As a kid I have been very big fan of The Prodigy. Prodigy were considered absolutely revolutionary style band in the 1995 – 2004 years. As an ex-big fan of the band and cause of the fact I happened to be near to Burgas I decided to attend their performance on August the 5-th. Spirit of Burgas as every year happens on the beach of Burgas.
A large number of nice underground rock / punk / jazz / reggae etc. continuing for days is not so common on the balkans so Spirit of Burgas is quite a unique undeground music gathering … Spirit of Burgas is taking place now for a 4-th year and starting to become an established Electronic, Dance, Metal feast here on Balkans.
Below is a list of all the bands that played on Spirit of Burgas 3 days feast this year;
The 1 night entrance fee was quite expensive 40 EUR, but for a famous band as Prodigy and the rest of bands bands playing on other beach scenes I guess the price was fair. The 3 days entrance fee worth it money much more though, for 3 days ticket the price was 60 EUR. The beer price too high; 1 beer price was 1.60 EUR. For a richer countries this prices are nothing and OK but for the low salaries in Bulgaria the beer price was killing.
Besides the high price, the only beer one can buy on the beach was Becks (taking me out the choice to buy another beer brand!). Everywhere around was those annoying writings on both billboards and video sceens B’ECKSPERIENCE, Jack Daniels, DSK Bank etc. Advertsiments should be but this was a bit over-stretched!….
Prodigy performance started about 10:30 on the so called Main Stage – a big scene facing the sea. Prodigy break out and enter, the scene right after a performance of modern punk band SUM 41
I don’t know the music works of SUM 41 that’s why I skipped most of their concert checking the other stages perf-s. On most of other stages mostly Bulgarian Punk / Rock / Alternative musicians were playing. Prodigy’s scene break-up was done with some famous buzzling sounds known from their works, as you can see from the videos I post below. The Stage was very over-crowded, according to some estimations the concert was attended by about 15 000 people ! ! !. Considering the decay in Prodigy popularity I guess this was quite a good number. During The Prodigy‘s play all the other scenes were shut off in order to allow everybody to enjoy Prodigy.
I should admit, the music beats and ruffs were just great, but I didn’t liked the vox messages “Keith Flinth”, was spreading; Saying some iditic phrases like:
Where is my People?, My Prodigy People, My Voodoo People and plenty of other non-sense
As a Christian I know pretty well Prodigy’s music message is not in consonance in Christianity and hence I didn’t liked to be associated as a “prodigy person”, cause I don’t want to be associated with people who preach evil. Something else, showing off the low prodigy vocal culture was his frequent use of the F*CK word, which btw was probably the most used word by almost every musician playing on every scene all night long…
The scene lightning was rich but not bright, enough to clearly distinguish what is happening on the scene. On the back stage, there was the name of latest prodigy album – How To Steal a Jet Fighter with a background of an old jet fighter plane.
The group scene performance was quite aggressive as always, actually probably it is the primitive behavior of the band and the primitiveness in music that attracts the crowds. People nowadays are too much civilized that the wild primitive deep in us is something we hardly miss as ppl.
The Prodigy in the beginning @ Spirit of Burgas 04.08.2012
The Prodigy – Breathe, Live @ Spirit of Burgas 2012
Prodigy Spirit of Burgas 2012 Black Sea Party Zone 1
The Prodigy Spirit of Burgas 2012 Black Sea Party Zone 2
Prodigy Spirit of Burgas 2012 Black Sea Party Zone 3
Prodigy Spirit of Burgas 2012 Black Sea Party Zone 4
Prodigy Spirit of Burgas 2012 Black Sea Party Zone 5
Prodigy Spirit of Burgas 2012 Black Sea Party Zone 6
Prodigy Spirit of Burgas 2012 Black Sea Party Zone 7
Prodigy Spirit of Burgas 2012 Black Sea Party Zone 8
The Prodigy – Spirit of Burgas 2012 Black Sea Party Zone 9
Prodigy Spirit of Burgas 2012 Black Sea Party Zone 10
By the way during the concert all around the scene, there was massive marijuana smoke (not to say fog 🙂 ). Probably kilos of “Mara” (as smokers call it for short in BG) was smoken by fans during the 1.15 mins group performance. As a result, many of the ruffling fans were in a tranced “Nirvana” state 🙂 Something, I’ve noticed is the quality of Prodigy performance, has severely fallen if compared to old concerts of the band period 1999 – 2002. One moment in the concert was really pissing off for me, when Keith Flinth instructed the public to GET DOWN, saying something like:
Now everybody GET DOWN, I SAID GET DOWN – the sheep fans just followed the ORDER squatting; This was pure “MIND CONTROL” – almost everyone squatted unquestionably. A girl behind me tried to push me down, to make me kneel down as I refused to squat 🙂 I told her that “I don’t follow orders, jokingly and didn’t squatted 🙂
This squatting from Christian position looked like exactly like worshipping Prodigy as [ idol (God) substitute ] … The concert end up in a very stupid way; there was no encore performance, not even introduction of the band members to the people and even a no simply BYE to the fans. They just shut off and went away silently like a beaten dogs 🙂
