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Welcome to my digital home! There are lots of articles you might find helpful buried in this site on topics such as modifying an Alfa Romeo , rebuilding a Lotus (Robin Hood 2B), not to mention a ton of stuff on technology in general. It's all here somewhere, so use the search function or navigate using the menu structure. if you want to talk, reach out via the contact function, I usually do answer!

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Generalok, I have had an X25 deck stand for years now, and it is actually quite good. Its stable and well put together, and of course, holds enough of the basic equipment to keep you up and running. Of course, as I expand my setup, I have come to basic realisation that what I need, is actually a simple flat surface. So me, being me, I opened up visio and knocked this up: ….essentially  it is 2 sheets of 8ft x 4ft, 3/4″ mdf cut into a number of shapes and sizes, screwed togetehr resulting in two vertical podiums, each wide enough to take a 19″ rack mount perfectley, and a worksurface 2meters by 750mm, big enough for plenty of equipment. the whole thing stands 600mm high, which is the same height as your kitchen sink! so its ideal to stan infront of for long periods of time. If anyone is interested I'll post up the 2 x cutting guides for the mdf sheets so that you can make your own. To put it into perspective. you can buy somthing similar, but inferior at www.htfr.com for well in excess of £130. The total cost for my version, which is bigger and better, is £30, yes 2 x sheets of mdf from B&Q at £15 per sheet. for the sake of an afternoons work, i know which one i would do! [...]
LiveMixeshttps://jabawoki.com/wp-content/mp3/Jabs_20102001_Progressive_House.mp3 Podcast: Play in new window | Download [...]
GeneralWell it has been a while since I treated myself so the other day I stopped by West End dj on my way into the office and I picked up an Akai APC 40. In fairness it was my birthday and I used that as a feable form of excuse for the expenditure, but I have a semi clear conciense as a reslut and another oh so sexy toy to play with! This toy really is the ultimate in live control, extending the interface litterally to your fingertips and bringing a whole new world of possibility. You can read all about it on Akai's site, but if you really want to see the potential, check out these YouTube links that just sum up the potential in full from my perspective: Ok, so its going to take me a while before I get  this good, but thats what its all about. ……watch this space 🙂 [...]
GeneralI have been working with a large retailer of late who is a heavy user of Sun & Solaris. As you can imagine, this is perfectly normal, and in fact, considered best practice for what they are doing. That said though, in an area such as retail, with low margins and profits based on sheer quantity, surely a leap of faith into the “dark side” or as we prefer to call it, linux, would be a better option? Once upon a time the argument was simple, RISC architecture was simply ahead of the game, by a long way, but guess what, x86 grew up, caught up, and overtook. These days, the performance you get out of multi-core x86 is significantly more than it's RISC based equivalent. I realise that point could be considered contentious by the purists out there, but for mainstream computing in a world that is ever more cost concious, I struggle see how any argument for RISC can win over x86. Once you have your x86 base, you can go with an x86 version of Solaris (not that you would) or thanks to Sun not playing silly games, you can actually use something useful, such as Redhat, Suse, or if you so desire, Novell.This additional flexibility is core to getting the base of your platform right. Large scale architectures need solid foundations to remain stable, perform and scale as desired. Lets consider it for a moment. Sparc vs x86 & Solaris vs Linux, well to be honest, there is barley anything in the comparison except cost. Sun make x86 hardware based on multi-core AMD processors which are blisteringly fast and being manufactured by Sun, they are rock solid. Now. If I were that retailer, I know where I would be looking to spend my money, but thats not what I am there to talk to them about, so I'll keep it for my blog and not overstep my scope. [...]
InfoSecOk, its been ages since I actually had snort up and running, so long in fact that the last time I used it, ACID was still the best way to deal with the alerts! Well after a couple of days (well a couple of hours here and there at least) I have a fully functional set of snort sensors in place on public and private segments of my networks, all feeding to a centralised database with “BASE” handling the analysis! woohoo. small victories are the best! I can definatley say its come a long way. It was much easier to install, and only took a small amount of syntax debugging to figure out the configs. During my research / re-learning curve though it would seem that version 2.8 with the stream5 processor is not as good as version 2.4 with the flow processor at detecting portscans. This was certainley the concensus of the community, and after a bit of playing I can agree. However, I now have sfPortscan running with stream5 and its seems pretty accurate to me, so I am certainly happy with the results. BASE is also a welcome move onwards from what used to be a very clunky interface. It seems light and intuitive, with decent features. I think it could do with the addition of some basic graphs, rather than having to use the graph engine to define your graphs each time, but on the whole i think it is certainly a good alternative to spending a large amount of money on a commercial product. Certainly the ability to abstract the managemnet interface, data storage and sensors from each other gives you a highly scaleable model to use a basis for a large scale deployment. Of course, if you don't fancy the pain of compiling code from scratch, or your just dam lazy, check out EasyIDS for a complete “IDS in a box” that gives you everything I just said with none of the hastle! ….You just can't ingore the momentum that opensource has gained 😉 [...]
