Author: Chris

Ever listened to Chef Aid and wondered why some of the vocals' sound quality is 'weird'?

I bought Chef Aid: The South Park album years ago. Great album, love it to bits and every so often still listen to it. However Track 18 always bugged me - Chef's vocals alternate between crystal clear studio quality and some dingy, Skypesque highly compressed garble (in reality probably closer to a 64 kbps ISDN codec).

These days I'm a qualified sound engineer and technician but I was always 'into' production, sound quality etc. I picked up on the weirdness of Track 18 from first listen but could never find anyone to ask or discuss it with. However Scott Smitelli outnerded me to the punch (in 2007) and wrote an entire article on his web site - with empirical evidence, good work that man! In his article he explains the differences between the portions of vocals contributed by Isaac Hayes and really goes into quite a lot of depth before coming to his own conclusion as to why the sound is as it is. Kudos to him... Because now when I'm talking to people about this I can just reference his page instead of explaining again from scratch. 😉

His article about the strange audio on Track 18 of Chef Aid is on his web site - go read if you're a fan of the album.

An' tha's yer lot fer now...

Is Skrillex Dubstep? I say no (in an open letter)

... In which Christopher, after being shown a video making the case for the current brand of dubstep, and why using the term "real" music is stupid (by composing a poorly considered cat-based analogy), adds his 2p to the ongoing debargument around the evolution of genre-defined music, where one genre ends and another begins... And why Skrillex is rubbish. Read on for the juicy bits

Tiplet: monitor realtime web site traffic on a Linux server with tmux and tail

I run a VPS which has numerous sites on it. Whilst I was trying to pin down the root cause of sporadic hard lockups and runaway memory usage, I settled on a somewhat inefficient (yet very handy) line of code which I run inside a tmux session over a PuTTY SSH connection (two other panes run iftop and watch --interval=0.1 iostat -m for realtime disk I/O).

An aside: tmux is like screen on speed, way more extensible and SO MUCH EASIER TO USE, I highly recommend you give it a try if you're a commandline warrior. There's some highly useful tutorials to help you get up to speed - google "tmux tutorial", Hawk Host's two-parter has some good stuff in it.

To accomplish this I'm taking advantage of the fact that DirectAdmin (which by default provides a base of Apache 2, MySQL and PHP 5) stores its httpd access logs in a common folder: /var/log/httpd/domains/<virtualhost>.log</a>. I'm combining the tail command with grep's egrep functionality (grep -e) and some pattern matching. It's not perfect: I have to occasionally Ctrl+C and restart the command as it stalls out, but it does everything I need.

Full command and my somewhat explanatory breakdown after the jump

Rosetta@Home cruncher? Don't worry, the project's still going! (Server migration update)

I noticed last week that my BOINC client wasn't connecting to the Rosetta @ Home server to report completed Work Units. I emailed David Baker, manager of the R@H project and this evening received a reply:

Very unfortunately, we had to move the servers from one location to another, and it is taking much longer than we thought to get everything back up again. We hope to have this complete in the next day or two. Please do notify the community that we are working as hard as we can on this, and we thank everybody for their patience. We have a big set of exciting jobs we will be sending out as soon as everything is up and running.

So hold tight everybody, R@H hasn't disappeared - just hold tight and wait for the server migration to finish.

I ♥