Month: November 2003

Modern Protest Music

looky

I’m looking for “protest music” made recently- in the 1960’s there was a big theme of social criticism in popular music. These days, modern music is totally without this emphasis…

That is, if you only listen to “rock.” Actually there is a lot of hiphop music and punk bands with “social change” messages, and it might be argued that both these genres are at their core anti-establishment.

So far I just have NOFX on the punk end, and City High, and The Black Eyed Peas (kind of weak) on the hiphop end. Very mainstream thus far… remember, “modern.” I am not buying a Rage Against Your Mom album because I think they are too screamy, overplayed and mainly for little boys.

So, my search continues.
DANH: would you like my list of songs to play when Reagan dies?
BRIAN: Sure why not.

A.P.P.L.E. – Impeach Reagan
Fartz – Battle Hymn of Ronnie Reagan
Men’s Recovery Project – Ronald Reagan
Shattered Faith – reagan country
D.I. – Reagan Der Fuhrer
suicidal tendencies – i shot reagan
minutemen – if reagan played disco
Lennonburger – reagum
Demented Youth – Assassination Attempt
Capitol Punishment – El Salvador
ism – John Hinckley Jr. (What Has Jodie Done to You?)
J.F.A – jodie fosters army
subhumans – america commits suicide
reagan youth – reagan youth=20
dead kennedys – we’ve got a bigger problem now
youth brigade – moral majority
dri – reaganomics
sun city girls – Nancy Reagan
Old Skull – Homeless
doa – fucked up ronnie
NOFX – Reagan Sucks
tsol – superficial love
government issue – Hey Ronnie
Beefeater – Reaganomix
F- ???
Ramones – Bonzo Goes to Bitburg
Menstrual Cycles – Kill the President
Crucifucks- Hinckley had a vision
Ratheal Bean and the Doonesbury Break Crew (Comedy)- Rap Master 12″
Prince – letter to ronald reagan on “Controvery”
Testicle Bomb – Go Fucking Die! 7″
Turd Town Records, 1999
Nancy Reagan’s Punk Rock Army
Minutemen – – Bean-spill 7″ Thermidor T8, 1982 PS
(Afternoons / Futurism Restated // Split Red / If Reagan Played
Disco / Case Closed)
BLITZ (Berlin) : “Heil Reagan” 7″

Flexible Displays

looky

More for Mr Saxby and his art installation.

This time the emphasis is on the next step up from the passively-lit medium of electronic paper: Organic LEDs enable “Flexible Displays,” which are “emissive”- they have their own light source (thus they require more power) but can therefore be seen in the dark.

Electronic paper

looky

Eric Saxby had a great installation idea involving flexible monitor displays. It sounded really cool.

In an effort to speed him on his realisation of this project, I did some quick surfing and compiled all the e-paper / e-ink resources I could find.

Twinkie Defense

looky

BRIAN: Hey! someone brought in Twikies today!
YONI: Oh, the things that guy killed the mayor with?

Ever been to the Metreon in San Francisco? The convention center next to it is Moscone Center. It’s named after George Moscone, a San Francisco mayor who was gunned down at City Hall by the former city supervisor.

This wasn’t all that long ago, either- it was 1978. We play for keeps in California.

From Oh No News‘ page on the Twinkie Defense:

In 1978, Dan White, a former San Francisco city supervisor who had recently resigned his position, entered San Francisco City Hall through a basement window, went upstairs, and shot and killed Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk.

Psychiatrist Martin Blinder testified in court that White had been depressed, which led to eating junk food: Twinkies and Coca-Cola. This further deepened White’s depression, since he was an ex-athlete and knew that the food was not good for him. This was evidence of his depression that prompted his murder spree. This celebrated diagnosis became known as the “Twinkie defense.”

Dan White got off pretty light- he killed two people, the Mayor and Supervisor Harvey Milk, and only got 7 years and change in prison… he served about 5 before being paroled.

From the “Twinkie Defense” page at the Urban Legends Reference Pages:

Even though White had entered City Hall carrying a gun loaded with especially lethal ammunition, climbed through a basement window to avoid metal detectors, evaded Mayor Moscone’s bodyguard, reloaded after killing Moscone, and walked across City Hall to find and gun down Harvey Milk, the jury found that White’s actions were not premeditated.

nTag hijynx

looky

Már Örlygsson is my new hero- not only did he come up with the “future proofing” how-to but he also has things like the nTag hacking story on his site. Plus his commentary just cracks me up.

Apparently nTag is like a badge for expo attendees, crossed with one of those radio tags you stick to bear’s ears in the wild. It tracks the attendees and records which kiosks they were interested in. So in this story a guy named Whit Diffie hacked his nTag to tell everyone else’s to go to sleep.

