“Maling Akala” and Reggae

I just love it when someone actually does justice in covering classic songs from great musicians - particularly the local rock band Eraserheads‘ songs. The local reggae group Brownman Revival did exactly that: they did a reggae cover of the Eraserheads’ song Maling Akala — and they even included a snippet of Ely Buendia’s vocals in the ending “May mga kumakalat na balita, na ang kaligtasa’y madaling makuha” phrase. (Ely Buendia was the lead vocals of the Eraserheads. The Eraserheads disbanded in 2002.) Whenever that song is played, my mind gets transported back to the early 1990’s when the songs from E-head’s debut album Ultraelectromagneticpop were played almost everywhere — in homes, buses, jeeps, establishments, and in the radio waves. (Unfortunately, Maling Akala was not played widely by radio stations back then, though I heard it played at least once by NU 107, if I remember it right. But it was very popularly played at homes, public vehicles and some establishments via cassette tapes. The radio stations play Walang Hiyang Pare Ko, Ligaya and Toyang. All of these songs, together with Maling Akala, are part of the Ultraelectromagneticpop album.)

But did you know that Maling Akala was really and originally intended to be played reggae-style by the Eraserheads themselves? But because of their apparent lack of experience in playing music (or rather, reggae music in particular) back then, they were unable to play it right. So they played it their own unique, creative way — a fusion of rock with bits of reggae, hip-hop and some craziness — and the end result turned out to be splendid and very cool!

Here’s an excerpt from an interview (Google cache; the original site is dead) with the Eraserheads about the recording of Ultraelectromagneticpop. I think it’s also included in the Pillbox, the Eraserheads’ own magazine. (I used to own it but I somehow lost it. By the way, the Eraserheads consists of Ely Buendia (vocals, rhythm guitar), Raymund Marasigan (drums, keyboards), Buddy Zabala (bass, keyboards) and Marcus Adoro (lead guitar) )

Here goes:

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Maling Akala

RAYMUND - Can’t do decent reggae groove so I switched to hip-hop. Experimented with drum fills na hindi aral [”drum fills I haven’t learned yet”]. Lyrics came up because of need. Few takes. No money for horn section so I put melodica lines and double tracked it.

ELY - The only song with two versions: first one had marimba [a xylophone-like instrument] by Buddy but was scratched because it was off-beat. Cost us lots of money. This version we recorded live (sabay-sabay kaming tumugtog [”we played it live together”]). Guitars are not loud enough. It’s not about sex! Ang dami ng takes mo sa lead, Marcus! [”You have too many lead guitar takes, Marcus!”]

BUDDY - Nice fusion of music. I like it the most over the rest in terms of music, playing instruments and what-not.

MARCUS - Ely, hoy! Gising! Marimba under lead guitars tinanggal, pinalitan ng torotot ni Raymund. Maraming individual takes na nauwi sa live Hip-hop Reggae. Sex. [”Ely! Hey! Wake up! Marimba under lead guitars was removed, replaced by trumpet by Raymund. It had many individual takes that eventually became live hip-hop reggae. Sex.”]

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The lyrics were written by Ely Buendia and Raymund Marasigan.

Internet vs. World Wide Web

Many people nowadays talk about “the Internet” when they really mean “the World Wide Web”. You often hear them talking about the latest sites, blogs and other fads they come across in cyberspace by surfing “the Net” lately. It’s as if the Internet is somewhat “distinct” or “different” from e-mail, FTP, chat, ICQ, and even Kazaa and BitTorrent.

Did you know that the Internet has been existing since 1969?!?! At that time, the Beatles were still intact and Elvis Presley was still actively making music. (Unfortunately, Emilio Aguinaldo, one of the country’s heroes, did not make it. He died on February 6, 1964 at the Veterans Memorial Hospital. So much for Philippine History. )

Well, the fact is, the Internet and the World Wide Web are two different, albeit related, concepts.

Think of the Internet as a highway. If you want to go to some place (i.e., retrieve information from somewhere on the Internet), then you must travel on this highway. But you cannot just travel on this highway; you need a vehicle to do that. As for the vehicle, you have many choices. You can ride a car, get on a bus, ride a bike, and so on.

The World Wide Web is just another vehicle on the highway. In techie speak, the World Wide Web is an Internet service. There are many other Internet services: e-mail, FTP, chat, ICQ, Kazaa and so on. The World Wide Web is one of the most popular Internet services. (But according to many sources I found, e-mail is still the most popular Internet service.)

At the surface, the Internet appears to be a “gigantic supercomputer” where all the computers in the world are connected. But in reality, the Internet is a very large computer network where millions of computers around the world are interconnected. This networking world is actually like a populous city where the computers are the houses and the buildings, and the Internet is a system of roads connecting the houses and the buildings. You will see many vehicles traveling around the city.

But these vehicles cannot just travel around as they wish; they must follow all the traffic rules so that everyone can go to their destination safely and smoothly. They must know on what lane they should travel; they must know how to respond when the traffic light goes red or green; they should slow down upon approaching a pedestrian crossing (the painted “zebra marks” on the road where people cross the street; in the Philippines, it’s called “the pedestrian walk”), and so on.

