Centroid.EU Blog
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February 29th, 2012
If you follow Reggae Music you may have heard that
Buju Banton
was jailed.
For a long time I have carried these words with me and I don't know if I
shared them yet, but the resistor codes in electronics stand for:
Buju Banton, Rasta Of Young Generation, Became Victorious, Glorious & Wise
following this is the Electronic Resistor Codes as taught by Canadian
Colleges.

I know Buju Banton is a resistor! Hang in there sir! Free Buju Banton!
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article test
February 27th, 2012
When searching some articles appeared duplicate, with one not having content.
This should fix that.
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100+ Euros donations to some *BSD's
February 26th, 2012
The Marakesh Express came through. Just Kidding! I donated 50 euros to
the OpenBSD project and 57 Euros (75 dollars) to the FreeBSD Project.
I use both Operating Systems at home and at work and am very satisfied with
both projects and their individual directions. I'm still looking to purchase
OpenBSD 5.1 when it's up for preorders, so this is a big spend!
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Jupiter and Venus really bright
February 19th, 2012
Today I saw Jupiter and Venus really bright in the South-West-Western sky.
I couldn't take a photo but I got a clip of xephem for the memories. Jupiter
is in Aries and Venus is in Pisces, and Uranus in Pisces too but it can't be
seen with the naked eye.
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Sticker time!
February 13th, 2012
I opened my OpenBSD 5.0 CD set today. I was going to give it away/trade it
away but noone was interested. 90 days on offer went past and so I opened
it today. I put the stickers on mars and saturn.
I think it looks stunningly good. Mars has a lot of goo over it from previous
OpenBSD 3.0 stickers that were on its casing that were removed for a bit, but
the goo didn't disappear. Just goes to show you going with OpenBSD is a one
way street :-).
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Information and its exchange
February 13th, 2012
What is information? It's data. It's written symbols or spoken words that
are encoded/recorded somehow. In the 80's when I was a child we had several
means of getting information. We could buy books. We could buy a vinyl record
or a cassette tape. Information intended for the masses was spread by radio
and television. Usually the radio stations were government run or were
independent private radio stations that were approved by government who listened
like owls for any "message" that did not fit a strict guideline. If someone
disregarded these guidelines (like saying F.U.C.K. on-air) would get penalized
or even turned off completely.
So what if you wanted a more relaxed medium to listen to? Well what we did
in the early 90's was share cassette tapes with
spoken word over music (hip-hop). The drawback was that you had to make a
master copy and copy from it because every time you copied the analog signal
on the tape would get ever so distorted. Also with more usage the tape would
get worn. It was fairly frustrating. When I then attended College for
computing engineering technology I was told that digital is a cheap way of
exchanging information. The digital circuitry didn't care if the voltage was
0.5 volts off what it really was, which meant you could now share the SAME
data over a medium that would have been impossible if it was over analog.
Digital communication meant that every time you did a copy of a copy of a
copy the data would not degrade in quality.
So then eventually the Internet became popular and spread. First it was
slow and the information exchange was probably in 8 bit ascii (e-mail, usenet)
which was fine for a 28.8 Kbps analog modem. Then came the DSL revolution.
ISP's who established themselves from BBS's were bought out or were forced
out of business as the Telco companies once again dominated in the Information
exchange. But how that went down is irrelevant, what is more important is
that Information exchanged could now be sounds as in music and it could be
spread en-masse. Formats such as podcasts came. Podcasts are large MP3
files that are stored on a server and can be downloaded via a server or a
bittorrent network for people to listen to a message.
So now we have a problem. Someones information is copyrighted, this means
that they wish to make money off the message. In the 80's this was easy
they'd get a distributor who printed records and people bought this in the
store and took it home. They did not worry about piracy because if people
wanted to spread the information the message would be distorted after so
many copies. Today in the 2010's the message can be mass-spread with no
quality degragation. The powers that used to make a good buck off the
80's method are now out of business or on the verge of. At the same time
we've never had a better way of spreading information on a personal level
than now. I can send a song to all my friends at fair quality. We've
been liberated by the Internet. And as a closing statement any attempt to
take quality sound reproduction from us is sheer censorship. The thought
has already been planted that we can do this, we're not talking about what
if's anymore.
