Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Category: Me (Page 22 of 27)

Mongolian folk music

February 27, 2011 / / 8 Comments

A few sounds I wanted to share with you.

I have a broad musical taste, ranging from classical to metal, from ethnic to industrial. I am drawn to all these kinds of music because of the physical and emotional impact. Music has to move me – I have never been a follower of hit lists. It’s not about the song texts, more important is the atmosphere conveyed by the song text. I like to be surprised by sounds I have never heard before, or a musical direction that is new to me. Ethnic music especially appeals to me – perhaps because as a young child, my dad used to let me listen to cassette tapes full of eastern and african music.

On the topic of ethnic music, which is what this post is about, what I appreciate in music is when it achieves a fusion of cultures. For instance, combining traditional ethnic melodies and instrumentation, with contemporary music and production. In a broader sense, mixing the old with the new. That is what keeps the old music alive and gives the contemporary music a new soul. Germany is full of bands that create an exciting mix of medieval and ethnic song structures with electronic or rock music. Musical purists have a hard time appreciating these blends… I have had discussions with friends and family about how old music is being killed by fusing it with modern rhythms. Well, to each their own taste. I enjoy myself immensely and to me that is the important bit.

I rarely listen to radio stations these days. When I was young, I was hooked to  my stereo because that was my source of musical education. Now of course there is the endless ocean that is the Internet… I visit a lot of music blogs and let myself be inspired by the stories told. If you’re interested, you may want to look at the Totally Fuzzy music blog aggregator.

Recently, I have been listening to some contemporary Mongolian folk music that was mentioned on one of these blogs. Mongolia is a country that has been influenced by its big neigbors China and Russia, who both ruled there in the previous century. Several hundreds of years earlier, Mongolia’s culture was touched by Tibetan Buddhism, but of course we all know it best for Genghis Khan, the ruler of the Mongol Empire some 800 years ago.

I was intrigued by the discovery that contemporary Mongolian bands practice the same “throat singing”, also called “overtone singing” or “höömii” that I was familiar with… but assumed to be limited to Tibetan Buddhist monk chants. What do you know.

A nice example of the art of throat singing, accompanied by an ancient mongolian musical instrument (in this case, a morin khuur) is displayed in the following video (exemplary is the comment “cameraman at 4:38 trying to identify where that sound is coming from – then? he’s like WTF?!?!“):

I was pleased to learn that there is a thriving musical scene in Mongolia, centered around its capital city Ulan Bator. I also found that I missed several concerts in the Netherlands and Germany that I could have attended if only I had known… but there are some good video registrations which I will link to further below.

Egschiglen is a group that has been around for some 20 years now. Their music has a trance-like feeling to it. It is inspired by works of classical Mongolian composers, and their instrumentation is fully acoustic and authentic. Quite different from the more modern sounding folk/rock groups I will discuss next, the two albums by Egschiglen I heard (Zazal and Gereg) touched me on a deep level. Perhaps because I have not really experienced a lot of traditional Chinese music? I found it magical.

I found a recording of a live performance in Berlin (the band has a second home in Germany) by three of Egschiglen’s members, followed by a larger set where you can experience the full band including their female singer:

Of the bands that produce contemporary music, perhaps I like Altan Urag best. There’s so much energy and originality here! The song “Khukh Tolboton (Blue Mark)??” of their album “Made in Altan Urag” featured during the closing credits of the movie “Mongol” (2007). Here is a link to a video that was made by joining shots of that movie with shots of the band (the song is played at a slightly higher pitch than the original album version, probably to make it fit with the movie credits):

Completely different atmosphere in their song Requiem:

And then there is Hanggai – a Beijing based group founded by a former member of a punk band who rediscovered his Mongolian roots. If I interpreted correctly, they are the most successful Mongolian band outside Asia.

