Panorama

Filthy Keyboard

Words cannot describe the amount of lint deposited in and onto the keyboards I am forced to use.

On shift

On shift again, this will be my cozy little home for the next week.

Composite Sync

So, I have this nice monitor, a SUN GDM20D10 which relates to a old Sun workstation that is dog-slow by todays standards and which I therefore no longer use for anything. I had built a adapter-cable for it's strange connector a long time ago, but never found a graphics card that outputs composite sync signals. Those sync signals tell your monitor when it has to start drawing a new line, or when it has to begin at the top of the screen after it has reached the bottom and todays PCs usually carry those signals on separate lines. And because SUN monitors are different, they want those signals merged together on a single input pin which my graphics cards is not able to provide. (Well, it is, but there is currently no simple way to tell it to do so). I always planned to build one of the circuits whose schematics you can find on the web for that purpose, but always forgot buying the necessary parts. Now while cleaning up the cellar, I stumbled upon that lonely 47LS00 you can see soldered to the white cables and held by the oscilloscope probes. Granted, my VGA connector now looks a little bit odd, but finally it sends something looking almost like a good composite sync signal onwards to the CRT. And it's good enough to persuade the monitor to display something (and not just turn off and going into power-save-mode). Finally, no more tiny icons and blurry text on that old and crappy 17"-tube. That makes me happy.

Bruce Schneier Facts

Ok, you have probably seen this already, but it's just too good to take the chance you'll miss it: Bruce Schneier Facts, which is a parody on Chuck Norris Facts, which itself is a parody on Chuck Norris. Update: The exhaustive list has been posted in Bruce Schneier's Blog

Book!

Now I'm the proud owner of a hand-signed edition of bunnies "Hacking the X-Box" book :-).

Computer Ticket

During my commute from work I saw that guy with his computer sitting in the train whom I cowardly photographed from where he could not see me.

Desert Climate

Because of the hot weather here in germany, the HERA accelerator has problems dissipating all the heat the overdesigned and energy wasting machinery generates.

All provisions to reduce the cooling-water temperature have been exhausted. Feedback transmitters are off, circumfence-voltage is down to the bare minimum and the HF-power has been moved to the west . Mr. Hurdelbrink has (developed?) operation-modes for winter and summer, but not for desert climate.

A nice evening.

Tinkering, Chatting, Eating.

Heat.

awaiting new toys...

I ordered myself new toys...

Learning how to program....

Separating Programming Sheep from Non-Programming Goats

T-Mobile tries to pull a fast one.

So I get a phonecall from my friendly T-Mobile user-care-agent, a very friendly saxony-accent woman who is tremendously grateful that I'm a loyal customer since 5 years. And to thank me for my loyalty, they want to offer me a FREE extra SIM-card for my mobile phone which I can give to friends or family members. I ask her if that's the same offer another friendly, saxony-accent woman, who was very grateful for my loyalty, made me half a year ago, the FREE one with the minimum turnover of 8 EURO or so? But no, this time, it's completely different. That card is FREE and does NOT have any minimum takeover. Quite the contrary, for 7 EUR per month I get 20 minutes of FREE call-time! Unfortunately she was not able to explain the difference between the two offers in a way I could understand and I politely rejected her offer and wished her a nice day. She ended the call by assuring me that she noted the fact that I'm not interested. Just as the other friendly woman with the saxony accent had told me half a year ago.

Office Temperature 30°C

Its really great weather, currently. Unfortunately it's also quite warm in my office. As long as some wind blows its tolerable though.

Holes

I just want to use the opportunity to direct the valued readers of this blog to the Wikipedia entry regarding holes. There are always too many where you don't need any, and when you desperately need them they are not there. Be wise and keep some Portable Holes in stock.

1st time on the berg

I was at the berg for the first time in my life... and I had a sausage roll with mustard, not with Ketshup.

IPSEC

Jun 5 21:12:55 entropy racoon: INFO: IPsec-SA established: ESP/Transport 192.168.1.36[0]->192.168.2.33[0] spi=254685122(0xf2e2fc2)
21:21:20.338991 IP 192.168.1.36 > 192.168.2.33: AH(spi=0x07252808,seq=0x6): ESP(spi=0x0f2e2fc2,seq=0x6), length 76
21:21:20.339403 IP 192.168.2.33 > 192.168.1.36: AH(spi=0x723baa29,seq=0x8): ESP(spi=0x29eed679,seq=0x8), length 76 < I played around with IPSEC today, it's quite some fun after you have found out all the rough edges :-). But now, hooray, ipsec between the windows-notebook and one linux-machine.

golden cone

Where I live, some prehistoric golden-cone has been found few years ago which gave one of the trails it's name: „Goldkegelweg“ (golden-cone hike).

Very bad code.

Just had a look at legacy code that spans several pages in this style:

 DO 13 K = 1,N
    Z(6) = U(K,I)
    U(K,I) = Z(5) * Z(6) - Z(4) * U(K,J)
    U(K,J) = Z(4) * Z(6) + Z(5) * U(K,J)
    IF(K .EQ. I .OR. K .EQ. J) GOTO 13
    H(I,K) = Z(5) * H(K,I) - Z(4) * H(K,J)
    H(J,K) = Z(4) * H(K,I) + Z(5) * H(K,J)
    H(K,I) = H(I,K)
    H(K,J) = H(J,K)
13  CONTINUE

All variables have 1 or two characters and it is full of magic constants and meaningless array indices.

Rubber chicken.

Don't ask.