Following the end of Prodigy performance on the neighbor Stage, the “legendary” Bulgarian Punk / Rock old-school band KONTROL was playing. I had great fun with KONTROL as I used to be very much loving the band back in my metal years 🙂 KONTROL’s performance was just great, but unfortunately the scene lightning was again shit and the big Video Screens was switched off so I could see the band hardly. After KONTROL’s end up another hard-core Bulgarian band jumped the scene (PIRANNHA). This guys, were completely funny and i really disliked them as they were heavily copying Venom, even their logo was copied from Venom’s Goat Pentagram (the band mascot was a Satanic Pentagram on wheels (complete iditiosm) :D) The vocal were cursing themselves, screaming funnily “F*CK PIRANNHA, F*CK PIRANNHA !” 🙂
Spirit of Burgas was supposed to close about 5 in the morning, but I was too busy and I left in 2:45, spending few minutes listening to some kind of nice sounding Drum and Bass DJ playing on the main stage.
While checking some information on Coptic Eastern Oriental faith, I've stumbled upon a very beautiful (and unique) ancient Orthodox Christian icon depicting Saint Menas and our saviour the Lord Jesus Christ, below is the very beautiful icon
Saint Mena (Sv. Mina) and The Lord Jesus Christ icon from 6th century
As you can see the iconography is very interesting, the images differ from modern day iconography the portraits are not looking so serious but looks like "childish". This childish forms and faces on the early Christian iconography is not accidental; it expresses the childish like pure faith our Christian devoted ancestors had. This early Christian faith and spiritual life icon is obviously in conjunction with our Saviour Jesus Christ words as red in the Gospel according to Matthew:
At that time the disciples came to Jesus, saying, "Who then is greatest in the kingdom of heaven?" Then Jesus called a little child to Him, set him in the midst of them, and said, "Assuredly, I say to you, unless you are converted and become as little children, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore whoever humbles himself as this little child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever receives one little child like this in My name receives Me.
Matthew 18:1-5
This icon as well as the early Christian icons are very different from nowdays iconography probably for reason; the images difference, the seriousness and the lack of brightness in the faces of nowdays iconography is a clear sign of the great decay of both Orthodox Christian as well as the down-fall of spiritual life worldly. I've seen similar childish looking image icons in some Bulgarian ancient relics museums in my child years and always thought the depictions are so kiddish because iconographers of that time did not have the painting knowledge and skills to draw better ones. Now as I know Christianity much better than then, I understand my previous assumption for the reason of the kiddish looking images is wrong.
Very interesting in the early Christian iconography are the shapes. If you take a close look to above icon, you will notice the disparity of the two body members; the hands, head and eyes are unusually big. My guess for the lack of correspondence of body members is the attempt of early iconographers to put accent on most important members of our bodies;
– The head (holding the mind and thoughts of the saints) – The hands through which the daily food is raised and the eyes through which the world is comprehended are much bigger than in a real person portrait. – The mouth which is almost the size of the eyes; obvious reference that for early Christian contemplating was much more precious (important) thing, than speech. This is also in accordance with the New Testament holy scriptures which says like so concerning the tongue:
8 But no one can tame the tongue; it is a restless evil and full of deadly poison. 9 With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who have been made in the likeness of God; 10 from the same mouth come both blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not to be this way. 11 Does a fountain send out from the same opening both fresh and bitter water? 12 Can a fig tree, my brethren, produce olives, or a vine produce figs? Nor can salt water produce fresh.
Notice also the Halos of the two saints, the size of the halos is almost one third of the whole body of the saints. The Gospel hold by our and all humanity Saviour Jesus Christ is also enormous sized; corresponding almost the height of the arm of Christ on the icon. The size of the Gospel stresses out the importance of the Holy Bible writtings for early Christians. Nowdays the size of Gospels or Holy Bible especially among protestant Churches "tradition" is becoming smaller and smaller following the spirit of the time proclaiming mobility …
Today the iconography Orthodox Christian "school" has severely changed and the icon images are much more complicated than in ancient times. The complication of images and elements on Orthodox Icons is a "mirror" of the internal complicated world of us modern-time Christians. This over-complication of our internal spiritual world, does separate us from God instead of uniting us as it is well known in Holy Orthodox Christian tradition God is best known through simplicity and pureness in life thoughts and actions.
