Posts Tagged ‘quite some time’

Holy fifteen Hierarchs Martyrs of Tiberipolis a saints of high veneration in Eastern Chrstiandom and Bulgaria in Medieval times

Monday, November 28th, 2022

Holy_15_Martyrs_of_Tiveriopolis_orthodox-christian-Icon

The martyrs of Tiberiopolis are the bishops Timothy of Tiberiopolis and Theodore of Nicaea, who participated in the First Ecumenical Council in 325 – both escaped from Nicaea, the priests Peter, John, Sergius, Theodore and Nicephorus, the deacons Basil and Thomas, the monks Hierotheus, Daniel, Chariton, Socrates , Comasius and Eusebius, were little known saints today in Christiandom but back in time these saints has been considered of a great importance and their intercession prayers were often seeken throughout the Eastern Church in Byzantium, Bulgaria and all the Chriatinized lands and perhaps even in the west. 

They were executed on November 28, 362 during the persecutions against Christians carried out by Emperor Julian the Apostate.Since Timothy died quickly due to his age, he was replaced by the layman Etimasius.

After their execution, the fifteen martyrs were buried by the local Christians in stone sarcophagi on which their names were inscribed.

Remains-of-original-Basilica-in-honour-of_15_Martyrs_of_Tiveriopolis

Remains of original Basilica with Tombs of the fifteen Holy martyrs

Later, the ancient Tiveriopolis (today Strumica situated in Macedonia), where the tombs were located, was destroyed by the Avars invasions, but the memory of the martyrs' graves remains in local legends for quite some time as there were many miracles happening on their tomb.

After the conversion of Bulgaria to Christianity in year 864, by Holy Prince (King) Boris, the Baptizer King immediately ordered the Comite (his servent governor) in Taradin, who ruled these lands, to search for the relics of the fifteen Holy Tiveriopol martyrs.

According to the original plan, the holy relics were supposed to be placed in the cathedral church on the Bregalnitsa river, which was being built at that time, but since the local population complained that their spiritual heritage and protection of the area was being taken away and there was a danger of revolts, a compromise was reached to take only the relics of three saints, Timothy, Komasius and Eusebius, and the others to remain in Strumica.

Sts_15_Martyrs_of_Tiveriopolis_Strumica-church

Contemporary Church dedicated to 15 Holy Hierarchs in country of Macedonia

The relics of the other saints were transferred to the new church at the time of King Simeon I (The Great).

According to the famous Medieval Theologian and Historian Theophylact of Ohrid from the beginning of the 12th century, a glorification was composed for the martyrs (which is a christian practice to glorify saints that continues to these day in the Church after new saints gets canonized), and the service was written and held in Bulgarian, which at that time was already having authentic cyrillic letters invented and translated by saint Kliment Ohridski and his pupils which just in western Bulgaria country to 3500. Some of those saint Kliment Ohridski (saint Clement of Ohrid) desciples priests as we know from the sources , composed the glorification church service in honor of the 15 Holy Hierarchs of Tiberipolis (The old Roman name for the area).

Sts_15_Martyrs_of_Tiveriopolis_icon

During the Ottoman invasion, the church of Bregalnica where relics held was destroyed and the holies were again lost.
Only saint Peter's hand remained in Strumica, but during the Balkan Wars in 1913 it was taken by the Greeks to Kukush ( Kilkis ) (Aegian Macedonia).

Sts_15_Martyrs_of_Tiveriopolis_Strumica-Kilkis-church

Contemporary Church in Aegian Greece dedicated to 15 Holy Hierarchs of Tiberiopolis

In Strumica, however the memory of the martyrs remains, whose memory is remember by the local Bulgarians at the place where, according to tradition, they were once killed.
A modern church temple was built on the same site, which is the successor of several older temples.

