Skip to main content

Karnataka

This was a strange gig. To start off with it was at the playhouse which is a seated venue with quite a steep gradient and we were sat right at the front. This meant that we could hear the drums and the guitar amplifiers directly, rather than through the PA, which was mostly behind us. I’m still not sure how we could hear the vocals so well, maybe it was the monitors, and we could hardly hear the keyboards, which is not a bad thing.

Karnataka are a great band, with a dreadful guitarist. Honestly, I really don’t know why they bother with him. Sometimes he plays badly, other times he’s not quite playing the right stuff. The rest of the band, especially the drummer seem really tight. I felt a little sorry for Hayley as her voice took a little while to warm up and she’s obviously not 100% comfortable on stage yet. When she gets going she’s incredible.

The other strange thing was that for most of the second half of the set the drummer’s high hat was falling apart. He spent as much time playing with one hand with a drumstick in his mouth while he tried to fix it with the other hand as he did playing with two hands. It still sounded fantastic though.

Karnataka only played a couple of songs I knew all night, which is totally my fault for only really knowing Delicate Flame of Desire. Those tracks really showed the flaws in the current guitarist. When I first saw them in the late 90s on the Delicate Flame of Desire tour the guitarist was superb.

Strangeness aside I really enjoyed Karnataka and will certainly be seeing them again given the chance. Mostly Autumn have played Bloodstock, so why not karnataka?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

It's great to be back at the ACCU Conference 2025!

Last week I was back at the ACCU Conference in Bristol, for the first time since I gave an opening keynote in 2019 . In March 2020, COVID hit the UK and I got out of the habit of attending and speaking at conferences. Plus the ACCU Conference, and the organisation in general, took a big step back towards C++ and that hasn’t been relevant to me for nearly two decades. It’s taken until now, 2025 for me to want to talk again, and I was really pleased to be accepted for the ACCU Conference again. It was just a 20 minute session and I only attended for the day I was speaking. There was enough varied content for it to be interesting to me and I’m hoping to be back for the full conference next year. I really enjoyed attending and it was great to catch up with people I hadn’t seen for years. I felt re-engaged and particularly liked being asked if I’d been to nor(DEV):con . Learning to stop writing code (and why you won't miss it) Daisy Hollman I should have read the summary of the openin...

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv...

Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7

I recently upgraded from Tomcat 6 to Tomcat 7 and all of my Ant deployment scripts stopped working. I eventually worked out why and made the necessary changes, but there doesn’t seem to be a complete description of how to use Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 on the web so I thought I'd write one. To start with, make sure Tomcat manager is configured for use by Catalina-Ant. Make sure that manager-script is included in the roles for one of the users in TOMCAT_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml . For example: <tomcat-users> <user name="admin" password="s3cr£t" roles="manager-gui, manager-script "/> </tomcat-users> Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 6 was encapsulated within a single JAR file. Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 requires four JAR files. One from TOMCAT_HOME/bin : tomcat-juli.jar and three from TOMCAT_HOME/lib: catalina-ant.jar tomcat-coyote.jar tomcat-util.jar There are at least three ways of making the JARs available to Ant: Copy the JARs into th...