Archive for January, 2013

Saint Anthony The Great Troparion in Arabic sung in Lebanon – The excessive literacy and spiritual illiteracy

Thursday, January 17th, 2013

saint-Anthony-the-great-holy-orthodox-icon

Today 17 of January  in Bulgarian, Greek and Romanian Orthodox Church and those Churches which are using the so called New Church Calendar,  celebrate the feast of our Holy Venerate Father Saint Anthony the Great. I have a special love or better to say saint Anthony has a special love for me. Saint Anthony is a father of the fathers and one of the most desert hermit monks. Saint Anthony was illiterate and poor in worldly knowledge but abundant in the science of sciences the knowledge of God. Today most of the society is completely educated and still most of people even among the highly educated rich in worldly knowledge are complete spiritual beggars. I myself am one of them. We're all filled with worldly wisdom, read and stay uneducated about the truth as the Holy Apostle says. But we have our Holy Father Saint Anthony by whose prayers still God shows mercy to us. Let by his holy prayers, we the highly literate of worldly knowledges attain faith and spiritual knowledge.
 

Saint Anthony The Great Troparion in Arabic – The father of desert fathers

 

Oh Holy Hermit Father Anthony pray the Lord our souls be saved !

The Treasures of Hermitage, Saint Peterburg Russia and its imitation Hermitage in Amsterdam

Thursday, January 17th, 2013

Sankt-Peterburg-Hermitage

Since some time, I'm very interested in Russia culture as it is so inter-related to our culture in Bulgaria. .It is sad that nowadays Bulgaria is not with Russia, we share much more cultural and heritage roots with Russia than any Western European county or even generally Europe. Thus I believe for every Bulgarian and generally for anyone interested in art, maybe the most remarkable place to visit if you're in Russia is the city of Saint Peterburg. There is found the Russian National State museum. The Hermitage is a museum which historically used to be Winster Palace (Residency) for the Russian Tsar / King. What is unique about this museum is it is one of the oldest and largest museums in the world. The musem was founded in 1764 and since 1852 is in open for public visits. The museum consists of 3 000 000 unique items. Only a small number of those 3 million are exposed for public visitors. The museum contains artifacts from all around the world including very rare things like Mummy sarcophagus. The amount of gold in mostly everywhere is remarkable the ornaments and everything is amazing. For people who value art it is a must see. I still did not have the opportunity to see it with my own eyes. But even seeing it on a video is very  worthy.


 

The Treasures of Hermitage, Saint Petersburg, Russia (State Hermitage Musem of Russia)

As I'm currently in Holland, it was very interesting to find out one of the worthy things to see in Holland is an imitation of st. Peterburg's Hermitage in Amsterdam. There is plenty of beautiful and unique works in it too, as you can check in below video.


 

Hermitage Museum Amsterdam Tour an imitation of Hermitage State Museum of Russia

Enjoy ! 🙂

Fixing Apache error – client denied by server configuration on FreeBSD

Thursday, January 17th, 2013

If you have just installed a FreeBSD host with Apache and configured a Vhost document root to interpret  PHP or Perl scripts and you end up with error in browser like:

 

HTTP 403 / client denied by server configuration error

or

Forbidden
You don't have permission to access /index.html on this server.

It is most likely due to improperly configured Apache directory or directories permissions. In Apache error log /var/log/httpd-error.log, there are plenty of error messages logged like:

[Tue Jan 15 13:09:39 2013] [error] [client 92.96.95.177] client denied by server configuration: /usr/home/hipo/public_html/management
[Tue Jan 15 13:09:41 2013] [error] [client 92.96.95.177] client denied by server configuration: /usr/home/hipo/public_html/management
[Tue Jan 15 13:09:41 2013] [error] [client 92.96.95.177] client denied by server configuration: /usr/home/hipo/public_html
[Tue Jan 15 13:09:41 2013] [error] [client 92.96.95.177] client denied by server configuration: /usr/home/hipo/public_html
[Tue Jan 15 13:09:41 2013] [error] [client 92.96.95.177] client denied by server configuration: /usr/home/hipo/public_html
[Tue Jan 15 13:09:41 2013] [error] [client 92.96.95.177] client denied by server configuration: /usr/home/hipo/public_html

