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...

Dave Brown is a young(ish?) British musician and YouTube vidder. He runs the "Boy in a Band" YouTube channel, where he regularly posts a variety of videos largely featuring or relating to music and production. The artist "23", whose Page I follow on Facebook, posted one of Dave's recent videos - this guaranteed an immediate conversation on Facebook with yes-men mostly agreeing with 23's POV (who is implicitly in agreement with the video maker). (without even looking at the Youtube page for the video, I know this will have generated thousands of incendiary comments with people vociferously arguing for and against this guy's point of view).

However, the chap in the video uses a rather poorly thought-out, non sequiteur analogy to promote his point of view. I thought I would pen a response on behalf of all of us who consider the current brand of 'dubstep' to be nothing whatsoever like 'proper' dubstep.

Here's the video:

And here's my response:

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This chap Dave's got a good presentational style but his analogy is fundamentally poorly thought out. Putting a hat on a cat in no way diminishes the intrinsic value and quality of said felis catus. However, removing the hard-to-define (but very obvious) 'soul' and depth from a good dubstep tune, replacing it with a metric ton of hard-limited sawwave wob, absolutely ruins the definition of the genre.

The genre tag 'Dubstep' to me defines ~140bpm music with a halftime feel to the beats, incredibly deep and powerful subbass with acres of space around the sound. Vibes music, designed for dark and grimy clubs on huge systems with scoop bassbins. You get into your zone and you experience the music; dubstep in its heydays might only have 50 or 100 people at London nights before the genre broke through into the mainstream.

Dubstep evolved from its roots in two-step garage and grime; it then developed and became slightly more daytime radio-friendly (cf. Skream's discographical tour de force, Magnetic Man). Today's music lazily defined as 'dubstep' is far removed, it's essentially electropop with a derivative song structure and similar halftime drums. This we can newly define as brostep, or just shit.

Most importantly, the "dubstep" genre also took its name in part from the heavy dub influence which is overwhelmingly evident in the 'classic' dubstep produced between 2004 and 2008 - gradually this was sucked out, like your granny sucking eggs, to replace it with midrange buzzes and little if no dynamic range. The two forms of music are in no way similar, dubstep was simply misapplied as the style morphed into a new genre and now it's stuck with the masses. If you want to hear what is arguably 'dubstep mk. 2', listen to tracks released by artists on the Deep Medi label - Mala, Pinch, Skream, Silkie, Goth Trad et al - all those who stuck to their guns and continue to produce 'proper' Dubstep.

Genre names exist to define a particular style of music. They do not exist to be a catch-all of anything at the common denominator tempo with a vaguely similar intro-buildup-breakdown-drop-breakdown2-drop2-outro format. 'Dance' music is the notable exception to this ("house", "techno") because it defines the common four to the floor beat... Even then you immediately jump into subgenres to accurately describe the exact form and structure.

Skrillex is musically and stylistically as far removed from someone like Loefah or Skream as you can get. Compare the former's remix of the track "I" by the latter artist [NB: for full effect, listen on a club system as intended, or at least a 10" sub!] to ... well, any Nero or Skrillex track, and you can see how it evolved to where it is now - but it's not the same genre, not by a long shot.

The derogatory "brostep" name needs to be replaced with something better though, that's where a lot of the hate comes from IMO as newcomers feel they're being cold-shouldered by us 'oldies'. If you want to listen to Skrillex? Fine. Have a sexy party with smoke and lasers and play it all night. Just don't call it Dubstep, because it's not.

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.

Here's my command:

tail /var/log/httpd/domains/*.log -f -n 50 | grep -e "GET / HTTP/1\|GET /2011/\|GET /2010/\|GET /2009/\|GET /2012/\|.php HTTP/1\|.html HTTP/1\|.mp3 HTTP/1"

To break it down:

1. tail = invoke tail
2. /var/log/httpd/domains/*.log = read all files ending in *.log from the path /var/log/httpd/domains/ (a relative path, or none at all, could be used if you invoke the command in a closer folder)
3. -f = declares it to refresh the screen live as files are updated
4. -n 50 = read the last 50 lines from each file (I recommend you set a large scrollback buffer if you want to specify more!)
5. | = pipe symbol, used to append another command - in this case, to perform further processing on tail's raw output
6. grep = invoke grep
7. -e = behave like "egrep"
8. the long command (actually several, separated with escaped pipe characters) inside inverted commas = only display lines containing any one of these matching strings

Notes: When including multiple desired string matches with grep -e, you need to escape the pipe symbol as it behaves differently used inside regular expressions (which is what grep and egrep use). To do this, you put a backslash directly before the pipe symbol, \| -- if you don't, it'll be ignored, or that match string will be prepended to the one following it (derp).

