RayRay Is Forever

I’ve been in my studio working on remixing various Anime and video game songs for Phoenix Cactus Comicon 2009. This will be the night of Friday, January 23rd. I’m really excited, especially now that I have Ableton Live in my studio. With my house cleared out, the sound is up so loud the walls are shaking!

Here is a pic of me from Diablo 2 with two of my friends, Kiko and Mai! I’m trying to be short, and it makes it look like I have no neck! You can check out Gordon’s pictures from Diablo 2 in the gallery, and one of me that Gordon took below this cut:

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I’ve added a whole group of albums from Gordon who has been taking some amazing pictures around the Arizona scene!

He also takes some fun and experimental pictures whenever he feels like it. He’s really talented.

Check out Gordon’s album here!

I adopted a cute lil’ cow fetus
from Fetusmart! Hooray fetus!

Wow! Its just amazing how little memory Lighttpd uses to serve out thousands of tiny .gif files. Apache would generate a memory intensive process for every request. I’ll be able to find creative uses for this in the future.

I’ve updated us to the SVN Gallery 2 that has the Gallery Core at 2.3. It seems really fast. Firestats slows down the gallery, and I wish that it would use PostgreSQL as an option so that the database writes, even in innodb, don’t slow it down so much. I get great stats from Firestats for both Wordpress and Gallery 2, however its speed degradation is pretty enormous. I gave up trying mod_mem_cache once I realized that I could never speed it up to the degree that it runs without Firestats. One idea is to run a separate MySQL server, but this seems inelegant. I may just end up trying it out, or putting a Firestats database on a VPN.

I still would like to finish sorting and updating all of the pictures. I can add so many recent pictures that Gordon and Cubbie have taken, but work consumes my life at the moment.

Boyfriends are Temporary, RayRay is Forever T-Shirts by M-Pire Clothing

You can see the 321 pictures and videos from Earthdance 2008 from Lostinthestarzzz.net here!

Earth Dance Video Player!

Below this cut, however, you can see all of the videos from a neat flash player!
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Here are some pictures my roommate and I took of an Arizona sunset and approaching thunderstorm.

Enjoy

I installed a fun, new plugin for the gallery. If you go to any picture, there will be a link to a puzzle in the sidebar. You can then turn any picture into one of two types of puzzles!

Here is an example with my kittens!

Per my friend’s instructions he left on his site, I finally added a 5th drive to my Mac Pro. While inside of my Mac, I just had to be amazed at how well it is designed. I tried to figure out how to dissasemble it myself, however I had to use Anandtech’s article to do it. Basically, all I have to do is pull straight up! Its silly!

I set up mod_disk_cache and mod_cache for Hardcoredreamer.com - specifically for browsing the albums.  We were  using mod_mem_cache on a server wide level. So far, the performance statistics are breathtakingly amazing. Recent pages are loaded right from the cache with long expiration times so PHP and MySQL are not even bothered.  I ran a test of 10,000 connections to the random page in 17 seconds. I may expand this to other sites, but it would need to incorporate mod_expires in the .htaccess files and some other tweaks.

Apache’s guide on caching. The Gallery2 forum page that gave the most tips!

Basically we have 4 levels of caching going on, and the goal is to balance out obsolete pages that disrupt users and the fastest loading time possible!

I wanted to help out the great site, The Free Sound Project, so I set up Squid proxy on our server. It is pretty amazing that we are now serving out twice as many bits of traffic, yet it has a negligible effect on our server load and other resources!

From their site:

The Freesound Project is a collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds. Freesound focusses only on sound, not songs. This is what sets freesound apart from other splendid libraries like ccMixter. New to this site? Read the What is Freesound page to learn more!

What I’ve gained is much experience using Squid, which gives me ideas on how to use it to get much more performance out of webservers in general. What I find cool about this is that the use of the http://freesound.cyborgcow.net proxy is invisible to you, when you are browsing the site. When you preview or download a sound, it actually grabs it from one of several mirrors.

I am always looking for ways to contribute to Open Source or Creative Commons projects. The Creative Commons liscense comes in several flavors, but a good example is the share and share alike license that Nine Inch Nails released their Ghosts EPs. That means you can legally download those songs for free! On top of that, you can remix the songs and release them. This spurs innovation.

By assisting a large collection of free, Creative Commons licensed audio files and samples, I hope to assist artists all over the world in creating new and amazing projects!

Rayray at the Big Ramada, South Mountain, overlooking Phoenix, Az. Photo by Mai

I’m getting to play a 2 hour set at Diablo, a party being thrown on October 11th, 2008 in Phoenix, Az. You can find the most current information from this forum post at AzEDM!

I’m going to be spending a LOT of time going through as much music as I can to find the right set. I will have some new and unreleased music by myself and others that I wish I could tell you, but you’ll just have to hear it!

This is just amazing. I’m running OSX, Ubuntu, Centos 5, and Windows XP SP3 all simultaneously on my Mac Pro. Wow. Click for the full size!

Using the Piclens plugin with Firefox, you can browse any of the galleries in 3D!

If you send your pictures from your camera phone to cameraphone(at)hardcoredreamer.com with the word pic in the subject line, it will be auto-imported into the gallery. This should be fun, assuming we don’t get spammed.

DJ Aaron Z and some of my favorite people in the world spent a week partying in Chicago and Detroit for the The Detroit Electronic Music Festival!. They uploaded so many awesome pictures, that I recommend installing the Firefox Piclens plugin to browse them all in 3D!