The issue is caused by Apache <Directory> configuration which is restrictive and set to first deny and then apply allow rule, i.e.:

 

<Directory /usr/home/hipo/public_html>
  Options ExecCGI -Indexes FollowSymLinks
   Allowoverride All
    Order Deny,allow
    Deny from all
    Allow from localhost
    Allow from 123.123.123.123
</Directory>

To solve the problem change default Deny set policy (Deny from all) and first policy to be applied which is Deny to allow;

 <Directory "/usr/home/hipo/public_html">
        Options ExecCGI -Indexes FollowSymLinks
        Allowoverride All
        Order Allow,deny
        Allow from all
        #DirectoryIndex index.cgi
  </Directory>

It is possible to not specify any Order Allow,deny (if there is no previous Apache <Directory> directive to override, so in many  cases you can use;

 <Directory "/usr/home/hipo/public_html">
        Options ExecCGI -Indexes FollowSymLinks
        Allowoverride All
        Allow from all
        #DirectoryIndex index.cgi
  </Directory>

Finally restart Apache and all should be good;

freebsd# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/apache22 restart
....

Video Review of Top Cities, Places and Things – must see in the Netherlands

Thursday, January 17th, 2013

South of Haarlem, makes the ultimate outing for ogling Holland's famed flower. The bulb fields in and around Keukenhof burst into colour from the end of March to mid May.
 

HOLLAND: Keukenhof – world's largest flower garden [HD]

 


 

hoe leuk is nederland , delft holland (How nice is Holland – Delft (one of the ancient cities in Holland)


 

Utrecht, The Netherlands

Views of the city of Utrecht and its tourist attractions like the Oudegracht canal, the Domkerk, Domtoren, Pieterkerk, Muziek Centrum. Check out the old tower museum and try to spot the Gothic churches spread around the city.


 

Utrecht Netherlands, City, Life and University


 

HOLLAND in MINIATURE – MADURODAM – The Hague, Netherlands

Madurodam is a park and tourist attraction in Scheveningen, The Hague, Netherlands, home to a range of perfect 1:25 scale model replicas of famous Dutch castles, public buildings, and large industrial projects as found at various locations in the country. The park was opened in 1952 and has been visited by tens of millions of visitors since that date. Madurodam was named after George Maduro, a Jewish law student from Curaçao who fought the Nazi occupation forces as a member of the Dutch resistance and died at Dachau concentration camp in 1945. In 1946 Maduro was posthumously awarded the medal of Knight 4th-class of the Military Order of William, the highest and oldest military decoration in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, for the valor he had demonstrated in the Battle of the Netherlands against German troops. His parents donated the funds necessary for the Madurodam project.


 

Scheveningen Beach (The Hague) Netherlands

Very surprisingly in Holland there are beaches too 🙂 It is a bit funny in such a Northern Country, there could be beach but there is. As you can see the sun lack takes off from enjoying the beach bathing. If you never have tried a Northern Beach destination and you happen to drop off Netherlands in the Summer give it a try 🙂


 

Haarlem The Netherlands – An Old Dutch city who most likely give birth to famous American suburb


 

Holland Gouda, The World famous Cheese Market

Nationaal park De Hoge Veluwe

near Arnhem, among whose attractions is an underground museum dedicated to subterranean life, and the Kröller-Müller Museum (www.kmm.nl) which contains 280 Van Gogh paintings as well as numerous other works. Bicycles are available free of charge to visitors.


 

Maastricht, Netherlands – Ancient Dutch city, place where European Union creation agreement was signed

Holland's oldest fortified city – Full of Medieval interesting architecture


 

NEMO Museum Amsterdam

 


 

Rotterdam Holland Tourist Attractions


 

Amsterdam Holland

Holland's emblematic capital (www.iamsterdam.com) brims with romance, culture and kicks. Take a candlelit cruise along the canals, lined with narrow-fronted buildings dating from the city's heyday as a trading centre, browse the paintings of the Dutch masters at the Rijksmuseum or join the punters prowling the alleyways of the Red Light District.