The Coptic Oriental Orthodox Church is the only Church, where there is still iconographers drawing in the style of the ancient times childish looking icons. The reason Copts preserved this ancient iconography is that they have conservated big portion of the ancient faith rejecting the decisions of all 7 Orthodox Ecumenical Church Councils. Copts still accept only ecumenical council decisions up to the III-rd ecumenical council. This is also the reason why Eastern Oriental Orthodox Christians are considered not in official communion with the rest of Eastern Orthodox Churches. I had the opportunity by God's grace to meet an Coptic Orthodox Christian (a guy called Baky); From what I've seen and experienced within the few months with Baky my conclusion is Coptic Orthodox layman faith is much stronger than the one in most of other Orthodox Christians I know. The official standpoint of our Eastern Orthodox Church concerning the copts are that they're in heresy and not really orthodox. I'm not sure if this is really true, since I have spend few months with this Coptic Christian brother this autumn and winter and from what I've seen and heard as well as researched on coptic Orthodox it seems their overall Church teaching, Holy Liturgies and everything is very much orthodox (with very little service and faith differences). Here are few beautiful Coptic Orthodox Christian icons still being drawn in the spirit of early days Christianity.
Abba (saint) Anthony the Great the father of Orthodox Christian Monastic Life
Coptic Orthodox Oriental Icon of Saint Anothony the Great – "the founder" of Monastic life
Tobias Old Testamential Story coptic icon
Holy Family – Flight into Egypt Coptic Orthodox oriental icon
Christ the Saviour – Coptic Oriental Orthodox icon
A friend of mine (Dido) who is learning C programming, has written a tiny chat server / client (peer to peer) program in C. His program is a very good learning curve for anyone desiring to learn basic C socket programming. The program is writen in a way so it can be easily modified to work over UDP protocol with code:
To Use the client/server compile on the server host tiny-chat-serer-client.c with:
$ cc -o tiny-chat-server tiny-chat-server.c
Then on the client host compile the client;
$ cc -o tiny-chat-client tiny-chat-client.c
On the server host tiny-chat-server should be ran with port as argument, e.g. ;
$ ./tiny-chat-server 8888
To chat with the person running tiny-chat-server the compiled server should be invoked with:
$ ./tiny-chat-client 123.123.123.123 8888
123.123.123.123 is the IP address of the host, where tiny-chat-server is executed. The chat/server C programs are actually a primitive very raw version of talk.
The programs are in a very basic stage, there are no condition checks for incorrectly passed arguments and with wrongly passed arguments it segfaults. Still for C beginners its useful …
I’ve used K3B just recently to RIP an Audio CD with music to MP3. K3b has done a great job ripping the tracks, the only problem was By default k3b RIPs songs in OGG Vorbis (.ogg) and not mp3. I personally prefer OGG Vorbis as it is a free freedom respecting audio format, however the problem was the .ogg-s cannot be read on many of the audio players and it could be a problem reading the RIPped oggs on Windows. I’ve done the RIP not for myself but for a Belarusian gfriend of mine and she is completely computer illiterate and if I pass her the songs in .OGG, there is no chance she succed in listening the oggs. I’ve seen later k3b has an option to choose to convert directly to MP3 Using linux mp3 lame library this however is time consuming and I have to wait another 10 minutes or so for the songs to be ripped to shorten the time I decided to directly convert the existing .ogg files to .mp3 on my (Debian Linux). There are probably many ways to convert .ogg to mp3 on linux and likely many GUI frontends (like SoundConverter) to use in graphic env.
I however am a console freak so I preferred doing it from terminal. I’ve done quick research on the net and figured out the good old ffmpeg is capable of converting .oggs to .mp3s. To convert all mp3s just ripped in the separate directory I had to run ffmpeg in a tiny bash loop.
A short bash shell script 1 liner combined with ffmpeg does it, e.g.;
for f in *.ogg; do ffmpeg -i "$f" "`basename "$f" .ogg`.mp3"; done.....
The loop example is in bash so in order to make the code work on FreeBSD it is necessery it is run in a bash shell and not in BSDs so common csh or tcsh.