Hanggai make quite an appearance! See this video which is a live performance at the Midi festival in Beijing of the song “Xig Xile” from their 2010 album “He Who Travels Far”:

A studio take of the same song can be seen here:

The unique aspect of these bands is how their music successfully fuses their own cultural roots with the world they live in today. In China, that is certainly an achievement. To me, this was a worthwhile addition to my musical library.

Enjoy! Eric

Recipe: Bogracs Gulyas

January 28, 2011 / / 14 Comments

… or traditional Goulash stew – which might sound more familiar to you.

In my previous post I suggested that I might give you a food recipe, in an attempt to write about something different than software. After some thought, that actually sounded like a nice addition to Alien Pastures. So here we go.

I used to cook a lot when I was younger (as a student and after my study, before I became a father and life overwhelmed me). And a rather good one too if I may have my moment of not-so-humbleness. In the years that followed, I traveled a lot, got ever buysier with work and no longer was able to prepare a decent meal, instead depending on my dear wife for my diner. And she cooks a whole lot better than I ever did! All the good food, it made me lazy!

Then, before you know you’re ten years older and your son needs to get initiated in the art of cooking. We decided that he and I will cook diner once a week – in the weekends when I have the time to prepare things that may take hours. For me that was a nice way to get back my skills and learn new techniques and cook stuff my way.

One of those weekend days, I decided to make a goulash. Not the soup that everybody knows from the store, but the original Hungarian recipe which is somewhat between a soup and a stew.

Photo by "Hungaro phantasto"

Hungary is known for its paprikas of course, and the goulash. You may not be aware, but the Gulyás were hungarian herdsmen who traveled across large parts of Europe with their cattle. They would cook their beef stew in large copper kettles above a wood fire – these kettles were called bogrács. This is how the traditional meal became known as “bogrács gulyás” – or just goulash. It took until the 18th century, when paprika and potato became widely known in Hungary, to turn the gulyás into the watery stew we all know and love.

Here is the recipe for 3 to 4 dishes (we are no meat eaters here,  so for some of you this may amount to only 2 to 3 dishes). Forgive me if I do not use the correct english words, I am used to write my recipes in dutch…

Ingredients:

  • 1 big onion, sliced into coarse pieces
  • 1 clove of garlic, cut into bits
  • 50 grams of butter
  • vegetable oil (olive or sunflower oil)
  • 1 tablespoon of mild paprika powder
  • pinch of hot paprika powder
  • pinch of salt & pepper
  • 400 grams of beef stew, cut into cubes
  • 1 teaspoon of caraway seeds
  • 1 tablespoon of thick tomato sauce –or- 3 to 4 peeled and chopped-up tomatoes
  • 1 green pepper (also called green paprika), cut into coarse pieces
  • ½ celery root (celeriac) or turnip, cut into cubes
  • 300 grams of potatoes, sliced into cubes

Preparation:

  • Heat the butter together with a generous sprinkle of vegetable oil in a large (iron) pot until the butter turns brown and stops sizzling.
  • Add the sliced onions and garlic, and sauté until they turn yellowish-brown.
  • Add the paprika powder and stir it through the onion. Add the beef cubes, the caraway seeds and a few tablespoons of hot water.
  • Sauté together until the meat begins to change colour, white to lightbrown. Keep stirring to prevent burning the onion. Sprinkle with the salt and pepper.
  • Simmer for 10 minutes, then add the tomato sauce (or the chopped tomatoes), the green paprika and the celery root.
  • Stir and mix the ingredients, then add half a liter of water, enough to cover the pot’s content.
  • Close the lid on the pot and leave the pot to cook on a small fire for two hours, until the meat is almost done.
  • Add the potato cubes (and salt to taste) and leave on the fire to cook for another 20 minutes.

Serve on hot plates with some bread on the side if you want.

Enjoy your meal tonight!

Eric

Please developers don’t hurt me!

January 26, 2011 / / 16 Comments

Pffffff….

