I’m just so damned indecisive.

I may have found a solution to my gallery issues though - Zenphoto. If I can sort it out to integrate with my site, then I will be laughing, cause it is actually a Gallery CMS, so, that will make the management of feeds nice and easy, and the uploading and management of files nice and easy. Its just a matter of working with the theme files to work out how to integrate it. Awesome!

And check out the band The Ghost Inside. They fricking RAAAWK!

Tonight was the Parkway Drive show that I have been pumped for, for a long time - about 3 months.

The show was awesome. The three opening acts were all unknown quantities for me - Break Even, Antagonist, and Have Heart - but they all blew my mind. They all had quite a different take of hardcore/metalcore, but geez they ripped.

First band up was Break Even, and despite being the opening act, they were extremely polished, and very tight. Their brand of very punk-influenced straight up hardcore was extremely refreshing after the metalcore brutality that I had experienced on Sunday night at the I Killed The Prom Queen show. Top work fella’s, and you will be getting my support from now on.

Second on the bill was Kiwi outfit Antagonist. These guys brought the brutal, and made the pit go crazy. Intense breakdowns, and just an amazing overall metalcore has made me a fan. Another band that I will support now that I have seen them live.

Last of the openers was Boston Mass. outfit Have Heart. These guys were definitely straight up Boston Straight Edge, and very tight. Despite the singer’s voice starting to fail due to either illness, or vocal fatigue (he seemed like he had good vocal technique though), they managed to get singalongs, and some crazy pit action - these guys were my first foray into the pit, and it was damn fun. My health still isn’t all there, so I kind of only lasted a couple of laps, before I had to pull out, but it served to help warm me up for the next set.

Time for the headliners, and as much as it pains me to say it, Parkway were just the tiniest bit off of their game tonight. Winston sounded off right from the get go, and the admittedly very few clean parts sounded incredibly rough, and just plain ugly. When he spoke, you could hear a bit of flu in his voice, which I guess will bring any good singer to their knees, so I’ll cut him some slack on that one. His screams still sounded amazing though. These guys got the most of my pit time, with me spending approximately 1/3 their set running in circles (that’s what a circle pit is dammit!). I don’t go out for the fight dancing too much anymore, I might two-step a little bit, but fight dancing doesn’t hold a whole lot of interest for me anymore. I don’t have any aggression or anger to let out (which is how it started in the first place), and people seem to go out of their way to hurt others these days. They played a solid mix of stuff from the “Don’t Close Your Eyes” EP, “Killing With A Smile” and “Horizons”.  Being hometown boys, they got the crowd whipped into a right old frenzy, which was awesome to see. There were a million stage dives, and with Winston’s voice failing a bit more with each track, plenty of crowd vocals. At one point a kid had the microphone in the pit, and he ended up on stage finishing (from about halfway) the track, with Winston giving him props, and then giving him some more later on.

All in all, a very good show, but not quite as good as any other time I have seen them.

Onto the design updates, and I have taken the link to the gallery out of my navigation. The pages and stuff are still there, and the feed is still up, and will stay that way until I get the new design up, at which point I will purge all the files, and that will be the end of that little adventure.

Its now 12:46, so time for me to hit the sack and recuperate from the knocks and sore muscles gained at the show tonight.

The new design is not going live today.

I have come across a few bugs that need to be ironed out before I go live. I’m hoping that this will be the last design update for a looong time, so I want it to be perfect so that I don’t have things to pick at and inspire me to start from scratch.

It should be a couple of days at the most.

On a completely unrelated note, tonight is Parkway Drive/Have Heart/Antagonist/Break Even, down in Byron. Should be a killer show, I’m feeling a lot healthier, so I should be able to get into the pit tonight, unlike Sunday night, which was a complete debacle as far as my pit participation was concerned.

Naah, their not. I just couldn’t think of a decent title, so I made a bad joke.

I have been working on the new design a little bit more, and got jack of trying to get a gallery looking pretty. As a result, I am canning it.

No more Gallery. It was a hassle to post to anyways.

New design live sometime tomorrow - I may even work on a better host for the loading times.