Additionally, the houses and the buildings must have addresses. Addresses must follow the format established by the city’s addressing system; it should state the name or unit number of the house or building, followed by the street name, followed by the city name, etc.

This set of rules on traffic and addresses corresponds roughly to a set of “communication rules” (protocols) all computers must follow when communicating with each other on the Internet. This set of rules is called the TCP/IP protocol stack, the soul of the Internet. To assure that every computer can communicate to each other regardless of hardware, operating system, filesystem formats and so on, they must abide by this set of protocols.

For example, TCP/IP mandates that each computer connected to the Internet must have a unique numeric address called the IP address. This numeric address used to be defined as 16 bits long (the IPv4 addresses) and it’s still the dominant type of IP addresses today, but the 128-bit variant (the IPv6 addresses) is very slowly making its way to the Internet, because the world is actually running out of IP addresses. The 128-bit variant allows a very wide range of IP addresses.

Internet services are assigned at least one “transport method” and at least one numeric identifier (ranging from 0 to 65535), called the port, associated with the transport method. The transport method is either the telephone-like communication method called TCP or the postal mail-like communication method called UDP. The World Wide Web is assigned TCP port 80; outgoing e-mail (SMTP) is TCP port 25; BitTorrent owns TCP ports 6881 to 6999; and mIRC owns TCP ports 6660 to 6669 and also UDP port 113. All “snippets” (packets) of information traveling on the network are required to carry with them the IP address and port of the source computer, and the IP address and port of the destination computer.

Internet services themselves have their own communication rules, aside from the Internet itself. The World Wide Web uses HTTP for communication between the Web servers (the “web sites”) and the Web clients (the “web browsers”). Each resource such as a web page, an image and a video clip is identified by means of a “Web address” called a URI (e.g., “http://my.server.com/images/hottie.jpg”). The URI of a web page is also called a URL. These URI’s are referenced in a web page via hyperlinks. The web page itself is formatted using HTML.

The Internet was born in 1969 as a reaction to the then USSR’s launching of the Sputnik I satellite, the world’s first artificial satellite, into outer space in 1957. The US feared that the Soviet satellite might drop a bomb to anywhere on earth from outer space. So in 1958, US President Dwight Eisenhower created the ARPA to spearhead the development of technologies that can defend against possible space-based attacks. In particular, the US military wanted a computer network that can withstand nuclear attacks and keep the Pentagon and other defense headquarters connected together. This initiative resulted in the development of the computer network called the ARPANET, which became live in October 1969. By December 1969, three universities and a research center each had a mini-computer connected to the ARPANET. The ARPANET started to grow by that time. In 1971, Ray Tomlimson successfully developed the first e-mail system through his programs called SNDMSG and READMAIL. In 1973, the ARPANET crossed the Pacific and the Atlantic ocean, and development of TCP/IP was started. In 1974, the term “Internet” was first used in a paper on TCP. In 1976, Queen Elizabeth II of England was able to send e-mail. In 1976, the LAN technology called Ethernet was born. In 1979, the USENET news group was born. In 1983, TCP/IP became the standard protocol for the Internet, and DNS was born (enabling people to use names instead of IP addresses for referring to computers on the network). In 1984, the T1 lines was born, and so is the T1 line-based NSFNET. In 1990, the ARPANET was retired and network connections were passed to the NSFNET; also Tim Berners-Lee invented the hypertext system we now know as the World Wide Web for use by the high-energy physics committee in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1993, Marc Andressen developed the first graphical web browser called Mosaic. Later on it will develop into Netscape. In 1994, Pizza Hut offered pizza ordering on its Web page. In 1996, Microsoft enters the Internet scene.

And the rest is history…

Audio and Video Page — “alt” links updated

Hi guys.

I uploaded the Stairway To Heaven and All About Eve songs in Rapidshare. They are all available via the “alt” links. I hope you’ll enjoy them.

I also put additional instructions and notes in the Audio and Video Page.

The “main” links will remain down until the first day of November.

Audio and Video Page “main” link — down again

Hi guys.

My site has exceeded its bandwidth limit again, that’s why the server that hosts the “main” links is down. If ever you managed to download anything from the “main” links, chances are you will get garbage which is unplayable.

But don’t worry guys, there’s still the “alt” (RapidShare) links available, so you should still be able to download my files from there. (Work is still in progress, though.)

To download via the “alt” links, you must click on the “alt” link. A “Choose download type” page from RapidShare will pop up. Select “Free” and wait for another page to pop up. Then wait for around 20 seconds and then the link to the actual file will appear at the bottom of the page. Finally, click on that link to download.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

More song uploads

Hi again guys. I uploaded some songs again.

By the way, I reuploaded the song Kahapon Lang because I found out that the one available in my site is clipped. One visitor has pointed it out to me. I didn’t believe it at first, but when I actually listened to the source, it turned out to be clipped, indeed. Thanks for pointing it out to me. My apologies.

