I’ve been an old times Metal head. The moment I accepted Jesus Christ as a Lord and Saviour and been visited by the Lord’s Holy Ghost grace, my life changed severely. I found out most of the metal bands, I used to be regularly listening to is against Christ and anti-christian in essence, I still however hold my love for Metal as my teenage years were dominated by Metal Music. Happily I found there is plenty of nice Metal music a Metal head could enjoy that are written for glorification of Christ and hence did not have the negative spiritual anti-christian charge that is so typical for a lot of the bads in the metal music world. Recently I’m not listening to as much music as few years from now but still every now and then I like playing some of my old Christian metal loved bands. I was maintaining a small list of Christian metal nice bands I found and playlisted on youtube. If you’re a metal geek you might enjoy my old christian metal playlist here 🙂.
For Christians, who are looking for online Christian Metal community I also suggest you check out Firestream – The believer’s Heavy Music Refugee . There are plenty of other interesting places on the net dedicated for Christian metal fans;;;
I will end up this post with 2 videos of one very favourite Ukrainian Christian Metal band – Angel 7;
Angel 7 – Jesus the Saviour
Angel 7 – The Last Day
There are probably plenty of other nice Christian Metal sites and resources on the net; surely I’m missing a lot here? if you know some other good Christian Rock / Metal resources please drop a comment.
I've been thinking for a lot of time analyzing my already years ongoing passion for Free Software, trying to answer the question "What really made me be a keen user and follower of the ideology of the free software movement"? I came to the conclusion it is the sharing part of free software that really made me a free software enthusiast. Let me explain ….
In our modern world sharing of personal goods (physical goods, love for fellows, money, resources etc.) has become critically low.The reason is probably the severely individualistic Western World modern culture model which seems to give good economic results. Though western society might be successful in economic sense in man plan it is a big failure. The high standard in social culture, the heavy social programming, high level of individualism and the collapsing spirituality in majority of people is probably the major key factors which influenced the modern society to turn into such a non-sharing culture that is almost ruling the whole world nations today.
If we go back a bit in time, one can easily see the idea and general philosophy of sharing is very ancient in nature. It was sharing that for years helped whole societies and culture grow and mature. Sharing is a fundamental part of Christian faith and many other religions as well and has been a people gathering point for centuries. However as modern man is more and more turning to the false fables of the materialistic origin of man (Darwininsm), sharing is started seeing as unnecessary . Perhaps the decreased desire in people to share is also the reason why in large number people started being self-interest oriented as most of us are nowadays.
As we share less and less of our physical and spiritual goods, our souls start being more and more empty day after day. Many people, especially in the western best developed societies; the masses attitude towards sharing is most evidently hostile. Another factor which probably decreased our natural human desire to share is technocracy and changing of communication from physical as it used to be until few dacades to digital today.
The huge shift of communication from physical to digital, changes the whole essence of basic life, hence I believe at least the distorted sharing should be encouraged on the Internet (file movies and programs sharing) should be considered normal and not illegal.. I believe Using Free Software instead of non-free (proprietary) one is another thing through which we can stimulate sharing. If we as society appreciate our freedom at all and care for our children future, it is my firm conviction, we should do best to keep sharing as much as we can in both physical and digital sense.
The anime Living Story of Saint Peter and Saint Fevronia is a modern story remake of an ancient Church living of two bright Russian saints. The official movie genre is orthodox christian kids animation movie. The 14 minutes cartoon re-tolds the living story of St. Peter and st, Fevronia in a playful and entertaining way like for kids or youngsters. Nomatter the movie primary target audience is children, the cartoon is great to see for adults people as well :). The movie genre is orthodox christian kids animation movie. The plot is based on a true (historic record) story of two saints venerated each year across Orthodox Churches around the world.
The original story I watched was a Bulgarian translation from Russian. But since I found it to be so valuable, I look for a translated video and got one in youtube.Take 14 minutes break and watch it, I'm sure you will like it so much, that probably give it a second time glimpse alone or with your wife, children or girlfriend.
