Truth, Computing and Fail

If that didn’t make any sense to you, it is related to the TV series Supernatural. Not interested? Move along.

This is a chat excerpt with Harsh on 5th April:

10:06 AM qwertymaniac: :p
me: what
qwertymaniac: its getting true more and more, that lucifer will come into
sam’s body like you predicted :p

So basically I predicted it even earlier than 5th April. All you thickheads who could finally get a hint only after seeing the final episode teaser, well……I have nothing to say

PS: You have no idea about my fanboyism regarding this show which is also heightened by the fact they always play classic rock in it. So yeah, if you have anything bad to say about it here, shut your whore mouth.

Even I used to wonder. I have listened to almost all their scores since their first commercial hit, Pyromania. Among them, Stage Fright would remind you very much of Iron Maiden tracks. So maybe before 1983 they used to churn out tracks in the NWOBHM genre. Though I’m glad they turned to glam metal

Harsh suggested me to switch to mpd after a series of unsatisfactory experiences with numerous media players on Ubuntu, which I would like to elaborate on in a later post. To keep it short, I was looking for a media player that would allow me to scrobble my tracks as well as would be supported by a pidgin plugin that would display the current track I was playing in my status message. I tried these:

Beep media player
BMPx
xmms

Rhythmbox doesn’t even deserve a mention here. Now what bugged me was that I wasn’t able to enjoy both the above mentioned features on a single player. Like Beep media player had a nice beep-media-player-scrobbler plugin that would allow me to scrobble my tracks but among the different current track plugins for pidgin available, I wasn’t able to find one that would support beep media player.

mpd or music player daemon is a software that runs as a daemon on your system and allows you to use a client such as mpc, ncmpc or sonata (more about these later) which would connect to the daemon and let you play music.
Install mpd using your package manager (apt for Debian or Ubuntu users, yum for fedora and so on). Now comes the part of configuring it. If you would run mpd as root, it would read the configuration files from /etc/mpd.conf or otherwise from ~/.mpdconf . You won’t need to make any big changes in the conf file other than the location of music directory. Open up the conf file in an editor and see the line that reads music_directory. Just change the directory to your audio collection. As you would notice, the conf file is commented and it says ‘You can put symlinks in here, if you like.‘ This is pretty useful if your collection is spread over multiple directories. You can always start it by typing mpd at the terminal and kill it using mpd –kill. Remember it would read the appropriate conf file depending on how you are starting the process i.e. as a normal user or as the root.

Note: Your home directory ~ may not contain a .mpdconf directory by default after mpd is installed. In that case create one and for an example conf file, copy the mpd.conf file from /etc/ to ~/.mpdconf

anomit@deadbox:~$ cp /etc/mpd.conf .mpdconf/


Now comes the part of installing a client that would interact with the daemon and play music for you. Install ncmpc, a ncurses based client for mpd using your package manager. Then just start it using ncmpc at the terminal. There is also a GTK+ based client called Sonata which would appeal to you if you are more of a GUI person.

If you would like your current track to be displayed in your pidgin status message, install mpdscribble using your package manager and download music tracker, the plugin for pidgin from here.

Configuring mpdscribble
To configure it, you need to compute the md5sum of your last.fm account password. Execute the following at the terminal:

$ echo -n "your-password"|md5sum>file-name.txt
Get the md5sum value from the file and add the follwing lines in the /etc/mpdscribble.conf file

username = user-name
password = md5sum


Now just type mpdscribble at the terminal whenever you want the scrobbling service to start and press Ctrl+C to end it.

Installing musictracker plugin

Extract the contents of the file and cd to the directory where it has been extracted. Run the following commands to install it:

./configure
make
make install

Just check the plugins list in pidgin and enable the musictracker plugin. Configure it according to your wishes.

Just finished playing The Two Thrones. It had remarkably shorter playing time, I finished it off in only 2 days. It was no where close to the complete experience Warrior Within gave me. The plot in WW was full of unexpected twists and turns and the alternate ending was something you had to really work hard to achieve. Collecting 9 life upgrades scattered throughout the island was never an easy task! I wonder why they needed to make T2T so melodramatic. Maybe they got the idea from the Venom episode in Spiderman. The evil, selfish, vengeance seeking side of the protagonists getting the better of them. Now follow it up with lots of emotions, heartbreaks and reunions…..and then finally a moment of clarity, when the hero finally comes to terms with his self and becomes this uber cool warrior cum sage. I mean they need not have done this in T2T. It seems the developers had already decided what had to happen at the end of the trilogy without thinking where the character development of the prince was headed. Suddenly within the T2T, you hear that monotonous female voice(Kaileena) narrating how hard boiled an egg the Prince had become, with no feelings for anyone but himself. What the hell? When did we ever get a hint of that in the previous 2 games? On the contrary, we saw the Prince giving not a damn about his life, risking everything, never giving up even when all the odds were up against him. In the alternate ending, he even defeats Dahaka, achieving the impossible, vanquishing the once dreaded beast that chased him around. Now suddenly we are being told all those qualities have made Prince a badass. It can’t get any sillier. The only thing good about T2T was the witty jokes and one-liners that the inner voice i.e. the evil prince kept on cracking.

I would be expecting PoP 4 to have a better storyline and a longer gameplay time.

Coming to metal, the soundtrack of WW by Godsmack was simply awesome. I missed it in T2T. While listening to Hallowed Be thy Name it suddenly occured to me that the lyrics make the song a strong contender for the theme soundtrack of PoP 4.

This is how the song starts:

I am waiting in my cold cell
When the bell begins to chime
Reflecting on my past life
And it doesn’t have much time
Because at 5′o clock
They take me to the gallows
The Sands of Time for me are running low………

See what I mean?

Finally, after lot of speculation the trailer for the movie War has been released. This movie, previously titled Rogue stars Jet Li and Jason Statham as the main protagonists along with Devon Aoki of Sin City fame.

Jet Li plays an assassin who goes by the name Rogue and kills the partner and family of FBI agent Jason Statham. Jason Statham embarks on a mission of revenge to settle personal scores and most probably there are some other aspects to the story as the Japanese crime gang Yakuza is also involved in the plot. Devon Aoki is the daughter of the Yakuza boss incidentally.

Going by the trailer this promises high octane action with Jet Li’s martial arts prowess and the staple Hollywood chase sequences thrown in. Jet Li looks sharper in this one as he seems to have finally got rid of the stupid spiky hairstyle he was having in the ‘Yo Dawg’ kinda movies with DMX and the hip-hop gang.

Get the trailer here at movie-list.

UPDATE: Also got a link at IGN.

After almost 6 hours of playing around with plugins and editing php files, I needed something else to relax. My friend Harsh gave me this certain link, retrojunk and its  one helluva site! Straightaway I went to the 80′s section in the TV shows and there they were, Knight Rider, Street Hawk et al ….. Suddenly all the memories came flooding back, with the typical 80′s techno, electronic music playing away with the protagonists being flawless, having that unabashed masculine quality about them, a time when TV series used to be far more engrossing than the ones on offer now-a-days.

Don’t be mistaken. I am not a 30-something uncle reliving his good old days. I am just a teenager and was introduced to these shows in the early 90′s. In fact they were one of the first shows I used to watch on TV.

Harsh again gave me a link totally devoted to Street Hawk. This one has all the theme music compositions, torrent links to all the 13 episodes of its short lived existence, wallpapers and what not! Recommended!!