Centroid.EU Blog

(this blog is mostly encrypted - adults only)

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).

0 comments

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.

0 comments

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.

0 comments

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.

0 comments

OpenBSD 5.2 Release day!

November 1st, 2012

Today OpenBSD 5.2 gets released. Because it is headquartered in Canada the announce may come a bit later as here in Europe we're a few hours ahead of them. Here is the release page, it has all information that you need to download or order OpenBSD 5.2. I personally have used and bought OpenBSD since the 2.5/2.6 days where my personal OpenBSD workstation was called geeklab.globalserve.net in 1997. Today OpenBSD is much more secure than it was back then which is good since OpenBSD focuses on security (but not just! but also functionality and openness). Why is it important to be secure, yet functional? Well when you're faced with securing something often you disable the service completely which is the opposite of functional. In OpenBSD services are secured by a multitude of attack prevention mechanisms. You may want to look at strlcpy/strlcat which was among the first changes that OpenBSD did. And then there is W^X (W xor X) and ottomalloc which are supposed to prevent stack and heap overflow attacks. Before I bore you, I'll just say "It's celebration day!" and leave you with that. Finally congrats to the OpenBSD'ers who made it all happen.

0 comments

Halloween Germany 2012

October 31st, 2012

Hooooooooo! Hooooooo! Scary movie! No! It's Halloween in Schweinfurt. Here is some pictures, including our first trick'o'treaters.

These guys look pretty scary!

0 comments

Big Donation to OpenBSD

October 28th, 2012

OK, this is the big announcement, it's a bit early but I need to visit my bank tomorrow so I want to give them the transaction then. Call this the Halloween donation just in time for the November 1st OpenBSD 5.2 release. The amount is for a staggering 411 Euros. This brings this years donations to 511 euros. I don't want anything in return other than the recognition on the OpenBSD donations page, which I'm already listed on so this doesn't make a change. Take it this way. I use OpenBSD at work, and without OpenBSD I would have no work, so this is justified to me. Thanks OpenBSD. Future donations will be more or less depending on my income.

I put OpenSMTPD on the purpose of the transaction, because they have been very kind with me, but this money isn't solely for them but OpenBSD in general.

0 comments

In five days I'll be making a great announcement

October 26th, 2012

I'm not going to go into details but I can hardly wait in anticipation. I have told a few people already and some think I'm nuts and others think I'm brave.

0 comments

Very satisfied with the new Mac Mini (not bought yet)

October 24th, 2012

Yes, Apple has released a new Mac Mini. It has USB3 and a more powerful processor. Both I like. It also accepts 16 GB of RAM. That I like and I want to max my Mac Mini when I get it.

Mac mini specs

0 comments

FreeBSD repository now has CSRG in svn

October 20th, 2012

The FreeBSD repo now has the CSRG revisions in it's SVN. And they made a blooper. If you're interested in what peoples first dogs name was then you can crack these passwords. Remember this is from the late 80's and early 90's where people still thought DES was secure or didn't understand that their password would follow them to 2012 where cracking with dictionary attack tools such as John the Ripper exist, and were are widely successful. Now I'm not saying you should crack these passwords but if you wanted to then you could.

0 comments