Pure Metal Comes to Norwich: Arch Enemy & Soilwork

I don’t recall if I’ve seen Soilwork before, but I’ve always been aware of them. When I discovered they would be playing with Arch Enemy I bought up a lot of their stuff and started listening to it. As metal goes it’s ok and very listenable. Live they were much the same. Thier sound wasn’t all it could have been, and I initially put that down to the Waterfront PA. For a bunch of clearly aging blokes they were really rather good and had lots of energy. I wouldn’t go to just see them again, but I’d check them out if they were on the same bill as someone else I wanted to see.

Arch Enemy are one of my all time favorite bands. I’ve seen them several times, but never in a venue as small as the Waterfront. I’ve never been disappointed with Arch Enemy and on this occasion they were better than all of the bands (including Symphony X, Fear Factory and Vallenfyre) I saw last weekend at Bloodstock. Which is disappointing in itself!

This was the first time I’d seen Arch Enemy with the singer who replaced Angela Gossow a couple years ago, Alissa White-gluz. Alissa was every bit as good as Angela, if not better.

I couldn’t have asked for a much better set, my favorites from Doomsday Machine (although a run through of the whole album would have been even better), several of my favorites from Khaos Legions and from War Eternal, as well old favorites like Dead Eyes See No Future and We Will Rise.

They played a sold, entertaining 90 minutes. Michael Amott can really play (guitar). Unlike Soilwork, I could hear every note, suggesting the PA at the waterfront wasn’t that bad, but Soilwork’s setup was.

What we need now is a new album and a headline slot at Bloodstock 2017.

Comments

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...

RESTful Behaviour Guide

I’ve used a lot of existing Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs and have created several of my own. I see a lot of inconsistency, not just between REST APIs but often within a single REST API. I think most developers understand, at a high level, what a REST API is for and how it should work, but lack a detailed understanding. I think the first thing they forget to consider is that REST APIs allow you to identify and manipulate resources on the web. Here I want to look briefly at what a REST API is and offer some advice on how to structure one, how it should behave and what should be considered when building it. I know this isn’t emacs vs vi, but it can be quite contentious. So, as Barbossa from Pirates of the Caribbean said, this “...is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules.” Resources & Identifiers In their book, Rest in Practice - Hypermedia and Systems Architecture (‎ISBN: 978-0596805821), Jim Webber, Savas Parastatidis and Ian Robinson describe resour...

Paul Grenyer

Search This Blog