Unfortunately, the english title is mis-translated as it says "Tale" and not "Story" and there is difference in meaning between this two words. It is not tale as tale is made up story and this is not a made story but a story based on the two saints who lived in the end of 12 and beginning of the thirteen century. Here is in short the real Church living: The two saints were living in Murom Russia. Peter was prince and Fevronia a poor maid a daughter of a beekeeper who made his family living by collecting wild honey in the forest.
Prince Peter was striken by a severe sickness and in a vision it was revealed to him, that the only one that can cure him is Fevronia (a village maid living in the village of Laskovo Russia. The prince went to her and since he saw she is a pious, good and wisdom rich maid promised her, if she manage to heal him to take her as a bride to his place. By her warm prayers to God and herbs, Fevronia succeeded in healing the prince sickness. Being fully restored st.Peter changed his mind and wanted to break his promise to marry her, cause the young made not part of the aristocratic Russian society. He didn't yet reached his home and the sickness, came back. This time with a deep repentance, he came back to Fevronia and she cured him again. Then the prince merried her and made her a princess of Murom
However there love in Christ had to went through high temptations. Once the couple married, the prince proud boyars requested the prince to leave his new bride, as they didn't wanted to accept a simple girl as Fevronia will be governing them. Being in uneasy situation prince Peter prefered to leave his governing power and castle but to stay with his life. Together by boat by the near river Oka they left the kingdom. Soon after Gods wrath came Murom because of people's rebellion and the people requested the chased prince family to be restored to power. Pushed by the peasents, the boyars bringed back the couple to power. The two saints governed their kingdom with great wisdom, love and mercy to the people.
In their old age the decided to become monks in separate monasteries. St. Peter received his new monk name David and princess Fevronia took the nun name Evphrosia (Evfrosia). Even living a sepate monk / nun life the couple continued having a deep love to each other and asked God to take them from this earthly life on the same date. God answered their prayer granting them to depart this earth on the same day in the same hour! Like in life even in death people tried to separate them. Fevronia was put in a coffin in the nun monastery, where Peter was prepared for a monk funeral in the man monastery and they put them in separate graves. In the morning the graves were empty and their bodies were found buried together in one grave. People realized it is Gods will they are buried together and left them buried together. Today the incorruptable bodies of the two saints can be seen and venerated in Holy Trinity's nun monastery in the town of Murom Russia. St. Peter and St. Fevronia are considered patron of the Christian marriage, couple's love and family happiness. It is common that many young people are, asking for the two saints prayer intercession in front of God for getting a good spouse in life and good marriage.
Also the two saints are oftenly asked for prayer for improving a marriege bindings. The two saints feast day is like the Orthodox Antipode of the Roman Catholic feast of couples in love – St. Valentine.
As you see, St. Peter and St. Fevronia living is full of wisdom and true spirituality, and there is plenty we the modern disbelieving people can learn from it. Let God by the two saints holy prayers have mercy on us.