Here are the songs I uploaded. By the way, all of these songs are contributed by Billy Munoz. Thank you very much.

All About Eve Soundtrack

Kahapon Lang by Kathleen Leslie - The Tagalog theme song.

Attic Cat (Cat on The Roof) Soundtrack

Sa Kanya by Sharon Cuneta - A remake of Ogie Alcasid’s original Tagalog classic, used as the Tagalog theme song.

Sassy Girl Chun Hyang Soundtrack

Naaalala Ka by Shamrock - A rock remake of Rey Valera’s mellow Tagalog classic song. Used as the Tagalog them song.

See the Audio and Video page.

Song Uploads

Hi guys. I uploaded some songs last Saturday, and I reorganized the Audio and Video page a little bit. I also uploaded my songs to RapidShare, and so I’m providing you with two links for each song: one from my site and one from RapidShare.

Here are the songs that I uploaded. See the Audio and Video Page.

Sassy Girl Chun Hyang Soundtrack

Jayoorowa 2 by Jiny - The opening rock song.

Mi-anhaeya Haneun Guhni by As One - A mellow acoustic guitar song sung by a cute female voice.

Queen by Park Yong Suk - A jazzy but funky, Jamiroquai-style song.

Haengbokhagil Barae by Lim Hyung Joo - A blissful, church-style song. Reminds me of Ave Maria, a popular theme song of Stairway To Heaven, except that Haengbokhagil Barae is sung by a lone male voice.

All About Eve Soundtrack

Kahapon Lang by Kathleen Leslie - The Tagalog theme song.

My site visitors last September

Thanks very much to all of you for visiting my blog. You’re all responsible for making my site popular. I really did not expect my blog to be visited by many people from different countries. But I thank you all very much.

I would like to share with you my site’s Webalizer stats for September.

Here’s the pie chart for the percentage of visitors by country (click for full size):

And here’s my top ten visitors by country (click for full size):

Thank you very very much.

Opera Web Browser to include buitin BitTorrent client

You’ve just witnessed the Opera web browser given for free — as in totally free of charge, no banner ads whatsoever — last September 20.

After that, Opera is about to enter the BitTorrent world as well.

In fact, the latest preview release of Opera, Opera 8.10 TP2, already includes a builtin BitTorrent client! Now you can download files from BitTorrent as if you’re downloading any other file.

But Opera cannot create torrent files, so if you want to upload your own files, you must download another program that can create them, such as MakeTorrent and TorrentSpy. Many standalone BitTorrent clients also have their own torrent-creating facilities as well, such as Azureus (the BitTorrent client I’m using at home, and my personal favorite).

BitTorrent is yet another P2P network, just like FastTrack (Kazaa, MLDonkey), Gnutella (LimeWire, IMesh, BearShare, Shareaza, MLDonkey), Gnutella2 (Shareaza, MLDonkey) and eDonkey (eDonkey2000, eMule, Shareaza, MLDonkey). (Notice that MLDonkey can operate on various networks. Almost the same with Shareaza. Both of them can also access BitTorrent!) Bittorrent is fast becoming very popular these days, that’s why Opera is getting interested with it. BitTorrent is recommended for downloading and sharing really big files, which sizes are on the order of gigabytes, such as whole movies or whole sets of TV show episodes. (Linux distributions are also becoming available for download via BitTorrent nowadays.) They can be downloaded from BitTorrent at terrific speeds. BitTorrent is recommended for those who have at least a DSL connection.

Among the P2P networks, BitTorrent’s big difference is in the manner it operates.

If you want to download a file from the BitTorrent network, you first have to search for its corresponding torrent file on the Web. (You download and share a file through its torrent file.) There are popular torrent search engines out there, such as TorrentSpy.com, TorrentSearch and Mininova. The search sites will display information about the torrent file, including the URL of the tracker site that provided that torrent file. The information also tells you if other people are seeding (sharing) the actual file you want. There should be at least one person seeding the actual file. Next, you download the torrent file and then open it using your BitTorrent client. The client will read the information stored in the torrent file about the actual file you want, and then it will download the actual file.

On the other hand, if you want to share your file, then you should create a torrent file for it first. But even before that, you should search for a tracker site where you can upload your torrent file, such as isoHunt, Pirate Bay, and Lucia Tracker. (You may even have to register first. Registration is usually free.) Tracker sites have tracker announce URLs, which you must incorporate into your torrent file. After you put the tracker announce URL info into your torrent file, you upload it to the tracker site. Next, open the torrent file in your BitTorrent client as if you’re going to download that file. When the client asks you where to “save” your file, go to the directory where your file is and then select your file. The client will then detect that you have that file already, and so it shifts to “upload mode”. Then it will compute the checksum for your file, and finally it will host your file, ready for sharing. This method also works when you want to resume your download.

Nevertheless, I’m still a fan of plain ol’ Mozilla Firefox. Hehehe…