadcast 192.168.0.10
        ether 00:00:e8:85:db:b0
        media: Ethernet autoselect (100baseTX <full -duplex>)
        status: active

These addresses can now be used for any service or virtual host (Apache) running on that machine.

I do not know how the introductory track of Daenn’s release Avva on the Japanese On-Li netlabel is meant to be interpreted, but were I to describe a scenery that comes into my mind for the song Xi, it would consist of the following impressions: Veils of fog are hanging over empty streets, schematic halos of laterns, their reflections bleach the drizzle wet plaster and dark purple skies pick up the sea of lights of a nearby city. In the midst of the scenery faint sketches of a figure are swallowed by the wavering white mass. Voices, footsteps and a soaring head of emptiness.

Chorus-drenched sequences of ambiguity, sometimes accompanied by feedback, low rumble or catchy overtones are floating down a stream of unconsciousness and bring back melancholic memories of solitude. Soundscapes may not necessarily last during the course of Avva, like nourai tube with some refreshing feedback that blows away the sorrow of the previous tracks. Just by the the time some chords are emerging a hard cut follows and we are thrown into the next scenery of sinister silence. But no grinding wall of noise a la Merzbow follows up as catharsis. Instead, hello portraits a weird bleeping environment of rumbling echo loops and sample snippets. Did we lose our way? It seems not: In re tou we return back to a friendly world with happily twittering birds. Somewhere in the neighbourhood a piano picks up the introduction’s ambiguous scenery with hammering tones and clouds temporarily cover the the sun on a pale milky sky. A click and crackle loop occurs and refuses to integrate into Daenn’s music, thus remaining an unrelated artifact isolated by its own choice.

With Avva, Daenn and the On-Li netlabel delivered a pretty decent release that does not lose its charme even after several times of repeated listening, thus I can safely recommend it for downloading.

Armiarma features the Basque artist Miguel A. García aka Xedh playing with some electronic gadgets in his bedroom. And so the listener witnesses his discovery of tone generators, how to record them and in which way different menu options in his sound editor immediately change the appearance of frequency modulations. In case you are worried about the state of your hearing you can now check your limits without the need of visiting a doctor, just by means of the release’s middle section and some high end earphones (editor note: luckily, I passed the test without any problems). Stoically continues the sound check for another 10 minutes without any significant events that could be considered as musical expression, save an accidental chord, some overtones, feedback and the luxery of stereo effects. Of course Xedh’s position that this release constitute art cannot be defeated, but considering it as music and comparing it to criteria I use for other releases as well, the overall rating is rather underwhelming. In my opinion, armiarma is not really worth the time spent for downloading and listening, but as usual your mileage varies.

In their latest release on Homophoni called in camera, Asher explore disturbances, feedback, crackles and sampling artifacts and integrate them into sketchy musical contures like isolated minor chords. The result is quite interesting at first, although not terribly thrilling as it somehow lacks an decisive idea that would make this experimentation distiguishable from a dozen other self-centred laptop autism projects. Where field recordings appear they are linearly lined up with merely a slight level of processing, which is a rather dull approach to mastering one’s audio processing gear in my opinion. As the release is painfully proceeding, it gradually loses the focus: Single sound snippets become the only major event and thus we are confronted with someone walking down a road, twittering birds, waves hitting a shoreline or alternating levels of noise and tape hiss. Sadly this happens without the foggiest idea about how to put these events together to an intriguing presentation. Perhaps Asher really tried hard to accomplish something but their obvious lack of talent in regard to (ab)using their gadgets in creative and unconventional ways severely impacts the originality of and desire for in camera.