DEMF 2008 Detroit Michigan

Detroit during DEMF weekend is like a surreal city torn from the pages of a fictional book that only exists in the hearts of dead poets. This city reflects the changing times that left it in the booming industrial era of early last century. At the heart of any place there are good people and bad, and most of the news from this city comes from the negative reports of violence on the news or a statistic comparing the level of violence with some cities in Iraq. But for one weekend at the end of May, the birthplace of techno comes alive as fans of electronic music make the pilgrimage back to the city that gave us dance music and parties that last for days. We were happy to attend this event and the all of the great after parties and here are some pix snapped by some of uf that attended to document : Rebbecca S., Seth T., Eon M, Aaron Z, Brandon B, Tara N, Tara M, Ruthie B, Claudia C and many others. Enjoi

OSX saves .DS_Store and other resource-fork metadata files such as .Appledouble onto hard drives and network shares. These normally are completely invisible to a Mac OSX user, but once you start to browse the drives with different operating systems, you get all sorts of helpful files that can be annoying or get in your way.

These show up either with period, or as a hex number beginning with a : with netatalk, which allows a faster and more native sharing of APF over TCP. With FTP or SMB servers, you can ignore or veto the creation of these files.  A way to avoid copying resource forks & metadata to network shares, you can try this hint to disable it as a finder preference.

It seems like nobody has ever discovered that the Darwin OSX man page for the terminal command “cp”, which is used to copy a file or directory recursively, has built a SIMPLE parameter to completely skip any of these!

First, I mounted my network share, which is just called rayray using Finder’s Connect To Server menu item. This put rayray in /Volumes/rayray Then I can run cp with the -X parameter!

cp -vRX /path/to/folder /Volumes/rayray

This will show each file as it is copied and happily it goes *fast* and skips all of those files!

By the way, I still have to test NFS’s speed, but with netatalk using Appletalk over TCP Apple File Transfers, I get 50-60MB/s over a gigabit crossover cable as opposed to 30-35MB/s with Samba. Kinda neat

I want to point out that this person’s blog was the most helpful resource to getting Avahi-Daemon to advertise exactly what I wanted, so if you’re setting up a Linux server on your network with services that you want to appear in Finder, Terminal, and other places automagically, check out HolyArmy.org

Some great new pics in his album! Click the picture to check them out!

I’ve had the old radiation icon for this site for years now, and decided to re-vamp it. Unfortunately, this wouldn’t scale down well, so instead I modified an animated .gif I made.

Success! Every thumbnail, resize, and movie still has been built! It took quite a bit of work and some switching around of certain plugins, but the gallery does not need to generate any images when a picture is requested.

In the meantime, I have munin monitoring the server and I am very pleased with how smoothly everything is running. I have given MySQL much more ram than it needs for the sake of performance, and have been watching the free memory to make sure there is enough for http processes. Of course, I was able to free up many processes by using mod_security smartly.

RayRay - Sapphire Mix - March 2005 Extreme Quality 78:43 MP3 Right click and Save As

[CUE FILE]

RayRay - Sapphire Mix Tracklisting Progressive House, Trance, and Breaks 
1. Pole Folder Feat. Sandra Ferretti - Protected - M.A.S. Collective black curtain dub mix - Modo Records
2. Steve Porter - Definite form - Remy & Roland Remix - Little Moutain Recordings
3. Subsky - Discollective E.P. - Do you want to play - Focus
4. U & K - Atmosphere - Panoptic’s Cold Depth Remix - Confi-Danace
5. Koala - Imagine - Disc 2 - U & K’s “V+T” Remix - Cuba
6. Nubreed - Depth - Bonzai Limited
7. Dave Seaman Presents Group Therapy featuring Nat Leonard - My Own Worst Enemy - Audio Therapy
8. DPP - M3X1CO - KiloWatt’s Grasiento Remix - Sunkissed Records
9. Descent - Projection - Original Mix - 3Beat/Release Records
10. Chris Domingo - Darklight - Thomas Penton Remix - BozBoz
11. U.N.K.L.E. - In A State - Sasha Remix - Cha Chat Records

I’ve set up the new server with a nice new firewall, very powerful virus scanning, and found time to update to a new version of ffmpeg module for gallery. This one lets you convert to a flash file, but for some reason (even after a lot of wasted time) it says that it can’t do audio, even when it should. When that is fixed, videos can take up less space, load faster, and be embedded easily!

I was going to take this move slowly, but I have a job interview and pretty important things going on that make me want to get this done right now so that just in case there is still time to get information off the old server.

I have not left my computer in 8 hours, and I’m starting to hurt… I think I may deserve a break in another hour. I have technical questions to review for this job interview!

Dual Opteron Goodness!

The site will be slow while I regenerate all of the thumbnails and both midsizes, which are at 640×640 and 1024×1024 and at 95% quality. That’s 276,190 images that it is processing!

While I’m doing this so that everything can be even higher quality, I’m also using it to compare the processing power of the new server. =) Lets just say I am very pleased!

In moving the gallery, the first attempt took 6 hours and failed because my internet connection at home hiccuped. Overnight I used Rsync to transfer all of the images. It was so much easier, I will be using that more often.

Would you like to add your gallery photos to your facebook? Well just create an RSS feed for 4 items and install this app! Also, if you have Windows, you can have your gallery as a rotating desktop background with GLoSS!

Here are some instructions to get your albums to show up as a flash slideshow!

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RayRay & Lucid - Dreams and Melodies started out with the sampling of Lucid’s voice, and exploring what I could do with it from there. About 60 hours of work, I used Ableton Live for arrangement and then fed 20 audio streams into Logic Pro via Rewire to master it using various plugins including Izotope’s Ozone 3. [Right Click and Save-As to download]

I’ll be throwing and performing at the Phoenix Con Games convention Saturday night,  June 14th from 8-11 in the A building at Mesa Convention Cente. It is for registered attendees at Phoenix Con Games, and I’ll be going through a large collection of video game and internet meme songs to find my set list. I plan to have some songs remixed especially for this event!