Heavy Duty MT mods

looky

I’m completing the “future-proofing” of MT individual archives. This involves using the Regex plugin, but also potentially modifying the “trackback” and “comments” portions of MT- I have to change these in a way which doesn’t break all the other blogs on the system.

It must be possible to implement these changes in a way such that:

  1. doesn’t generate too much per-blog manual work for new blogs- blogs using the default setup should not have to deal with my insanity
  2. affects other existing blogs as little as possible
  3. when possible, separates the server address (the machine hosting MT) from the individual blog (zeromachine) – there should be no references to the server machine in the blog. This is to hide implementation as well as making the blog easier to move to alternate servers.

Due to this first requirement I also have to fix the Search functionality, which shows the name of the server after the second search.

And finally, I also made changes to the CategoryHeaderFooter plugin, because quite frankly it was totally broken. Much like the comment functionality on the author’s site, so I cannot communicate my fix to anyone. Screw ’em.

  • Search:
    • The Search library included with Movable Type actually does have logic in it which looks for user-specified blogs in which to search… but they don’t include that flag in the generated search page returned by the search! So if you do more than one search, suddenly you will be searching in every blog on the system….
    • The form field in question is “IncludeBlogs”
    • I was about to go buck-wild and have the script remember the value of the previous search… but it’s easier (and more sensible) to change the default template so that searches automatically search only the blog you are on at the beginning of the search. Like, I can’t think of an example of why I would want to enable searching every blog on our server, since they all belong to different people. Obnoxiously, this is an intentional feature with a simple solution: add the hidden “IncludeBlogs” element to the default search template!
    • Still a problem- the CGI location is still the general one, listing the server’s name, which does not match the blog’s domain name. To solve this problem originally, shac and I set our scripts to name the root apache cgi-bin directory, so our cgi location was /cgi-bin/mt … but I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to alias the MT directory inside that one to our “cgi-bin”s in the Apache httpd.conf so we could just use it as if it’s at cgi-bin. Then we could change the default search template (action is previously <$MTCGIPath$><$MTSearchScript$>) to name “/cgi-bin/search” etc and wouldn’t have to worry about changing it for every blog in the future. Okay, I’ll do that.
    • actually no I won’t- I’ll just set it to the empty string, “”. That is because the template is always returned by the search cgi URL, and so sending the new result to the same location will be to the same executable.
    • This is a problem also for Comments because of the “Preview” button- MT returns a page from the base level general to all the blogs on the installation. Fortunately, unlike the search page, the comments pages are modifyable on a per-blog level.

  • “Future-proofing“:

    • Installing the Regex into the templates- pretty easy.
    • Tweaking the comments- not so easy, and it does (temporarily) break everyone’s comment links- if someone saved a link to a particular comment on a particular page, it will no longer work. I am not worrying about this on mine because I’m breaking their links anyway (the locations of all the individual archives have changed!), but it will break other people’s comment links on their non-future-proof blogs.. However, judging from the access logs not many people are looking at the blogs on our system, let alone the comments, so not a big. This will resolve itself when everyone does a rebuild. I changed Comments.pm.
    • Wait a second… No one on this system is even USING comment permalinks. Gah why am I doing this? Ah whatever, I’ll put it in anyway.
    • the future-proofing guy points out that it is not necessary to change instances of MTEntryPermalink because they will just have the index.html in them and that will still work. However, I did it anyway, because I am mental like that.
    • Trackbacks- once the trackbacks are registered on the foreign system, they use the permalink- so the 5 or so trackbacks I got already will be broken. Ah well…
    • Trackback sends a URL to the foreign blog being pinged. That URL is the permanent URL of the new posting, on the local blog. Now that we have
      taken such pains to future-proof this URL, we may as well make sure it is accurate! The modified code is in Entry.pm and does two things:

      1. strips out the “index.html” from the permalink, if it’s there (this is important because as I mentioned we don’t want to mess up anyone else’s unaltered blog)
      2. makes long-ass named anchors in permanent entries in multi-entry archives, such as Monthly or Category archives. Again, people aren’t yet using these anchors as links, so we should be ok still.

      Even if these break, it’s just the “#” part of the URL and the same page will still appear, so it’s not a big deal.

    • while we’re separating the blog from its host server name, we have to change the template for the Trackback popup.
      It by default uses “<MTEntryTrackbackLink>” which is a global variable and will contain the name of the server, like “http://servername/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/673”.
      So I’m changing this to “<$MTBlogURL$>cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/<$MTEntryID$>” which is a direct link to the trackback for this blog.
  • CategoryHeaderFooter:
    • line 40 was totally wrong, naming a nonexistent variable $header rather than its actual name, $headerData
    • error messages for header/footer macro definitions are returned by the subroutines, but then they show up in the page.
      So I guess you are intended to put the defs within a comment block in the template’s HTML… to make this easier I had them print out inside their own comment blocks