You may have noticed that I seem to change the design of this website just about every week or two. Basically a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, I am bored, and looking for things to do, and redesigning my site is fun, so I like to do that. Secondly, I am trying to improve my graphic design skills all the time, and I am getting a little bit better with each design, so its fun.

I have been working on anther design, and here it is. I think its my best work so far.

As per usual, its fairly derivative, although I can’t really recall of what - I just know that it is derivative.

Anyway, let me know what you think.

With this week being the week of gigs that I have been looking forward to the most ever since I started going to gigs, I figured that the next entry in the mixtape series would be the “Seen ‘Em Live” Mixtape. A collection of bands that I have seen live over the last couple of years, and the bands that I reckon are the best live acts. Anyways, here it is - the “Seen ‘Em Live” Mixtape

1. The Bronx - Heart Attack American
2. From Autumn To Ashes - On The Offensive
3. Hatebreed - Tear It Down
4. I Killed The Prom Queen - Sharks In Your Mouth
5. Madball - Down By Law
6. Parkway Drive - The Siren’s Song
7. Slipknot - Disasterpiece
8. Terror - Last Of The Diehards
9. The Warriors - Ruthless Sweep
10. The Dead Walk! - Mosh of The Undead

So, today, or last night (I’m in Australia here), or whenever it was/is is the annual Apple love fest the WWDC. That time of year when all those Apple fan boys wet their panties in anticipation of what new form over function devices/software will be announced. If I had any semblance of a real readership beyond curious people clicking my forum sig links, or the link on my Virb profile, I’m sure I would get flamed like nothing else for daring to speak my opinion about Apple products.

You see, I couldn’t give a damn about Apple products, basically because of the smugness of users, and what I see as their decision to make things “pretty” and “easy to use”. It might be the case that they are pretty and easy to use, but personally I still prefer Windows, and Linux. Linux for the mega stability, and the fact that I can do just about anything I can imagine with it. Windows for the fact that I simply find it a more appealing operating system to use.

Uh oh. I just realised that I have become as guilty of an operating system superiority complex and the vast majority of mac user’s. I couldn’t really care what operating system you use, just don’t think that you are better than me because you use a system that is prettier (in your opinion - I think Windows is better looking to be honest), and you think it is easier to use. I sit at a Mac, and I haven’t got a fricking clue how to operate it.

I don’t really have anything against Apple, other than their attitude that they are better than everyone else, and as a result can point and laugh at all the others. Case in point - the windows network icon on Mac OS X 10.5 - if Microsoft did something similar for Mac’s on a network (if they included Mac’s proprietary networking protocol in their OS’s), imagine the outcry from apple fan boys. The bottom line is Apple come of as unprofessional, and haughty because not only do they think they are better than the competition (as any company really should), but they try to push that attitude onto their user’s. The Mac vs. PC ads were equally derisive and unprofessional.

My biggest gripe with Apple however is their tendency to sell their hardware at double the price of similarly spec’d PC’s, and the fact that you cannot upgrade the components easily. Sure, I dropped a couple of hundred about a year ago for an 80GB iPod video, but the sole reason for that was I couldn’t find any other MP3 player that had a hard drive larger than 4GB at the time. I still don’t know if anyone makes one with a hard drive larger than about 10GB. if you know of one, please let me know, so that I can get rid of the scourge that is iTunes/Quicktime bloatware from my system.

That was surely a rambling post, and I doubt if I made any point other than the fact that I don’t like Apple, or Apple products, but you get the idea.

At last I feel healthy enough, and awake enough to sit here and write my Prom Queen trip story. But first, a preface for those who do not know who/what I Killed The Prom Queen are. They are a metalcore/metal band from Adelaide, South Australia, who have helped the hardcore/metalcore scene in Australia grow to the size that it is today. They have released 2 full length albums, 1 EP, and 1 split EP (with Parkway Drive). Basically they are stalwarts of the Aussie scene, and they are now no more.

