DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I discovered this groove in one of the many stacks of scribbled transcriptions next to my drum kit. It may have began as an attempt to jot down the Apocalypse in 9/8 groove from memory, although I’d hate to think I’d forgotten what time signature Apocalypse in 9/8 is in.

This is a linear, 2-bar kick/snare rhythm, under a cymbal ostinato that moves from downbeats in the first bar to offbeats in the second. The offbeat section actually starts on the + of 7, a half-beat before you might expect it. This, and the rest on the first beat of the second bar, throws off the listener’s perception of where the 1 falls.

      1   2   3   4   5   6   7     1   2   3   4   5   6   7   
7  RB                           o |   o   o   o   o   o   o   o 
-  RC o   o   o   o   o   o   o   | 
8  SD     o   o         o   o     |     o   o       o     o
   KD o o   o   o   o o   o   o o |   o   o     o o     o    

Patronize these links, man:

• Virtual Drummer Loop
• MIDI
• MP3

It’s worse than Code Red — the NIMDA virus infects both Microsoft’s Outlook as well as Microsoft’s IIS webserver. My server has registered between 3500 and 10000 infection attempts per site today.

If you run an Apache site and have PHP available, you can use my Webserver Virus Warning Generator to send warning emails to owners of infected sites. I’ve updated the script to handle NIMDA as well as Code Red.

It’s little wonder that insurance companies have begun charging higher rates for users of NT and IIS… crappy products beget higher maintenance costs.

The surreality of yesterday’s tragedy continues. Life goes on — of course — and yet any communication that doesn’t acknowledge the disaster seems tainted, out of touch, as if only within the context of yesterday’s events can we move forward with our lives.

Today’s Chron ran an unprecedented full-page cover photo of the south tower of the WTC collapsing. Most of the newspaper’s content is devoted to coverage of the attack — news, analysis, opinion, images. Nearly every page shows a somber black banner across the top: America Under Attack.

But there was no such banner on the Food section. The headline reads Exotic Wraps and the subtitle announces that “banana leaves and other ingredients add panache to special dinners.” I can see that it’s perfectly reasonable for the newspaper to include this section today, but its glib headline and apparent ignorance of the day’s context is jarring.

The Business section showed a remarkably powerful photo of a man walking out of a dust cloud, in a well-tailored suit and tie, shoulders back, briefcase in hand, looking every bit the part of the world-beating investment banker — except for the look on his face, of pain and terrible grief. This image reminds me of Nick Ut’s 1972 photograph of children fleeing a napalm attack on a village outside Saigon.

Jon Carroll’s column is interesting: Welcome to the 21st Century

I think the best thing I’ve read about yesterday’s events so far is the account of the Jeremy Glick from Flight 93, as recounted on Jerry Pournelle’s website.

Here are good explanations of why the towers collapsed: BBC and David Perlman

I thought P*B’s DSL network was puking again. I could get online, but only just. All my remote connections were in slow-motion.

Normally I just reboot my DSL hardware. This time, I didn’t, because the problem appeared to be in Pac Bell’s network. I was getting 2-second ping times as soon as I got past my own router.

The P*B tech suggested, to no one’s surprise, that I reboot the DSL hardware. I did — it didn’t help. I unplugged my switch… no joy. I unplugged my webserver… and suddenly the line cleared. Immediately, ping times dropped to their normal, 10-ms range.

“So there’s something wrong with your server,” the P*B tech said. “Are you running NT?”

Err, no.

I scanned some processes and didn’t see anything amiss. It didn’t occur to me to check my bandwidth graphs until much later. Finally I realized that one of the websites I host was getting about 10x as much traffic as normal. The site offers street maps of popular travel destinations.

Referer info wasn’t helpful; many users were clicking through from Yahoo, to view maps of Manhattan. But that Yahoo placement has been there for a year…. why would it suddenly begin generating so much traffic? Why are so many people suddenly interested in maps of Manhattan?

It was at this point that a coworker told me via IRC to check the news, that an apparent terrorist attack had taken down both the towers of the World Trade Center.

The New York Times put it into perspective: this is the Pearl Harbor of our generation. Forty years from now we’ll be talking about where we were when we learned of this attack. I feel trivial and misguided to have been wrestling with webserver bandwidth at a time when hundreds of thousands of lives were altered, or ended, by this tragedy. My thoughts and prayers go out to those people.

I’ve begun using PNG images rather than JPEGs and GIFs on this site. For large, full-color continuous-tone images (such as photographs), PNGs are larger than JPEGs, but have a number of advantages over JPEG, including the fact that image quality is superior (not that any of my images are that great to begin with).

I found a great tool for compressing PNGs. It runs under a variety of OSes and provides an easy way to make PNGs smaller. Because it is a command-line utility, you can quickly process entire directories at once — without all the tedious opening and saving as with a GUI.

On my images it provided a savings of about 8% on large images, and nearly 20% on small images, as compared to PNGs created by Photoshop 6.

The utility is called pngcrush.