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.

Rain...

On my last day in Hamburg it is too rainy to do something non-work related - like visiting the city. That's sad.

The queens cheese

Phil, one of the queen's folk dancers just joined the shiftcrew of the experiment. And not only is he coming to do my work, he even brought delicious cheese, bread, grapes and olives.

Nice guestroom...

I worried that I would not have a nice guestroom but would get one with shared showers and bathrooms. Insted I got one of the rooms for disabled persons with a huuuuuuge shower.

Dumbfounded

I just read a email from one of the bosses that people would not be allowed to work more than 10 hours straight. That's the same person who, about half a year ago, told me that the minimum work expected from underlings would be 11 hours a day (9AM-8PM) including saturdays. Now someone probably pointed out that working 24 hours and having an accident would be considered grossly negligent, insurance would not pay or rather try to get the money back from those bosses. Wow, it took only one heart-attack, one almost fatal accident (that I know of) and the danger of having to pay for lifelong medical care to reach that conclusion. I'm amazed it went that fast.

Related: Going into physics was the biggest mistake of my life. I should've declared CS. I still wouldn't have any women, but at least I'd be rolling in cash

Sand (sequel)

It's good to have friends when you need them the most, which, sometimes, is for such mundane tasks as moving sand. So here goes a big thank you to Phil who helped me with this task and additionally beared listening to all my slander about work.

Too much sand.

Having fun with roughly 0.5 m³ of sand. Want to joing building sandcastles?

welcome back, kryptikmo

Kryptikmo is back from the dead, blogging again. Nice to hear that!

advance in storage technology

Two harddisks and one compact-flash card: Miniscribe, Model 6032 23 MB (s/n 122544), Hitachi HTS548080, 80GB, SanDisk UltraII Compact Flash, 1 Gbyte Update: I just found out that the XT harddisk-driver is still included in recent linux kernels (just could not see it on a non ISA-enabled machine). I will try to make this message appear today: Ending clean XFS mount for filesystem: xda1

Ticks

Our cats are really good in bringing Ticks back into the house as soon as they are outside for a little while. Look what I found creeping on our floor. Those hairy cats really deserve a good shearing I suppose. Insert joke about shaved pussy here.

noisy monstrosity

It was the fastest machine with the biggest storage once. Now it's just a noisy monstrocy from which I have to copy data off a unstable RAID. Just imagine a circular saw operating in your office.

Spring

After being quite angered because of the computer problems, it is really nice to see spring finally arriving. It's also much better for the blood pressure :-)

Windows XP is a piece of shit

So I'm installing WinXP on the notebook again. After some time it showed signs of bit rot. And I'm annoyed. Again.

This is such a piece of shit. Obviously not enough thought was spent on design. The latest annoyance: How to turn off autorun (stuff running when you put in a CD) when not running with administrator rights? Actually, you can't. The settings you make on several overly complicated dialogs are useless. You just *have* to know that the only way to turn it off is to enable Turn off autoplay in the Group Policy Editor under Local Computer Policy/Computer Configuration/Administrative Templates/System.

Now that was an easy one. As all other security related stuff seems to be fucked up that bad it's no wonder how many windows installations are plagued by worms and virusses. You have a long way to go Microsoft.

Just don't get me started about all the 10000 things you have to suffer when trying to run *NOT* as an administrative user. Interestingly most open-source and free stuff works like a charm, it's the commercial stuff that is very much broken.

computer illiterates

This is what you get in your email-inbox if ... like I have to. Please give attention to the actual content of the email, one line at the top, and 11 generations of redundant fullquotes below.

foul weather

Currently the weather is really depressing.

Finally going home.

I chose a good train-connection and printed out the online ticket. Nothing will keep me from going HOME! MuahahahahaMuahahaha.....! (thanks perreira for the correction)

Go chris go go go!

Had a very enjoyable walk. Possibly someone knew that I would go that route?

Nice fill

Just completed a nice fill. HERA seems to work fine again.

Self-explaining code

Some snippet of analysis code. Some cut actually.

300 Volts, 1000 Amps

This are the meters on the power supply of our big spectrometer magnet. It's a fridge magnet, you can put refrigerators on it easily.

Breakfast

End of Phil

Phil now also starts to blog, welcome to the blogosphere, Phil!

Malfunction

Supervising a broken experiment.

Finally: Darkness

The day after my first nightshift was terrible. My hotel room does not have real blinds and I could not sleep because of the light. Some black foil and sticky tape hopefully fixes that.

Night shift...

Dealing with beautiful software on night-shift.

License Plate Interpretation

Numerologic interpretation of your license plate from interstar-astroservice, translation by the Babelfish

This characteristic symbolizes reputation, loyalty and organizational ability. With it a high realization ability is connected at the same time. Truth and sense search play thereby a large role. Furthermore with this characteristic a strong resolution loyalty is expressed. And are moral problems such as property and bad of a solution combine confidence into mental laws as well as the desire, contrasts to supply to want a further signal effect of this number sign. Sense of responsibility and the position of the conscience find here a particularly strong development. Virtue orientingness as well as always-lasting striving for an equilibrium with oppositenesses can be specified as further characteristics.

Looking forward.

I will have much fun on my shifts -- starting two days from now.

Playing with my toys...

UB1002, SC400

New favourite pizza

My new favourite pizza, featuring fresh tomatos, basil, arugula (or rocket), parmesan and mozzarella.

Keeping me sane...

... is keeping me sane.

Error report.

Trying to file a error report with the producer of some online photo-print application, I'm told to send them a generated ascii-file via email.

Public Transport

It's always nice to have good public transport.

Hello World.

Wikipedia: List of Hello World Programs, ..in esoteric languages.

It's ALIVE...

Salvaged a working Pentium 166 MHz/64MB from the dumpster of where I work. It's in a nice 4U-19" rack. Most likely it will become my new home router/server doing PPPoE/DSL, DNS, DHCP :-). Memtest86 says RAM is ok, cooler was stuck and has been replaced. Netbsd, here you go :-).

Changed the heilige e-TIC-Zahl

This is an excerpt out of the loogbook of the HERA Accellerator.

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.