Centroid.EU Blog

(this blog is mostly encrypted - adults only)

New Intro Screen with Animation

May 10th, 2013

The Centroid.EU website has a new intro screen. If you have the blog bookmarked you can simply click on the logo on the right hand side.

I painstakingly wrote the javascript for this, and I'm pretty proud.

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Finished upgrading to OpenBSD 5.3

May 9th, 2013

mars - check.
jupiter - check.
luna - check.
and finally uranus - check.

All my computers that needed upgrading are upgraded. One thing about 5.3. My IPv6 setup stopped working. Something went in the 5.3 code that caused everything to fail. I'll have to figure out something new...

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Strato.com HIDRIVE is real slow today

May 8th, 2013

I decided to download my backups today and I think I'm going to do it tomorrow morning. As, the route from 2 sources to sftp.hidrive.strato.com is real slow. Both go through DECIX and stall all the time:

/users/label-3462/backup-gf20130506.tar.X.gz   32% 1339MB 234.4KB/s - stalled -

So I don't know if this should be a buyers beware signal. But let's see how it works tomorrow.

[pjp@trojan ~]$ traceroute sftp.hidrive.strato.com
traceroute to sftp.hidrive.strato.com (85.214.3.70), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
 1  static.65.5.40.188.clients.your-server.de (188.40.5.65)  2.368 ms  2.038 ms  0.826 ms
 2  hos-tr4.juniper3.rz10.hetzner.de (213.239.236.113)  0.296 ms
    hos-tr2.juniper3.rz10.hetzner.de (213.239.236.81)  0.312 ms  0.304 ms
 3  hos-bb1.juniper1.ffm.hetzner.de (213.239.240.224)  5.096 ms  6.030 ms  5.206 ms
 4  atuin.rzone.de (80.81.192.110)  32.147 ms  5.335 ms  5.316 ms
 5  te0-1-0-6.core-b1.as6724.net (85.214.0.70)  17.631 ms  17.838 ms  18.989 ms
 6  be1.core-b2.as6724.net (85.214.0.33)  18.065 ms  17.918 ms  18.091 ms
 7  te1-1.core-b4.as6724.net (85.214.0.37)  17.868 ms  18.046 ms  17.709 ms
 8  ssh.hidrive.strato.com (85.214.3.70)  17.691 ms  17.799 ms  17.524 ms

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Hackathon Trademark

May 8th, 2013

Peter Hansteen (I've had the pleasure of meeting him once at a EuroBSDCon), has written about the term "hackathon" being trademarked. The people (Young Targets) who trademarked this term charged up to 2500 euros per violation in Germany. On the mailing lists misc@ (OpenBSD) someone said they gave up claim of trademark on the term "hackathon", which is a win for the free world.

As a note of interest I was a regular at the GTABUG (Greater Toronto Area BSD User Group) right from its start in 1999 to around 2001. In around the year 2000, Louis Bertrand (I think) organized installathons, and word had it that it came from the word hackathon, or the two terms came from each other. That's probably longer in time than Young Targets had ever conceived of the term.

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Asterisk patch

May 7th, 2013

I have made a patch for asterisk. They don't accept it though and I had to sign an NDA agreement in order to submit patches. Sheesh.

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Changed blog a little

May 6th, 2013

I hope you like it. When I went to a CSS class the instructor said that in Germany or any place that you read left to right there is a menu bar on the left. Well in my case it's on the right, which would make my style arabic or persian. As a compromise I have added a black bar on the left now so that there is bars on both sides of the article. I think it looks better now and I'm working on fixing the jagged edges.

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Earworms, Ohrwurms and co.

May 6th, 2013

I've been diagnosed of Schizophrenia at least once in my life. I also have been diagnosed of depression , and OCD which is a form of Tic disorder. However what I haven't been diagnosed with is "Susceptible to Earworms" disorder. An earworm is when you hear music and it plays over and over in your head, in my case it can be as little as one syllable as in a simple "oh" of the reggae artists Vybz Kartel or as high as I would guess ten syllables. In fact I've never heard a single voice in my head that I didn't hear before, most of them stem from music I hear and very rarely from other recordings, yet the headmusic keeps going at the weirdest moments.

It makes me a little paranoid to be honest, and I suspect my medication I currently take amplifies earworms. Now it doesn't matter what music I listen to I get the bug but I prefer to be listening to Reggae music at home. Current head spinners that I like listening to are Alaine - Jehovah (listen close to the syllables as they are a classic reggae beat), Lutan Fyah - Bossman, and Turbulence & I-Shenko - Obeah man. The latter two are off the downtown riddim collection which I like listening to as well.

As I walk down the street with headmusic in my brain, I wonder if it's noticeable. When I go into a supermarket I usually get inducted with white peoples music or whatever is playing on german radio, something like "message in a bottle" by the police/sting. Usually I leave the store playing repeating sentences of message in a bottle in my head. Totally bugged out!

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Ordered a new book from Amazon

May 5th, 2013

It's another Ruby book. I fear I never get to read all these books fully because as soon as I get started with one I already have the next one. But I'm easily bored, confused, irritated with some books and their delivery style. Hoping this one will be a thriller. It's called Practical Ruby for System Administration by Andre Ben Hamou. I should have it delivered to my parents in 3 days.

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We don't really have alternative access

May 4th, 2013

The german telco DT has capped its links to 75 GB if you use 16 Mbit DSL. What I thought about is the alternatives... there are none. DT has assets of 500K Euros per employee of its 230,000 workforce. And they own the copper links. Does that mean the DT can do with us what they want? There is only one alternative, and it doesn't scale. Check freifunk.de which is a citizen built Wifi mesh. They do not exist on a scale the size of Germany and beyond so they don't really scale. We need something to counter big evil telcos who do with us what they want.

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Google Glass doesn't really phase me

May 3rd, 2013

I wear glasses. As a teenager I wore contacts predominantly. But I can't understand anyone wanting to give their life to google by wearing google glasses. Oh yes, life may be better because it may have been without hope at some point. But what of that is just illusion? Now the concept of google glasses isn't so bad. Until the part where you upload. To Google. Enough said.

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