LiveMixesOldschool hard house from the archives https://jabawoki.com/wp-content/mp3/Jabawoki_06052002_HardTrance.mp3 Podcast: Play in new window | Download [...]
Alfa 159This post covers the interior lighting made to my 2008 alfa Romeo 159 TI.For the exterior led conversion guide, click here. This modification is worth completing as a single project as the results are a dramatic change in the mood of the interior of the car at night. The  filament bulbs are very yellow so choosing a good LED that puts out a colour range around 6000K changes the feel of the car to a much cooler, relaxed and crisp feel.The parts required to complete this conversion are as follows: 7 x w5w / 501 Type bulbs (all CANBUS) (Puddles, Maps & Glove box) 2 x 42mm FESTOON type bulbs (CANBUS) (Cabin & Boot) Expected Cost: £35-40 Required : One Bojo trim removal kit “Bojo Bars” (£30) …or a few screwdrivers and a steady hand! I personally used two of these Festoon type bulbs for the courtesy lights in the front of the car and the boot and four of these 501 type bulbs for the rest of the courtesy & map lights in the front and rear of the car. These were a good balance of brightness and colour, and matched well as I did not want to flood-light the car at night. For the puddle lights and the glove-box I wanted more light so I chose these 501 type bulbs that provided much more light output than the other ones, as these were areas of the conversion that would benefit from more light output. It is important to understand that the bulbs you use must be CANBUS ready. What this means is that the LEDs have additional resistance added to them that simulates the load of a normal filament bulb so that the internal computers do not think that the bulbs are blown. This is due to the fact that modern cars put a small electrical current across the lighting circuits to check that the bulb has not blown, and to report an error if it has, so you know to fix it. While the interior lights don't report the errors, the circuit still has a small electrical current across it, so if you do not use CANBUS friendly bulbs you will find that some of the lights never turn off and instead stay illuminated (all be it quite dimly) forever! Here are some images taken from an iPhone, which explains why they look very dark. Its not actually dark at all!    The following expanding links give you the specific guides for each light unit to perform this upgrade yourself:   The front courtesy light is a single unit with several components in it including switches, alarm sensors and the B&M microphone so care is required when replacing the bulbs. The unit itself is held in place with a series of clips down each side that hold it against the roof lining (1a in diagram). You will need 1 x 42mm Festoon bulb (1 in diagram) and 2 x 501 bulbs (2c in diagram) to upgrade this component, below is the removal guide from eLearn: Like the front courtesy light, this unit is held against the roof lining by a series of clips (1a in diagram). care must again be exercised so as not to damage the unit during removal. You will need 2 x 501 type bulbs (1c in diagram) for this light unit. Below is the removal guide from eLearn: The puddle lights are located in the base of each front door and provide illumination of the ground when the doors open. They are held in place using a simple clip mechanism (1b in diagram) and are a self contained plastic unit which the bulb sits inside. You will need 2 x 501 type bulbs (1c in diagram) to complete both doors. The guide below from eLearn shows how to remove the units: The glove box makes use of the same style bulb holder as the puddle lights and requires a single 501 type bulb (2 in diagram). The eLearn guide below shows how to remove it: The boot light makes use of the final 42mm Festoon bulb (4b in diagram) and is located behind a simple clip on housing (1c & 1b in diagram). The eLearn guide below shows how to remove this: [...]
Alfa 159Once the car was pepped and ready it was onto the enclosure build. This was a combination of trial and error mixed with some loose  calculations and estimations around box size. I had worked out utilising box design software that  for my sub, a 0.6 cuft sealed enclosure was going to give me good responsive SQ and enough power. This also suited my limited boot incursion requirements so was ideal. I also wanted the amp to be located as part of the enclosure and with the heat-sink visible to aid in cooling. The end result was to have something that looked as close to built by designed as I could achieve without a lot of fibreglass and pain! ” order_by=”sortorder” order_direction=”ASC” returns=”included” maximum_entity_count=”500″]   [...]
LiveMixesIts been a long time coming, but here it is… a fresh mix on a totally new rig, so excuse the flaky mixing 🙂 https://jabawoki.com/wp-content/mp3/Jabawoki_Rolling_House_Beats_15082009.mp3 Podcast: Play in new window | Download [...]
LiveMixesWell, this one is definatley better quality, on all fronts!! music, mix & production. Let me know if you like it! https://jabawoki.com/wp-content/mp3/DJJD__ElectroFied__04082008.mp3 Podcast: Play in new window | Download [...]