Can’t stop farting terribly the whole day :] Yesterday I ate tons of food without thinking I’ll suffer in the morning.I woke up with terrible acids in the stomach. It’s like the sin. When you sin again and again you don’t realize sinleads consequences after him body suffering illness and death in the end both spiritual and physical. My daystarted terrifying. I was feeling cold most of the day. I have a bad blood movement so it’s very usual for me to feel cold.I hate this coldness! I went to the college for an hour it happened I have hour after 1 hour. I was almost ready to sleep walking.Today I’m terribly sleepy. On my home I met “Narf” a collegue in the college who is an IRC maniac and linux fan also :]. He proposedto drink coffee. So we spent an hour on a coffee. He explained me about the structure of the IRC in general it seems the backbone of the UniBG irc is debian.spnet.net. After an hour we went to the college but it seems like our English class was not after an hour but 2 hours, again the dumbs mismatched The Schedule. Nomen was infront of the college and we drunk coffee together on the fountain. I had Introduction to Management after the Business English. My classes ended in 15:45. I take Habib and we went home and discussed his plans about his future. He have plans to fly for UK if they approve him for Visa and make some money to be able to pay his taxes. After that Nomen come home we played MAMEs. A very commical situation was in the midday when I was with Nomen infront of a food kiosks, he was wayting for his snack, suddenly I farted terribly :]]. And we started laughing cause it smelled very brutally :]] I have peace almost the whole day. And I feel God’s love through his holy spirit. Thanks Lord Shabbaoth glory be to your Holy name Father!END—–
It was a day full of waiting. The Admin/tech support personel in sofia is a real pain in the ass. I waited half a day for a simple debian base install. The guy installed debian over already installed freebsd on a server we sent destined for colocation in evolink. The machine is great dual 3ghz Xeon with 3 x 70 gb SCSI discs. In 4:00 o’clock I received a mail with username and password of the server, but the system was unaccessible for 1 more hour. I got really nervous I received tons of calls from the boss, our project Manager, Vladi the PHP programmer. I logged to the server in 5:00 and configured apache with mysql upto 10:00 o’clock then did a little walk with nomen in the central park and drinked one beer per capita. I had to meet Static and Amri in 6:00 o’clock but I was busy configuring the new rack so I missed a great oportunity to have fun with old friends. ORDER has to come back to Bulgaria, today or even he maybe is already in Varna. I’m quite impatient to see him! In the afternoon I went to some spiritual downfalls but now Thanks to God I’m alive and well. The pozvanete site already points to the new rack so I hope the machine would be able to serve it’s goal perfect. This will be made clear in the morning. Soon I’m going to bed. Glory be to God for fulfilling me with his love and sustaining my life and keeping me from evil! END—–
Yesterday Night me and Nomen decided to spend the night in the house on my village “Kragulevo”. It’s a nice place to be.We drinked beer smoked cigarettes have a walk around the village after we arrived somewhere around 21:40. In the morning we decided to go to the forest it was a hard job to wake up Nomen, all the time he was repeating “Please leave me to sleep more 5 minutes” and after 5 minutes the same sentence. In the end I 20 or 30 minutes later get out of bed. We drinked coffee and walked in the beginning of the Wood (It’s recharging). in 08:15 after a 20 or 25 minutes walk we went back to Dobrich. Yesterday I went to a Doctor because I have a constant pains around my stomach. He assigned me some health tests for tomorrow. I hope God hasn’t allowed that I had a serious sickness. Kragulevo is connected with a lot of memories from my young years. I’m regretting a lot I didn’t spend more time during the last summers when I was still going to school. I remember so many great moments with my Grandpa ( Peace be upon him. ). And I miss him a lot Grandpa Marin ( Mino ). Was a great example for me for a lot of things like attitude towards live, love towards beings and also ppl service. Actually now After I believed I realise this virtues match perfect with some recommendations the St. Apostles give for us to live to be a pleasent in the eyes of the Lord God.END—–
As I a person who values highly love between man and woman and believes in true love between man and woman under God’s providence I really enjoyed The Notebook and I recommend it to everyone out there looking for true love. The movie gives a good example that one can experience great love. This is a fresh breath for me as I’m surrounded by dozens of people who does concentrate too much about the fleshly pleasure and forget that the essence of love is not in the flesh but in the love between man and woman’s spirit and soul. The Notebook is a record of one true love story between a man and wife who went through love, hate long time separation, regret broken heart, loss of path in life, fading love and then after a long time of being away of each other burning love again. It tells the story of a man and wife who loved so much that they get old together a story of true dedication and lasting love. Watch the movie you will certainly not regret it.
I'm in Sofia for a couple of days being a guest to a friend (thx Nomen), after my stay for a week in Bodesće (a little village nearby Bled located in Slovenia). Yesterday on my way to sleep I wanted to see a movie and asked Nomen to recommend me a movie. His recommendation was a German-Australian movie from 2004 called The Edukators – The Fat years are Over. I had absolutely no idea what it will be like so I didn't expected much but it seems the movie plot took my attention.