We're not out to do harm, and we know that this is just a step between
now and then. What's next is anyones guess but the Internet keeps changing
us. We learn, and the Internet is the teacher. We are transitioning. We
are as curious what's next as the next one. Some people fear change because
it uproots their previous power structure. But let me ask you in all honesty
is it not fair to give everyone the same outlet as an elite bunch once had?
This is what (r)evolution is about and we are still evolving. One more
observance is that we're becoming more seclusive in our own homes due to the
Internet. This takes away some of our unity, that's the drawback. We don't
need laws like ACTA to draw us further back.
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Change is in the air
February 2nd, 2012
I've done some changes and I'm planning to do more changes. What I've done is
I increased my BOINC load from 1 core (25%) to 2 cores (50%). It will run
like this until May.
Why? What's in May?
Well, that is when OpenBSD 5.1
comes out and I've decided I'm going to make OpenBSD 5.1 my host operating
system. No more vmware, it won't run on it. Also it may mean no more BOINC
so that's why I'm doubling the load now to leave them with something. Also
means no more windows 7 vm, and the other vm's that run FreeBSD and NetBSD
I'll have to switch over to QEMU. What I'll do is get a new backup harddrive
and start converting vmware containers to a format that I can play it back
on QEMU. Much of what prompted me to design this thought is that youtube now
works with an OpenBSD browser. This makes OpenBSD ready for the desktop for
me. And it's not the first time I ran OpenBSD as a desktop, it's just that
I had a breather.
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Wildcarddnsd fixed on big-endian machines?
January 28th, 2012
Ever since I resurrected my G4 Cube and put OpenBSD on it I was dying to
know if wildcarddnsd works on this platform. I copied uranus's configs
to it (it's called mars) and ran a few queries. It was then a surprise
a few weeks later that I tried an AXFR and it came back as a hexdump in
dig. Not good. With gdb then I finally found out what caused the mangled
packet, the nameserver and responsible person fields were of length zero,
and were skipped in the SOA answer. I traced this to an integer overflow
right at program start at the config file parser. Well I fixed this now
in HEAD yesterday and in the upcoming release for BETA7 it will be working
on big endian machines.
I also tried compiling wildcarddnsd on OpenBSD/amd64 5.1-beta and got a
compiler warning. A nice developer helped me out and a second pointed to
another
possible problem. So I have the fix for silencing this compiler warning
but I haven't committed it yet. I want to play with this a little first
before I do so I know that it doesn't cause any problems.
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My dream Smartphone (Computer)
January 27th, 2012
My dream smartphone would be small like an iphone. It would have USB ports
for keyboard and mouse and perhaps a VGA port for external monitor. It
would be running OpenBSD without locking or restrictions. What's really
important to me is that I can program the OS on this phone. The phone
functions can be proprietary without source code but they must be installed
in a way that it allows the rest of the system to function with it. Perhaps
an asterisk server built-in so that it can do programmable voice mail or
something. There wouldn't be a harddrive in the phone but rather an SSD.
What's really important to me is that I can develop applications on the
phone for the phone, and not have to buy a proprietary laptop to use some
application which is the only one that can do so. It may have a GPS and/or
Galileo/Glonass/whatever geopositioning chip in it. But this should be
readable by an open driver on OpenBSD and through an ioctl into userland or
something. I want to make use of the Geolocation too. It should have
Wifi and bluetooth and if I want to allow tethering I should be able to
program it in. I should be able to compile the kernel on this smartphone
and run that instead. Really. I really want this to be MY phone not
THEIR phone that I am allowed to use. Currently I have no cell phone at all
because what I just described doesn't exist. Hmm how much would I pay for
what I just described? Perhaps 400 euros at max.
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Removed web mirror on uranus.centroid.eu
January 18th, 2012
You may not have known it but uranus.centroid.eu was serving this blog for
well over a year. I have now killed the rsync job and erased the mirror.
Uranus will do other tasks in the future, stuff I don't want to go into
just yet. Here is an mrtg yearly graph that I was hosting on uranus that
doesn't run anymore.
As you can see uranus did quite a bit of traffic every month. (about 15GB
per month on average). If you used to go to uranus.centroid.eu to get
whatever you can still get it on ipv4.goldflipper.net for the time being.
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