Multicast Hate

I am trying to get multicast routing between two subnets running. Why has this to be so complicated? The kernels have the right stuff compiled in, the routing daemon is running but it ignores the IGMP reports of its peers. Even the much hated rp_filter is turned off... :-( 12:16:41.141 SENT IGMP Membership Query from 192.168.1.34 to 224.0.0.1
12:16:41.142 SENT IGMP Membership Query from 192.168.2.34 to 224.0.0.1
12:18:46.115 SENT IGMP Membership Query from 192.168.1.34 to 224.0.0.1
12:18:46.116 SENT IGMP Membership Query from 192.168.2.34 to 224.0.0.1
12:20:50.298 SENT IGMP Membership Query from 192.168.1.34 to 224.0.0.1
12:20:50.299 SENT IGMP Membership Query from 192.168.2.34 to 224.0.0.1
12:22:55.342 SENT IGMP Membership Query from 192.168.1.34 to 224.0.0.1
12:22:55.342 SENT IGMP Membership Query from 192.168.2.34 to 224.0.0.1

Another Rant: Dell Latitude D410

So, I have to reflash the bios on a Dell Latitude D410 notebook because sometimes after the screensaver kicks in, the displays backlight stays dark. (you can barely see the screen contents). So I reflash the Bios.... and Xorg stops functioning because the new bios has the videomodes messed up. THANK YOU DELL FOR FUCKING UP MY DAY.

I love Bildblog.

Long time, no post. Sorry for that. But nevertheless: I love BildBlog!

Pentecost, Garden and ISDN

Enjoying pentecost, and relocated my cordless phone's base-station so I can chat with friends while hanging around in the garden. Oh Joy. Morgan, if you read this: Greetings from Nils :-)

From Apples MAC-OSX compatible devices page: Mac OS X offers built-in support for more exotic offerings such as (..) mice with (..) more than one button.

Web-Zen

Boingboing::
amidst all the sharp-edged and otherwise pointy stuff, is a single purple sombrero. Confiscated by the NTSA. In the name of national security. If there was ever web zen, this is it. This is the sound of one hand clapping.

S65 is a piece of crap.

The Siemens S65 mobile phone is a piece of crap. The bluetooth implementation is so unstable that is essentially useless. I have a less than 30% chance of successfully connecting the the emulated serial port (/dev/rfcomm0), most of the time the phone just reboots or the bt-connection times out. This of course means that internet access via that phone is basically useless. GPRS also is unstable as hell, not only through bluetooth (which does not work most of the time anyway, see above) but also the locally running java applets are basically useless because of the shoddy GPRS/ppp/IP... implementation of that crappy mobile. Now I have somehow a corrupt message store for SMS messages. This means that the menu that formerly gave me a list of folders where the SMS are stored just gives me a blank screen (100% white pixels) and I have to hold the "hangup" key for 2 seconds which aborts the currently running menu and goes back to the "default" screen. Thanks, no more SMS for me. And to add insult to injury: When you search for **ANYTHING** concerning those things on the web you find websites built by 12 year old imbeciles which brag about how great it is to make photos with the dreadful 1.3 MPixel camera or about the awsome ringtones which the S65 digest in 18 different formats. Or you find sites wanting to sell you software how to "unlock" the phone, which means to release the restrictions imposed upon you by the cartel formed by the telephone network operstors and the vendors of the phone. That somehow the corrupt file (which I alredy found in the phone's filesystem, but in a location which locks me out from modifying or deleting it) is also protected, I am not amazed at all. So to make a long story short: Thank you Siemens for building, and Thank you Telekom for selling me a absolute abysmally fucked up piece of shit.

PhD-Comics 2005-04-30

Read more Piled Higher and Deeper:

get perpendicular

Hitachi Global Storage is going to cram more bits onto your harddrive by making the bits stand perpendicular. Turn on the volume.

useless options

There are 66 useful settings that affect case sensitivity, plus 10 settings that are nearly useless, with the remaining 116 settings being either redundant or useless. (from the g77 documentation)

Programming...

Kernelnewbies' Docs Section provides you with very informative and funny reading about programming the Linux kernel. Read it NOW!

Just call me Chestnut Whiskers

So according to http://www.hanzismatter.com/ my nickname might be transcribed to 栗須 which are the kanji for Chestnut Whiskers. Well, I think it could be worse...

Michael’s Optical Illusions & Visual Phenomena

Very much recommended: Michael’s Optical Illusions & Visual Phenomena contains a big number of surprising optical illusions and also tries to explain them.

No more oxygen...

According to Heise Newsticker, telephone provider O₂ is trying to sue Weinmann GmbH, maker of mecidal oxygen supplies.

I am of course sure, that common-sense-impaired lawyers will find a perfectly logical explanantion why some corporation can own the symbol for a Chemical Element, especially as they use it for some abstract phone service while the other corporation uses it to name exactly what it describes since two hundred years: oxygen!

I think I will go ahead and start registering trademarks for hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron, ... ununoctium, and their various isotopes.

Democracy could be so easy.

Ok, democracy is cool stuff, but it's so hard. You have to invade other countries to spread it, and when people have democracy they stop caring after some time. But it could be soooo easy! Just use DemExp. Freshmeat tells us: demexp is a client/server system for direct democracies

Kill Sweety

No more annoying ringtones! Just Kill Sweety!: (note: as of 16.3.05, it seems to be dead)

Some literature....

Charlotte Roche and Heinz Strunk are performing a dramatic reading: Penisinjuries caused by masturbation with vacuum cleaners! Which actually was a PhD-Thesis of Dr. med T. M. Alschibaja, and yes, I checked that at the TU-Muenchen-Library, you can get the details here. You can read a german critique of that performance at the Westdeutsche Zeitung and you can buy tickets for the event in Erlangen.

l33t: A parent's primer to computer slang

Microsoft proudly presents: A parent's primer to computer slang, a.k.a. leet-speak :-). Enjoy.

I saw the movie which could cry very much

Nice t-shirt found on engrish.com:

Phd-Comic, 13. Feb. 2005:

I'm already hungry.

Consequences

As we are right now in a critical phase of our project, it is essential that everybody in this project is contacting me before doing something in the test area. If this will not happen in the future, I will have to think about consequences.

I'm scared.

Great John

So you have a way too large bottom? http://greatjohn.com/

The size of the average person has increased dramatically over the last century. Most toilets made today are manufactured from designs dating back to the early 1900´s. In the past, the pleadings of big and tall people went unanswered. For this reason GJTC engineers, medical doctors and artists took to the task of creating a NEW GENERATION of products satisfying the needs of today’s customers. Our goal was to create the most comfortable and safe toilet for Large-Size people in the market. The other challenge was to make a toilet that could also be used by any size person. The final result was the creation of a "SIZE FRIENDLY TOILET".

Amazing.

root-Function of the day: TH2::FitSlicesY

Today's ROOT function of the day is:
void FitSlicesY(TF1 *f1, Int_t binmin, Int_t binmax, Int_t cut, Option_t *option)
Project slices along Y in case of a 2-D histogram, then fit each slice with function f1 and make a histogram for each fit parameter Only bins along X between binmin and binmax are considered. if f1=0, a gaussian is assumed