Welcome to LukeMcReynolds.com!
This is my place to put stuff online so I won't forget it, show the world that I can make a decent website, and share my thoughts with family and friends. It's also a place for me to share Linux/web development tips and tricks with the world at large, and a place for me to post pictures of my cat. If you don't know me and would like to, please get in touch with me - I'll try to respond right away.
Dubstep Artist Popularity Based on DMCA YouTube Takedown Notices
I created and continue to run dubstepp.com, a music (YouTube video) aggregator for dubstep and reddit’s /r/dubstep community. It and /r/dubstep have been fairly successful - dubstepp.com is currently keeping track of more than 2,000 songs submitted to reddit by /r/dubstep members.
Anyway, I need to go through the submitted tracks and remove dead links every once in a while. The vast majority of those dead links are caused by YouTube taking a link down due to a DMCA request done by a record label or artist. I’ve kept track of those dead links, and made a list and tag cloud-style graphic of the words which pop up most often in removed links.
(Click to view larger. I used wordle.net to make this).
Based on the idea that more DMCA takedowns = greater popularity and greater record label support, we can see that the most popular/best-supported dubstep artists are Rusko, Borgore, Burial, Datsik, Flux Pavilion, and Benga.
You can check the data out for yourself: download deadstep.ods (OpenDocument Spreadsheet) or deadstep.csv (comma separated values file) for the source data. In the tag cloud I created above, I exluded the words “dubstep” and “remix” from the cloud, as they weren’t artist names and they were the two most-mentioned words in the data.
Posted on Sep 15, 2010 - 12:53 AM Categories: Art, Geek, Musicread more | 1 comments
One of the best lay explanations of the Trinity that I’ve heard yet
If you ask a lot of people, the concept of the Trinity is one of the most non-intuitive concepts in the Christian faith. God is three separate persons, but He is also one, somehow?
User rainer511 in reddit’s Christianity community posted a great response to the question, “Can you please explain the concept of the trinity to me?” I’ve copied it below. Click to read the rest or here to read the original post.
Posted on Sep 08, 2010 - 01:25 PM Categories: Christianity, Personalread more | 1 comments
rsync from Linux to a Windows partition, ext3 to NTFS
Just figured out a solid way to use rsync to efficiently sync data from a Linux host (ext2, ext3 or ext4) to a Windows-based NTFS filesystem.
rsync -rltDvu --modify-window=1 --progress --delete /mnt/sata /media/windows/
/mnt/sata here is the Linux directory to be backed up, and /media/windows is the NTFS-formatted Windows destination.
The crucial part is “—modify-window=1”. Because Windows and Linux use slightly different formats for file creation/modification timestamps, a regular rsync operation won’t recognize identical files between ext3 and NTFS filesystems. The “—modify-window=1” option tells rsync to allow for a 1 second difference in timestamps between files; once rsync knows to be slightly less literal in its definitions of “same”, it works quite well.
Hope someone finds this useful. I’m using it to make a backup copy of my MythBuntu media (ripped movies and music) to an external hard drive (formatted with NTFS instead of ext3 or 4 so I can easily share it with friends).
Posted on Sep 05, 2010 - 08:34 PM Categories: Geek, Open Sourcedread more | 3 comments
A gang of Turkish spammers have found my site
I woke up this morning and found 50 or so messages in my inbox saying that someone had left a comment on my website. Turns out that lukemcreynolds.com had been “profiled” in the r10.net forums as being an easy target for comment spam.
I found out the source of all the spam by looking at my referrer logs: all the new hits on my site were coming from http://r10.net/dmoz-ve-diger-dizinler/663993-kisa-sureli-dofollow-paylasimlari.html. In case the link gets taken down, here‘s a link to the content of the frontpage (PDF).
Anyway, I deleted all the spam comments and disabled commenting on the site for a little while. Commenting is back up now, but I’ll be keeping a close eye on things. It pisses me off that people are making money off of causing me work.
The person who posted the initial links to my site, inviting other to spam it, was “Serdal_Altundal”.
Posted on Jun 23, 2010 - 06:34 PM Categories: Geek, Personalread more | 0 comments
David LaGrand Promises Never to Become A Lobbyist
Just saw a press release from David LaGrand. David, who’s running for Michigan State Senate, has pledged to never become a lobbyist if he he’s elected to state office. I worked on his 2006 State Senate campaign, and know him and his family personally. David’s “no lobbying” pledge doesn’t surprise me in the least. In my experience, David LaGrand honestly only wants what’s best for Grand Rapids and Kent County, and becoming a lobbyist after his term(s) are up will do a lot more harm than good for Grand Rapids and West Michigan in general. I wish a lot more politicians would have the same commitment to the better good that David has.
