while i was searching for a plug-in which allows access control to posts based on users and/or user groups, i stumbled about many different plug-ins, some of them very promising, but either dead, not updated for a long time, or simply not exactly usable by producing a long list of php error messages already in the admin screen after activating them. grrreat. well, of course, i could also try to do it myself, as usual. but hey, that sucks: i’d be better of writing my own blog software.
well, i talked about the problem a bit with kornel, and we concluded that an optimal blog system would be a very slim piece of software, just providing the very basic features, i.e. managing posts, comments and pages, users and user groups/roles/whatever, and access privileges, while everything else—such as galleries, embedding videos, gadgets, comfortable post editors, …—is implemented as plugins.
anyone want’s to do this, and produce a well-documented, slim, bug-free blog system with a good plugin interface, together with a few standard plugins? :)

yesterday evening, i wanted to grab a few cds. while cdparanoia was running, i copied a text file to another place. then, i noticed that the content of the copy was garbled. a quick check showed that the content of the original file wasn’t. tried it again, the same result. and again. then, i stopped cdparanoia, and after that, copying worked. well. after restarting cdparanoia, copying still worked fine. so i stopped thinking about this and continued working – which was a fatal error.
this morning, when i turned the macbook on again, the desktop was pretty garbled and the dock was at the wrong position and had the wrong size and the wrong content, i.e. everything i changed since i first got my macbook was gone. moreover, skype wanted to know a user name and a password, and adium seemed to have forgotten a lot of things i taught it, too. after starting the terminal (which is not so easy to find, if it’s not in your dock) i quickly checked some files i created yesterday – all garbled! what the heck. the older files seem to be ok. after some more trying around, it turned out that some other files from yesterday evening (namely, the music which i ripped) was fine, too. so, what happened? i don’t know. well, most of the files which were garbled i had backuped on the institute’s server, so that wasn’t a problem. but there was one file, called termine.txt, where i collected all appointments for the next months, which i changed yesterday evening and which i created in the last few days in long hours, and which i hadn’t backuped yet: now it’s garbled, too. screwed.
well. i don’t know what happened or whose fault it was. but for me, garbling data is something which an operation system should never ever do. well, good for me that i ordered a thinkpad yesterday, so i’ll switch back to linux soon anyway, hoping it will be less annoying… after all, all big data losses i had in the last years, which weren’t related to dying hard disks, happened on osx.

well, after this rant, something more constructive. one thing what could have happened is that for some reason, something screwed up with the realtime disk encryption i enabled on the macbook. maybe, for some reason, a screwed up dma transfer (maybe initiated by cdparanoia?) somehow managed to screw this up. just guessing.

the third piece of art i bought is the grimalkin by the german prog/doom project noekk. the cover depicts a beautiful black and white image of an old, wooden house with a window and lots of green in front of it, which made me wanting to listen to it. the album begins very interesting, with a small foreplay which sounds both strange, somehow, and, at the same time, makes the prog interested hearer curious on how this thing continues. the music evolves into a stream of various styles interwoven to a beauty, taking you by your hand, pulling you into a colorful world of fantasy. featuring three tracks, of eleven, ten and twenty minutes, this album sounds like a real gem of beautiful prog, which is not only a beautyful soundscape, but also tells stories, of beautiful dream worlds, having dark, gloomy parts, secrets.

another beauty i found while browsing around in the record store is apokatastasia‘s demo waiting four. apokatastasia is a swiss progressive/experimental metal band, featuring besides classical instruments like guitars, bass, drums also violoncellos and e-cellos. the demo features thirty minutes of a gloomy trip through a mystic world. beginning with a drone, turning into the sound of someone running, maybe fleeing. the music is intense, progressive, dark. the (violon)cello is perfectly integrated into the music, sounding almost like its perfectly normal to have cellos playing. equipped with screams, choirs, and sound effects like steps, breathing, the music turns into a thirty minutes long stream of horror, gloom, darkness, reminding me of the blair witch project. in particular in the running scenes at the beginning and at the end, i can almost see the scenes with my inner eye, like taken with a shaky handheld camera. makes me feel the fear.
i hope i’ll get hold of the band’s first album, shedding, somewhen near in the future.