Well, that’s all oggs are in mp3; Hip-hip Hooray 😉
I’ve been an old times Metal head. The moment I accepted Jesus Christ as a Lord and Saviour and been visited by the Lord’s Holy Ghost grace, my life changed severely. I found out most of the metal bands, I used to be regularly listening to is against Christ and anti-christian in essence, I still however hold my love for Metal as my teenage years were dominated by Metal Music. Happily I found there is plenty of nice Metal music a Metal head could enjoy that are written for glorification of Christ and hence did not have the negative spiritual anti-christian charge that is so typical for a lot of the bads in the metal music world. Recently I’m not listening to as much music as few years from now but still every now and then I like playing some of my old Christian metal loved bands. I was maintaining a small list of Christian metal nice bands I found and playlisted on youtube. If you’re a metal geek you might enjoy my old christian metal playlist here 🙂.
For Christians, who are looking for online Christian Metal community I also suggest you check out Firestream – The believer’s Heavy Music Refugee . There are plenty of other interesting places on the net dedicated for Christian metal fans;;;
I will end up this post with 2 videos of one very favourite Ukrainian Christian Metal band – Angel 7;
Angel 7 – Jesus the Saviour
Angel 7 – The Last Day
There are probably plenty of other nice Christian Metal sites and resources on the net; surely I’m missing a lot here? if you know some other good Christian Rock / Metal resources please drop a comment.
I had to convert Adobe PDF file to Microsoft Word ( .doc) file on Microsoft Windows OS for a friend. There is plenty of software available to convert PDF to DOC on Windows, as well as few web-site services claiming to convert correcly PDF to DOC. Converting PDF to DOC is easy and can be done with Open Office, however the reverse process is a real pain in the ass. I tried a dozen of free web serviecs to convert an ancient Latin writting PDF to DOC but none of them couldn’t properly convert it. Failing with the web services as a tool to convert, I’ve turned to seeking a tool that will do the trick. After trying few PDF to DOC converters which failed to produce a properly structed edittable DOC from the PDF file, I’ve come across ABBYY PDF Transformer 2.0. Abbyy PDF Transformer finally did it …
I’ve tried hard to look for a free software good PDF to DOC converter alternative for Windows but it seems as of time of writing this post there is no GPLed free software that does properly convert PDFs to MS WORD DOC ….
Using Abbyy PDF Transformer 2.0 is a piece of cake all I had to do is select the PDF file (pressing Open PDF) and then click on Convert (in right bottom corner). Below is a shot of Abby PDF transformer in action.
Today it is considered the modern laptop (portable computers) are turning 30 years old. The notebook grandparent is a COMPAQ – GRiD Compass 1011 – a “mobile computer” with a electroluminescent display (ELD) screen supporting resolution of 320×240 pixels. The screen allowed the user to use the computer console in a text resolution of 80×24 chars. This portable high-tech gadget was equipped with magnesium alloy case, an Inten 8086 CPU (XT processor) at 8Mhz (like my old desktop pravetz pc 😉 ), 340 kilobyte (internal non-removable magnetic bubble memory and even a 1,200 bit/s modem!
The machine was uniquely compatible for its time as one could easily attach devices such as floppy 5.25 inch drives and external (10 Meg) hard disk via IEEE-488 I/O compatible protocol called GPiB (General Purpose instrumental Bus).
The laptop had also unique small weight of only 5 kg and a rechargable batteries with a power unit (like modern laptops) connectable to a normal (110/220 V) room plug.
,br /> The machine was bundled with an own specificly written OS GRiD-OS. GRID-OS could only run a specialized software so this made the application available a bit limited. Shortly after market introduction because of the incompitablity of GRID-OS, grid was shipped with MS-DOS v. 2.0. This primitive laptop computer was developed for serve mainly the needs of business users and military purposes (NASA, U.S. military) etc.
GRID was even used on Space Shuttles during 1980 – 1990s. The price of the machine in April 1982 when GriD Compass was introduced was the shockingly high – $8150 dollars.
The machine hardware design is quite elegant as you can see on below pic:
As a computer history geek, I’ve researched further on GRID Compass and found a nice 1:30 hour video telling in detailed presentation retelling the history.
Shortly after COMPAQ’s Grid Compass 1011’s introduction, many other companies started producing similar sized computers; one example for this was the Epson HX-20 notebook. 30 years later, probably around 70% of citizens on the globe owns a laptop or some kind of portable computer device (smartphone, tablet, ultra-book etc.).