The movie plot revolves around 3 avarage German persons who live in Berlin. The three youngsters has just passed the 20s, Peter and Daniel (two close friends who hold some serious anti-capitalist views and does organize house break-ups without stealing.) Peter and Daniel's rich villas break-ups aim is idealistic, they don't steal but just change the order of furniture and leave messages to make rich people aware that money doesn't make them invincible… Jule a girlfriend of Peter, becomes friend with Daniel and they fall in love, while Peter is away for a vacation. During Peters sojourn abroad Daniel tells Jule the secret (Peter and Daniel) are the Edukators whose break-ins has just recently become known via the local Berlin newspapers. The Edukators group leave messages to every of the "victim" homes saying – "die fetten Jahre sind vorbei" – "The fat years are over", a sentence well known from the Holy Bible's story of Joseph in Egypt.
Jule works as a waitress in a luxurious restaurant but her payment is only good to cover her very basic needs as well as pay her debt (as she is already indebted as many youngsters in Germany).
Jule is more indebted compared to many of the young germans, since by accident she hit a rich businessman's car which costs 100 000 eur. Since more than a year she is working for paying the monthly bills to cover richman's car and she succeeded to pay only €55000 …
The Jule's "injustice" is just a part of the many injustices that are in society, but as the youngsters hold anarchistic and anti democratic views, this whole Mercedes crash accelerates as Jule and Daniel break up in the Luxurious Villa of the rich man whose car Jule is still paying.
Just like the other break ups Jule and Daniel change completely the order of the furniture and leave the threatening message die fetten Jahre sind vorbei , this time however they do even more as they decide to drop the sofa in the pool. These time Daniel and Jule's planning is more like an venture than just a well planned Edukators break-in. Suddenly the watchdogs in the yard start barking and the two youngesters has to move quickly to prevent being taken by the police patrol. On the next day Peter is back from his vacation and Jule realizes her mobile phone is missing (probably fallen in the pool or somewhere in the richman's mansion)… On the next night Jule and Daniel, enter the house again in hope to find and cover-up the tracks they left last night and hopefully find, Jule's missing mobile. They don't know however the richman would arrive his villa to stay for the night. As he enter his house, the businessman encounters Jule and immediately recognizes her. Daniel being in the other floor comes down and hits the richman from behind and he enters unconscioness. As the two are panicked they call Peter and tell him about "the villa accident". Daniel arrives immediately and the three "revolutionaries" decide to take the wealthy man who as a hostage bringing him in Jule's uncle mountain hut. The 3 anti-current system democrats and the representative of the wealthy class has to spend few weeks together in a small house each one exposing his stand point and philosophy. Little by little the 4 people become friends and a dramma between Daniel and Peter emerges as Jule is now in love with Daniel and Peter finds out … Hardenberg (the 3 youngesters hostage) happens to be an ex-leader of a Socialist German Student Union some 35 years go … and tells a story how he and his union members hostiged a VIP german person in their youth days and how funny is that he is in the same situation like the person they hostiged so long time ago… The movie is interesting as it really shows the sad reality and the falling democratic system which we have established and follow. It exposes the injustice of the system but it doesn't really offer a solution to the society and economic problems and injustices.
I remember GNU / Linux, 11 years from now, times when ALSA was not standardly shipped with Linux. Back then ALSA still lacked good support for many SoundCards and was still a "baby project". In that time what we used to have sound on Linux was OSS – Open Sound System. OSS emerged right after the first ever Linux sound system VoxWare (formerly known as the Linux Sound Driver).
Back in those days OSS was used for multimedia support on both GNU / Linux and BSD based free OSes. It was few years later when I heard and used ALSA for a fist time and it wasn't really a love from first sigth.
One can easily find out by the name ALSA it is a system especially built for the Linux kernel and that's one of the reasosn why *BSD systems has their custom separate sound system. There is plenty of reasons why OSS was substituted with ALSA. Main reason was its commercial like license, OSS wasn't completely "open source" GPLed (free software), there was resctions on use of OSS for commercial goals.