Below is the list with names and the position each of this holy man had, before their martyrdom:

Theodore Θεόδωρος bishop of Nicaea
Timothy Τιμόθεος of Tiberiopolis, bishop of Nicaea
Theodore Θεόδωρος priest Tiberiopolis
Nicephorus Νικηφόρος priest of Tiberiopolis
John Ioannis priest Tiberiopolis
Peter Πέτρος priest Tiberiopolis
Sergius Σέργιος priest of Tiberiopolis
Thomas Θωμάς deacon of Tiberiopolis
Vasilii Vasileios deacon of Tiberiopolis
Komasius Κομάσιος monk Nicaea
Eusebius Ευσέβιος monk Nicaea
Daniel Δανιήλ monk Tiberiopolis
Socrates Σωκράτης monk of Tiberiopolis
Chariton Χαρίτων monk Tiberiopolis
Hierotheus Ιερόθεος monk of Tiberiopolis
Etimasius Ετιμάσιος a layman of Tiberiopolis

The 15 Holy Martyrs, today are highly venerated in region of Macedonia (today country of Macedonia), as Macedonia has been historically part of Bulgarian Kingdom as well as in Greece who are considered patron saints of city of Kikis (central Macedonia today in Greece), where the local Church of Transfiguration was deciced to be reconsecacrated in favor of the 15 holy hierarchs of Tiberipolis as the hand of saint Peter from the 15 martyrs and an old icon was brough their by war emigrants escaping the Balkan wars, this hand is kept their even today.

Hand-of-saint_Peter-15-tiberioupolis-martyrs-in-Kilkis-church

Hand of Saint Peter from the 15 Tiberoupolis Martyrs holy relic

 

The greatest tracker (demoscene) composers / Purple Motion, Necros, Skaven, Pro-XeX

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

For all of us who yet remember the Demoscene , Purple Motion, Necros and Skaven are absolutely legendary names.
Their music work contribution for tracked Electronic music, video games music and general development of the IT culture is truly invaluable.

Many younger computer users (I’m 26 now), and probably IT starters would probably never heard about neither Demoscene nor Purple Motion or the other three patriarchs of tracked Electronic music.

This musicians have a special value for people who has ever composed music with Impulse Tracker and the many other programs to compose music from samples.

Purple Motion has his own home page for quite some time now, however I just noticed that he has recently turned his home page to a PHPBB Forum where there is plenty of information about the composer as well as open discission and many questions and answers of people who are interested into the great electronic composer.

The “foster-father” of tracked electronic music is Necros.
Necros is the Artistic Pseudonim of Andrew Sega, probably his most notable piece of music work is called mech8Mechanism 8 .

The third by significance electronic musician who is probably known by the many old school computer users and musicians is Skaven .
Skaven is part of the Future Crew .

One of the most notable Skaven music works is actually the soundtrack song produced for the Second RealityDemo .
It’s worthy to say few words about Future Crew as well, Future Crew (link to wikipedia)
– “Future Crew is a now-defunct group of Finnish computer coders and artists who created PC demos and software, active mostly between 1992 and 1994.”
You might also consider checking Necros profile in modarchive
There you can find plenty if not all of his works for download and listening.
A descendant of the the 3 up-mentioned wonderful tracker musicians is Pro-XeX also known under the artistic pseudonim Necroleak
Though his works are much later first originating from the distant 1995 his works are comparable by quality and goodness to (PM, Necros and Skaven’s works).
If you really want to completely turn back some memories about the good old times when we used to use DOS environment and to listen the great old MOD, S3M, XM etc. songs with the good old Cubic player which is already available under the free port called Open Cubic Player

A port is even available for most UNIX platforms You can download and install the Linux / Unix port of Cubic player here plus on the below link you will find some brief instructions on how to make it work on Debian, Ubuntu, Redhat, Gentoo and FreeBSD.

Under Debian Lenny, Squeeze/Sid installing opencubicplayer is pretty easy and comes to simple installation via apt-get as follows:

debian-desktop:~# apt-get install opencubicplayer

First time I’ve noticed Cubic player I should admit it was a real joy to know there is already a Unix port since Linux and BSD are my OS choice for almost 10 years already.
Another possible way to play the old school songs on Linux is through the well known console player mikmod
I’ve prepared a downloadable song archive for each of the 3 great electronic composers (Purple Motion, Necros, Skaven) on my personal webserver.

