Today I've written a small PHP script to convert my blog to XML and RSS.
On the right hand side is now the RSS button with the feed. I'd appreciate
it if someone who knows their stuff about this would send me an email if you
noticed something wrong with this feed. Right now it only dumps the last
10 articles but I can make it higher or lower if need be. My PHP really
sucks I noticed but somehow I managed to write this out.
I found a condition that made the kernel
panic
when I'd execute a certain code. It took less than a day to get an interested
OpenBSD developer to produce a patch, after review it'll be committed before
5.4 hopefully. This is why OpenBSD and open source in general rocks!
If you haven't heard of Oculus Rift then
perhaps you're not reading the same literature and magazines as me. They
are VR goggles at a reasonable price. Right now they are in development and
we have still to see if they will make it out to the mainstream production.
Anyhow I have thought of a useful tools for headsets such as these.
Basically I want to explore my computer for security and informative needs.
What I envision is a filesystem displayed in a 3D environment ala
fsn (see also
fsv) by a program. This program
also polls the kernel for events ala inotify and displays accesses with a pop-up or flash. This way a
person can step back on the filesystem and gain the big picture. A replay
function would be good so that one can investigate what happened.
Since in UN*X everything is pretty well a file this should unearth some
questions hopefully, and then one has to search for answers. OpenBSD
currently has no inotify mechanism, and I'm investigating whether it's
worth it persuing this or whether my idea will be left for someone else...
the decision process could take years same with the development process.
I have added an access point to my network. It is firewalled to shits but it
lets UDP through. A wildcarddnsd is wildcarding the entire DNS tree from root
to branch and gives out only 1 IP, it seems to work magic... here is the
config file:
version "5";
wildcard-only-for "wildcard everyone" {
0.0.0.0/0;
::/0;
}
zone "default" {
*,soa,3600,miranda.solarscale.de.,hostmaster.solarscale.de.,1,3600,1800,7200,3600
*,a,3600,192.168.32.1
}
So then I use redirection rules in pf to redirect all web and DNS to apache
httpd or wildcarddnsd.
# grep rdr-to /etc/pf.conf
match in on em0 proto udp from 192.168.32.0/24 to any port 53 rdr-to 127.0.0.1
pass in on em0 proto tcp from 192.168.32.0/24 to any port 80 rdr-to 127.0.0.1
The website says something like "dear neighbour, you can use UDP through this
gateway but it's only outbound and doesn't return inbound". I have also
rate limited how much can be sent, the rule for that is:
pass in log on em0 proto udp from 192.168.32.0/24 to any keep state (max-src-conn-rate 1/20)
This means that only 1 packet per every 20 seconds should emanate from this
access point.
What I hope to achieve with this is that people will build their own SMS
mechanism and send out SMS messages out via UDP to a gateway of sorts.
It could be interesting for someone's car ie. as soon as the car pulls up
in the parking lot next door it sends an SMS saying it's arrived at its
destination.
This is no ordinary access point, you can't surf with it, you can't do much
with it really. But it may delight someones nerdyness of what they can do.
Non-nerds need not apply, and nerds in training are welcome. My next goal
is to look at openwrt and see if I can better this access point somewhat.
Tonight at 7PM EDT, Chris Hadfield undocks with two other Astronauts from
the ISS. He's the coolest Astronaut I know of. Google for him and the ISS
for some great youtube videos, they are really heart touching. I hope the
landing goes well for him when he comes back to earth.
I'm looking forward to the german election in the fall. I will be voting
for the pirate party of germany as I think they are right on. My hope is
that the pirates are going to overcome the 5% of votes needed to enter
parliament. And then it'll be wake-up time for the bigger parties.
So what can you do with a chunk of mass? Well for one you don't have to
bring it up by means of earth rocket. I believe the Americans are not being
honest with us in some respect. Because the asteroid is either the forerunner
or the initial counterweight to a lunar space elevator
(see here). Even if this asteroid mission is a failure at least we can stroke out
visionaries use of countermass being asteroids then. The asteroid as an LSE
counterweight is gonna make the US a lot of money, in savings. They don't have
to use precious fuel to land on the moon anymore but rather take the lift
down to the surface of the moon. And that's where the money's at, at least
in the foreseeable space-faring future.
I have drawn 2 LSE's roughly of how it looks like (one is international and the
other belongs to the USA). The counterweights span from
L1 to L2 lunar-earth orbit so the cables are around 100,000 km long.
Why do I think there is money to be made on the moon? Well for one the human
space exploration is destined to go to the moon because we have too much
space junk in earth orbit to sustain living there in reasonable safety. It
is a fact that the ISS has to fire thrusters to evade space junk every so
often and it takes supercomputers to figure out if any junk is threatening
the space station. The moon on the other hand is still a space junk virgin.
Also there is resources on the moon. It isn't just a dead rock made of
silicon and basalt (in some respects I wish it was). No. There is elements
that can harbour life as we know it, and we can mine the moon for resources.
Take the fact that asteroids occasionally fall on the surface of the moon.
These contain metals so they are just waiting to be mined. With a moon
elevator the rocks could be sent to space and there they could be molten with
an array of mirrors from the sun. By means of centrifugal forces the metal
could be extracted and formed from the impurities. Then the pure metals could
be brought back down to the surface of the moon to build further space capsules
or a set of tubes that are part of the space bases that I think are inevitable.
The trade between the moon and earth would likely be human cargo (such as
specialists to better the industrial output of the moon) and data (on the
far side of the moon there is no radio interference making it an ideal spot
for radio-astronomy and SETI).