 

Hermitage Amsterdam Tour – Sibling of the Original Hermitage in St. Peterburg


 

Open air museum Arnhem in the Netherlands

Keukenhof (The Kitchen Garden) Holland – The Largest Flower garden in the World

Tuesday, January 15th, 2013


 

HOLLAND: Keukenhof – world's largest flower garden [HD]

One of the most famous landmarks in holand as well as worldwide is Keukenhof's – flower gardens. Whoever planned this beautiful place has done a great work congrats! It is a peaceful place, seeing the garden also gives a good idea on how most parks in Holland look like. Most of the things to be seen in the garden are also to be seen in city parks all across Holland. In Holland most things looks alike. Building architecture, roads, gardens, dikes, bicycle and road areas. Even Roman Catholic Cathedrals and Protestant Churches / Cathedrals looks similar to each other. If the weather is good all looks shiny like on the video, however in bad weather the beauty is hard to appreciate. The nature to be seen is not wild like in less developed economy countries ,it is all planned and shaped and sustained by people.

Create ASCII Art Text banners in GNU / Linux console and terminal with figlet and toilet

Tuesday, January 15th, 2013

Create fun and colorful text ASCII art banner logos on Linux (figlet and toilet)

As an old school hobbyist, I'm a kind of ASCII art freak. Free Software is just great for this text / console maniacs like me, who spend their youth years in a DOS (Disk Opearting System) command prompt.
For long time, I'm researching the cool programs which has to do somehow with ASCII Art, in that relation I decided to write few ones of figlet and toilettwo nice programs capable of generating ASCII art text beautiful banners based on a typed in text string. Obviously toilet developer Sam Hocevar had a great sense of humor 🙂

To play with figlet and toilet install them, according to (rpm or deb based package manager on distro) with yum / apt-get.

yum -y install toilet figlet
....

apt-get --yes install toilet figlet
....

There are no native tool packages for Slackware, so Slackaware Linux users need to compile figlet from source code – available on figlet's home page figlet.org

Once figlet and toilet are installed, here is few sample use cases;
 

hipo@noah:~/Desktop$ figlet hello world!             

figlet ascii art banner hello world
 

hipo@noah:~/Desktop$ figlet -f script Merrcy Christmas

figlet merry christmas text in ascii art with script font linux

Plenty of figlet font examples are available on Figlet's website example section – very cool stuff btw 🙂 To take a quick look on all fonts available for toilet – ascii art banner creation. Type in your console tty or terminal; for i in $(dpkg -L toilet-fonts|grep -i /usr/share/figlet); do toilet -f $(echo $i|sed -e "s#.tlf##g" -e "s#/usr/share/figlet/##g") test; done

On below picture, I made a screenshot of my gnome terminal with most fonts installed by toilet-fonts (fonts package).

ascii art banner create generate program linux figlet toilet with fonts on debian linux screenshot pic - how to create ascii banners linux

There are about 150 fonts, most of which needs to be downloaded and installed manually. A quick search online led me to a fonts collection of 263 figlet ascii art fonts – you can download a mirror of the file figletfonts40.zip here. To aid up toilet and  with those 263 extra fonts (on Debian) do; wget https://www.pc-freak.net/files/figletfonts40.zip cd /usr/share/figlets unzip figletfonts40.zip Note: you have to have installed unzip in advance, unzip is not in default install, so if you don't have it fetch it with; apt-get install --yes unzip toilet and figlet are partially compatible, between each other so most fonts should work okay on both.

figlet supports, also simple formatting of ASCII art banner, here is few examples with formatting; a.) format to center  

$ figlet -c bla bla

figlet centered ascii art text bla bla screenshot

b.) format to left


figlet ascii art banner left formatted text debian gnu linux

c. right formatting


figlet ascii art banner right formatted ascii art text debian linux generator

d. format to terminal width By default text that figlet generates is to suit for 80 rows terminals, normally on higher resolution in gnome-terminal and other Linux environments, terminals are not dimensioned 80×25, thus it is useful for longer sentences text to display text in accordance to terminal size;

figlet ascii art banner sentence phrase to terminal width banner debian gnu linux

The cool thing and advantage of toilet over figlet is toilet can print out ASCII art banners in colors – very very cool stuff; To quickly test all filters issue; for i in $(toilet -F list|awk '{ print $1 }'|grep -v Available|sed -e 's#"##g'); do toilet -F $i pC-fREAK; done Change text pC-fREAK with whatever you like;

> using toilet to create funny ascii-art banners linux pc-freak logo pictures

Very nice use of toilet or figlet, can be if it is placed to produce some nice message in ASCII banner on each user login. Other nice fun applications  is together with cowsay.

apt-cache show cowsay|grep -i description -A 5 Description: A configurable talking cow Cowsay (or cowthink) will turn text into happy ASCII cows, with speech (or thought) balloons. If you don't like cows, ASCII art is available to replace it with some other creatures (Tux, the BSD daemon, dragons, and a plethora of animals, from a turkey to an elephant in a snake).