This accomplishes exactly what I need on this box, I can see requests to site roots, requests to WordPress-based sites running with rewritten URLs (see the year-based URLs) plus any PHP, HTML or MP3 files. You can expand upon this to your heart's content but the default should work quite nicely. You *will* have to do further work on the string if you want to match sites with rewritten URLs if there's no indicator in the URL to show it's a page of content, but that's beyond the scope of this wee article. Hope you find it useful!

---
Related reading:

Dayid's screen and tmux cheat sheet (Chris: VERY USEFUL!)
http://www.dayid.org/os/notes/tm.html

Hawk Host's tmux article: Part 1 | Part 2 (Chris: VERY USEFUL!)

screen and tmux compared (with keys)
http://www.dayid.org/os/notes/tm.html

Hawk Host TMUX tutorial: Part 1 | Part 2
Mutelight: Practical tmux
http://mutelight.org/articles/practical-tmux

Googly-oogly...
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=connect+to+defunct+tmux+session

SU: Why do I have multiple tmux processes?
http://superuser.com/questions/259154/why-do-i-have-multiple-tmux-processes

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.

Examples of what I've received in the past twelve months:

• Criminal Records Checks for slightly dubious looking individuals
• Correspondence for University Campus groups
• Australian pre-pay mobile telephone account details (including personal details and telephone numbers)
• Canadian mobile telephone account details (including personal information and telephone numbers)
• Birthday greetings, sadly not on the correct day
• Microsoft XBox Live activation emails
• Microsoft Windows Live activation emails (immediately cancelled)
• Pictage emails for someone's wedding
• Science Center of Iowa mailshots
• Someone's Foursquare account emails
• Tuxedo hire information
• Various invoices for purchases, including some antique furniture
• Pharmaceutical company meeting detail emails

... Plus loads of things like home addresses, relatives' names, telephone numbers etc. I email back to the people where I can to advise them of incorrect details, but I can't believe so many people can make such a fundamental mistake as to get their own email address wrong!

Monday rant over...

Anyway, given that TDK have produced their own BD-R media for a while now, I decided to plump down a few units of my local currency and purchase a ten-cake of some TDK 4x 25 GB BD-Rs (part number t78088, I paid £16.15 on the 7th of September and they're currently at £16.84). I'll shortly be doing a test burn with some mixed media and will duly report back with qualitative burn analysis, some general read/write speed observations and any other findings as to the quality of the discs themselves.

UK blank media e/retailers: if you'd like to send me test media for review please get in touch, I'm considering making a miniseries of this due to the absence of decent like-for-like comparisons of currently available blank BD media.

Chris Cook's Lock Screen app works great - and still works with 10.5.8 on the MBP1,1 I use at work. Give it a try if you dislike leaving your Mac unlocked whilst you go do other srs bsns.

(I'm also aware that there's umpteen other ways to both lock a workstation and accomplish Fast User Switching without mousing to the option; look here (StackExchange), here (MacWorld) and here (MacWorld again) for starters.

A friend emailed me a link to a BBC article¹ discussing the 'landmark' judgment handed down by an (out of his depth?) judge regarding the enforced blocking by BT of Newzbin2 to stop its customers from accessing copyrighted materials in a piratey manner.

Everyone's dancing around the topic. (I do not advocate piracy as a means to solve the current problems the creative industries face, but I haven't paid for every single song I've ever listened to.) However the older I get, the more I understand about the importance of paying your dues - and understanding the value of a piece of music or film, and understanding why it's right to pay a fair price for it. I have, quite literally, spent thousands of pounds on my music collection, with a heavy investment into vinyl along with many CDs and even a few C90s Regrettably I believe this judgment could have serious ramifications for not only the future of entertainment industries but personal rights and freedoms. My email back to my friend turned into somewhat of a long one... And here it is reproduced for your enjoyment.