while browsing around in my favorite music store in town some time ago, i stumbled across several very good albums. one of them, about whom i want to write today, is ashes against the grain by the american folk/black/doom metal band agalloch.
a stream of dark, intense music. full of beautiful, sad melodies. doomy. somehow, catchy, too. creating mental images.
the first track, limbs, is a very good example for this. i feel beauty and despair, going hand in hand.
also a very beautiful song is this mountain on which you will die, with eyes closed, i feel like through a foggy, snow-white landscape in the mountains. a gloomy atmosphere is building up. staying, while the music fades out…
another beauty is not unlike the waves, beginning with the sound of waves. powerful; full of energy, pushing forward, almost no rest. clean vocals mixing with screaming. beautiful.
the album ends with the three-parter our fortress is burning…. the first part is more quiet, slow. at the end, distorted guitars are lightening up in the background, like flames starting to lick, trying to spread. in part two, they gain more intense, spreading over the fortress, while in the more drony part three, they eat up everything. destruction. death. the end has begun.

this friday, metallica held the release party for their newest album, death magnetic, in berlin. the concert was completely paid by metallica; the entrance fee, which was just 10 euros, was completely donated to the german heart center berlin. well, giving money to charity, listening to a good concert, meeting a friend and visiting berlin is always a good idea, so i was there ;-) the party took place in the new-built o₂ world arena, next to the ostbahnhof:

after waiting for a long time outside, we were let inside. we weren’t able to get tickets for the standing area, only seat tickets, but who says you have to stay seated during the concert? here’s a view on the stage including the technical equipment including the speakers, hanging from the top of the hall:

first, the hall seemed quite empty, but as it got later, it filled up. the concert started at 21:30, even though it said 20:00 on the tickets… and i’ve never heard music played soooo loud before the concert, you basically had to scream at each other to make yourself understood. that was a bit annoying. anyway. then the show began, with lots of light effects (though no pyro stuff), loud and heavy music; after some absence (on the album side), back to good old thrash metal.
the setlist was as follows:

1. that was just your life;
2. end of the line;
3. the thing that should not be;
4. of wolf of man;
5. one;
6. broken, beat, and scarred;
7. cyanide;
8. frantic;
9. until it sleeps;
10. wherever i may roam;
11. for whom the bells tolls;
12. the day that never comes;
13. master of puppets;
14. blackened.
    encore:
15. blitzkrieg;
16. jump in the fire;
17. seek and destroy.

my personal favorite from the new tracks is cyanide, as its best suited for head banging :) a cool part was when they released nets, installed at the roof, which contained big air-filled black balls with metallica written on them, which bounced around in the standing area on the hands of the fans. well, until they were more and more captured by some fans and tried to shrink, to make them easier to transport. well, here are some visual impressions:

today i was again thinking on backup solutions. my current backup harddisks use ext2 resp. ext3, a linux file system. but now i’m forced to use osx, as my linux machine completely died. it turns out that osx can read ext2/ext3 using ext2fsx, but that one is pretty instable and already killed one ext2 partition of mine (note: don’t mount anything as writeable!). i began looking for a file system which both osx and linux can write and read (and which is known to be stable). but… so far, i found: nothing. well, except fat32. i mean, hey, what the heck?! it can’t be that fat32 is the only one supported by both of them; fat32 is a relict from the stone age of computing, nothing which you want to use on a modern computer. well, maybe, but only if you store your stuff in tar files, another pretty antique, but at least somehow useful thing. this makes it pretty much impossible to browse the backup data, to see what’s in it, to easily extract certain files, but at least provides a working alternative. but, well, is this really the only one?!
another reason why we’re still in the stone age of computing…

