T400

I inherited a interesting looking old ISA card. After closer inspection it appears, that it houses a INMOS T400, a Transputer CPU! Absolutely fascinating and unfortunately utterly outdated.

No gigabit for me :-(

Bell, No Bell, Bell

Three things found next to eachother in the hospital. Bell, No Bell, Bell.

Garbage in, garbage out, ...

10 m³ garbage container

Election Computers

Wij vertrouwen stemcomputers niet have analysed the election computers that are used in the netherlands and found out that they have a huge number of security flaws. Their great publication is a very detailed description of all the shortcomings they found up to now, it shows some possible attacks they have implemented and describes few more that are now known to be feaseable.

Those machines are basically a overpriced version of the Amiga 500, with less RAM and without the nice sound and video capabilities -- in a huge box. There is not a single feature built in to try to counter vote forgery, it's really just a plain 68k computer without any cryptographic or trusted-computing capability.

Those voting-machines are very simmilar to the computers that are used in some regions of germany. Of course they have been thoroughly examined; in germany (where I live) by the PTB which is responsible to maintain precise clocks (a task it does very, very good) or to provide standard-weights so that scales at the grocery-store measure the correct amount of vegetables you buy. I'm sure our election computers are really precise in this regard.

It's noteworthy that the german BSI (the authority for security in information processing, who really are knowledgeable about computer and IT security) have not been ordered to evaluate those computers (who said bribery?)! And of course the report on the test done by the PTB is confidential not to compromise the valueable 1980's technology trade secrets of the supplier. What a joke.

In the Netherlands they have been checked by the authority responsible for the safety of cars or electrical installations in bildings. No one will ever get a electric shock or be injured by a hard edge on those machines -- correct counting oviously was of no concern to the testers.

The computer magazine c't recently had an article about that e-voting-mess in general (issue 16/06, page 54), and after reading few reports about how that works in the USA I honestly was not really surprised about what the dutch hackers had found out. Maybe that's also why I quicky got distracted from studying the NEDAP-hardware to find this little gem:

A javascript emulator of hd44780 LCD displays!

More video surveillance

After the attempted train-bombings here in germany, our minister of the interior promptly declared that he had already spoken to the representatives of the german bundesbahn to have the number of cameras in trainstations increased. This is done, so that we can catch more of those TERRORISTS, of course. Now obviously this plan has been carried out already, because since the last time I visited hamburg the number of cameras on the S-Bahn in Altona and Sternschanze has doubled! If you look more closely at the camera housings (those photographs are so shoddy, you cannot even see the label :-( ) they are clearly marked as "camera 4" and "camera 4 (redundant)". I feel much safer already.

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.