In case interested in using cowsay on system logins, I suggest you check out my tiny cowrand script which uses cowsay and shows random cow ASCII art picture on each user login.

Also a good use if you're Christian is to combine, some nice Holy Scriptures  verse in text ascii with  some encouraging daily bible phrase from verse or fortune.

Apart from fun, common use of ASCII art slogans is in e-mail or blog comments ASCII art signatures, also they are certainly good for creating unusual (text) advertisements and even can be used to save printer ink:) cause text generated in ASCII art logo is not massive like most text fonts are 🙂 Last but not least  ASCII art banners are useful in generation of ASCII slogans as an art; after all ASCII art is one of innovative arts of 21st century 🙂

Linux record audio from console / terminal with rec, arecord and ffmpeg

Monday, January 14th, 2013

 

Recording sound input from microphone linux penguin holding microphone

Recording from microphone input on Linux is possible, through multiple programs.

1. Recording microphone input using SoX's rec

 The classical old-school way is through a little proggie called sox. Back in the day I remember we recorded with sox with a friend from the school years necroleak – mirror of his website is on kenamick.www.pc-freak.net, trying to make save vox for one of his Tracked Songs. The experiments was not very succesful as both the PC microphone was low quality one, as well as the the state of recording microphone sound streams on Linux was terrible, but at least I learned about sox.

sox is not so popular and mainstream as it used to be back in the day but for anyone willing to investigate into the roots of GNU / Linux sound capturing make sure you have installed sox, alsa-utils and lame package. The package is available across virtually all main stream Linux distributions, depending on the distro to INSTALL sox do:

 

apt-get install --yes sox alsa-utils lame 
....

 (On Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, Xubuntu … )

yum -y install sox  alsa-utils lame
....

 (on Fedora, CentOS, RHEL …)

 slapt-get install sox ; swaret install sox alsa-utils lame
.....

(on Slackware and derivatives)

Before continuing it is a good idea to check, the microphone is not muted in alsamixer, amixer or aumix

The SoX package provides 4 binaries;

dpkg -L sox|grep -i /usr/bin/
/usr/bin/sox
/usr/bin/rec
/usr/bin/play
/usr/bin/soxi

sox -is tool to apply effects to recorded sound streams

rec – is historically among the first sound recorder tool to make records from microphone (even form the days of OSS – Open Sound System)

play – play is tiny .WAV and some other native classical sounds formats with a beautiful ASCII art (text) equalizer

soxi – gives information on recorded sound stream header (info)

rec -r 8000 -c 1 record_microphone_input.wav

rec is unfortunately made to use the old and now obsolete /dev/dsp sound interface, so on many Linux distributions, recording sound with it might pose problems.

Another problem of rec is it usually records with a lot of noise, thus reducing the noise later with sox cmd is almost necessery, to mitigate the noise you will have to experiment with its options. For some better quality of recording use arg -r 22050.

A little shell script with plenty of example use cases of rec and post sox effect applied as synchronization record_and_normalize_from_mic_with_rec_and_sox_on_linux.sh is here

Generally I mentioned rec for historical reasons, nowadays it is quite obsolete so you probably better stick to the newer alsa native arecord.