The full press release is available here:
Posted on Jun 07, 2010 - 05:52 PM Categories: Friends, Grand Rapids, Local, Personal, Politicalread more | 2 comments
“Busted” Posts Written Up By Minneapolis Local Newspaper
It seems like Busted Magazine has moved in to the Twin Cities, Minneapolis area - and local investigative reporters in the area have used my website and blog posts to learn more about the magazine and its publishers.
Jay Gabler from the Twin Cities Daily Planet wrote a piece about Busted Magazine, referencing and linking to my initial “expose” about the magazine and its ownership, and a later article in which I call the guy who runs it, Dan Oakley, a dick.
It makes me happy that more and more people are finding my website and my writing useful.
Edit June 9, 2010: I’m not sure how or why I forgot to link to the Twin Cities Daily Planet article earlier, but here it is:
http://www.tcdailyplanet.net/blog/jay-gabler/busted-magazine-20-pages-twin-cities-mug-shots-just-1
Edit June 13, 2010: Mentioned in the Dallas Observer. See http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2010/06/now_that_dallas_got_busted_its.php
Posted on Jun 05, 2010 - 02:44 PM Categories: Grand Rapids, Local, Politicalread more | 1 comments
Virtualmin GPL installation on Amazon EC2 with the ami-3c56b255 instance
This is more of a note for myself than for anything else, but maybe someone else will find it useful:
If you’re installing Virtualmin GPL on the ami-3c56b255 Centos5 instance, you’ll find that running the regular install.sh script doesn’t work. It’ll give an error something like this:
FATAL - Fatal Error Occurred: Something went wrong during installation: 0
FATAL - Cannot continue installation.
FATAL - Attempting to remove virtualmin repository configuration, so the installation can be
FATAL - re-attempted after any problems have been resolved.
FATAL - Removing temporary directory and files.
FATAL - If you are unsure of what went wrong, you may wish to review the log
FATAL - in /root/virtualmin-install.log
Anyway, all you need to do to fix it is to install the openssl-devel package: yum install openssl-devel
The Virtualmin GPL install will work just fine after that.
Edit 1/25/2011: if you get
Missing Dependency: httpd = 2.2.3-43.el5.centos.3
run yum remove httpd-devel to clear that up.
Posted on May 13, 2010 - 03:40 AM Categories: Geekread more | 0 comments
Desktop Wallpaper - 100+ images!
I’ve been collecting cool-looking desktop backgrounds for a long time, and I’ve just decided to put them online to share with everyone. You can check them out at http://lukemcreynolds.com/wallpaper/.
Let me know what you think, or if you know the source for one of the images I wasn’t able to find a source for.
Posted on Apr 20, 2010 - 12:47 AM Categories: Art, Geek, Personalread more | 0 comments
OpenX vulnerability leads to site hack and malware speading
A client of mine recently had his site start distributing malware due to an OpenX vulnerability. He was using 2.8.0.
Here’s how I found the problem and how I fixed it.
We first knew something was up when Firefox started displaying this warning when trying to access the site:
Using Google’s Webmaster tools to find out which pages were infected, I traced the problem to OpenX (instead of ExpressionEngine or other software) using the Web Developer plugin for Firefox. Here’s what worked for me:
Posted on Mar 26, 2010 - 01:03 PM Categories: Geekread more | 3 comments
reddit.com moderation tools
I’m a moderator on a couple of the subcommunities on reddit.com. I like reddit and being a mod a lot, but that doesn’t mean I don’t need to put up with my fair share of trolls.
Here are a couple tools I’ve found that make it a little bit easier to see what types of comments a user tends to make. These should help moderators and other interested individuals in figuring out who’s constructively contributing to reddit.
Reddit Score Card
Gives average comment karma per word of a user’s last 25 comments
AreYouATroll
Test to see if you’re a troll or not. (Alright, that part’s not accurate, but the percentage up/downvotes are useful.)
Reddit Comment Finder
This is a simple reddit comment finder script. It’s useful, but it doesn’t have many features, although it’s written in just 5KB of python, so it’s easily extensible.
Know of any other good reddit tools? Post them in the comments - I’ll add them to this list once I test them out.
Posted on Mar 19, 2010 - 12:28 PM Categories: Geekread more | 0 comments
