So, finally the time has come to get packed up and head out for the yearly Wave Gotik Treffen (not a very sexy web site, but I’m going there for the music, not the web design ;). Last year we didn’t go so this years festival has been eagerly anticipated for a long time. And these are the bands that I expect to see:

• Aesthetic Perfection (USA)
• Agonoize (D) – if nothing better is going on at the same time
• ASP (D)
• Cat Rapes Dog (S) – depends on what’s going on otherwise at that time
• Client (GB)
• Combat Company (D) – don’t know what to expect really
• Combichrist (N) – here on the other hand I do know what to expect. Pain. =)
• Container 90 (S) – we’ll see what this turns out to be
• Die Form (F)
• FabrikC (D) – this can not be missed!
• Feindflug (D) – seen them way more times than what’s healthy for you – but why not again? =)
• Fetisch:Mensch (D) – don’t remember if I’ve heard anything by this band before or not, let’s give it a shot
• FGFC 820 (USA) – let’s hope their stage show isn’t as pathetic as one of their music videos
• Frozen Plasma (CH)
• Icon Of Coil (N/CDN) – not seen live before, partly the same crew as in Combichrist
• KMFDM (USA) – ooooh yeees!
• Lahannya (GB)
• Megaherz (D) – this could be insanely boring, but it could also be great
• Melotron (D)
• Painbastard (D) – last time I saw this guy live it was a great show, let’s hope he can repeat it this year
• Patenbrigade:Wolff (D) – TURMDREHKRAN
• Project Pitchfork (D) – a potential sleeping pill, but if nothing else requires my attention I’ll be there
• Qntal (D) – always wanted to see them, but last time it was impossible to get into the venue even with a press pass
• SAM (D) – oh hell yeah!
• Sara Noxx & Friends (D) – I’d be willing to go to pretty great lengths to see her perform live
• Scandy (N) – I’m assuming this’ll be a DJ set in one of the night clubs
• Shnarph! (D) – this also can’t be missed
• Solitary Experiments (D)
• Sonar (B) – not really my taste in electronic style, but might fly anyway
• VNV Nation (GB) – now why did I put this band on the list? SO I CAN AVOID IT!
• Winterkälte (D) – I like freezing in the winter =)
• Yelworc (D)

As I was surfing around to find that utterly pathetic video of FGFC820 I instead found this lovely interpretation of EBM dancing on the youtubes: Combichrist – Without Emotion. You have got to see it – I love it!

In about one hour we’re leaving. Wohooo!

Just finished the picture from this past saturday night (after my failed plane spotting @ Arlanda). This is how it turned out:

Along with this picture I’m launching a new category on my photography site – dailies. It sometimes happens that I take pictures which are more or less devoid of context, and the only reasonable place to put them would be in a category like this (rather than the misc or other categories).

I happened to have a rental car over the night this saturday, so I thought that maybe I’d go to Stockholms no. 1 airport Arlanda and try to get a bunch of cool pictures of airplanes landing/taking off. After having visited the proper spot for sighting airplanes (the spot which is endorsed by the airport itself) and realising that all the airplanes aren’t using that runway I got in the car and zipped to the runway being used (i.e. where I saw a plane land). My plan was to stand under the planes when they approached, so I went to the south end of the runway. After having stood there for about 30 minutes I see one plane – approaching from the other end! Turns out that there was no wind to speak of so I guess the pilots could pick any approach they wanted.

This is about as fun as it gets…

Turns out that Arlanda on a saturday night is pretty darn boring. I’m guessing that going there on a sunday night would’ve given me more photo opportunities. Some other time maybe. Instead I decided to head out to Nynäshamn and maybe take a few pictures of the sea. I might be able to show you the result of that little trip later tonight.

Update:
Here’s the picture I promised you before: http://blog.diktator.org/index.php/2009/05/25/mist-over-the-road/. As you’ll see it has nothing to do with water or boats (which is what I had imagined when I set out to Nynäshamn). I just saw this scenery and I had to get out and take some pictures of it. So there you go, enjoy! =)

I feel that maybe a small clarification to my previous post about the IAMX concert in Stockholm is in order, especially after the comment added to that particular post.

I agree that it is a shame that the event turned out like it did, because I did enjoy the show (what I saw of it) and I do enjoy their music. They are also the first band I’ve seen that interact with their projections (which I guess plays a part of the spectacularness). Personally I’ve never seen this done before, it was a cool touch!

