Centroid.EU Blog

Orion's belt led me to it

January 13th, 2010

An aqaintance in NYC made a picture of the star sky and I was dying to know what constellation it was he made a picture of. So after checking a few constellations it didn't match I left it. Today I took a look at my astronomy calendar and there was this constellation that I was looking for. It's called the Winter Triangle/Hexagon and has the stars Sirius and Aldebaran in it, my aqaintance only got half of it but I was able to reconstruct it with the gimp picture editor. Then I was able to match the Gemini constellation , that was real cool. Looking through the program Xephem, it pointed out that there was another star between Betelgeuse and Aldebaran called Bellatrix, see if you can make it out. It's visible. Also the star labelled Pollux is at the end of the line not the star immediately next to the label, that's Castor. Anyhow this is the original picture and this here is the edited picture.

PS: researching a bit further I found the centroid of the Winter Triangle called Monoceros constellation . According to William Herschel it is "one of the most beautiful sights in the heavens".

PSS: I was having so much fun, I mapped most of the star sky in the image, except of course Orions belt which should be straight forward. Here is another one with one frame deleted and the rest merged.

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Hackepedia, making hyperlinks

January 8th, 2010

I've written a script to cross reference more articles in my hackepedia backups. Here is the script, don't use it unless you understand it.

#!/bin/bash

cat /dev/null > list
for i in *.html; do
echo $i >> list
done

for i in *.html ; do
	echo working on file $i
	awk '
BEGIN { while (getline < "list") list[$0] = $0; }
{ for (i = 1; i <= NF; i++) { 
	for (j in list) {
		keyword=sprintf("%s.html", $i);
		if (keyword != ARGV[ARGC - 1] && j == keyword) {
			save = i;
			$i = sprintf("<a href=\"%s\">%s</a>", j, $save);
		} 
	}	
  }

  print;
}' $i > new/$i
done

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Congratulations Wikipedia

January 7th, 2010

On November 13th or so of last year I donated five euros to Wikipedia. Well the fundraiser is over. They raised over 8 million dollars from more than 230,000 doners. The average donation was about 35 dollars which I'll have to keep in mind for next years donation as someone picked up my tab so to speak. So, congratulations Wikipedia, you're the best!

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New Project: cryologd

January 6th, 2010

For the last few days I've been hacking away at a new program. Well, three actually. It's called cryologd and can be found at sourceforge, here (don't worry I didn't style that page, sourceforge, did).

So what's it do? It encrypts log files and doesn't write the private key (needed for decryption) to disk. This is good if your filesystem is subject to snooping. It uses routines I wrote for natally (and improves on them) which is good because every project I write I do it to build on top of them.

Let me give you an example. cryologd and natally encrypt their communications. But at some ISP they don't encrypt and all their credit cards can be read through the wire. I can now get a job perhaps implementing the crypto at the ISP, it's easier on me because I've already written this. Anyhow I wish about the job, but you never know.

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Random Hackepedia

January 1st, 2010

The RH for this week is DragonflyBSD.

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Merry Christmas

December 24th, 2009

Today is Christmas eve and in the tradition of german people we open our presents tonight. Followed by dinner, I think we're having duck or something. Anyhow, thanks for being with me for the year and have a safe and happy holiday.

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2009, a look back

December 23rd, 2009

I saw a lot of people already writing about this year so I'm going to sum up a few things that I did technically this year.

Jan 3rd, became user of sixxs.net, PJP4-SIXXS handle.

Jan 16th, first article of this blog, with a more technical side than before.

Feb 1st, first sixxs IPv6 tunnel to my static IP which I also obtained then.

May 21st, OpenBSD patch sent to OpenBSD, system/6149

Jun 8th, first initial commit of natally, natally.sourceforge.net.

Jun 9th, transfer of centroid.eu from intergenia to joker.com, who doesn't yet
support v6 glue to .eu domains.

Jun 14th, 30 day trial of QNX, nice that they have pf(4).

Nov 17th, purchase of vmware workstation 7.

Nov 17+  change from redhat linux to ubuntu on uranus.centroid.eu

Nov 17+  purchase of windows 7 HE.

And that was some of the highlights this year. Natally works for me somewhat today and there was a few bugfixes to wildcarddnsd as well. I also purchased 2 GB of RAM, 1 250 GB harddrive and 1 DVD drive, all not exceeding 180 euros. My grandmother also died this year leaving me with an inheritance of a bit of money, but not much. I may purchase a new computer in 2010.

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Fibre Optics, the Olympic upgrade

December 22nd, 2009

I've been collecting stories about the telecommunications upgrades done because of the Olympic games. Here is what I've found.

• 2010 Vancouver Olympics, Bell Canadas new fibre network.
• 2012 London Olympics, BT's upgrades to fibre optic network
• 2014 Sochi Olympics, Fibre optic backbones, (search for Telecommunications)

The Olympics aren't about just sports anymore, telecommications benefit.

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Random Hackepedia

December 18th, 2009

This weeks RH is MAC.

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Solstice approaching fast

December 12th, 2009

The Solstice is here in nine days (on the 21st). What is this? It's when the sun is at it's lowest point (at high noon) in the northern hemisphere, also called the winter solstice. Because our earth is tilted and the tilt in winter favours the southern hemisphere it is the summer solstice there.

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