The One Man Cipher

Symfony

I am working on a web project that uses Symfony as it’s framework. I have mod-rewrite enabled, so all the URL requests get routed through my application’s index.php. This means that  www.site.com/foo/bar is actually www.site.com/index.php/foo/bar and  my default routing.yml settings will look for a module named “foo”and an action named “bar” in my application.

The Problem

I want to host a couple of static web pages on my site independently of the rest of the Symfony driven pages. The first thing that came to mind was putting the files/folders in the project’s /web which happens to be my document root. Assuming that I created a  folder named “static” in /web and placed a index.html file in it, I can go to www.site.com/static/index.html and access the static html page, but  if all I wanted to do was to type  www.site.com/static/, I would get an error saying that your symfony project has no module named static.

The Solution

After several hours of trying a lot different things and a reasonable amount of googling even though I wasn’t sure of  what I was looking for, I found many solutions and most of them involved editing Symfony’s mod rewrite configuration so that it does not try to not rewrite requests coming to your static directory. This works but can be confusing for someone who does not know the syntax for mod rewrite so I kept on searching until I came across a more elegant/simple solution. All you need to do is create a .htaccess file inside your static folder with “RewriteEngine Off” and if you want “DirectoryIndex index.html” and all your problems are solved.

Some of the search terms I used were:

mod rewrite exclude directory
symfony redirect
symfony routing params redirect
symfony routing params
symfony routing static
apache directoryindex folder
subfolders symfony
subfolders symfony web directory

I don’t usually  do this but this is just too good. I remember seeing Lupe introduce Gemini on MTV: My Block as “the antithesis of Lupe Fiasco, real violent…” and anyone who listened to Fahrenheit 1/15 pt.V - Gemini: Untamed Beast* could not have missed all the talk about cash, hoes, guns, etc but there was no denying that dude was definitely a beast on the mic and his singing was on point too. Fast forward to 2008, the braids are gone, he’s had multiple guest spots on Lupe’s Cool, lost some weight and is on some conscious/honesty shit**.  The mixtape opens with:

“First off, I’d like to take a moment before I get in your head
And apologize to every fan I ever misled
There’s a lot of things I rapped about, you shouldn’t have been fed
I’ve led people to destruction from the things I done said
I’ve glorified bustin women down, selling drugs, licking rounds
Anything negative you can think of to keep us down
Because when it’s positive people don’t wanna hear it
I wanted to speak the truth but I was afraid you wouldn’t feel it
I overcame and I’m not ashamed of it,
Untamed Beast was cool but I wasn’t talking about nothing
Lying in my lyrics to be accepted by the critics,
all the hot punchlines about crack I didn’t distribute
God blessed me with a talent to paint a picture so vivid
And I turned around and wrote “Bust Down”- Ignorance is bliss
How can I be so oblivious, but they say the first step to recover is to admit…”

You know what, listen to the mixtape already!!! This is not a review… I originally intended to paste the link, a picture and maybe write one line. Ah well…

http://www.hiphopdx.com/index/mixtape/id.465/title.gemstones-the-testimory-of-gemstones

* Does anyone know what  Fahrenheit 1/15 pt.IV was ?
* Er. excuse my language parents

The iPhone 3G got released today and geeks, gangstas, goons and goblins all over the place are going nuts over it. Not only is it cheaper [sorry elitist folk, time to pick another phone as a status symbol], it is also 3G enabled so browsing will not be as slow as it was on the EDGE network. Here is a pretty solid review if you want to know more about the iPhone 3G.

Thanks to all the frenzy over the iPhone, I have decided to write a quick phone review that I meant to do four months ago.

The Backstory:
About 4.5 month ago, I went home (to NYC) for the weekend and found a brand new (box and all), cool looking phone sitting on the table. After a lot of begging, pleading, negotiating and explaining why I needed another phone, I finally convinced a jury of my peers (o.k, maybe just my mum) that I deserved the phone more than whoever it was originally meant for [I even played the “it’s an iPhone knockoff, you cant give it as a gift” card]. I left for MD excited with a brand new phone that was not being offered by any national carrier.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you the CESIM A880

Please stop clapping…. no really….

