The scum float to the surface

[Big Words ]

BB is off to Barcelona for a break shortly. Are we worried? Nervous? Concerned? Nope, can't wait. And we'll particularly look forward to breathing the same air as a sane, humanitarian, motivated electorate. Hopefully, the numbers of Bush-voting American tourists will be down currently, so there won't be any unpleasant farmyard smells around either.

According to Culture Smart: Spain, a little book we bought to avoid some of the embarrassments of our last visit (boy, that business with the bread and the tomatoes was shaming), the average Spaniard enjoys a good debate and, whatever vociferous disagreements may then flow, never takes an argument personally. We hope so, because it's difficult to imagine that even the most placid Spaniard or Catalan could listen to a clueless American commentator lambasting them as "cowardly appeasers" for five seconds without launching themselves across the table, grabbing the insensitive clod in a headlock and holding their face in the nearest pile of dog caca until they stop that annoying breathing thing they do. It wasn't so much a vote for al-Quaida as a vote against El Dubya (that's right, George - if we're not for you, we're against you). To listen to them whining about the perceived shortcomings of Spanish democracy reminds us of the nationwide protests that occurred across the US when Bush was declared President based on his non-majority:
"Well uh, actually we united behind him..."
Oh right, we remember now. Tell us again how a democratic election works:
"Hell, we'll show you! In Iraq!"
Rii-ight, thanks Clyde. The Spanish people will give you a call. When they get back from burying their dead.

Meanwhile, we note that Zapatero's threat to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq without more UN support has led Bush to talk up the possibility of gaining a new resolution. From this, we infer that:

1. Threatening America over Iraq works;
2. Bush is also open to appeasement;
3. Christ, Blair really is a lapdog.

But presumably the "pro-war" lobby feel that continuing as normal in Iraq, unquestioningly supporting someone else's botched corporate takeover and coping the flak for their ignorant bullheadedness, is still the better policy.

Other bubbles

• Harry's Best of the blogs on Spain
• Arrogance to the tenth power
• Thoughts on Spain from US expats
• Spanish appeasers?
• Al Qaeda Is The New Nader
• Spain got the point
• Dialogue in Spanish
• Unbelievable crap from Philip Greenspun (the comments show a distinct lack of listening skills too, so perhaps it's not so surprising that anyone could be so badly informed, although the level of blundering insensitivity still amazes). We doubt that Europeans will call Philip Greenspun "sir" now either.

Have - I - lost - my miiind?

[Big Noise ]

"The whole sixth form likes The Smiths and he's listening to Yes!" scoffed Garve one day in the sixth form common room as I foisted 90125 on everyone again. No actually Garve, the whole sixth form does not validate your tastes because they're not all tossers (not quite), I thought inwardly. Strange that someone who prided himself on being so radical in his politics couldn't tolerate non-conformity in music preferences. Sadly, I lacked Garve's raging certitude of the rightness of my own opinion and couldn't muster the appropriate response, which would have been to pull out a large revolver and empty it into his smug, twitching corpse. Doubtless there would have been denim-clad rockabillies throwing gladioli at his funeral; he'd have liked that.

If only back then, as an alternative to random violence, I'd been able to tell him that one day "How Soon Is Now" would be covered by a couple of Russian pretendy teen lesbians - and they'd do it better.

I hated the Smiths and I loathed Morrissey, and whenever his name is again feted and sainted in the press I loathe him afresh. All that "Oh, this cruel, uncaring world is such torture for exquisitely sensitive and lonely yet handsome souls such as I, oh woe, oh misery, the Establishment's got it in for me!" crap...here's the lithium, now fuck off back to the dingy bedsit that your parents bought for you and take an overdose (he said from behind a Margaret Thatcher face mask). Our other resident Smiths fan used to sit in front of the common room stereo in his M&S cardie, playing The Queen Is Dead and staring hard at the floor while he feigned contemplation of the tragedy of his pitiful existence - an existence that I regretted without any need for pretence.

"So you go and you stand on your own, And you leave on your own, And you go home, and you cry, and you want to die"

That situation rang true for most of my teenage years and yet I still had no sympathy for poor, maltreated Steven when he whinged about it in the aforementioned song.

On the other hand, take a couple of young Russian pop starlets, a shit-hot production team (featuring Trevor Horn), a dodgy lipstick lesbian makeover and you get not only a tailor-made tabloid stunt but also, for once, a great album and some hot lesbo action (Britney take heed)! I can hear the objections already, but I just can't see it working with real lesbians. Real lesbians would be like: (Pattie and Selma voices) "Uh, I gotta headache tonight." - "Huh, me too!" Whereas pretendy ones at least have to look like they're enjoying themselves, right? As No Rock'n' Roll Fun noted, even sex-crazed lesbians don't do it three times a week, let alone a day. Tatu do though, honestly. Think how much better other female pop acts would have been with a sapphic shtick: Atomic Kitten, Bananarama...MEL & KIM! And some decent tunes.

Obviously, Tatu's version of "How Soon Is Now" isn't quite like the original. For a start, it has decent vocals. Listen to them defiantly belting out "You shut your mouth, how can you say I go about things the wrong way!" and compare it to Morrissey's limp sighing. He wrote those words but only had the one note to sing them with, whereas Julia and Lena can barely pronounce them but still put maximum feeling into it - albeit a totally different feeling (bored disinterest, I think, but that's better than whining self-pity). And check the heavy riffing added by the session guitarist! Not only that, but you get the singles in English and Russian, plus their Eurovision entry, which knocks the spots off "Congratulations" and "Making your mind up", plus a bonus DVD featuring Julia and Lena on a bed in their undies! And all for four quid from the remainders bin.