Below I present you with links to their music.

Download all tracked music by Purple Motion

Download Necros composed music works

Download the songs composed by Skaven

Download a collection of all composed songs by Pro-XeX / Necroleak

I have few other composers who are very liked by me, their music works can be obtained through my tracked music tiny collection available here

Many of the demos created and works by Jonne Valtonen known under the artistic pseudonim Purple Motion are currently uploaded and available for watching via Youtube – (search) Purple Motion

I’ll close this post with a the Award Winning Demos (Second Reality and Panic) which are the most notable produced Computer Simulation Demos of all times created by the collossal Future Crew group.


Second Reality by Future Crew [ Winner Demo of Assembly ’93 competition ]


Panic by Future Crew


Toasted by Cubic Team & $een
Also don’t forget to check The ultimate source for MOD Music – modarchive.org

Installing XMMS on Debian Squeeze from a Package / Installing XMMS on Debian – the debian way

Tuesday, July 17th, 2012

installing xmms on debian squeeze linux playing free software song green skin screenshot

I use Debian Linux for my desktop for quite some time; Even though there are plenty of MP3 / CD players around in Debian, I’m used to the good old XMMS, hence I often prefer to use XMMS to play my music instead of newer players like RhythmBox or audacious.
Actually audacious is not bad substitute for XMMS and is by default part of Debian but to me it seems more buggy and tends to crash during playing some music formats more than xmms ….

As most people might know, XMMS is no longer supported in almost all modern Linux distributions, so anyone using Debian, Ubuntu or other deb derivative Linux would have to normally compile it from source.
Compiling from source is time consuming and I think often it doesn’t pay back the effort. Thanksfully, though not officially supported by Debian crew XMMS still can be installed using a deb xmms prebuilt package repository kindly provided by a hacker fellow knuta.

Using the pre-build deb packages, installing xmms on new Debian installs comes to:

debian:~# echo 'deb http://www.pvv.ntnu.no/~knuta/xmms/squeeze ./' >> /etc/apt/sources.list
debian:~# echo 'deb-src http://www.pvv.ntnu.no/~knuta/xmms/squeeze ./' >> /etc/apt/sources.list
debian:~# apt-get update && apt-get -y install xmms

There are also deb xmms built for Ubuntu, so Ubuntu users could install xmms using repositories:

deb http://www.pvv.ntnu.no/~knuta/xmms/karmic ./
deb-src http://www.pvv.ntnu.no/~knuta/xmms/karmic ./
That’s all now xmms is ready to use. Enjoy 🙂

I blog again :)

