Caliban - Opinion and Righteous Anger

It's been silent on the blogging front of late, as you may have noticed.

You may thing that means not much has been happening, but in fact, the opposite has been true. Something had to give, so there wasn't any time to blog.

I have plenty to write about, but still no time to do the actual writing.

This entry is also being squeezed in before I head off to Brussels in the car for a two night stint of Killing Joke at the Ancienne Belgique.

The band aren't coming to Amsterdam this time and, well, this time it's a bit special. With the recent sad death of bassist, Paul Raven, the band have reunited with the original line-up that hasn't played together since 1982. That means Youth on bass and Paul Ferguson on drums. Apparently, the idea of the reunion was hatched at Raven's funeral.

Not only that, but they'll be playing their first two albums tonight in their entirety. Tomorrow, they'll play the full Pandemonium album, plus the singles recorded for Island in 1979 to 1980. So, it's not your usual band standard mix of songs through the ages, plus the requisite crowd-pleasers. No, this time, we get the seminal early material through to 1981, plus the band's favourite album, Pandemonium.

I'd rather not have to spend a night away from home -- I miss my children if I'm away from them for more than about four hours -- but, like I said, this is a bit special. I also had to ask myself, 'Which bands would I still make the effort for? If not for the Joke, then for whom?'

I once missed a red-eye flight to Texas, where I would have attended the 2003 Ruby conference. Instead, I stayed on at Slim's in San Francisco to see the end of Killing Joke's performance there. That made it a pretty expensive ticket, but in return, it was a hell of a gig.

Besides, there are few people as angry as Jaz Coleman when he's on stage. Aged 48 now, he still really means it. As I hurtle towards the grave myself, I don't notice any diminishing of my own levels of bile and gall. In Jaz, I find a kindred spirit and I like the hellish noise his band makes, too; once described by Paul Ferguson as "the sound of the earth vomiting".

And so I head to the Belgian capital this afternoon for a night of cathartic spleen venting. And then a good night's sleep, a walk through the old city, a few photos, some good food, coffee, and a second night of purging oneself in the company of like-minded people.

At least, I hope they'll be like-minded people. They may just be a bunch of dispassionate, complacent zombies, the like of which I've suffered before at concerts on the European continent.

But with the US about to elect another misguided fool to continue the flow of billions in military aid to Israel and prolong America's self-assumed role of policeman to the world, imposing its own peculiar brand of pseudo-democracy in the pursuit of self-enrichment, there's still a surfeit of things to be angry about in the world.

So, perhaps now, more than ever before, the world needs Killing Joke. I know I do.

Killing Joke last ruled the roost last night.

The Ancienne Belgique is a good venue, a fact that becomes evident before you even reach the main hall. You can dump your belongings in a locker downstairs, so there's no need to queue for a cloakroom ticket.

The various tour T-shirts were mostly sold out in my sizes, so that made the decision whether to buy one much easier. I have a wardrobe full of T-shirts, but it's an old habit of mine to buy a shirt from each gig that I go to, just so long as the shirt lists the tour dates.

In the main hall, the support band were playing. It was some metal combo, but they were rather good. At the very least, they served to indicate that the venue had good sound.

The Joke took to the stage at 21:00, looking ready and in the mood. Without any ado, they launched into Requiem. The sound was crisp, clear and very, very loud. Around me, younger members of the audience, who weren't even alive when this material was first released, hastily shoved yellow ear-plugs into their head. The youth of today...

The onslaught of the eponymous first album continued all the way through to Primitive. There were scarcely any gaps between the songs for the band to draw breath. The sound really thundered out of the PA, turning an unremarkable studio track like Bloodsport into an earth-trembling, chainsaw guitar wall of sound. You didn't have to dance: the earth moved under your feet.

With no pause for thought, What's THIS For...! continued the aural bombardment. Somewhere in the middle of it, Jaz announced "a change of plan", at which point the band unexpectedly treated us to a stomping version of Eighties. I couldn't tell you why, because it's a track from several years later.

It was interesting to hear tracks that I've never heard live before, such as Madness and Who Told You How? And not just that, but also the fact that they were being played by exactly the same line-up that had originally recoded them.

During the encore, Jaz said a few words about dearly departed Paul Raven. He said that Paul would "always leave the band when the money ran out; like always!" and added, "But he would always come back if you waved more money at him." Finally, he concluded "the world is a darker place for his loss".

This was the prelude to another deviation from the period being aired tonight, as the band launched into what is perhaps their best known song, Love Like Blood.

Change was a particular highlight of the evening for me. I haven't heard it sound so good since seeing the band in San Francisco a few years ago.

Needless to say, I'm looking forward to tonight's gig, which will see the band fast-forward about thirteen years to the Pandemonium period. Apparently, that's the band's favourite album, but it's also the album that Youth returned to the fold to record. Besides that, it's one of my favourites, so it's going to be a real treat to hear the entire album played live.

That's the sign I saw in a temp agency's window today, here in Brussels.

At least, that's what I thought it said. The actual text was: Helpdesk staff wanted for shift work.

I can't imagine how I made that mistake.

As you may know, I use a Netgear ReadyNAS RND4410 for my internal network's mass storage. I'm very happy with the device, but it is a bit inflexible when it comes to back-ups.

The problem is that most forms of back-up that it provides for don't support the deletion of files that are no longer on the source. For example, if file A and B were backed up last night, but file A was deleted on the source by somebody this morning, tonight's backup should back up only file B (and even then, only if it has since changed) and delete file A from the back-up destination.

This level of control calls for the common free software program, rsync, to be used for back-ups. The ReadyNAS does support rsync, but Netgear's interface to it via the Web-based FrontView software is less than ideal. That's because it doesn't allow one to specify the use of rsync's many optional flags and parameters. In particular, it doesn't allow the essential --exclude flag to be used to omit certain directories from the back-up. I'm not being picky; I actually have a back-up job that will fail without the use of this flag.

Happily, though, the ReadyNAS is Linux-based and Netgear nowadays provide an EnableRootSSH patch, which will, oddly enough, allow you to ssh into your ReadyNAS as root.

I'd been resisting the temptation to do this for some time, because I had no good reason to do so. The ReadyNAS is sold as an appliance and one isn't really supposed to go prodding at its internals. The potential for rendering one's device non-functional is definitely there. Of course, I know what I'm doing (famous last words, I know), but I still have a healthy respect for devices supposed to operate as black-box appliances.

Nevertheless, I needed more flexible rsync functionality for my back-ups. An alternative to poking around on the Netgear would be to schedule the back-up jobs on the clients themselves, pushing the data to be backed up to the ReadyNAS instead of having the ReadyNAS run the back-up job and pull the data from the clients.

I wanted my back-ups centralised, however, so I installed the EnableRootSSH patch and went gently wandering across the file-system.

I found what I needed and was able to add the functionality I needed with 15 lines of Perl. Now, it's possible to define a set of extra options to be passed to an rsync back-up job when it's invoked.

I've posted details of how to do this to Netgear's ReadyNAS forum, so I won't repeat them here. I mention the hack here only to gain a bit of publicity for it, as I'm sure I'm not the only person who needs this extra functionality.

Of course, a much better solution would be for Netgear to integrate this into their FrontView Web-based interface. I'd much rather be able to use the supplied tools than have to resort to hacks like this.

Still, at one level, it is nice that Netgear have allowed this kind of thing to be done. It encourages experimentation, development and user community growth.