on saturday, i visited the rock 2008, a one-day festival held on königstein fortress, located in the beautiful landscape of the saxon switzerland, together with a friend. here are some pictures from the fortress:

after strolling around the fortress interior a bit, we walked near to the stage to watch the first band, krieger, a german hard rock band. usually, the first band(s) playing on a festival have the ungrateful job of killing some time, while most of the crowd hopes they’ll stop soon. often, they aren’t exactly experienced or aren’t too good. but not krieger; they played a pretty solid kind of hard rock, maybe not exactly my style, but it was good and we enjoyed it. some photos:

after krieger, a short break took place when the stage was prepared for lacrimas profundere, a german gothic metal band. the break went on pretty fast, and the band entered the stage. i haven’t heard them before, just their name. i think i have to listen to some of their albums before i can give a better judgement, but they sounded pretty good. a photo:

a very noticeable thing about this festival was that all stage reconstructions were done very fast, and the sound quality was really good all the time. i haven’t seen this combination ever before; often, it seems that the reconstruction times were eternal and the sound quality still really bad.
another admireable thing was the strict adheration of the time table. the first two bands had like 30 minutes, and the whole festival was planned to be over by around 23 o’clock, and so they managed to do. even though the doors opened a few minutes later than planned. (well, please admit it, have you ever experienced some festival or concert without any delay?)
anyway, the third band was schandmaul, a german medieval metal band. i know a bunch of people who like them a lot, but this doesn’t change the fact that i managed to not know a lot of them except a few songs, maybe. schandmaul did a very nice show. they managed to get the last bits of the party rocking and rolling. definitely a very good live band. some photos:

then, finally, it was time for the big stars of the evening, the finnish cello rockers apocalyptica. i’ve already seen them last november in zürich, and they were one of the main reasons why i travelled so far for this festival. the stage design was as usual: four large metal chairs, formed like skulls, with a huge drumkit in the middle:

their performance was, as usual, excellent. it’s always amazing how eicca and perttu manage to combine heavy head banging with playing their cellos perfectly. unfortunately, antero wasn’t playing with a burning cello this time, though. besides that, they managed to let the crowd freak out, and played lots of great songs, including some of my very favorites like prologue (apprehension) from reflections and the norwegian black metal classichall of the mountain king from cult, featuring paavo stomping around the stage while playing the mountain king. simply great. here are some photos:

after maybe one and a half hour, everything was over. we took a peek at the merchandizing booth, where the guys from lacrimas profundere were waiting for their fans to talk, being photographed, autographing and talking. then, we took the bus down to the city of königstein and walked back to our hostel, where its owner, lutz, was waiting for the concert attendees at a nice bonfire.
well, i think this concert/festival qualifies for being one of the best i’ll attend this year. the technical stuff was marvellous, the timing good (except that at least lacrimas profundere should have played a bit longer and, well, apocalyptica could have played the whole day anyway :-) ). all four bands were ranging from good to excellent, and in particular the last two made the crowd go crazy. (even though i still don’t get it why on earth one wants to have a mosh pit while a gothic metal band is playing. but then, hell, kiddies aren’t exactly predictable…)

just made some photos of today’s lunar eclipse, after missing the last one. here are some of them:

note that the last one had a shutter speed of 70 seconds. the moon moved a lot during that, as you can see. two more pictures of the night:

she didn’t say it. never ever.
a cloud of dust, debris, arises. so majestic, somehow beautiful, but deadly. ripping apart the two bodies, parting them forever, leaving emtpyness. blackness wins, once again.
dil se.. (imdb), another bollywood movie, does not features a happy end in the classical sense, with blowing the lovers to dust. still, the beauty which can be found in particular in the last moments of the movie, is amazing. even though she didn’t say it, she accepts it and, somehow, expresses the yes, in her deep look into his eyes. if this isn’t, then what’s love after all?
then, in another glimpse of time, all is gone, shattered.
sounds familiar.