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009

I haven’t blogged for quite some time. First I glorify the Almighty God our Blessed Holy Trinity for his abundant mercy towards me!! Glory be to the Father, The Son and The Holy Spirit! Now and forever and ever! Amen. I start with this loud words and I have so many things to say. But yes yesterday a joyful news came to me it seems my Exemption letter for Internship has been Approved! I prayed to God that he make them approve this exemption letter because I want to graduate asap and go back to Bulgaria. Here in the Netherlands I feel really terrible, the spiritual state of the country is simply softly said terrible, even though they seem to be an advanced country from the tangible aspect of the things from the intangible/spiritually poor. Not to say that I feel like the devil is controlling most of their lives already. The complete mix of negroes, chinese, indonesians and all other type of races makes the country mixed. Here in the air it feels like a spirits of gluttony are crawling around all the time, also quite often I feel like madness crossing around the air. Sometimes I have that strange thoughts in my mind that something is really wrong with that country. Maybe I had a nice point about that.This SHR project is getting schizophrenic, anyways glory be to God for his abundant mercy towards me and sustaining me always. Yesterday was a terrible day I felt so confused such a profound spiritual sorrow was rulling me that I can hardly bear it, I had a couple of terrible days this days. Since some time I am suspecting there is something wrong here, everytime I have classes with most of the teachers here I feel terrible afterwards and I usually need a couple of days to recover to some sane state. In their presence I experience profound spiritual sorrow and suffering, I’ve been in a similar spiritual states before and I know that this simply can be described in the biblical word hell. Since some time I suspect something is wrong with this guys (I mean the tachers), a couple of days Mr. Joop Vinke the guy who seems to be like a dean to us mentioned during some of the theater sports answered my question where have been yesterday “to the rotary club” and then he added like every other day before, it was not clear is he mean it or not. My suspects became even stronger, because I know that one of my employers used to be attending rotary club as well I know some really terrible things happened in his life and I think he quit that club, anyways. Last week on Friday I met one of my other teachers (Mr. Da Ponte) and I spoke with him, the conversation flowed as he mentioned something about the Lord making the sun circle around the earth, I was interested by his statement so asked him if he believes in God and if he is a roman catholic. He said he is not roman catholic and then what followed was a sort of preach about what he believes and his God as I continusly asked him questions. From his description I left with the impression that he is probably believing in the same God of the masonry (I’ve red about that just a couple of days before). So many things matched, the teacher even mentioned that a lot of teachers in that school are also believing in God and I was left with the impression that he meant the same God as he believes, so I make the connection that they are probably rotarians, masons or taking participation in some sort of organization like that which has to deal pretty much with the occult. A couple of days before I spoke with a brother in Christ (Stelian) and I explained him what is happening and about this BHC (business ethics classes), I explained him how much they want you to accept what they say and if you don’t you are not worthy, I also explained to Stelio the whole story and how this guys are able to make you feel really bad. Since this guys tried to teach us their methods and I tried a couple of times their methods and saw the effect how by doing “something” “unconsciously” you can alter the other into a state of broken spiritness and terrible suffering while at the same time you feel overflowed with joy, a sort of stealing his living power or Angels so to say. I don’t want to enter into details about that since its to me surely related with demonic manifestation. I’ve also remembered that one of the guest lecturers that Mr. Vinke has brought here mentioned that he is rotarian, the coincidences started becoming too much seriously. I also spoke with a student who has graduated and I asked him if he feels that bad thing inside of him, I was stunned when he confirmed. Also in that SHR project it really is schizophrenic I feel that spiritually something really wrong is happening there I started thinking and I could recognize many of the things done in classes of Mr. Vinke has to deal with the paranormal even though not openly showed, even his theater sports has a lot of unconscious spiritism involved, not to mention his Werewolf games including vampires, whitches etc. a lot of the theater sport games include games which include things with dying, you play dead etc., etc. I also have noticed that teachers often are pointing me and saying that I’m not changing, many of the students here are changing seriously for bad. I know by my saviour Jesus Christ who said “by their fruits you will know them”, seeing their fruit suffering, confusion, hate, lies etc. I started being more and more convinced that this guys are dealing with the devil. So if my theory is right and I think it probably is, most of the teachers are members of the rotary club. Maybe they even see it as harmless way to improve their business contacts but I know this is not the case, and this guys are giving oaths, having their strange believes spiritual leaders and do worship the devil even though not openly. I shared all that with a couple of my colleagues and many of them probably just thought that I’m out of my mind. But the holy spirit in me testified all that the things I am thinking are true. I’ve shared what is happening with a brother in Christ (a priest) in the orthodox Church Bulgaria and he said he is gonna mention my name on the altar before God on the Divine Liturgies. I guess this matters because today even though I am not completely okay I feel much relieved and better and I feel God! Glory be to the Immortal and Holy of Israel now and unto ages of ages. I try to learn the gospel a bit early in the morning and a bit late at night before I go to bed I also try to pray a bit each morning and evening and trust the Lord to keep me and protect me from the schemes of the evil one! Yesterday I was at Ina’s place and tried to explain her that this project we do now has something to deal with evil spiritism. I even have suspected that this guys from the rotary club ask their members to share information about certain people that the rotary members work with and then try to bring some curses and spells if they see somebody as a problem to their practices. I suspect that this guys somehow use their members as a channels to spread their evil spirituality. I’ve also taken the advice of Stelio to start caring an Icon in me whenever I go to school. Quite often here and especially in the dormitory I feel something is happening inside of me, my heart starts beating unsteady I also feel spirits flying around and trying sort of trying to conquer me this more or less has to deal with their broken spirituality here. Often I feel completely exhausted like somebody stealing my living power and willingness. Also I have noticed that here in their discoteques, they don’t allow you to enter with a hat? My assumption is that there are somethings placed in the discoteques which has to deal with inducing thoughts in you. On saturday I and Sali entered into a discoteque, I was not so willing so I’ve removed my hat I’ve borrowed temporary from Sali. After being in the discoteque on the day after and on Monday I had terrible headache and felt weak and pretty much like almost dying, Also I felt something on my forehead happening, just like I felt on a numerous times the Holy Spirit annointance and the Lord’s spiritual sign on my forehead, I’ve red in revelation that the Antichrist is going to put something on ppl’s forehead and and their right hands I’m more and more starting to think that this in some phase is already working, I’ve felt aches on my right hand on a numerous occasions, here often Its like I fight for my spiritual survivance. People around I see as they’re dead and just living to consume “limed tombs” as they are called in the gospel. I know that all I’ve written here might seem like too much of a conspiracy, however I’m pretty much sure that many of the things I suppose are true to a certain high degree or even completely.END—–

