Music to hack to

Whoever spent a whole day and night (or two) with hacking a server or any other type of code knows about the importance of music in the background. The music should push you forward, motivate you and keep you from falling into sleep. But it shouldn't make you nervous or aggressive. It must give yo u that feeling of peace and satisfaction that keeps you working on the code for hours.

Today i want to show you my favorite music to listen to while hacking:

Explosions In The Sky
(Photo by nailest)

An American instrumental rock band from Texas. They know how to make you feel the music even without lyrics. Guitarist Munaf Rayani said about their status as instrumentalists, "I mean, I think we discussed singing for half a second, and then it just kinda, we just dropped it. We just didn't go back to it because we were comfortable enough." ^[wikipedia]

YouTube Video: Your Hand In Mine (Live)

Blackmail
(Photo by rockzoom_de)

A German independent band from Koblenz. Their debut album "Blackmail" was released in 1997 - Their first really successful album was "Friend Or Foe" (Released in 2003) which was heavily played on Viva2 (a German independent/rock music tv station).
Blackmail is currently working on a new album "Tempo, Tempo" which is planned to be released on March, 28th.

YouTube Video: Moonpigs

Embee

Embee is a popular swedish DJ. Be prepared: His music keeps you unbelievably warm and loose! In the mid 1990 Embee worked as a solo DJ in the USA and released a number of singles and album although none made an lasting impact.

He is part of the famous swedish hip-hop group Looptroops and won a Swedish Grammy for his first solo album "Tellings from Solitaria" (best hip-hop or soul release of 2004).

YouTube Video: Send Someone Away

Kings Of Leon
(Photo by cheekymonkey_princess)

Kings Of Leeon are a rock band from Tennessee, USA. Their sound is a kind of southern rock or blues. They consist of three brothers and a cousin.

In an interview Caleb Followill (one of the three brothers) said that their early influences where The Rolling Stones, Neil Young and Bob Dylan.

YouTube Video: Knocked Up

Songs: Ohia
(Photo by smallestbones)

My very favorite! Songs: Ohia was mainly a project of Jason Molina (who does also release single albums) and other revolving musicians. In 2003 they changed their name to "Magnolia Electric Co.".

Their music is very emotional and enthralling. Feel the goose bumps touching your skin when listening to Cabwaylingo (from the very first album "Songs: Ohia").

YouTube Video: Cabwaylingo (Live)

No fonts in Steam/Half Life 1 on Wine

When Half Life 1 on Wine is running but does not display any menu entries you need to install the Microsoft TTF fonts. On Ubuntu/Debian you can install them with "aptitude install msttcorefonts". You also need to place the Tahoma font into "~/.wine/drive_c/windows/fonts" - Don't know where to get the Tahoma TTF file? Google is your friend.

How to download entire websites using wget (Linux [,*NIX])

You can download a whole website with the handy wget program:

wget -r http://example.org/somefolder

This is very useful for downloading documentations which are not available as a tarball or PDF.

Google powered observation

It seems like there are many network cameras available over the internet which are not password protected...

Just use Google to search for one of the following terms to find some of those unprotected cameras:

• inurl:ViewerFrame?Mode=
• inurl:axis-cgi/jpg
• inurl:view/indexFrame.shtml

You may see some asian people play tennis or some europeans looking into office windows. Many interfaces even allow you to navigate the camera and zoom in.

ABGraph v.1.0 is out

I just wrote a script called "ABGraph". It is free software, licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).
ABGraph is a simple tool to benchmark webservers. The program uses ab (apache benchmark) to actually benchmark the selected remote host. A graph in PNG format is generated with gnuplot and saved to the selected path/file.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/abgraph

Here is the source code:

#!/bin/sh

## Copyright 2007 Lennart Koopmann [lennart@dev-my.org]
##
## This program is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL)

VERSION="Version 1.0 (01.09.2007) \n"

## TODO: check if host is up |

########
## This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
## it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
## the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or
## (at your option) any later version.
##
## This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
## but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
## MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
## GNU General Public License for more details.
##
## You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
## along with this program. If not, see .
########

# $1 = hostname to benchmark
# $2 = where to output the PNG file
# $3 = number of requests (must be over 100)

# find out location of ab
ABLOC=`which ab`

#find out location if gnuplot
PLOTLOC=`which gnuplot`

echo "This is ABGraph $VERSION";

# check if all needed parameters are given
if [ -n "$1" -a -n "$2" -a -n "$3" ]

then

# move the gnuplot instructions to /tmp/abgraph-plotme
echo "set terminal png
set output '$2'
set title 'Benchmark results of $1'
set size 2,1
set key left top
set xlabel 'request'
set ylabel 'ms'
plot '/tmp/abgraph-data1' using 10 with lines title 'Benchmark 1 ($3/1)', '/tmp/abgraph-data2' using 10 with lines title 'Benchmark 2 ($3/25)', '/tmp/abgraph-data3' using 10 with lines title 'Benchmark 3 ($3/50)'
" > /tmp/abgraph-plotme

# first benchmark
echo "Benchmarking... 1/3 ($3 HTTP requests)";
$ABLOC -n $3 -g /tmp/abgraph-data1 $1 > /dev/null
echo "Great.\nContinuing...";

# sleep 5 seconds
echo "\nsleeping 5 seconds...\n"
sleep 5

# second benchmark
echo "Benchmarking... 2/3 ($3 HTTP requests, simulating 25 concurrent users)";
$ABLOC -n $3 -c 25 -g /tmp/abgraph-data2 $1 > /dev/null
echo "Okay.\nContinuing...";

# sleep 5 seconds
echo "\nsleeping 5 seconds...\n"
sleep 5

# third benchmark
echo "Benchmarking... 3/3 ($3 HTTP requests, simulating 50 concurrent users)";
$ABLOC -n $3 -c 50 -g /tmp/abgraph-data3 $1 > /dev/null

echo "Looks good. Finished!\n";

# generate graph (png saved to user selected path by gnuplot)
$PLOTLOC /tmp/abgraph-plotme > /dev/null

echo "The graph has been saved to $2";

# tidy up
rm /tmp/abgraph-data1
rm /tmp/abgraph-data2
rm /tmp/abgraph-data3
rm /tmp/abgraph-plotme

else

# display error message on wrong usage
echo "Usage: abgraph [hostname to benchmark with http:// and trailing /] [output file .png] [number of requests]"
echo "e.g: ./abgraph http://example.com/ /home/myhome/graph.png 500"

fi

The main requirements are an installed ab (apache benchmark) and a installed version of gnuplot.

the output of abgraph

a generated graph

The script is very useful for web developers and administrators to tune up their applications and servers.

Hello.

Hello. ;)