Song Of The Week: March 30, 2007

On 3/30/2007, In Music, sotw, By Will

This week we return to that late-80’s Wash­ing­ton, DC sound. In the early 90’s, I was so into the DC music scene that I could tell you the mem­ber of just about every band going back to 1980, and I could count on one hand the num­ber of Dischord Records releases I did not own, and had not spun at least a dozen times.

When I was play­ing with Sub­stance in 1987, we had the plea­sure of open­ing for this DC band I’d never heard of called Soul­side, an insanely intense band dri­ven by the things that made “that DC sound”: emo­tion, pol­i­tics, and pas­sion about play­ing music that meant some­thing. The show was out­side of Louisville on the back of a flatbed trailer by a barn on a farm in south­ern Indi­ana. It was hot, it was loud, and it was fun.

I had another chance to open for Soul­side at Tewligan’s Tav­ern in Louisville, when I was in Cere­bel­lum, which to this day remains one of my favorite shows of all time.

This tune comes from Soulside’s sec­ond record, Trig­ger, which is in my all-time top 10 list of favorite albums. Enjoy.

Soul­side — Trigger.mp3 — from the Trig­ger LP.
Click arrow to play, or right-click and “Save As” to download

 
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Song Of The Week: March 23, 2007

On 3/23/2007, In Music, sotw, By Will

In 1991 I was play­ing drums with Crain, hav­ing just recorded our Speed LP, and head­ing out on a month-long, coast-to-coast, book-your-own tour in a big-ass 70’s Dodge Ram exten­sion van.

Our first stop on the tour was in Wash­ing­ton, DC, where we had some stu­dio time at Inner Ear Stu­dio, and where we were to meet up with the band we would be tour­ing with, Cir­cus Lupus.

I had seen this band about a year ear­lier when they came through Louisville, and I knew the singer, Chris Thomp­son, from the band Igni­tion and other DC-based punk acts.

Any­way, this song, Pop Man, comes from the then-unreleased LP they had just recorded, Solid Brass, which hap­pened to be pro­duced by none other than Joan Jett. This became my favorite song by Cir­cus Lupus, and I always ended up singing along from beside the stage each night when they played it. It’s catchy, it’s edgy and raw, and of course, it rocks.

Pop Man by Cir­cus Lupus, from the album Solid Brass.
Blue arrow to play, right-click and Save As to download.

If any of you ex-Circus Lupus folks stum­ble across this, drop me a line!

 
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The Future of Music

On 3/21/2007, In Internet, Music, Tech, By Will

A post over at TechCrunch pretty much sums up my feel­ing of the music indus­try today. Things have got­ten com­pletely ridicu­lous, with the RIAA now suing their cus­tomer base, stron­garm­ing them into set­tling out of court, and doing all of this based on IP addresses, for cry­ing out loud.

Peo­ple want music the way it should be — free and good! When will they under­stand that?

 
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Song Of The Week: March 16, 2007

On 3/16/2007, In Music, sotw, By Will

I’m gonna start some­thing ambi­tious here, and fea­ture a Song Of The Week. The songs I’m pick­ing will likely be from way off the beaten path, but are songs that I think need to be heard for one rea­son or another.

The first song I am going to fea­ture is by a band called The Did­jits (more at Wikipedia), who were a Chicago-based trio from the late 80’s to the early 90’s. I was way into their first two albums, Fiz­zjob and Hey Jud­ester. My first expo­sure to The Did­jits was when the band I was play­ing in at the time, Cere­bel­lum, opened up for them and Squir­rel Bait on new years eve, 1988.

This tune pretty much sum­ma­rizes their almost rock-a-billy, but still punk-ish, and a wee bit surf-ish, style of insan­ity. What­ever the case, they were all about rock­ing. I had the plea­sure of see­ing them two more times, once in Louisville when I was asked to come up and sing a song on stage with them, and once in Lex­ing­ton, Ky. Wish these guys were still around.

King Carp — from the album “Hey, Jud­ester” (1988)
Right-click and “Save As” to down­load, or press blue arrow to stream it.

Lyrics:

Pull my line, pull my line
I dive the deep­est, I’m King Carp
And you know I really dig your sexy legs

Yeah I’m the fish with the bad drug prob­lem
I’m the fish with the brand new car
It’s a 1964 ‘Cuda, I think

I am the king of the fish King Carp, King Carp
I am the bad­dest dude, King Carp
And you know what my fins can do
I’m dri­ving just for you

On my way back to land and I have to reach out my hand
To cush­ion my fall as I hit the fine, warm sand
(some­thing some­thing) baboon
And a fish joins in on basoon
And he sports a styl­ish hairdo, like Vidal Sasoon

I am the king of the fish King Carp, King Carp
I am the bad­dest dude, King Carp
And you know what my fins can do
I’m dri­ving just for you

Big bad fish goin down to the bot­tom
(repeat first verse, chorus)

 
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The Biggest Shot In The Foot Ever?