How to make NAT enable hosts in a local network to access the internet, create port forwarding to local IPs behind the router using iptables

Tuesday, August 23rd, 2011

I’m bulding new iptables firewall on one Linux server. The Debian GNU/Linux is required to act as firewall do Network Adress Translation for a small network of office PCs as well as forward some of the inbound ports to hosts from the local network located behind the router.

The local network besides the router had an IP addressing in the class C network e.g. (192.168.1.1-255)

First I procceded and enabled the Network Address Translation via the Linux kernel variable:

linux:~# sysctl -w net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
linux:~# echo 'net.ipv4.ip_forward=1' >> /etc/sysctl.conf

Initially I even forgot to switch on the net.ipv4.ip_forward to 1 (by default this value is set to 0) – GNU/Linux’s default network behaviour is not predetermined to act as network router.
However, since I haven’t configured Network Address Translation for quite some time it completely slipped my mind!

Anyways next the actual iptables rule which makes NAT possible I used is:

linux:~# /sbin/iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 192.168.1.0/24 ! -d 192.168.1.0/24 -j SNAT --to-source xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

Whether xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is the External IP address assigned to the router on eth0

With this very simple rules now Network the local network is capable of accessing the Internet withotu problem.

It’s a good time to say that still many system administrators, still erroneously use MASQUERADE rules instead of SNAT .
IP MASQUERADING is an ancestry from ipchains and these days should be completely abandonded, especially where no often change of primary IP address to access the internet is made.
For dial-ups or other kind of networking, where the IP addresses are often changed still IP MASQUERADING might be a good idea though.

My next goal was to make the Linux router to do port forwarding of Traffic which arrives on port 80 to a IIS server assigned with a local IP address of 192.168.1.5
I did the webserver (port 80), port forwarding from IP xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx to 192.168.1.5 with the iptables rule:

linux:~# /sbin/iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -d xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/32 -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -j DNAT --to-destination 192.168.1.5:80

There was a requirement to do port forwarding for a Windows remote Desktop running on standard port 3389 from the router to the internal Windows IP address running the IIS webserver, however the company required me to only allow access to the rdesktop 3389 port to certain real IP addresses.
Initially I thought about using the above PREROUTING rule which makes the port redirection to the IIS server and only change port 80 to port 3389 , and then use filter table INPUT chain rules like:

/sbin/iptables -A INPUT -s xx1.xx2.xx3.xx4,1xx,2xx,3xx,4xx,xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx -p tcp -m tcp --dport 3389 -j ACCEPT/sbin/iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 3389 -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-port-unreachable
32

However this did not work out, so I decided to give a try to do the same within the filter table using the FORWARD chain, like so:

FORWARD/sbin/iptables -A FORWARD -p tcp -m tcp -s xx1.xx2.xx3.xx4,1xx,2xx,3xx,4xx,xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx -p tcp -m tcp --dport 3389 -j ACCEPT
/sbin/iptables -A FORWARD -p tcp -m tcp --dport 3389 -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-port-unreachable

Adding this rules did not added any filtering to the forwarded remote desktop port. I suspected that somehow probably my above PREROUTING nat rules are read before any other rules and therefore automatically allows any IP address to port fortward traffic.
I’ve checked the iptables documentation and it seems my guess was partially right.

When some kind of network traffic enters the iptables firewall it first goes through the PREROUTING channel and then the traffic flows in a certain order.
iptables packet flow diagram

The iptables network packets flow is clearly seen in above’s diagram a thorough looks gives a very good idea on how packet is being processed by iptables

Finally as I couldn’t think about a good solution on how to only filter the port redirected traffic, which always firstly entered in the POSTROUTING chain, I’ve consulted with the guys in irc.freenode.net in #Netfilter.

I’m quite thanksful as a guy nicknamed Olipro has given me a pretty good picture on the port forwarding POSTROUTING problem and has provided me with a very logical easy and great fix.
He suggested that I only do port forwarding for certain IP addresses instead of allowing all IP addresses and then lookup for a way to allow only some of them and filter the rest.

The iptables rule to restrict the incoming traffic to the remote desktop forwarded port 3389 to few only allowed IP addresses looks like so:

linux:~# /sbin/iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -d xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/32 -s xx1.xx2.xx3.xx4,1xx,2xx,3xx,4xx,xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx -p tcp -m tcp –dport 3389 -j DNAT –to-destination 192.168.1.5:3389

Now the three sample IPs passed xx1.xx2.xx3.xx4,1xx,2xx,3xx,4xx,xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx has added to port forward traffic on 3389 to 192.168.1.5

By the way I did not know that newer versions of iptables support passing by multiple IP addresses to the –source or –destination IP. This is really great feature I’ve learned from the good guys from #Netfilter. However one should be careful when using the multiple IPs with -s or -d, it’s really important that the passed consequent IPs has no space between the , delimiter.

Now that’s all my task is completed. All computerse inside the Network 192.168.1.1-255 on the Linux router freely can access the Internet, all IPs are also capable to access the IIS server located behind the NAT as well as only certain IPs are capable of accessing to the IIS remote desktop.
Hope the article helps somebody 😉

Bulgarian Orthodox Monastery st. martyr George Zograph few monks songs from Holy mount Athos for download

Sunday, April 10th, 2011

Zograph Monastery Holy Mount Athos complex distant picture

A friend of mine who is a devoted Orthodox Christian (and ipodqkon Georgi), regularly visits Holy Mount Athos as a pilgrim.
On a few times he has been there serving to the workman who are currently restoring a number of monastery building which has been abandoned for quite some time.

Every Sunday morning he also goes to the Monastery Church St. George Zograph for the monks Holy Liturgy service.
He send me few recordings he made with his phone during the Holy Liturgy monks chanting. The recording’s quality is quite raw as however still it’s very invaluable piece of spiritual music, which I think every spiritual person will highly regard and enjoy.

Here are the 12 songs which he send me over skype I hope the songs, will be enjoyable and a spiritual blessing to some Christian brothers and sisters out there:

Zograph Monks Church Service Chanting – Song 1
Zograph Monks Church Service Chanting – Song 2
Zograph Monks Church Service Chanting – Song 3
Zograph Monks Church Service Chanting – Song 4
Zograph Monks Church Service Chanting – Song 5
Zograph Monks Church Service Chanting – Song 6
Zograph Monks Church Service Chanting – Song 7
Zograph Monks Church Service Chanting – Song 8
Zograph Monks Church Service Chanting – Song 9
Zograph Monks Church Service Chanting – Song 10
Zograph Monks Church Service Chanting – Song 11
Zograph Monks Church Service Chanting – Song 12