The reason I flipped so much about the timing is that I’m a bit of a time keeping fascist myself, and I get terribly annoyed by people who don’t handle other peoples time with the appropriate amount of care. I guess that when you’re an artist/band and have the power over hundreds of peoples time this is even more important. An even more personal reason behind my bad feeling about this is that I’m beginning to suffer from a bad knee, and standing still infront of a stage waiting for the show for more than an hour isn’t really working magic for it. Another reason for these bad feelings is that I had to get up at 05:20 the next morning in order to go to work, so delaying the show for more than an hour meant that I wouldn’t see the whole show – i.e. not being able to extract the full value for the money I payed for the ticket.

All these things added up turned out to be a bummer for me. But who knows, maybe I’ll be able to attend another one of their concerts in the future?

Went to see IAMX at Debaser yesterday night. Haven’t really listened to their music before but I’ve been listening to a couple of their albums and I liked it.

The stage show was supposed to be spectacular, like “Soft Cell on better medication” someone wrote. I don’t know if I’d go as far as saying that the show was spectacular, atleast not compared to 5F_55 when they appeared at the Wave Gotik Treffen some years ago or The Retrosic when he made his first appearance at WGT back in 2007. Sure, the IAMX crew hade some nice and well designed costumes and all the band members were active and played their part, but spectacular? No.

Musically speaking they did a good job. Chris Corner has a good and interesting voice which is clearly able to perform live as well (far too many singers in the electronic genre have a problem with that – e.g. Rotersand).

However – what really pissed me off with this concert was the timing. They got on stage more than one hour and ten minutes after the announced time! Without anyone announcing that they were delayed. They have effectively stolen one hour of my life! That is remarkable to such a degree that it overshadows the actual performance. Atleast in my book it does. If I’m late for a meeting I usually call ahead to notify whoever it is I’m going to meet that I’m late, anything else would display an utmost lack of respect for that other persons time. The way I see it I am a customer who has payed for the delivery of a performance by a band called IAMX which is supposed to occur at a certain time (the web site states “20:30 approx.”, but more than an hour late is outside of what I call “approx.”) and at a certain place. Now, why is it that some artists think that the relationship customer<–>supplier suddenly no longer is in effect? Is it because they think it has something to do with their perceived ’status’ and that they therefore no longer have to care about what people think about them because one or two pissed off ‘customers’ won’t matter anyway?

I’m sorry, but that kind of behaviour just ruins it for me. I’m sure that there are many good explanations/excuses for the delay, but right now I couldn’t care less about them. I could’ve cared around 20:45 last night.

I guess every blogger needs to go down this road sometime…

For some reason my post about geotagging has become some comment spammers new favorite darling. When my server came back online (after this little outage) the comments started flowing in at a rate of approximately one comment every four minutes (360 every 24 hours). What I did then was to enable the akismet plugin which is shipped by default with the wordpress installation. And sure, it did mark all the offending comments as spam. But then another problem arose – the usability. How can you guarantee that none of the comments marked as spam are actually mismarked comments, so called false positives? The only way to do that is to manually check the whole spam queue before deleting all comments in said queue. This struck me as slightly sub optimal. What I wanted was a 100% reliable solution.

So I started looking for captcha plugins for wordpress. I came up with one called simpleCaptcha but as it turns out it requires an image processing library (e.g. GD) to be installed on your webserver. While I am the administrator of my own webserver I didn’t really feel like fiddeling around with that kind of stuff, so I kept on looking. The next suggestion on the interwebs is reCaptcha which is actually a quite nifty idea!

ReCaptcha is basically using images of words which can’t be recognized by OCR software from scanned books. The good thing about this is that my server doesn’t have to generate the images itself, they’re already obtainable from another server. And the whole idea of using words which can’t be recognized by machines is most likely drastically reducing the amount of autonomous captcha busting bots able to post comments to my now reCaptcha protected comment forms!

Now the only one remaining issue with this plugin is that it still saves the comments in my wordpress database – although marked as spam. Sure, they’re not published but I’ve still got a spam queue to clean up once in a while. It’s not that much of an issue really since after having disabled akismet there’s only one way a comment could end up in the spam queue and that is by failing the reCaptcha test. Ergo – I can empty the queue without checking it manually beforehand.

