Centroid.EU Blog

Why landing on Mars may not be a good idea (for humans)

August 5th, 2012

Mars may be toxic. So what do you do? I have a "backup" plan for landing humans on mars. Instead of landing them on Mars itself, a craft lands on the moons Phobos or Deimos. This puts them so close to mars that a round trip time with communications between any point on mars is likely less than 500 ms. So if you think back to the movie "Avatar" there was a human commanding an avatar and sensed what the avatar sensed. I propose that we do this with robotics that land on mars instead of humans. While the humans are getting comfy on the moons (little gravity unfortunately) and controlling the robots they will have almost instant feedback of what a robot sees, hears and feels. I think this will be enough quarantine to explore Mars even if it harbours biological virii that could wipe out the human race when brought back to earth on a human. Something to think about anyhow.

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Why I don't trust the ITU

August 4th, 2012

The Internet is a dream come true for both techs and non-techs. It revolutionized communication costs big time. This is why I do not like hearing about the ITU wanting control of the Internet.

This article from the BBC writes the following: The ITU is hosting a conference in December in Dubai to which representatives from 178 nations have been invited to review the International Telecommunications Regulations (ITR). The ITR is a 1988 treaty which set out rules for how traffic should flow between different telecom networks, and how to calculate charges for traffic exchanged between carriers in different countries.

This is why I don't like the ITU because the ITR is mainly out of date. It's people that made the Internet happen and people that drove costs down. And they did this mainly from 1995 onwards. A 1988 treaty could not have conceived of the explosiveness of the Internet's expansion.

Finally I'd like to say we're more than just customers to a telecom (who is a member of the ITU), we are the Internet. Right now as it seems to me the Internet is controlled by the US but it's in good hands. The ITU would tear us apart and raise costs.

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Five technologies of the future

August 2nd, 2012

Here are 10 Futuristic Technologies That Will Never Exist.

I kinda laughed reading this and thought I'd create my own that will exist. Here, then, are five technologies that I predict will make it in the future.

1. Quantum Computers

There is a lot of people working on these now with semi-successful attempts. I believe in the next 10-15 years we'll see the first desktop quantum computers.

2. Artificial Intelligences

In the future there may only be 2 types of programs. Operating Systems and Artificial Intelligences. The latter can program you anything you wish, from a game (interpreted or compiled) to a complex astronomy program.

3. Lunar Space Elevator

Unlike the Earth Space Elevator the LSE has a lot more going for it. No thunderstorms, no atmosphere that eats away at the fibres. The LSE is almost a perfect invention. And there can be 2 of them, one at the near side and one at the far side of the moon.

4. L5 rotational space stations

You know those wheels that rotate in space? Well when the LSE is finished these will also be easier to do. Mining on the moon will likely make these possible. They will be constructed of iron or steel rather than light alloys.

5. Pseudo Time Machine

If an event happens on earth and you want to look back to see the events that happened just prior you can. By placing earth observing telescopes very far away, so that light travels on the matter of hours to their mirrors you can create a "Way-back-machine" and it's due to the laws of physics (speedlimit of light) that this works.

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Cloudcracker, does it make economic sense?

July 30th, 2012

Came across this from a heise.de article. And I'm thinking...this is such a waste of resources. It's contributing to global warming quite possibly just to crack a silly password.

Perhaps we need "cloudbroker" an entity that corporations sign up to and they broker access to a corporations system considering the data that would be used for a crack. It would save the economy money for one and you could give it a certain amount of penalty before the broker rats on the cracker, and then the corporation is alerted.

Now if the cloudcracker was powered 100% off-grid by solar panels, I'd like the idea.

There may be a good side to this however. If enough people use such blatant climate-killing services perhaps they will introduce low-cost, low-power quantum systems sooner than later. At that point all crypto would be mute anyhow and cryptosystems would live a renaissance most likely.

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Donated 50 euros to OpenBSD

July 13th, 2012

I've been in contact with some OpenBSD developers the last few days and they managed to create a patch in the kernel that I needed. I promptly wrote Theo a transaction for 50 euros. The money should go through in the next few days. Thanks to Claudio, Henning, Otto, and if I didn't mention your name a thanks goes out to you as well.

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A bit disappointed with dspam

July 6th, 2012

In May of 2011, I identified an issue with the FreeBSD mail server for the company I work for. Dspam was coring on signal 8 repeatedly. I investigated the issue and produced a workaround, it is written about here.

