Sun, 30 Jan 2005

More Mor Lam

Good to see some Wikipedia has an excellent article on Mor Lam music, complete with articles on my favourites, Jintara and Banyen. Now I know the amazing little acapella sections at the start of some Mor Lam tracks are called Gern.

I'll be off to Thailand again Real Soon Now, apart from some fun family stuff to do I can update my Morlam CD and VCD collection. Interesting that one sensible approach to preventing music piracy that I have seen in Thailand is by.. actually pricing the CDs reasonably.. with legit audio CDs and VCDs costing only a few baht more than the badly made pirate copies, buying the real deal is a no brainer there.

Posted at: 22:35 | category: /bleeps | # | 0 comments

FUTON = GET FUCKED ?

Interesting to note that one of my current favourites, Anglo/Thai electro band Futon have a member who was involved in English dark tech/house act Get Fucked, their album Dot to Dot was quite a fave of mine a few years ago.

Posted at: 21:57 | category: /bleeps | # | 0 comments

if it's the religion of truth..

..then why tell lies?

but all of this can be understood perfectly in the the context of a particularly vicious struggle between two similar but competing meme complexes.

Religions are special because they use just about every meme-trick in the book (which is presumably why they last so long and infect so many brains). Think of it this way. The idea of hell is initially useful because the fear of hell reinforces socially desirable behaviour. Now add the idea that unbelievers go to hell, and the meme and any companions are well protected. The idea of God is a natural companion meme, assuaging fear and providing (spurious) comfort. The spread of the meme-complex is aided by exhortations to convert others and by tricks such as the celibate priesthood. Celibacy is a disaster for genes, but will help spread memes since a celibate priest has more time to spend promoting his faith.

Another trick is to value faith and suppress the doubt that leads every child to ask difficult questions like "where is hell?" and "If God is so good why did those people get tortured?". Note that science (and some forms of Buddhism) do the opposite and encourage doubt.

Finally, once you've been infected with these meme-complexes they are hard to get rid of. If you try to throw them out, some even protect themselves with last-ditch threats of death, ex-communication, or burning in hell-fire for eternity. - from here

Posted at: 01:34 | category: /rants/religion | # | 0 comments

Mon, 17 Jan 2005

no god

Getting quite fed up with all the religious bullshit going down... why don't these people think for themselves instead of taking the easy way out and going for voluntary self brainwashing.

GOD DOES NOT EXIST
And furthermore...

Paraphrased from my good mate Jon's web page.

I could go on and on about the various logical fallacies and inherent contradictions in religion but it's a waste of time.. just observe the strange blank facial expression of a fundy whenever you catch them out as the cogs in their brain jam up and then the brainwashing kicks in and changes the subject for them.

Posted at: 23:21 | category: /rants/religion | # | 0 comments

Sun, 16 Jan 2005

if war is a racket - then make it perpetual

I must be getting old.. I have started to actually take an interest in my superannuation, and associated once boring things like investment and managed funds and stuff.. this has also lead me to attempt to soak up some info on ethical investment and online investing.. once I have got a handle on it I might post more but right now my disclaimer is I don't know shit.

But as a counter to the managed funds with an ethical bent I came across the VICE FUND which invests in weapons, booze and porn - all no doubt good earners.. this also led me then to the more directly war oriented Perpetual War Folio and the Axis of Evil Fund.. lists of companies raking in big bucks given a Bush induced state of perpetual war. Interesting to ponder who has the most to gain financially from keeping the US in a perpetual state of terror alert and war.. and who is down with the current US Govt.. and how closely these two groups overlap.

But I think this was all figured out by ages ago by a US Marine when he figured out that war is a racket.

Posted at: 08:54 | category: /rants | # | 0 comments

search engine trendwatcher blog

My good pal Leigh has created an interesting tool at http://trendwatcher.koan.net/ where you can sign up and graph the populatiry of various search engine terms. waycool!

Posted at: 00:43 | category: /links | # | 0 comments

Sat, 15 Jan 2005

XenoLinux rocks

I have been messing around with Xen for work and it is excellent. It's a bit fiddly to set up, so not for those who haven't messed around with kernel compiles and other nerdy stuff, but once working works very well, without the licensing fees of VMware and a lot less performance overhead than user Mode Linux (according to the site).

I see the founders have just made a company XenSource to make some dosh on it, and got some funding, hope it all goes very well for them, and Xen remains free.

Posted at: 22:06 | category: / | # | 0 comments

trivial but useful hack for redirecting rsync through a firewall

rsync is an excellent tool for replicating directory trees on a drive or across a network. You can specify the transport layer for network copies, it defaulting to use ssh. The below script just pipelines two sshs together cleanly to use as a the transport, to replicate a directory tree to/from a server inside a firewall:

example command line from outside the firewall: 

ENDHOST=192.168.1.20 rsync --delete  -vzaP --rsh ./dssh.sh firewall.example.org:/backups/ /backup/fubar/
In this case ENDHOST is set to the IP address of the endpoint host inside the firewall, while firewall.example.org is the hostname of the firewall we have ssh access to to get to the firewall.

dssh.sh consists of the following 

#!/bin/bash
# simple ssh wrapper so we can treat 2 sshs pipelining as one..
MIDHOST=$1
shift 1
exec ssh $MIDHOST ssh $ENDHOST $*
Nice and simple, and saves a lot of messing about with port forwarding, escaping of command line args etc.

Posted at: 21:59 | category: /nerdy | # | 0 comments