With its emerge ALSA started to push away OSS slowly. Somewhere in 2003, alsa has officially entered the Linux kernel source and until 2005 it was the default standard for all GNU / Linux operating systems.
As of time of writting ALSA has become the only sound system to have support for multiple sound card devices for Linux. My experiences with ALSA, however ain't so nice if I take a look in my past experiences. Since the very beginning of using ALSA, I had plenty of troubles with configuring properly my sound card not to mention, even after configuring it the MIDI support was not there. Besides all the troubles main problems were stemming from the many applications still written to use OSS as sound system and hence with those sound was impossible with ALSA.The most problematic thing about apps written with OSS in mind was all of them tried to stream sound via /dev/dsp (OSS Digital Sound Processor), since alsa did not used /dev/dsp those programs was soundless.
On the other hand OSS was creating issues as well, one severe problem with OSS was the inability to stream multiple sounds simultaneously, because each sound stream required to pass voice through /dev/dsp and usually there was only one /dev/dsp.
The message;
/dev/dsp: Device or resource busy and the proceeding irritation that used to annoy us in the early GNU / Linux days had of course some raw workarounds hacks but generally the workaround did not fix problems always.
Introduction of alsa free us from /dev/dsp issues but on the other handy has created a whole ocean of new BIG problems … ALSA has modular structure and this imposes a great problem nowdays. The modular architecture is generally a good idea, however the way this was implemented within ALSA is far away from clear and easy to understand by the end user and therefore makes it very unintuitive and obscure. Alsa misses simplicity which somehow was partially in the days of OSS. Thinking over the general situation with Linux multimedia nowdays, I believe it was exactly ALSA Project responsible for the so delayed mass Desktop Linux adoption.
Many long year standing Linux users had certainly had the alsa troubles during new system installs (correct me if I'm wrong). The only fix to multiple soundcard initialization problems was to download alsa source and compile from source and hence made it hard and discouraging for people giving Linux a try. This kind of ALSA "brokenness" pattern continues even to this very day (in Debian) Linux and probably building the alsa system from source is among the good practices to have a functional Linux sound system…
With all said the historic reason why ALSA was not quickly adopted and still is not a preferred default system for many applications ported to Free Software OSes by commercial company vendors is clear. Its simply not working out of the box …
Hope some ALSA developers will read this post work on changing the crazy structure of ALSA over complexity. ALSA needs automate way to solve issues with itself, the configuration should be more trivial and unified if Linux has to become more attractive for Desktop adoption.
Anyways, after the few words of history and indicating my pesonal observations on ALSA. I will proceed and explain few things on how ALSA can be configured to support and play nice with OSS dependant programs as well some basic explanations on common incompatibility between esd and pulseaudio and how this can be fixed;.
To assure nowdays OSS API built programs and games would work with Alsa its necessery to have installed;
ALSA wrapper for OSS applications
On Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and most Linux distributions the Alsa OSS compatability layer comes under a (deb / rpm) package named alsa-oss
To install OSS compatability on Debian, Ubuntu and the like Debian based distributions issue:
Note! The three modules has to be separately build using kernel source at most cases and does not come with most Linux distributions, so on many installations (including my current), they will be missing. If for you they load properly or you have customly build them add them also to load on system boot, like so:
The Linux sound situation becomes even more messy when ESD enters the scene. Many of the novice new Linux users certainly don't remember (Enlightened Sound Daemon) . ESD historically preceded PulseAudio . Hence it will be good to mention ESD was used for few years in GNOME and in around 2006-2007 it was substituted by PulseAudio. Many applications, however who was ported or written for Linux especially (the proprietary ported ones) was already built to work with ESD and even though newer GNOME releases was fully using pulseaudio, this (non free software apps and games) were still depending on ESD.
The situation was partially fixed by creation of module for pulseaudio which added emulation support for esd . This was done by a module library for pulseaudio called libprotocol-esound.so The package for almost all Linux distributions which does the esd emulation via pulse is pulseaudio-esound-compat . In latest Fedora Linux pulseaudio-esound-compat is installed by default. In Debian and other Linux distributions it might need to be installed via apt with;
pulseaudio-esound-compat solves some of the ESD app incompability but not always … Handy tool also worthy to mention in solving PulseAudio, OSS incompatibility issues is padsp
padsp is helpful in solving obsolete issues with OSS applications (trying to access /dev/dsp) and therefore unable to communicate with Pulseaudio padsp – is a PulseAudio OSS Wrapper.
