January 2006 - Jayson's Blog

In the drummer world, Buddy Rich is generally considered to be the best of all time (with Peart and Bonham running a very close second and third respectively).  The sheer amount of noise he could produce with a minimal kit (smaller kits being standard amongst jazz drummers) was staggering.  Here’s an amazing video of him in action.  Unbelievable.

Sidenote:  A little background on Jayson as it relates to music.  My father played drums to pay the bills throughout high school and college, and later went on to play drums for the Navy when he got drafted.  That being said, as soon as I was old enough to realize what drums were, he sat me down behind a kit and taught me how to play (around age 7).  I would later switch from drums to bass (age 12), and then gave up bass for visual arts around age 15 which turned out to be a huge mistake as I had minimal talent in the visual arts arena…I was a much better musician (but I absolutely abhorred practicing which is what ultimately lead to me stopping).  I’ve been playing various pieces of hand percussion (mainly djembe and congas, with my next major purchase being a set of tablas) in my free time ever since I decided not to attend art school. 

I don’t have many regrets, but giving up formal music training is definitely one of them.  Interestingly enough, it wouldn’t be drums that I would go back to if given a chance, I much prefer bass.  It’s also worth mentioning that while I definitely appreciate a good guitar riff, I never had any interest in playing guitar (what kid from my generation didn’t want to be the next Bon Jovi in elementary school?); I always knew I wanted to play bass.  Even more interesting (IMO) is that I suffer the same malady as Brian Wilson does (no, not the drug addiction):  I have severe stage fright when it comes to performing for an audience, yet I have no fear of public speaking.  Weird eh?

Just because I disabled trackbacks on my site doesn’t mean the traffic hasn’t continued to pour in and sap my bandwidth.  So after some hunting around I found this nifty tool which in essence tricks would be spammers into thinking your site is overloaded, and hopefully they’ll disconnect.  From the website:

ReverseDOS is a very simple HttpModule that checks various parts of incoming requests against a list of crap that you don't want pushed on to your site. If ReverseDOS detects a match, it attempts to stall the requesting client for a number of seconds (specified in a .config file). During this loop, which uses virtually no server resources - and only a tiny smidgen of bandwidth, ReverseDOS checks every .3 seconds to see if the client is still connected. If the spammer disconnects, good riddance. If the spammer sticks around, they're finally rewarded with the Response Headers - containing an HTTP 403 - Access Denied Response Code.

In addition to the binary download, the author also has a full source download.  Already within the couple of hours I’ve had it installed I’ve seen a decrease in the amount of bogus requests, so obviously it really works.  This is a great solution because it stops spam at the source (packet level) which frees up bandwidth, CPU cycles, etc as the message never even reaches the machine (assuming the spammer disconnects, which they usually will when faced with a repeated number of 403 errors).  It’s actually quite elegant when you think about it (and certainly much simpler than building a blacklist in your database or whatnot), so a job well done award to Michael Campbell for this fantastic tool.  Hopefully I can re-enable trackbacks soon after a few days of monitoring.

I realize this is ancient news (by blog standards at least), but I at least wanted to give my shout out as I’m a huge Fripp (and along the same vein, Eno (who did the Windows 95 startup sound)) fan.  The Channel9 video on it is pretty fascinating as well; Fripp is well known for not letting people photograph or film him while he’s working.  He’s a master of creating incredibly textured music, usually more towards the ambient end of the spectrum (as of late at least).  So some good news in light of this, though given a choice I’d rather MS pour money into the Vista GUI over the Vista soundtrack (“dude, you’ve got to hear MS’s new operating system, it sounds so frickin’ cool!”…something tells me this isn’t what IT managers are looking for).  Granted I prefer audio over video any day, but not in my OS.

Sidenote:  This is my 500th post, yayee!