The ultimate solution (in my opinion) would be a reCaptcha plugin which doesn’t save the comment as spam when the check fails but rather deletes the comment all together. Atleast this could be a configurable option. If I could set an option like that it would mean that I could re-enable the akismet plugin again and then the only way a comment could end up in the spam queue is by failing the akismet test. Let’s see if anyone picks up on this. =)

A weird thing occured yesterday. Our ISP (Bredbandsbolaget) has a switch in our basement which obviously has had problems for a while. Due to these problems we’ve been offline from time to time. The fact that a ISP has problems now and then isn’t the weird thing, what is the weird thing is that when the switch in the basement has been rebooted and our connection should be up and running again my FreeBSD (pfSense installation) can’t get a new DHCP lease.

To give you a clearer view of what our infrastructure looks like I’ll give you a brief description:
We have a physical machine in our wardrobe which runs a slimmed down version of Windows XP (much like TinyXP, but I’ve built it myself using nLite). Apart from the regular stuff this machine also has an extra network card, this card is connected to our ISP and the other is connected to our internal switch. Installed on this machine is VMware Server 2 and one of the virtual machines running within it is a pfSense installation (pre-built for VMware – nice!) which we use as our network gateway and firewall. This machine is configured to use the ISP facing network card as its external interface and the internally facing network card as its internal interface (d’uh). This setup has been working nicely for quite some time now (about a month or so) and we’re getting pretty good throughput as well, I’ve measured it up to 95 Mbps!

So, now to the weird stuff. When our ISP has been offline and it goes back online our gateway won’t or can’t get a DHCP lease from the ISPs DHCP server, or atleast that’s what it looks like. Changing the MAC address in the VMware configuration of our gateway and then rebooting the gateway doesn’t solve it. Running

dhclient em0

in order to interactivelly register a DHCP lease doesn’t help either, it just times out and then states that no lease could be obtained. The only thing that seems to help is to boot up another virtual machine configured to use the same external network card (in my case this happens to be a Fedora installation) and have it use the exact same MAC address as the gateway machine. The fedora machine will successfully receive a DHCP lease and will also able to communicate with other machines on the internet. After shutting down the fedora machine and then starting the gateway the gateway will receive the same DHCP lease as the fedora machine just had and then everything works!

I haven’t had the time to look at this with a packet sniffer, it might reveal something interesting. Right now I can’t really deduce what the real problem here is:

• Is it a problem with the fact that I’m running the gateway as a virtual machine within VMware? If that would be the cause the fedora machine shouldn’t be able to get a DHCP lease either – but it does.
• Or is it some sort of problem with the combination of FreeBSD/pfSense and Bredbandsbolagets DHCP server? This is the most reasonable explanation yet, since the fedora installation has no problems at all obtaining a new DHCP lease.

This is isn’t such a big problem right now, but I imagine that when we move and our server (with all the virtual servers in it) is moved to our friends internet connection (also Bredbandsbolaget) for the duration of our relocation this might be a greater PITA than it is now because our traveltime to the server increases drastically.

Any input would of course be greatly appreciated. =)

Last night I sat down and processed some of the 366 pictures taken during the weekend. It contains some street photography, some urban exploration and some industial stuff. And all the photos are geotagged. =)

Here goes!

Just found a spiffy little tool (Geosetter) which you can use for setting the coordinates where a picture was taken in case you don’t have a built-in GPS or an add-on GPS in/on your camera. A nice feature is that the tool can update the metadata sidecar (.xmp) files which Lightroom makes use of. And it does indeed seem to work! Clicking the coordinates button in Lightroom brings up a browser with Google Maps showing the correct coordinates. I did also test that the GPS information follows all the way through to Smugmug as well (using the export plugin for Lightroom built by Jeffrey Friedl) and it works there as well – mucho nice!

I’ll use this a lot I think. Just tagged 366 pictures with coordinates. =)

Update:
Does anyone know if there’s an equivalent software for Mac OS X? I might need one when I decide to switch over to a MacBook Pro at home.

Update 2:
Looks liks PhotoGPSEditor is what I’m looking for. Can’t really try it without a Mac though. ;)

Today I sold my old Nikon D200. It was good knowing you. It’s always a bit sad replacing things you like with newer and better things. But that’s the way of life I guess, everything gets newer and better.

Time to move on with the newer and better Nikon D700!