"I'm so glad you wanted this album," I told my Glamorous Research Assistant. "I thought you wouldn't be interested."
"I didn't mind, you're the one who stood in the shop looking like a sad pervert for buying it," she replied.
Actually, I was more concerned that people would think that the other album I was buying for her was mine: "The Nelly Furtado CD is a gift for someone else, honest! Mine's the Tatu album! I'm going to take it home and wank over the free poster like any normal man! I like Morrissey too!"

From now on, I want all my music to be sung by pretendy teen lesbians (and produced by Trevor Horn - Yes, take note when deciding the next line-up). Otherwise, I don't wanna hear it.

Incidentally, just think what this entry is gonna do for my Google wan...I mean, ranking.

Standout tracks: All The Things She Said; How Soon Is Now; Ne Ver, Ne Boisia

Alright in your head

[Big Noise ]

Thanks to Matt from Debris for putting me on to the OSI album. Say "prog metal supergroup" to me normally and I'll be halfway out the door before you reach the final syllable, and indeed I approached this one warily, circling round it for a good few months (twelve, actually) before hitting the Buy button. But there's a lot of melody amidst the heavy riffing, plus some artful drumming from Mike Portnoy (who you can watch in action on the bonus enhanced CD-ROM). It puts me in mind of the late lamented XC-NN (I managed to get their second album, Lifted, on import and it's far, far superior to the first). And surprisingly for a prog group, there's even a political angle (what was the last prog rock song in that vein? Get 'Em Out By Friday?), with the 9/11 theme suggested by the name carried through to the lyrics.

Of course, it turns out that most of the songs were created by splitting up a 25 minute concept track, and that one of them is in 25/16 which, as far as I'm concerned, looks as Wrong on a sheet of music as it would on a faulty digital clock.

Standout tracks: OSI; When You're Ready; Head.

Remartyred

[Big Ego | Big Noise ]

Lonely? Depressed? Filled with despair and feeling suicidal?

You're probably best not downloading these Scarlet Martyrs MP3s then - now available once more following a long, and we're sure much-needed, absence.

Technical notes

The 2000 recordings were taken from final mixes, rather than the rough (and rather harsh, thanks to some bad exciter defaults) versions previously uploaded to MP3.com.

As you'll know from my DAT/DDS pages, I haven't been able to read the DAT stereo mix tapes so the older recordings have been sampled from analogue cassette tape and cleaned up using the software discussed here.

The recordings were encoded as VBR MP3s using LAME with the r3mix settings.

Root yourself to the ground

[Big Job ]

The pace of change in the Unix world has sure picked up since Linux took off. Whereas previously a sysadmin could coast for years on knowledge of a few key packages like sendmail V8.6 and BIND v8, secure that little was likely to change and the skills were transferrable to every site (ahem), suddenly the Unix infrastructure can change overnight (or at least between Solaris releases) and you find yourself having to relearn basic configurations on the fly.

Case in point: Sendmail in Solaris 8 & 9.

Here's a typical secure Sendmail configuration for a client (i.e. outgoing mail only, to a central hub or relay):

• Config file built using the nullclient feature.
• sendmail daemon disabled.
• sendmail run in queue-processing mode at regular intervals via cron (i.e. not listening on the SMTP port).

In previous Solaris releases, this involved disabling the sendmail startup script and adding an entry to the root crontab to run sendmail -q.

In Solaris 8, Sun made things easier by allowing you to change the normal mode of the program via the /etc/default/sendmail file; sendmail would run as a daemon, but only in queue-processing mode.

In Solaris 9, Sun have updated Sendmail to V8.12. This supports a new feature called message submission, defined in RFC 2476 (wha'? did I miss a meeting?). Mail submission requires a second sendmail process using a different config file called submit.cf (which Sun warns you not to edit) and running under the smmsp UID (huh??). It also assumes that it can submit mail to a sendmail daemon running on the local host in listen mode - if you configured sendmail for queue-only as above then bad luck, you lose (and you won't receive any email to let you know either).

To their credit, Sun actually discuss this issue in the Solaris 9 documentation (Resource Management and Network Services guide) and provide an alternative secure configuration, which involves editing the sendmail config to bind the daemon only to localhost with the line:

DAEMON_OPTIONS(`NAME=NoMTA4, Family=inet, Addr=127.0.0.1')dnl

(This is the way that Sendmail on Red Hat/Fedora is configured out of the box.) This advice seems to have been taken from the Sendmail FAQ, Q3.44. But who reads the FM, right?

Update, 2004-03-09: Just as well, because the advice isn't complete. You also need to lock down the MSA port (587), which is used by the mail submitter. Insert the following two lines after the one above:

FEATURE(`no_default_msa')dnl
DAEMON_OPTIONS(`Name=MSA, Port=587, Addr=127.0.0.1, M=E')dnl

(And remember not to use any of these macros in comments unless they're `quoted', otherwise they will be expanded and insert spurious lines in your config. He said from painful experience.) Thanks to Scott Burch on the SAGE members list for the extra advice. (Scott also suggests disabling the MTA and using your central mailhost as the MSP in submit.cf instead, but Sun warn you not to touch that file.)

All these configurations are discussed in the Sun BluePrints paper, Solaris Operating Environment Security (Dec 2002). Learning what the goshdarnheck RFC 2476 is and what it means is left as an exercise for the reader (but please post a summary back to me when you've done it ;-).