So then when doing upgrades just recently I noticed the signal 8's were back on the FreeBSD port, and also on the newest version of dspam. So I put my patch to good use again and the signal 8s disappeared. All in all I'm a bit disappointed that my "hint" to dspam development did not see a concrete fix and I'm sure others must be having these problems as well.

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Fritzbox 7930 NAS too slow!

June 30th, 2012

I bought my parents a Fritzbox 7930 made by AVM. It's a nice box but it can't do everything. I think it's underpowered as I get only 4.5 MB/s writes via ftp to this thing. I get less with CIFS which prompted me to write a utility with ftplib that reads from stdin and dumps to a file via ftp. The cpu on the fritzbox is at 99% and it won't go any faster. Here is my program:

#include <sys/types.h>

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <ftplib.h>

#define FTPUSER 	"ftpuser"
#define FTPPASS		"somepasswd"

int
main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
	char *user = FTPUSER;
	char *pass = FTPPASS;
	netbuf *nControl = NULL;
	netbuf *xControl;
	char buf[512];
	int ch;
	int len;
	
	while ((ch = getopt(argc, argv, "u:p:")) != -1) {
		switch (ch) {
		case 'u':
			user = optarg;
			break;
		case 'p':
			pass = optarg;
			break;
		}
	}

	argc -= optind;
	argv += optind;

	if (argv[0] == NULL || argv[1] == NULL) {
		perror("args -> IP file");
		exit(1);
	}

	FtpInit();
	

	if (FtpConnect(argv[0], &nControl) == 0) {
		perror("FtpConnect");
		exit(1);
	}

	
	if (FtpLogin(user, pass, nControl) == 0) {
		perror("FtpLogin");
		exit(1);
	}

	if (FtpChdir("SAMSUNG-HD154UI-01/", nControl) == 0) {
		perror("FtpChdir");
		exit(1);
	}

	if (FtpAccess(argv[1], 
		FTPLIB_FILE_WRITE, FTPLIB_IMAGE, nControl, &xControl) == 0) {
		perror("FtpAccess");
		exit(1);
	}	



	while ((len = read(STDIN_FILENO, &buf, sizeof(buf))) > 0) {
		if (FtpWrite(buf, len, xControl) < 0) {
			perror("FtpWrite");
			exit(1);
		}
	}
	
	if (FtpClose(xControl) == 0) {
		perror("FtpClose");
		exit(1);
	}

	FtpQuit(xControl);
	FtpQuit(nControl);

	exit (0);
}

Anyhow if you don't believe me watch these statistics with dump(8):

  DUMP: Date of this level 0 dump: Sat Jun 30 17:15:09 2012
  DUMP: Dumping /dev/sdb1 (/) to standard output
  DUMP: Label: none
  DUMP: Writing 10 Kilobyte records
  DUMP: mapping (Pass I) [regular files]
  DUMP: mapping (Pass II) [directories]
  DUMP: estimated 158901841 blocks.
  DUMP: Volume 1 started with block 1 at: Sat Jun 30 17:15:13 2012
  DUMP: dumping (Pass III) [directories]
  DUMP: dumping (Pass IV) [regular files]
  DUMP: 0.81% done at 4273 kB/s, finished in 10:14
  DUMP: 1.64% done at 4340 kB/s, finished in 10:00
  DUMP: 2.50% done at 4416 kB/s, finished in 9:44
  DUMP: 3.37% done at 4461 kB/s, finished in 9:33
  DUMP: 4.23% done at 4485 kB/s, finished in 9:25
  DUMP: 5.10% done at 4498 kB/s, finished in 9:18
  DUMP: 5.95% done at 4499 kB/s, finished in 9:13

I'll be taking the external hardrive back to this computer for backups. Too bad.

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Going to the moon? You'll need this!

June 30th, 2012

I'm a big proponent of GW Bush's moon to mars idea. I think we should establish a base on the moon first before venturing to mars. However to needlessly spend fuel to land on the moon is pointless, you'll need this, a lunar space elevator.. Thanks to Brad Guth for implanting that idea in my head.

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Congratulations to China

June 30th, 2012

Since I get chinese people looking at this blog occasionally I want to congratulate you on your spacetrip and first chinese woman in space. I was looking at the " CSS" earlier today. Pretty cool! I hope one day germany will be able to design space stations, or perhaps europe. How about on the moon!?

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Solstice in 4 days

June 16th, 2012

Hi, the solstice is in four days from now. Get your celebration planned to worship the sungod, or whatever. In the southern hemisphere of course it means winter where in the northern hemisphere we'll have summer.

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