An example where padsp is helpful is in case of /dev/dsp errors like:
/dev/dsp: Device or resource busy
Could not open /dev/dsp
Another common problem with sound on Linux is when running windows applications (running windows games with wine). Quite often sound fails to work since wine tries to directly communicate with alsa and fails because alsa sound channel is taken by pulseaudio.
To workaround wine issues with pulseaudio, one of the solutions is to temporary stop pulseaudio, before running the wine emulated application:
hipo@debian:~$ pulseaudio --kill
Later on when the windows wine emulation is completed, pulseaudio has to be started once again in order to make Pulseaudio applications produce sound again, e.g. one has to issue:
hipo@debian:~$ pulseaudio --start
Alternative way to workaround wine sound issues is by using a script to kill pulseaudio every second. Here is fix_pulseaudio_wine_sound_probs.sh script
This script was reported by many people as fix to problems with wine games failing to play sounds and music, anyhow I personally prefer using the stop / start pulseaudio method.
The picture below is taken from Wikipedia and illustrates, clearly the intergalactical complexity of sound systems on Gnu / Linux and BSD
I just hope one day this (OSS, ALSA, esd, Pulseaudio) mess will be over! In the mean time I hope my suggested work arounds helps someone. If someone has a better more unified script or solution please share in comments
It is 27th of December, the 3rd day of Christmas and in those day in the Bulgarian Orthodox Church we co-memorate saint Stephen's Martyrdom.
Its a well known fact that by his martyrdom Saint Stephen become the first Christian martyr Stephen's name etymology comes from Greek (Stephanos) and translated means "Crown".
What we know from Orthodox Church's tradition is that Stephen was a very young in his age of Martyrdom probably in his 20s.
Stephen's glorious martyrdom has inspired and strengthened significantly the early seveerly hunted Church and has give a lot of courage and faith to many of our early Saint Martyrs. These early Church saints now incesently pray to God to have mercy on our earthly Church. Its not much known fact St. Stephen held a rank in the early Church clergy, he was a HieroDeacon. Hierodeaconism in our church is considered the maximum rank of deaconship one can have just before he is ordained for a Priest.
St. Stephen was burning for love in Christ and had a strong faith in God, turning many Jewish to our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. He has shown the truth way to many by teaching them, how to properly interpret the Old Testament (Ancient Jewish) writtings. He explained to many jewish, how all the old scriptures testify about the coming of the Messiah (Christ), which will save all who believe in his name from sins hell damnation. As Jewish looked for ways to shutter any kind of preaching of the Gospel and kill Christianity, they saw Stephen as a big enemy just like all Christians in those early days. Therefore they looked for ways to accuse him and execute them and end up the large numbers of jewish people converting from Jewism to Christianity The whole story of stoning (execution) of st. Stephen is described in the Holy Scriptures in the book called Acts of the Apostles
As he was about to die, Stephen looked up to heaven and said;
"Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing at the right hand of God." Then, as he was being stoned, he cried out, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.".Our Beloved saints last words were, "Lord, do not hold this sin against them." manifesting his saintship and deep Christ love even during his last moments of earthly living. St. Stephen is celebrated in almost all West Roman Catholic Church and in Anglicans. Churches who co-mmemorate the great saint are located in all around the world. St. Stephen is also considered a patron saint of Republika Sprska (Bosnia and Herzegovina) Stephen's name later probably become the origin name for western's so popular Steven name).
Saint Stephen's Byzantine Icon from the 11th Century
Let by the Holy Prayers of St. Stephen God have mercy on the Church and increase our faith and mercies to us sinners.
I remember GNU / Linux, 11 years from now, times when ALSA was not standardly shipped with Linux.