Most of computer users owning a desktop nowdays, owns a laptop too for mobility reasons. Interestengly even 30 years later the laptop as we know it is still in a shape (form) very similar to its original predecessor. Today the notebook sales are starting to be overshadowed by tablets and ultra-books (for second quarter laptop sales raised 5% but if compared with 2011, the sales rise is lesser 1.8% – according to data provided by Digital Research agency). There are estimations done by (Forrester Research) pointing until the end of year 2015, sales of notebook substitute portable devices will exceed the overall sales of notebooks. It is manifested today the market dynamics are changing in favour of tabets and the so called next generation laptops – ULTRA-BOOKS. It is a mass hype and a marketing lie that Ultra-Books are somehow different from laptops. The difference between a classical laptop and Ultra-Books is the thinner size, less weight and often longer battery use time. Actually Ultra-Books are copying the design concept of Mac MacBook Air trying to resell under a lound name. Even if in future Ipads, Android tablets, Ultra-Books or whatever kind of mambo-jambo portable devices flood the market, laptops will still be heavily used in future by programmers, office workers, company employees and any person who is in need to do a lot of regular text editting, email use and work with corporative apps. Hence we will see a COMPAC Grid Compass 1011 notebook likes to be dominant until end of the decade.
At security critical hosts running Apache + PHP based sites it is recommended functions like:
system();
exec();shell_exec();.....
to be disabled. The reason is to mainly harden against script kiddies who might exploit your site/s and upload some shitty SK tool like PHP WebShell, PHP Shell and the probably thousands of “hacker” variations that exist nowdays.
In latest Debian stable Squeeze, suhosin – advanced protection module for php5 is being installed and enabled in Apache (by default). Simply disabling a number of functions using suhosin, could prevent multiple of future headaches and hours of pondering on who 0wn3d your server ….
Disabling the basic PHP system(); and other similar functions which allows shell spawn is not always possible, since some websites or CMS platforms depends on them for proper runnig, anyways whether it is possible disabling ’em is a must. There are two ways to disable system(); functions; One is through using /etc/php5/apache2/conf.d/suhosin.ini and 2nd by adding a list of functions that has to be disabled directly in Website Virtualhost file or in apache2.conf (/etc/apache2/apache2.conf; For people hosting multiple virtualhost websites on the same server using the custom domain Virtualhost method is probably better, since on a global scale the functions could be enabled if some of the websites hosted on the server requires exec(); to work OK. In any case using /etc/php5/apache2/conf.d/suhosin.ini to disable system(); functions in PHP is less messy …
1. Disabling PHP system(); fuctions through /etc/apache2/apache2.conf and custom site Vhosts
Place somewhere (I prefer near the end of config);;;
Disabling it for custom virtualhost is done by simply adding above Apache directvies (before the closing tag in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/custom-vhost.com
2. Disabling PHP system();, exec(); shell spawn with suhosin.ini
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:
Being able to count the number of PHP source code lines for a website is a major statistical information for timely auditting of projects and evaluating real Project Managment costs. It is inevitable process for any software project evaluation to count the number of source lines programmers has written. In many small and middle sized software and website development companies, it is the system administrator task to provide information or script quickly something to give info on the exact total number of source lines for projects.
Even for personal use out of curiousity it is useful to know how many lines of PHP source code a wordpress or Joomla website (with the plugins) contains. Anyone willing to count the number of PHP source code lines under one directory level, could do it with:::
This will count and show statistics, for each and every PHP source file within wordpress-website (non-recursively), to get only information about the total number of PHP source code lines within the directory, one could grep it, e.g.:::
server:/var/www/wordpress-website:# wc -l *.php |grep -i '\stotal$' 4280 total
The command grep -i '\stotal$' has \s in beginning and $ at the end of total keyword in order to omit erroneously matching PHP source code file names which contain total in file name; for example total.php …. total_blabla.php …. blabla_total_bla.php etc. etc.
The \s grep regular expression meaning is "put empty space", "$" is placed at the end of tital to indicate to regexp grep only for words ending in string total.
So far, so good … Now it is most common that instead of counting the PHP source code lines for a first directory level to count complete number of PHP, C, Python whatever source code lines recursively – i. e. (a source code of website or projects kept in multiple sub-directories). To count recursively lines of programming code for any existing filesystem directory use find in conjunction with xargs:::
As you see the cmd counts and displays the number of source code lines encountered in each and every file, for big directory structures the screen gets floated and passing | less is nice, e.g.:
find . -name '*.php' | xargs wc -l | less
Displaying lines of code for each file within the directories is sometimes unnecessery, whether just a total number of programming source code line is required, hence for scripting purposes it is useful to only get the source lines total num:::
For more professional and bigger projects using pure Linux bash and command line scripting might not be the best approach. For counting huge number of programming source code and displaying various statistics concerning it, there are two other tools – SLOCCount as well as clock (count lines of code)
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