They broke up over 12 months ago when their new English singer - Ed Butcher (ex-The Hunt For Ida Wave) - decided that he couldn’t be in the band anymore, and caused an acrimonious split. The band tried to continue, but were unable to find a singer that was good enough to replace Ed, who had in turn replaced the inimitable Michael Crafter. As a result of this, and principle songwriter Jonas Weinhoffen’s departure to join Californian juggernauts Bleeding Through, the band was no more. Over the last 2 weeks, the band has been on a national tour, their last, dubbed the “Say Goodbye Tour”. Last night was the final show of this tour, and I was lucky enough to be there to see this important bands final show, with the classic main three of Crafter, Weinhoffen, and drummer JJ Peters.

I have been extremely pumped to see this show ever since the tickets were purchased, and it was known that Crafter would be singing for the band on the tour. The trip up to Brisbane was decidedly uneventful, we left Lismore at 4pm, stopped at Macca’s at Reedy Creek on the Gold Coast to double check our route, and headed off. Arriving in Brisbane at 7pm, an hour before the doors were supposed to open, we had to wait around for what actually turned into 2 hours for the doors to open, and the first band to go on.

Up first were The Ghost Inside from the US, who put on an extremely intense set, however due to merch purchasing, and a quick dash back to the car to stash some stuff, most of the set was done by the time we were ready to settle in on a spot and check them out. They were extremely impressive, playing very tight, and inspiring me to purchase the album (tomorrow). Up next were Geelong deathcore punishers The Red Shore. These guys lost both their lead vocalist, and roadie/merch guy in a tragic car accident whilst on tour with All Shall Perish in December of 2007, which lead to an outpouring of goodwill from both the hardcore and metal scene’s in Australia, with many tribute and benefit shows happening over the next month or two, with all proceeds from all shows going to the families of the victims, and the band to purchase new equipment. These guys put on a hell of a show, being, in my opinion the most impressive of the opening three acts. However, I don’t really understand how these guys manage to get spots on hardcore tours, and be considered hardcore. To me they were very good, very intense death metal, with breakdowns being the only thing I can see that helps them classify as hardcore, and get hardcore shows. Nonetheless, they were a great act and I look forward to seeing these guys continue.

The final opening act were British youngsters Bring Me The Horizon, a very impressive metalcore act with a huge following in the UK, and the US. Despite being very young, they all managed to sport impressive amounts of ink. The first band of the night get a real circle pit going, albeit a small and shortlived one, they were the first band to get a lot of crowd participation.

Then, finally, the headliners - I Killed The Prom Queen - in their last ever* show. Opening proceedings with “… Forever WIll Come To An End”, they set out of the blocks to have a rip roarer of a show, and didn’t fail. Playing favourites such as $666, Never Never Land, Necktie and of course Say Goodbye, they managed to incite the crowd like no other band of the night. However the crown participation was still decidedly unimpressive, and no real circle pits got going. At the closing of Say Goodbye, they incited an encore request from the crowd, and played “Sharks” as the set closer. This track was amazing, and being right next to the stage, I was blown away by the passion that the crowd felt for the band. Allowing the crown on stage with them, and with members of the crown singing lines and verses, this was finally the crown participation I had been looking for. Even better was Jona getting out into the crown and playing guitar from the pit (where, incidentally, I ran straight into him), with his conclussion being that he was hoisted onto a crown members shoulders, and played from up there until the end of the song. All in all, an amazing night, and one I will remember for a long time.

My two complaints about the whole show are that the crowd did not participate enough, and that there was no bottled water for sale.

* - Crafters words “possible the last show this band ever plays” make me think reformation.

I don’t have much else to write about, but I am making baby steps with my server setup, so I will keep posting about it until I have something more interesting to say.

On to the meat of the post, and I can now admit that my “problem” with PHP not being parsed, and include_path being set incorrectly was not a problem at all. What it was, was that I was unzipping my CMS “on-the-fly” as I transferred across to the web server, and I hadn’t set permissions properly. The first aspect was causing some funkiness with the files, and causing them to be unreadable by the server, and the second issue meant that if I created the file on my desktop and transferred the files across, they didn’t have the correct permissions to be executed.