The Good

• The phone has 2 sim card slots, <obvious>this can be really useful for those people who have two phone lines but prefer to carry only one phone</obvious>
•  The phone comes with a T.V/Radio tuner, how cool is that ? You can watch local channels on the phone!! take that iPhone!!
• The phone is touchscreen but also has a  keyboard. Can you say convenient ?
• The phone comes with an extra battery
• The phone has a microSD slot and comes with a free 256 MB card
• The volume on the phone is ridiculous!! The phone is almost louder than my laptop
• When connected to a computer, the phone can be used a storage device or a webcam

The Bad

• The photos are really low quality. The box has a 3.0 megapixel camera label, the print on the phone says “2.o MEGA PIXELS” but the actual picture quality makes me believe that its 1.3 megapixels or something
• The phone comes with no manual
• There is no power button indicator; pushing the red cancel button might be intuitive to some but I’m just sayin….
• The keys are small
• The phone has one of those old fashioned antennas. It does improve the TV quality a lot when you pull it out [||] but I cant help but to get flashbacks of my grandma’s old AA battery powered FM/AM radio… good times
• Most phones have four rows of numbers and 3 columns of key, this phone goes the opposite way so the ‘*’, ‘0′, and ‘#’ buttons are situated to the right side of the ‘3′, ‘6′, and ‘9′ buttons respectively

The Ugly

• The phone uses Windows XP icons for it’s menu. Not only are the icons low quality, they also dont make much sense if you’re familiar with Windows (i.e. if you’re in the majority of computer users on this planet); they have the Internet Explorer icon for “Services”, the “Show Desktop” icon for “Shortcuts”, the “Add/Remove Programs” icon for “Organizer”, etc
• I’ve already mentioned how loud the phone gets, the downside to it is the really annoying phone startup tune that plays at max volume. Sitting on the phone during does help a little
• The phone has the apple icon printed on its back side. This alone takes it from the “iPhone competitor” category to the “iPhone imitation” category
• The box it comes in has the following text: “Moving TV & Dual-Sim, Moving Funny & Business!”… dont ask

In the end, I could not get the phone to work with any sim card (I tried both t-mobile and at&t). If anyone out there has any idea how I can get the phone to work with t-mobile or at&t, holla @ me.

Pictures

Windows Icons

The Box

Home Screen

Watching NBC (It was during March Madness)

Phone as webcam on MSN Messenger

1. He penned 1/2 of “Jesus Walks” and won a grammy for it with Ye’ even before he dropped his debut album

2. Unlike your favorite rapper who only “battles” in a recording booth (alone), Fest actually battles and is a scribble jam winner. One of the notables on his battle defeat list is some guy named Marshall Mathers

3. To support his wife and child, he didn’t go the usual “heat carrying, crack peddling, old lady robbing, etc” route that your favorite rapper probably claims to have gone (And you know as well as I do that there is probably very little truth to it), instead he got multiple low paying jobs including one as a Janitor for a university. Gotta respect that

4. This line: “My style is running to the toilet, You ain’t seen SHIT yet”

5. He’s been name dropping Obama in freestyles since 2006, thats way before most of us (hip hop crowd in this case) ever heard of the senator from Illinois

6. He put out a Michael Jackson tribute album and Its CRACK!!!(disclaimer: kids drugs are bad) son and its free for download

7. He met with the United Kingdom’s Parliamentary Leader of the Opposition, David Cameron do discuss the good, the bad and the ugly of hip hop

This is the kind of blog that usually comes at the end of the year but I somehow managed to wait until now. I really want to write a short review for each of the albums on the list but the Nets play the Celtics in a couple of minutes so this has to be a quick one. So without further ado:

[In no particular order]

1. Little Brother: Getback

2. Kanye West: Graduation

3. Lupe Fiasco: The Cool

4. Joel Ortiz: The Brick - Bodega Chronicles

5. Common: Finding Forever

6. Jay Z: American Gangster

7. Brother Ali: The Undisputed Truth

8. Talib Kweli: Eardrum

9. Blu & Exile: Below The Heavens

10. Amir Sulaiman: Like A Thief In The Night

And as a bonus, here are 5 honorable mentions that could have easily made the list

1. Cassidy: B.A.R.S

2. Akon: Konvicted

3. Canibus: For Who The Beat Tolls

4. Ne Yo: Because Of You

5. Pharoahe Monch: Desire

Think I missed an important one ? Leave a comment

<understatement>I know I was not the most active of bloggers in 2007</understatement> but all that is about to change (hopefully). I have a couple of blog ideas the readers [all two of them] will probably enjoy. To show my new commitment to blogging, I came up with a more creative/cooler title than “Sjobe’s Blog”

Announcer: LADIES AND GENTLEMEN…. I PRESENT TO YOU….