On 3/16/2007, In OS, Software, Tech, Windows, By Will

For the last few weeks, the techie blogs have been cir­cu­lat­ing sto­ries about how Microsoft Win­dows Vista can be installed and used for free for 120 days. You see, Microsoft gives you 30 days to try it out for noth­ing, but then they will dis­arm it and require you to pur­chase a license to con­tinue using it.

Some­one found out that Microsoft had built in a way to extend that 30 trial to 120 days through a lit­tle reg­istry tweak.

Well, now some­one has fig­ured out how to extend it indef­i­nitely, not by hack­ing or crack­ing the oper­at­ing sys­tem, but by using the built-in tools that Microsoft included in the oper­at­ing system.

From DailyCupOfTech.com:

“It appears that crack­ers need not break Win­dows Vista acti­va­tion because Microsoft has done it for them! Brian Liv­ingston of Win­dow Secrets writes in Microsoft allows bypass of Vista acti­va­tion about how to allow you to keep your Vista box run­ning indef­i­nitely with­out acti­vat­ing it.“

It is likely that MS will try and fix this through some future patch, but what will they break in doing so? They obvi­ously had a need to pro­vide this func­tion­al­ity for some reason.

Now that I’ve aban­doned Winders on the home desk­top com­pletely for Red­Hat Fedora linux, this makes me chuckle. How­ever, maybe I’ll give it a shot and see what happens!

 
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Part II: Setting up Apache, Tomcat, and mod_jk on RHEL4

On 3/15/2007, In Internet, Tech, Web Dev, Work, By Will

After man­ag­ing to get Tomcat5.5 work­ing with Apache2 using mod_jk, my next ven­ture was to enable SSL using a self-signed cer­tifi­cate in Tom­cat. This proved to be quite a task.

The sys­tem I’m set­ting up is run­ning Red­Hat Enter­prise Linux 4.4. I installed all the offi­cial Red­Hat RPM’s to get Tom­cat and Apache talk­ing together with mod_jk (see Part I of this tuto­r­ial).

After 4 days of bang­ing my head on my key­board, I noticed that when I would run:

#java -version

It spit out this:

Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build pxi32dev-20061002a (SR3) )
IBM J9 VM (build 2.3, J2RE 1.5.0 IBM J9 2.3 Linux x86-32 j9vmxi3223-20061001 (JIT enabled)
J9VM - 20060915_08260_lHdSMR
JIT - 20060908_1811_r8
GC - 20060906_AA)
JCL - 20061002

This let me know that I am sup­posed to be using IBM’s ver­sion of java, which appar­ently is the default on my Red­Hat sys­tem, not Sun’s ver­sion. I think some­where along the way I down­loaded Sun’s jvm, and I assumed that I was sup­posed to be using it’s key­tool to gen­er­ate an SLL cer­tifi­cate for Tom­cat, but such is not the case. This caused me much con­fu­sion, but here’s how I ended up fix­ing it:

1. Gen­er­ate Key­store file
(NOTE: all of this assumes you already have Apache con­fig­ured with SSL. I used OpenSSL, which I don’t go into here, but there are loads of resources online for you, and it’s rel­a­tively easy to do).

Assum­ing you have the default Red­Hat java rpm already installed, run this:

# /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-ibm-1.5.0.3/jre/bin/keytool -genkey -alias tomcat -keyalg RSA

NOTE: I used Tomcat’s default pass­word of ‘changeit’ when prompted.

The key­store file gets dropped in the home direc­tory of what­ever user you are logged in as. I was root, so I then moved the key­store file to the tom­cat home direc­tory:

# mv /root/.keystore /etc/tomcat5/
# chown tomcat.tomcat /etc/tomcat5/.keystore

2. Next you have to edit Tomcat’s server.xml file

# nano /etc/tomcat5/server.xml

Uncom­ment the SSL con­nec­tor and set it up like so:


<!-- Define a SSL HTTP/1.1 Connector on port 8443 -->
<connector port="8443" maxHttpHeaderSize="8192"
maxThreads="150" minSpareThreads="25" maxSpareThreads="75"
enableLookups="false" disableUploadTimeout="true"
acceptCount="100" scheme="https" secure="true"
clientAuth="false" algorithm="IbmX509" sslProtocol="SSL"
keystoreFile="/etc/tomcat5/.keystore"
keystorePass="changeit" />

Note that I added algorithm=“IbmX509” and I changed sslProtocol=“TLS” to sslProtocol=“SSL”. This is nec­es­sary to get things work­ing with IBM’s jvm.

3. Restart every­thing

# service tomcat5 stop
# service tomcat5 start
# apachectl restart

If you were fol­low­ing along from my last arti­cle, then browse to:

https://yoursite.com:8443/hello.jsp

If all went well, you should see the hello.jsp page show­ing you the sys­tem time!

 
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