In a few days’ time, there were new releases of major and highly visible pieces of software: VLC, LibreOffice and KDE. I so happen to package all of these as “unofficial” additions to Slackware. I had a few hectic days (well, nights) preparing binaries, testing, rebuilding and writing changelogs and blog posts. I think it’s time for a bit of rest & relaxation, because I also have a stressful day job, and it was becoming a bit too heavy, all combined.

Praise to all of you, but please developers, get a drink, visit long-forgotten friends and let me get my breath back…

I think my next blog post will be a food recipe.

End of communication.

Watching out for expiring SSL certificates

November 15, 2010 / / 6 Comments

I guess that, like me, you will be using one or more SSL certificates to encrypt client/server communications.

I use self-signed certificates as well as several which I created at http://CAcert.org/ for encrypting traffic between me and my web server, my IMAP server, my SMTP server and more. Invariably these will eventually expire, because that is part of the blanket of security you apply to your services.

An expired server certificate should at least generate warnings when a client connects to it, some clients will even refuse to connect to an encrypted data stream using an expired certificate.

So, you’ll have to watch out for expiration of your certificates, and replace them with new ones before any of the client programs will be affected.

There is a one-liner command to show you when a SSL certificate (let’s call it “somecert.pem”) expires:

?# openssl x509 -noout -in somecert.pem -enddate | cut -d= -f2-
?
The command returns something like:

Nov 29 12:20:12 2010 GMT 

I use this command in a cron job that checks all SSL certificates in the “/etc/ssl/certs/” directory of my Slackware server for imminent expiration and starts sending me daily emails one month in advance. This is the script’s content, I scheduled it to run every day:

#!/bin/bash
#---------------------------------------------------------------------
# Check SSL certificate expiry. Warn root via email.
# Eric Hameleers, 23may2005
#---------------------------------------------------------------------
CERTDIR="/etc/ssl/certs"
THE_DATE=$(date +%Y%m%d_%H%M)
WARNDAYS=31
#---------------------------------------------------------------------
TODAY=$(( $(date +%s)/86400 ))
for i in ${CERTDIR}/*.pem ; do
EXPDATE=$(openssl x509 -noout -in $i -enddate | cut -d= -f2-)
EXPDAY=$(( $(date -d "${EXPDATE}" +%s)/86400 ))
if [ $(($EXPDAY-$TODAY)) -le $WARNDAYS ] ; then
(cat <<EOT
!!! SSL CERTIFICATE EXPIRY !!!
==============================
The SSL Certificate '$i'
which is located in directory '${CERTDIR}'
will expire in less than $(($EXPDAY-$TODAY)) days!
NOTE:
You can check the contents of this certificate by running
'openssl x509 -text -noout -in $i'
==============================
Your Administrator.
EOT
) | mail -s "SSL Cert '$i' pending expiry on $(hostname)" root
fi
done

Hope it can be of use to some of you.

Eric

Busy spheres

November 7, 2010 / / 6 Comments

Last week, we had visitors at work who had done a Linux related job for us and were ready to demo their product. One of the consultants had a nice screensaver running on his Debian-powered laptop (or was it Ubuntu… I don’t remember). He told me it was called “busy spheres” but it took me a while to find out that that is nowadays part of the GLX port of the “Really Slick Screensavers” collection.

Busy Spheres

I liked it enough that I created a Slackware package for it…. http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/rss-glx/ After installation, the screensaver collection will be available for selection both in XScreenSaver and KDE screensaver (KDE will show some of them twice, since some of the RSS are already incorporated in the kdeartwork package).

The list of screensavers contained in the package is quite large: biof, busyspheres, colorfire, cyclone, drempels, euphoria, feedback, fieldlines, flocks, flux, helios, hufo_smoke, hufo_tunnel, hyperspace, lattice, lorenz, matrixview, pixelcity, plasma, skyrocket,solarwinds, spirographx and sundancer2 .

By the way, I noticed that Really Slick Screensavers has another recent addition which is not available yet in the Linux port – MicroCosm – which looks really slick (pun intended). Let’s hope rss-glx gets updated soon.

Eric

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