Centroid.EU Blog

Rant on oil

I'm worried about the human race. Ever since the great wars in the 1940's we've been using gasoline and oil based fuels to power our economies. Our economies pride themselves by having multiple trading partner, so as to not be relied on one partner too much, yet we don't do this with transportation means such as cars. People are lazy too. They will boycott buying gasoline _for a day_ to make statements but it doesn't get any results. What we have to do as a human race is to strip ourselves free of this dependency and create a _mix_ of transportation means so that we don't fall into poverty when there is no more oil. Guys ride your bikes more often! Mayors! Ban cars in cities unless they are electric! We can't sleep on this or else we'll be poor as we were in the beginning of the industrial revolution when the oil runs out. Let's try to have 50% electric cars and 50% gasoline cars by 2020! I wager that in 2022 the oil will run out if not sooner.

Upgraded Anti-Virus

Today I bought Anti-virus for my Windows 7 vm. I was 1 day away from losing my support and subscription so I bought it for this and 2 other PC's for a years subscription. I believe all windows computers need anti-virus and I even bought anti-virus for my dad's Mac. It's very important to keep malware out.

Got a new VPS

I got a new VPS. It's called io.solarscale.de. I got this because goldflipper.net was down for 1.5 days and my DNS was hanging on a string. The new host io doesn't do DNS just yet but it will in the next few days. One bonus is that it does IPv6, and one drawback is that it's not BSD. Oh well. I'll be comparing goldflipper.net and io for the next year and a half and decide which one I will keep running. It's a matter of quality of service.

$ host www.centroid.eu
www.centroid.eu has address 78.47.14.22
www.centroid.eu has address 200.46.208.61
www.centroid.eu has IPv6 address 2001:a60:f074:4::1
www.centroid.eu has IPv6 address 2a01:4f8:d13:1980::22

As you can see www.centroid.eu is DNS load shared between three hosts. io and goldflipper for IPv4 and uranus and io for IPv6.

uranus upgraded

I've upgraded my dear box uranus to OpenBSD 5.0. Downtime was about one hour as I was upgrading packages as well in single user mode. Some packages didn't want to be upgraded, and I'll have to sort that out. Otherwise it worked like a charm.

kern.version=OpenBSD 5.0 (GENERIC.MP) #59: Wed Aug 17 10:19:44 MDT 2011
    deraadt@i386.openbsd.org:/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/compile/GENERIC.MP

OpenBSD 5.0 Released

Well I was hoping to give you news of my CD's having arrived but they aren't here yet. So I did an FTP of the install50.iso file for the amd64 architecture and upgraded 2 vm's so far. I've made a screen shot:

Screenshot

Well as you can tell by the screenshot Libreoffice is in 5.0 instead of OpenOffice. This is amazing! Also facebook stopped working for the 4.9 browser a few days ago. The browser bundled with OpenBSD 5.0 makes facebook work again. Yay! Let's hope this will be as consistent and stable as the 4.9 release. I'll be upgrading uranus.centroid.eu soonish.

7 Billion Humans

Here is a United Nations report that says we'll hit 7 Billion (estimate) Humans in five days. I gotta say congratulations to the human race, but at the same time I'm worried because in the 1970's we had just 4 Billion people on earth.

Here is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that SHOULD give every human, every one of our 7 Billion, the rights that are the foundation of freedom, justice and peace.

I have some issues with the large number of people like mentioned above, but let me ask some questions. How are we going to feed everyone? Oil is running out, how can we keep relative comforts for everyone? More fresh water is polluted every day, how can we ensure drinking water for everyone? Machinery is taking away humans work, how can we accept being unemployed because of it? We realise we live on a planet in space, how can we ever accept that there is other species elsewhere?

Rocket Scientists, why can't this be done?

I was wondering why humans insert rockets in a circular orbit around the earth first and then gun the engines to "escape". First a picture of how it's done currently.

I envision space craft going directly up into the sun toward L1 Lagrange. Basically it's ascending straight up, followed by a coast and then possibly ION engines backed by possible lasers (for energy) from the ground, in order to stay at this Lagrange point.

Basically up there it's like an eagles nest in the mountains. You experience day at all times, see the earth lit all times, and are able to move between other lagrange points with little to no chemical energy. Also accessing the moon from there should be no problem.

German Trojan, some thoughts

This story is circulating. I noticed that the programs being spied on are programs that use encryption and that's probably what the police are out to get at, encryption keys or seeing what someone is doing what they can't see by simply wiretapping the line. I noticed they are interested in skype (which uses encryption). What it comes down to is that there is a frustration out there that the cops want to see through the encryption of end-users that they suspect for whatever reasons. In a way this is a nicer way of peeking through encryption than installing X amounts of supercomputers to crack the encryption used, it's likely also cheaper. The underlying problem of creating a police state is real though. So where do you find a median? We can't turn encryption off as some countries dictate because organized crime will get to us before the cops can protect us, and the losses will be huge. We can't install supercomputers because they suck up too much energy and cost too much. So what can the cops do to track criminals? It's not so easy, why don't you send me your thoughts? Lastly we don't want to put the cops in a position where they can surveil anyone or everyone without a court order.

Did you know you could get BSD Certified?

At EuroBSDCon I met and spoke a bit with Dru Lavigne. She does the BSD Certifications at most major BSD events. All in all a good thing if you live in a place where certifications are important. If I go to EuroBSDCon next year I'll try to do the certification myself. The website is here at bsdcertification.org . I also made a photo of Dru but it turned out very blurred so I can't share that, sorry.

The FreeBSD German Documentation Project