(Drum roll)

THE ONE MAN CIPHER!!!!

Crowd: Huh ? One man what ?

Let me break it down, since most of my blogs will be on hip hop and-or computers [sorry, I know you were expecting juicy personal details :-)] and me being a sucker for double entendres and all, I came up with a title that can be interpreted differently by hip hop fans and geeks

Crowd: Ooooh… That kinda sorta makes sense
So what comes to your mind when you hear the word “cipher” ? Lupe, Papoose and Styles P spitting or Ceasar Shift ?

1. His fans still passionately debate about which one is better; The Food & Liquor leak or the official Food & Liquor
2. He flowed better over other rappers beats on his Fahrenheit 1/15 mixtapes than most rappers did on their original songs
3. He had Jay-Z co-executive produce Food & Liquor even though he had rejected a record deal with Roc-A-Fella
4. He was GQ Magazine’s “Breakout Man Of The Year”
5. He’s in a Nickleback video
6. He has a black belt in Karate
7. He was featured on a single off a Kanye West album. [To see how big this is, simply take a look at the other artists Ye’ has on his albums; Common, Jay-Z, Mos Def, Kweli, Twista, Jamie Foxx, Ludacris, Adam Levin, The Game, Nas, and Brandy just to name a few]

*If you have a reason or reasons that you believe should have made the list, let me know by leaving a comment.

Unless you have been living under a rock, you have heard of 50 Cent and Kanye West dropping albums on the same day and unless you have been living inside a hole [thats under a bigger rock], you must have heard of Kanye outselling 50 by almost 300,000 copies. Now I don’t know about you, but I’m shocked; Not because Kanye sold more, but because 50 did not cross the 800,000 mark on his first week [He went platinum (1,000,000 +) his first week on both of his prior solo efforts]. I guess thats what happens when you beef with half the industry and stick with the same tried and tested formula [Formula 50?] on your albums [Or maybe all the 13 year old gangsta wannabes finally realized that shooting people is not cool… at least not as cool as snapping their fingers and cranking that soulja boy… but thats another blog].

But as you might have guessed from the title of this blog, the topic is not Ferrari but rather the marketing genius of Def Jam. By not moving Mr. Louis Vuitton Don’s release date in order to avoid competition [and of course 50 promising to fulfill every hip hop head’s dream by promising to retire if Kanye beat him on the record sales], the people in suits at Def Jam got a portion of the hip hop community that isn’t usually active when it comes to buying albums to go out purchase an album.

We all know at least one of these people; the hip hop head who hasn’t bought a record since the Goodie Mob days, the random guy on the street with a “Hip Hop Is Dead!” T-Shirt, the college kid who only listens to underground/conscious hip hop, the old school guy [who probably rocked a huge gold chain and a shiny suit back in the day] who swears that Common Sense is the GOAT, the white dude who knows so much more about hip hop than you do, the guy who’s a member of the Facebook group “Lupe Fiasco = Da truth” and the list goes on and on. To a lot of these people, it not simply a matter of Kanye v.s 50, its a matter of “Uplifting Music” vs “All that is wrong with hip hop today”, its about “A rapper who disses everyone” vs “An emcee/producer who has collaborated with almost everyone”, its about All Falls Down” vs “P.I.M.P”, its your modern day good vs evil scenario in Hip Hop.

Last week, buying a Kanye album was kind of like voting; A lot of people weren’t actually voting for Kanye West, they were simply voting against gangsta rapper Curtis Jackson. Whether or not the marketing gurus at Def Jam planned all this out is a matter of speculation, but if they did…

IT WORKED!!!