2. Recording sound from microphone using alsa-utils arecord

alsa-utils package has bunch of tools to record, play and tune sound;

dpkg -L alsa-utils |grep -i /usr/bin/
/usr/bin/aplaymidi
/usr/bin/aplay
/usr/bin/aconnect
/usr/bin/amixer
/usr/bin/alsamixer
/usr/bin/aseqdump
/usr/bin/arecordmidi
/usr/bin/speaker-test
/usr/bin/iecset
/usr/bin/amidi
/usr/bin/aseqnet
/usr/bin/arecord

One of tools included arecord is able to capture sound from microphone. arecord, can record into .WAV, but as .WAVs are not compressed and most people prefer to save the input to some more wide recognized format as .MP3 it should be invoked in conjunction with lame;

arecord -D plughw:0,0 -f S16_LE -c1 -r22050 -t raw | lame -r -s 22.05 -m m -b 64 - mic-input.mp3


Writting this long and hard to remember command line and arguments is tough, so I created a tiny shell script wrapper which accepts as 1-st argument a file name and saves .WAV and converts it to .MP3. The script linux_record_from_microphone.sh is here

3. Recording from microphone input using ffmpeg

I've earlier blogged on how to use ffmpeg to capture Microphone sound here.

For those lazy to read my previous post the skele syntax is;

ffmpeg -f alsa -ac 2 -i pulse -acodec pcm_s16le -vcodec libx264 -vpre lossless_ultrafast -threads 0 -y myVOICE.wav 

To later convert WAV to MP3 use lame;

 lame -r -s 22.05 -m m -b 64 myVOICE.wav  mic-input.mp3

People Living in 2-nd and 3-rd world country are spiritually blessed – Why we should be thankful to live in a Developing Country

Monday, January 14th, 2013

Orthodox Christian countries blessed, Undeveloped countries more blessed than developed ones, ortodox priest blessing the blessing of the Eastern ex byzantion empire countries

Nowadays, every country under development from the so called 2nd and 3rd world countries is trying to follow after the United States, Japanese and the European Union Western World countries (Germany, France, Holland) developed economies. People in many countries like my motherland Bulgaria are not happy for the life they receive in their home land. There is such situation in so many countries nowadays. Many musicians sung a lot of songs about the prosperity of westerners like for example Jim Morrison – who was singing – "The West is The Best" in The Doors song "THE END". A lot of the modern culture in 2nd and 3rd world countries is singing and following the trend of the Western Art and Songs. But is it really true, that on the West they're more happier or more blessed?  Is the Western life so good and worthy as most people thing?

First thing among western developed countries is the development of technology. Technology use and implementation is in much higher level compared to under-developed countries. Part of technologization is wide use of Internet and connectivity to it as well as all kind of gadgets that somehow use the Internet for their daily operation. In practice Internet is part of the daily life of virtually every Western inhabitant in age 8 to 60. This trend is also spreading in Eastern Europe and is slowly changing the people their too. However still the amount of technology use in East is little compared to West.

From purely spiritual point of view the Internet (though can be used for a spiritual purpose and is now helping people a lot in their life) is changing completely the essence of life, making people dependent on the World Wide Web. Making them less and less attached to the normal relations person to person which used to be main thing in existence since the creation of the world.
In countries where the Internet is slower and they can't watch youtube (India, Pakistan) this simply means less people will spend big chunk of their time consuming youtube videos but likely spend a bit more time with friends and relatives or in best case in Church praying for themselves their relatives and the whole world. Thus from a spiritual standing less developed countries are in more blessed situation.

Also in western world life is so complex, making achieving unity with Christ very hard  – according to Divine Theology God is easier to find in simplicity. For citizens living in Western developed countries nowadays having a touch of true genuine Christian spirituality is harder to achieve and most of people in Western Countries, though possessing humanitarian kindness are lacking any spiritual deepness.

Thus my assertion is, we people from Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Russia and other poorer and even less undeveloped ones like India, Iraq, Syria, Somalia etc. should be thankful to God for being the opportunity to live in a simple countries with less material goods but deeper spirituality. We the poor country inhabitans have much more opportunities to pray and hope on God's mercy and live a humble life in Christ.

Even in business, people are starting to realize "Less is More", the simple the life is the better.
As we Balkan inhabitants has much more worries and concerns and misfortune than westerners means simply we are more likely to look for God's help than our well fed and educated Western fellows.
Here in Western world most people have too many opportunities for entertainment and ways to spend their time good and forget about the bad in the world. Though from one side it is good and easy life, from another (spiritual) angle it is pretty much like closing your eyes for death, suffering and bads that happens in World.