The Open Rights Group man has it right. It won't really make a dent in the numbers of people using the services - indeed, I suspect anonymous VPN proxy services (which cost from as little as £3-£5 a month) will get a lot more popular as people realise they can just use these to completely mask what they're doing with their Internet connections. I already VPN some of my web traffic, for privacy purposes, web development testing or perhaps if I'm just feeling particularly paranoid.

In an email interview before the verdict, Newzbin 2 threatened to break BT's filters.

"We would be appalled if any group were to try to sabotage this technology as it helps to protect the innocent from highly offensive and illegal content," said a spokesman for BT.

Emotive language like "highly offensive" doesn't help - who's  to say what people find offensive? Is Mary Whitehouse back in charge? I could argue that I find the mass worship of Jesus Christ as a representation of the one true God highly offensive - but they're never going to even consider a block on Il Papa (Hello Your Holiness, hope you're doing well!²). In the meantime all this does is place increased load on the ISPs - effectively policing what are CIVIL copyright claims from private sector companies - and the end result? Everyone's broadband becomes more expensive.

The issue of p2p and downloading things for free boils down to something far more fundamental - it's now a mindset firmly stuck in a subset of society. And who's to say, taking a broader look at general 'consumption' of music and video, that their outlook on the value of recorded music isn't legitimate? However you look at it, we've lost the fight with those people - so let's move on to the next generation and explain to them in a helpful, unpatronising way why things, people, works of creative and cultural value deserve to be supported and funded through paying a fair price for their creations.

My personal opinion is that if you download music and films which you quite like and enjoy listening to/watching, you should pay a few quid of your hard earned - out of respect for the artists if nothing else! Consider the price of a CD - still about £10, even though the cost of everything else (including the materials to make CDs) has risen steadily with inflation ever since the CD was first introduced. Then, think about how many times you'll play the CD (dozens of times in the car or the kitchen, probably hundreds of times once you've put it on the MP3 player and carry it round with you). Then, think about the dozens of people involved in its production, including production, mastering, engineers, the musicians themselves, studio facilities, label promotion, management, distribution...

Once you've thought about that, go take a look at the price of a gig ticket for that artist - probably £20-£40 for most mainstream groups, sometimes more. That £10 CD price suddenly looks like VERY good value for money! And there's literally thousands of people involved with making a film, how do they pay their rent and electricity bills? The machine of the "industry" obviously tries to maximise its own profits whenever possible but there has to be some kind of infrastructure in place for everyone else to be employed by it. You can't just have a wifty wafty cloud of disorganised people all just saying "yeah ok, whatever, I'll do a bit of work here and magically get paid sometime in the future". I don't particularly like how some aspects of the music industry work, but it's a vicious circle (less money's made, the industries have to try and make quicker and quicker profits with the manufactured bands which inevitably leads to a lack of *artist development* - you could never have someone like Bob Dylan around today, he'd be too expensive to fund whilst he was songwriting and 'developing' as an artist).

This could quickly turn into a 1,000 word essay on why I'm so pissed off about the music industry - I think that people who just download everything they ever watch or listen to without ever paying for a single thing are being very disrespectful towards artists and creative individuals who produce the entertainment they're enjoying. As my boss said to me a while ago, this is the essence of the divide: these people are consumers - they simply gobble up everything they can find without a thought to the sustainability of the approach... Then then bitch and whine when TV shows go under after one series or a band breaks up because they couldn't afford to live on a musician's wage. Fortunately there's still enough respectful CUSTOMERS who understand the value in paying a fair price for what is ultimately a very long-lasting, high quality piece of work. In some respects (and forgive the crude analogy) the creative industries are a little similar to a pension fund (the more people paying in, the less each person has to pay and the more everyone receives at the end).

Blocking newzbin2 will not change the mindset of a consumer, it'll only set the precedent for them to be taken to court and locked up for downloading a film. Is copyright infringement - a civil offence - akin to a criminal offence such as GBH or fraud? No. Does it therefore merit a similar level of punishment? Absolutely not. This whole issue regarding enforced blocking of sites and services is a very slippery slope; it further reinforces their opinion that Big Content (aka the "MAFIAA" - Music and Film Industry Associations of America, and their European counterparts) are simply trying to sue people into stopping downloading. Then they'll just go download even more stuff out of spite! This kind of prosecution is also a massive waste of taxpayers' money.

1. "BT ordered to block links to Newzbin 2 web site", BBC News, July 28 2011
2. he's a Friend of the Blog