Centroid.EU Blog

Let your weapons rest

March 19th, 2020

It is time for peace on the planet, let your weapons rest. The human family is under attack with this coronavirus (covid-19) outbreak. There is also no time to blame anyone for it. If you want to blame someone blame the aliens. And they are in their spaceships far away, so we can't even get at them either.

I was very much upset that someone tried to break into my system yesterday. This is no time to be doing such a deed. It is cowardly, and we know who the perpetrators are. Let it rest.

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Angela Merkel will address the german nation tonight

March 18th, 2020

Likely at or just after 8PM. Here is the report angela merkel .. (spiegel.de). Since no news is good news, it can only mean bad news.

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Looking for work, have home office

March 18th, 2020

If you need any help let me know. My resume is found here. Have a look. Given that these are difficult times I can contribute I have 8 years experience working from a home office. Preferably part-time but full-time is OK depending on the circumstances.

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Schweinfurt election results 2020

March 16th, 2020

Mayor Remele was voted to stay as mayor, next was Eder, then Laschka. There was a 45% voter turnout so relatively low. Coronavirus outbreak is likely to blame.

At city hall the individual parties got the following results:

This represents the following seats:

party	seats
CSU	17
SPD	8
Gruene (greens)	6
Die Linke	3
AfD	4
Freie Waehler	3
Zukunft	1
prosw	1
FDP	1

The source for this is here.

If you voted, you're fearless. The most fearless neighbourhood is Eselshoehe which had the highest voter turnout (37%). Good for them, and hopefully noone was infected with corona during this process.

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I voted in the Schweinfurt city election

March 15th, 2020

I just hope I didn't catch a virus. Other than that, go Holger Laschka and the greens! Good luck!

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Working from home - it's half as bad

March 15th, 2020

Many people dread working from home because of the covid-19 outbreak. It's half as bad. You'll get used to it. I did it for 6 hours a day for 7 years. Make sure you sometimes get to tour the office so you get a feeling of worth for the operation, that's one thing I missed when I was working remotely. A period of 2-3 weeks for a tour, to me seems reasonable. It will give you a feeling that you're still here and worth something to be part of something greater than you. Feel free to explore technologies that you may not have explored before. I worked for a VOIP company, so a sip phone was around. We did try teleconferencing with a camera but I didn't like it so much, try to keep it off as much as possible (a boss has no right to watch you work, that's repulsive). I didn't have this problem that I had other people in my apartment when I worked remotely but if you do have an "office" try to set rules with family that when you're at work, you're at work and unless it's an emergency you're not around. Do close the door if you must. For air-flow purposes I often had the door open though.

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Research: the 2001 UNIX time_t apocalypse

March 14th, 2020

I've over the last few weeks given this a lot of thought. When I read a post on hackernews about time_t (seconds since 1970 epoch) rolling over to a 10th digit (1 billion seconds), I thought to look into software breaking on Sept. 10, 2001. Unfortunately it wasn't covered long in the media due to the terrorist attack in NYC the next day, which caused everyone to forget what happened before. But I'd like to pick up the pieces a little and remind people that there was a Sept. 10th apocalypse. In a slashdot post I found while googling it was mentioned that software like FreeBSD's cvsup, OpenLDAP slave servers and UW IMAP broke. I would assume anything that had 9 digit space for representing a time_t value would have rolled over to 0.

• Billeniums over Anything (slashdot.org comments)

There is not too much to do here other than look back and learn from history. The 2036 problem is with Network Time Protocol, and the 2038 problem with 32-bit UNIX time_t's. Many Linux and UNIX's have fixed that to 64-bit value but computers remain that could be affected. ie.

pjp@rhombus:~$ date --date='@2147483647'
Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 UTC 2038
pjp@rhombus:~$ date --date='@2147483648'
date: invalid date ‘@2147483648’
pjp@rhombus:~$ uname -a
Linux rhombus.centroid.eu 4.9.93-mainline-rev1 #1 SMP \
Tue Apr 10 09:42:40 UTC 2018 armv7l armv7l armv7l GNU/Linux

Here is a good sum-up of these rollover dates (that I also found with google):

• a look at the year 2036 (lieberbiber.de)

Have fun with this, and prepare, if we survive coronavirus without hamsterbuys (panic buying) then perhaps stocking up on cans for 2036 isn't such a bad idea.

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Received present from PiRATA

March 10th, 2020

Thanks PiRATA! I received the book "The art of software security assessment" by Mark Dowd et al. This was a present in an exchange of gifts between PiRATA and me. I sent him a K&R and he sent me this.

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Birthday in 7 days, Equinox in 11 days

March 9th, 2020

Yes I'm a winter-born person (officially). I'm turning fourty-four. The official start of spring is on March 20, 2020. This is the calendar start of spring because that date is also the equinox. Daylight and night are equally long that day.

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I'm not a screw-up, but why do I feel like it?

March 8th, 2020

When I look at my Resume/CV I am not a screwup. I've been fired three times in my life and that's not exactly much. Let's have a run-down where I have been fired from (oldest last):

• Webhosting.com (not mentioned on my resume because I was there 3 weeks)
• (After this timeline I had a diagnosis of a mental illness)
• Scan Plus GmbH (fired, because I had a medical emergency)
• Bavarian Red Cross (fired, circumstances were weird)

In fact the Bavarian Red Cross termination was a golden opportunity to make three times as much money with my second employer at the time easyofficephone.com, it actually worked out well. I do not know why the german system wants to suffocate me when-ever I have any contact with german employers it's for shit wages and never seems to work out.

All other jobs I left on my own free will in order to find a better paying job, or better opportunity. It didn't always work out as with Ibcos GmbH, I actually feel I would have liked to be back at Jive Canada. It was too bad and since that time I'm unemployed and can't find a decent job.

I'm at a very low emotional state right now, and it's not my fault in my eyes. I should be happy because I have a great working history and it's amazing that I had all this free time to persue Open Source project and take it to a level that noone, and I repeat noone can duplicate inside a short period of time. I've been working 15 years on this DNS project. That's 15 years experience.

So this employer who puts me down for not being able to produce documents and certificates of my job history can take a hike. Why would I want to work for someone that is speaking down on me in authority when he's got none? Thanks for nothing, I'm very receptive on negative emotions. You should understand, I'd rather be on welfare in this screwed up state than to work for an abusive employer. I have that choice.

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