r3dux.org

You’re bound to have heard the Prodigy‘s Smack My Bitch Up (incredible, and incredibly NSFW, video @ link) – but how was the song made? What goes into making one of the highest regarded dance tracks of the past 10 years?

Well, a bloke called Jim Pavlov knows – and to prove it, in case you didn’t believe him, has recreated the entire song by taking the samples from their original sources, modifying them in similar ways to how Liam Howlett must have to create the original, and slung the meat of the process together into this spiffy video:

Now, it’s not short at 10 minutes – but it’s really interesting to hear the original samples and then see them modified, in front of your very eyes, to the final states that make up each constituent part of the track.

That kind of sampling and effects knowledge just does not happen overnight… Awesome stuff.

Oh, man… This made me laugh something stupid Beautifully surreal.

Definitely in the linux fanboy camp on this one

Have been tarting up the site in small ways to bring it closer to what I’m after when I’ve had the time – to date this means:

1.) Block quotes now have a nice little ” image and style. If you’re running wordpress, look at style.css and add the tag !important if you need to overide things like colours properly. If you’re stuck, read this.

See what I mean?

2.) I’ve added a printing plugin that shows a Print This Post button in the Categories bar of each article, and modified the print output to look kinda nice. If you’re looking at this post on the main page and there’s no Print This Post button, it’s because it’s set to only show up on individual posts. I should probably make it display on every post regardless of whether you’re viewing an individual post or a set of posts…

3.) WP-SuperCache is fixed and running, making the site a lot quicker to load for non-logged-in users (caching disabled for logged in ppl so I can see site changes as their made instead of having to destroy the cache to see any updates).

4.) The topic bar running across the top of the page (About, Email etc) is now correct and working, though I’m yet to modify the “orange” image so it doesn’t wrap around. I’ve been playing with Liquid Rescale (the Gimp version of seam-carving to try to keep the centre orange perfectly round while only allowing distortion of the during resize – it’s gonna take a little reading and experimentation…

5.) Fixed image uploads by modifying the WordPress upload path in Settings | Miscellaneous – legacy problem from moving hosts from Win32 to Linux.. Tsk.

6.) Added a Digg This button via the digg-integrate plugin so I can selectively add one to articles for people to Digg any articles up that they find useful. Not that anyone does. You lazy fuckers

7.) Sorted out the .htaccess rewrite conditions for apache to work better with WP-SuperCache and stop hotlinking to images on my site:

Hehehe.

Actually, I haven’t sorted hotlinking out – I’m making a hash of the rewrite regex so it’s either rewriting my theme images and allowing the post images or rewriting all. And I HATE working on a live site – will have to take this to localhost and smack it around until it works =/

I’m using the following apache rewrite conditions in my .htaccess – but it’s not rewriting the URL to display my no-hotlinking image when I check things with this hotlink checker…

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?r3dux\.org [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !google\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !live\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !bing\. [NC] 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !search\?q=cache [NC]
RewriteRule \.(mp3|avi|swf|gif|png|jpe?g)?$ http://r3dux.org/files/hotlink.gif [NC,R,L]

Any idea what I’m doing wrong?

Update: I’m getting closer to resolving this (thanks in no small part to the help of the mighty Shetboy! Cheers, bud!), but due to me not having complete control over the hosting server, I still need to tweak things because I can’t modify the apache httpd.conf file directly and need to use Directory sections and stuff. When I’ve the time and inclination I’ll crack it fo’ shizzle!

8.) Updated the WordPress permalink structure so that posts now have links like http://r3dux.org/2009/12/lipstick-meet-swine/ rather than http://r3dux.org/?p=1424 – while both still work (via apache’s mod_rewrite) so that previous posts linked on forums or whatnot still take you to the right page.

9.) Um… think that’ about it.

(almost) Yay me

Tomato firmware is a free, downloadable firmware for the Linksys WRT series and some Buffalo and Asus routers which provides vastly improved functionality over the stock firmware. One of the nice things about Tomato, assuming you have a router which it’ll run on, is that it provides a very configurable method of selectively blocking access to the net in general, specific applications or protocols, or even specific websites. So if you have youngish kids who have (largely) unsupervised access to a computer with a net connection, you can keep them away from social networking sites like facebook, myspace, habbo etc. pretty easily. Here’s how:

1.) Go to you routers web interface (http://192.168.1.1 on my setup) and click on Access Restriction

2.) Click on Add to create a new rule

3.) Untick Block All Internet Access to display the full options list, and set it up something like this:

In the above example I’m only blocking selected machines (so the wife still has access to facebook etc.) – the PC the kids have access to is 192.168.1.105, and my IP is 101 (so I can test the blocks on my machine before removing myself from the block list).

The blocklist uses regex sub-string matching to decide which sites to block as follows:

• Regular words on their own are blocked if they occur anywhere in the site URL, so for example, having the word facebook in there will block sites such as: http://facebook.com, http://www.facebook.com, http://facebook.com.au, anything.facebook.anything-else
• Words with a dollar sign at the end of them will block domains ending with what you’ve specified, that is, putting: .com$ would block ALL sites ending with .com, so putting slashdot.org$ would block slashdot.org, linux.slashdot.org, games.slashdot.org, hardware.slashdot.org etc. etc.
• Words starting with a caret (^) block all domains starting with what you’ve specied, that is, putting: ^chat will block sites like http://chatworld.com, http://chat.parachat.com but not http://www.chatworld.com or http://www.parachat.com
• Words starting with a caret and ending with a dollar sign blocks that exact address, i.e. ^www.r3dux.org$ would block http://www.r3dux.org, but not http://r3dux.org or http://www.r3dux.org?p=1407 (i.e.this page)

You can also block specific protocols (BitTorrent, eDonkey, LimeWire etc.) using the built-in IPP2P module, or via Layer 7 (Application Layer) deep packet inspection, which can detect and block traffic of specific types (World of Warcraft, FTP, Flash etc. etc.) regardless of what port they’re running on. Which is both amazingly awesome and slightly depressing at the same time.

I’m a firm believer in preparing the child for the world, and not the world for the child – but sometimes it can make life easier to restrict the amount of mischief they can get up to, hence the social networking blockage. Now all you need to do is make sure you’ve got a strong password on your router (which isn’t stored on a post-it note under your keyboard) and you can keep the little darlings out of harms way with a few clicks… Until they discover pr0n, where you’re going to probably going to have to take a whitelist rather than a blacklist approach like this.

Once you’ve started, where does it end, eh?

Anyways – Happy Benevolent Dictatorship!