With high degree of Computerization in the West, it is my understanding whether one is behind the Computer Screen / Mobile / Tablet screen you can only help people "Virtually" by speaking to them and can't physically support them. I will not mention about the many health troubles a physical inactivity causes us. Also by having this well developed social system in countries like Holland and France this takes away one's opportunity to meet the poor and suffering beggars. Thus one's heart cannot be touched by the suffering in the way it is touched when you leave in a society with poor, hungry and suffering on streets.

All this means paradoxically, countries, which want to have the blessing of consumerism that has took over developed countries, are now more spiritually blessed and spiritually richer than developed ones. However pithily majority of people in undeveloped countries are un-thankful to God for their blessing, but looking after the imaginary and temporal worldly well being that is now in west. I hope we the Eastern people will realize our mistake and take time, and start enjoying our life in our homelands with thankfulness in our hearts to God for we are wealthy in spirit.

The Ancient Bulgarian Alphabet – And how Ancient Bulgarian is Church Slavonic and how Ancient Bulgarian give birth to Russian language

Sunday, January 13th, 2013


 

Ancient Bulgarian Alphabet – Старобългарската азбука

I was interested how Ancient Bulgarian writting letter used to be and found a video and youtube worthy to share.
Ancient Bulgarian, became the basis for many Slavonic languages – modern Serbian, Macedonian, Slovenian, Croation and maybe most importantly modern Russian. In practice the so called Church Slavonic is Ancient Bulgarian language. Back in the day Ancient Bulgarian writing was invented by the Holy Brothers St. Cyril and St. Methodius for reasons to translate the Holy Bible for Slavonic people who lived in territory of nowadays Bulgaria and Serbia. Their pupils later spread the Church books and Christianity as well as writting and all translations to nowadays Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova and Romania. Romanians just until recently used cyrillic until 1920, and still cyrillic is widely used in Church. The video above is very interesting, as some of the words mentioned as ancient Bulgarian words are still figurating in Russian and Serbian language, but for some reason evolved or disappeared from modern Bulgarian. People should know their roots, especially Bulgarian who was so great nation and still are but because of western influence and global consumerism, our national identity and significance is tried to be diminished. If you're a Bulgarian read this, know your roots and How great nation we were and we continuously are and will be! Don't be ashamed to be Bulgarian on the contrary consider it as a great honour. There is no other nation in the Balkans who survived under 500 years of Ottoman Turkish Slavery except us Bulgarians and Serbs. Over this V centuries of slavery we kept our Christian faith, language and writting intact. This is a nation heroism worthy for praise and astonishment! We Bulgarians are nation worthy to respect, we are not stupid or inferior as often modern world progress is trying to convince us. Our nation is not among the top developed countries, for the reason, we Bulgarians are more spiritual oriented and most of time in history our ancestors looked and lived taking in their mind and heart eternal life in Christ and not the temporary earthly progress. Still there are plenty of Bulgaria, who are like this, still Bulgarians have great spirituality, but we forget our faith, we forgot what kept us alive as nation over the last 13 centuries of existence. Go back to the roots, read the history and learn the old alphabet and words, all this will enrich you and give you easier way to learn the other Slavonic nations. Next time they ask you about nationality say you're Bulgarian with dignity!

Church Slavonic Language is Ancient Bulgarian literary language – Academic Dmitrij S. Lihachov – Дмитрий С. Лихачов

Who is Killing us? – A video explaining how the Leftist Communist Marxist philosophy is being spread in European Union and Western World – Why Political Correctness and Tolerance is not necessery good

Saturday, January 12th, 2013

One Priest, who is true Christian and living for Christ give me a link to below video. The video is very interesting to see. I thought myself a lot on issues as Political Correctness and culture and nation and skin color respect. Though there is nothing bad in these, the way it is implemented destroys our Christian culture, society and even sometimes sadly pictures other immigrant picture cultures than better than the local cultures to country where emigrated. I have plenty of friends from different nationalities and I deeply respect all of them, their culture and tradition. However I don't support the muslim invasion, that is plaguing now Europe. I do understand it is not only Islamic people responsible for the boom of muslim believers in Western World, but also our failure to respect and keep Christian faith and our centuries tradition.

Who is Killing us? – A video explaining how the Leftist Communist (Marxist) philosophy is not dead but alive and well and being fostered and praised by Europe Western Country leaders and the European Union

Evil under mask of love – How people’s perception of good and bad is being twisted under mask of fake un-Christian (humanitarian) love and tolerance