Centroid.EU Blog

(this blog is mostly encrypted - adults only)

I got a new apartment

December 06th, 2012

I got a new apartment. The old apartment is in the same condition as it was in August, so nothing had been done. So I cancelled it.

The new apartment has a lot more space, and includes a work room where I can work in and then close the door at the end of the day. Also it's close to shopping amenities so I'll probably have a better quality of life. I'm pretty happy. Despite the setbacks in 2012, this year has been pretty good to me.

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KNF Kongress 2012 - Complex World...

November 26th, 2012

The KNF which I'm a member of is an organization centered around networking and digital communication of Franconia (a region in Germany). Every year they have a Con and it's called "KNF Kongress" and this years con was about "Komplexe Welt - in und um das Internet", so in english "complex world - in and around the Internet". The con is held in Nuremberg at the Ohm College. Here is how it went down for me:

I got to the venue at 10:25 and it was too late to get to the early talks. So I set my laptop up with the KNF wireless, which turned out to be pretty intermittent in quality throughout the day. All the talks were being held in german so I'm gonna translate it to english on what I saw and heard.

The first talk I went to then was "OpenSeaMap - Status und aktuelle Projekte". This talk was being held by Markus Baerlocher. I didn't know anything about OpenSeaMap (google it) prior so this was an interesting talk. The status on the project was that they need developers and servers (mostly for storage).

Then there was lunch, and pizza. :-)

Next I attended the "mbed - der schnellste Einstieg in Web-basierte Steuerung und Regelung" by Jochen Krapf. This was an inspiring talk and demonstration by Jochen but I gotta admit I didn't know C++ or electronics all that well so there was about 5% of things I didn't grok. Otherwise a very nice talk about mbed.org which is sorta like arduino.

After that the mbed talk continued with another person Christian Besenreiter who required a dhcp server. Lastly it was my netbook running OpenBSD which provided that function. Chris showed us three real live examples of metering electric current with mbed. In the end Jochen had a few more words which cut into our coffee break. Both of these talks were very well done and the highlight of the day.

The last talk I attended was by Richard Lippmann about "Sicherung virtueller Server Umgebungen" which was a niftily thought-out demonstration how virtual environments make backups and snapshots. Only in the end I was a little disappointed because it was over so soon. Richard is a very good presenter.

And finally we had a Jam Session where anyone could go to the beamer and present a project. This was very well done and I think I'll do this next time as well. Perhaps I can talk about wildcarddnsd and its development.

By the time I got to the Nuremberg main train station it was 18:20 and my next train would depart at 19:00. It took a while but I got home at 20:30 and my dad picked me up from the train station in Schweinfurt.

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Fibre Optics in Schweinfurt?

November 23rd, 2012

According to this german article we can expect Fibre Optic cabling (FTTH) to the home by end of 2014. So 2015 is reasonable. The Deutsche Telekom would be laying all the fibre and the cost would be around 20 million euros.

This would be good for me since the Internet is my sole means of income. I do remote system administration currently (a work from home type job).

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The Space Program(tm)

November 21st, 2012

So in my eyes Europe has lost out. They cancelled the moon rover and went ahead with the Ariane 5ME. And the winner is? Commercial US space programs. It was Elon Musk of Space X that said Ariane 5 can't compete with the Falcon 9 and heavy Falcon rockets. Apparently the world agrees as Space X has 4 dozen outstanding contracts to deliver satellites to orbit.

In my eyes Mars is interesting but not _that_ interesting. The moon is the ugly gem. What we need as the human race is manufacturing on the moon. Only from the moon can we make it beyond earth orbit. Putting up material from earth is too expensive, so I see the moon is similar to a VPS on the Internet, if it can sustain itself via remote control then everything is alright.

One of my personal beliefs is that the moon has plenty of resources that we can use. We can use the iron, the aluminum and even the stones on the moon. And best of all we can use the moons gravity. I have a feeling it's just enough to allow long missions. Imagine being 3 years away from earth! So far the record isn't even half that. Yes we'll always be dependet on resources from earth but if lastly the only resource from earth is humans then we got it made. Space link.

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Why Open Source works (reiterate my point)

November 20th, 2012

I have a success story to tell you, well partially. While someone else is programming driver support into my netbook's (saturn) internal wifi, I went out and bought a wireless dongle. To my shock it wasn't supported with OpenBSD and then I did what any half-clued would do.. that is to see if I can hack support into it. And it worked.

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Citation needed(tm)

November 13th, 2012

Wikipedia is back to fundraising. I won't be donating any money to them this year because I'm still peeved off that a contribution of mine to wikipedia has been censored/retracted. There exists some real bureaucracy in wikipedia, and it needs to change otherwise people will look elsewhere, or even fork.

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My C Primer hits 20,000 views

November 10th, 2012

Over night, the counter to my C Primer will turn to 20,000. Thank you to all who read it. It took a little under a year to do the second 10K. That's an average of 29 or so per day. Also we're nearing 1 million views on Hackepedia itself, which is a great feat. I'll make another announcement when that happens (probably around December 1st).

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Purchasing a Mac Mini

November 7th, 2012

Tomorrow I'm going to purchase a Apple Mac Mini. It'll be the faster version with 16 GB (maxed) RAM. On monday when I got a quote from the store I'm buying it from said they won't get them delivered until next week, so I'll have to wait a little but the purchase goes out tomorrow.

I'm buying this computer for a new stand-up desk that I'm also going to purchase so I'm going to eventually buy a new monitor as well.

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The Main river produces 118 MW electricity

November 5th, 2012

I got a list of power generation stations of the Main river from the german wikipedia, and this is how I got to the result:

$ history
1       more main.txt
2       awk '{print $NF}' main.txt | grep [0-9] | tr -d . \
| awk '{total += $0} END {printf("total: %ld\n", total);}'
 END {printf("total: %ld\n", total);}'                                        <
total: 118640

Now this is probably only the peak draw, however judging from the flow of water through the turbines in Schweinfurt it's pretty steady all the time.

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Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2012 blocks my captchas

November 4th, 2012

Today I wanted to write a blog comment on my own blog and found that the captcha images didn't load completely rendering them useless. So after searching for 2 hours around my system, the net and my parents home network I was able to isolate the error to my workstation which is windows 7 - 64 bit. My moms Linux on the same LAN rendered the image fine. I tested this on 3 sorts of browsers (Safari, Firefox, and IE) and everytime it was blocked. So someone asked me to turn firewall off and that didn't do it, and then I as a test turned web inspection off on the AV 2012 and the image loaded.

So now I've sent Kaspersky a support email to look into this.

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