Basically those two errors conspired to have me pulling my hair out, and put an extremely helpful Ubuntu forum member through a waste of 2 hours of troubleshooting time trying to work out what the problem was, until he had a simple possible solution (aren’t they always?) that I hadn’t even considered, and that was to download the latest tarball of the CMS from the Ubuntu repositories, and see if that worked, and whaddya know? It worked. I felt so stupid. I still hadn’t worked out the permissions issue by then - it wasn’t impacting the files created when I untarred the tarball.

I ran into the permissions problem today when I started to work on a basic custom theme for the CMS (I’m planning on running the web server as a bit of an intra/extranet for myself and my family), and when I created the PHP files on my windows system, I couldn’t execute them. I then chmodded one of the files, and it worked. I thought maybe my problems were done (how naive of me), and kept on creating files locally, then transferring them via SAMBA shares to the web server. I chmodded the directory and all sub-directories, and kept on working thinking that my recursive chmod would have done the trick. I transferred a few more files across, and ran into the same problem, and I had a lightbulb moment. It was my SAMBA config file’s set permissions which meant that the files had 700 permissions which meant that I had permissions to execute them, but apache didn’t. I fixed that issue, and everything was working perfectly. In other words, all my issues were my own doing.

Once I had that sorted out, I spent the other 3.5 - 4 hours of the day drifting between research into remote access, and working on the theme for the intranet. In the end I started to focus on the remote access, and ended up with something totally different. I found out that my router has the ability to manage a DYNDNS domain, so I signed up for an account and set it up. I tested it out and ended up at my router config page. That wasn’t right. Except it was. I thought I had set up port forwarding correctly, but I had misconfigured the port number (I was trying to use a non-standard port for security reasons), so when I typed in “hostname.dyndns.org:6060” I ended up on my web server, but when I just entered it without the port number I ended up at my router. I fixed up my router config to forward http (port 80) requests to the web server, and it worked. It still wasn’t what I wanted, but it was something that I didn’t realise I wanted - the ability to host a website locally, and have people OUTSIDE my network access it.

I had actually hoped that I could set up the DYNDNS account to point to my SAMBA shares (using the FTP protocol - with both open, and authenticated access), so that I could dish out connection details to my mates if they wanted any of my files. I haven’t worked out how to do that, and it looks like DYNDNS doesn’t like you to change the port the request is sent on - they even disable the words port & change as search terms on the forums). There is still NO-IP which apparently allows you to change the port on which the request is forwarded, so that I can set up an FTP server (I’m not worried about sFTP, because security isn’t really an issue as far as I am concerned), and get what I want. My only other hope is that if I can set this up, that there is a way to disable file delete permissions, as thats really my only security concern - people accidentally (or deliberately) deleting files.

Anyways, thats about it from me today - quite a long post I know. I’ll try and get some more work done tomorrow morning, but I Killed The Prom Queens last EVER show is in Brisbane tomorrow night, and me and a mate are heading up the highway to mosh our hearts out to ‘em. There will DEFINITELY be details from that to be posted (maybe even photos for the gallery - not sure if I’ll take a camera or not).

I installed Ubuntu Gutsy server edition onto my old laptop, and have so far set up almost perfectly the Samba shares - they just look a bit empty at the moment, because I haven’t migrated my shares over to it yet.I am currently working on getting the apache webserver operating. I have got it almost completely done, its just that PHP5 is causing me some issues, with the default “include_path” in the php.ini file not returning any results, and as a result, its not parsing php at all. In fact it is returning an error, so that sucks.

At this point, I am leaving the FTP server for the time being, and also the remote access until I can get the webserver and my files migrated into the Samba shares directories. Once thats up and running I still have a little bit more tweaking that I want to do with my Samba shares - I want to have authorised users (i.e. username and password authenticated users) to be able to read/write/execute, and unauthorised users to be able to read. Just as a safety precaution so that no-one can accidentally (or deliberately) remove any of my files.

Once that’s done I will sign up for a No-IP or DynDNS account, and work out the remote access stuff, and if I can get that to do what I want, then I won’t need to worry about the FTP server. I’m not terribly clear on that bit yet.