I have just seen in the blog dashboard the following activity log:
“Akismet has protected your site from 6,753 spam comments.”
Nice. There are some people out there that are quite nice and have useful things to comment on, I see. Hopefully I am using Akismet, a spam protection tool for WordPress, that is using a webservice for comment validation. It actually works pretty well. I have just got a couple of spam comments lately, that I have anyway to approve before showing up.
I have just slightly updated the description page of pView, a photo gallery viewer I had programmed in 2004/2005. I have in particular added a few screenshots. Feel free to use this software if you like it.
Summary of its features:
As a few of you probably already know, I am using a car to go to work from my home in Zurich to Baden. This for a main reason, it’s faster than using the train. By public transportation, the trip lasts 1 hour door to door, one way, while using the car it lasts just 30 minutes. At the end of the day, literally, I am gaining 1 hour. But of course, by car I am less environmental friendly than using public transportation, which I am aware of.
Browsing the net, I stumbled upon the website of a Switzerland-based company, myclimate.org, active in the domain of climate protection and CO2 compensations. The idea is quite interesting and simple: try to get environmental friendly by avoiding carbon emissions, while buying carbon credits for the emissions that cannot, for some reason, be avoided. The collected money is then invested in projects around the world, which aim at reducing the carbon emissions, e.g. the construction of a wind park in Egypt, which will avoid using a coal plant for producing electricity.
So here we go. I calculated the CO2 emission caused by my car use for going to work, which corresponds to about 11’000 Km a year with a car consuming 7 l/100 Km. This gives 2.35 tons of CO2 a year. Not kidding! Although there is just 25 Km between my home and work place, it gets to 2.35 tons! The majority of CO2 weight comes form the oxygen atoms, which come from the air. That’s the reason why 770 l of fuel produces 2.35 tons of CO2. At the end, I bought the carbon credits, which is a good thing, I think, but should not restrain from living, or trying to live, more climate neutral.
In the last past weeks I had a busy time finishing an Eclipse/SWT project, therefore having less time to post news on this blog. It should be better for the coming weeks.
We arrived yesterday in Madrid, back from a short week in Extremadura. It was a nice journey. We visited some other nice pueblos. Caceres about 80 km North of Don Benito, where we saw nice roman and arab ruins, in particular a few towers around the antique city along with walls protecting against invaders. Caceres shows a nice mix between the original roman style and arab constructions. We went also to Guadalupe, a village in the mountain at 1.5 hour driving North East from Don Benito. There we visited an old monastery, where lots of antique christian objects in the purest Spanish and baroque tradition have been conserved. We did finally a short stop on Thursday in Medellin, that I mentioned already in my last post. There we saw of course a statue of Hernan Cortes. I am wondering if this guy is worth admiring, considering what has been done by the spanish conquistadors in South America, where the native peoples were persecuted, their culture and language largely cannibilized by the spanish invaders.
Spending some holidays in Spain at the moment. We arrived on Saturday in Madrid and then went to Don Benito on Sunday. It is a small town at 3.5 hours driving from Madrid, in Extremadura, a state in the center of Spain bording Portugal. Very nice. The area has lots of antique roman buildings to visit. We were yesterday in Merida, about 60 km away from Don Benito, where we visited lots roman ruins like a stadium, a theatre, various houses and roman roads, as well as an incredible roman bridge that is still in use today and is a couple of hundreds meter long! Definitely worth visiting.
It’s funny, because around here there are lots of villages or small town with well known names. A village beside Don Benito is named Medellin. There are just a couple of thousands people living there. But it is also the home village of the spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes, so no wonder that there is a city in South America, in Colombia, with that name. Merida, is also a name found in Equator and some other place around the world. Although I am not sure why.
Definitely worth a look. The page shows an example configuration for a Linksys SPA, PAP2 or Sipura VOIP device for different VOIP operators. Unfortunately the explanations are in German. Otherwise, lots of details, relevant options appearing in red and even advice given when needed.
The wireless access point and router WRT54GL is an amazing device. Since Linksys changed the firmware of the WRT54G and WRT54GS from Linux to a custom one and reduced the RAM and flash memory size, they released the old linux driven device as the WRT54GL. It is the only device of that family on which we can install a wide range of firmwares, for instance the excellent OpenWRT, or Tomato. You can find here a complete list.
I had beforehand experimented a lot with OpenWRT. With it, you can do pretty much everything you want. You can setup wireless security (e.g. WPA), you can configure a firewall and even assign one of the ports of the switch to another network subnet than the LAN. Unfortunately, although you have got a basic web administration tool in the previous stable release (White Russian), you need to do lots of stuffs using the command line.
So this week-end I tried to install Tomato 1.07 on my access point. You have got a very nice set of features. I’ll list some of them after a small screenshot.
So far I have had a very good experience with Tomato. It’s easy to configure and power users can even customize or extend the system scripts (init, firewall, wan up, etc.) using the web interface.
Updating my backup script that is using rsync, I have just realized that without further options, rsync does not handle well copying sparse files (i.e. files that are for instance holding a file system and that just take the space needed by their actual size). A consequence is that on the target file system, the sparse file won’t be any longer a sparse one, i.e. will take its maximal size.
Fortunately, adding the -S option to rsync will do the trick, for instance
rsync -a -S /source_dir/ /dest_dir
I have written a small howto that explains how to configure a Linksys PAP2 VOIP adapter for a voip provider like voipbuster.
There is an annoying problem with Ubuntu. Using the command line editor nano, the backspace key acts sometimes as the delete key (deleting the first character on the right and not on the left).
You can fix this by adding the following line to your /etc/nanorc file:
set rebinddelete
I have just installed Ubuntu Feisty (7.04) server edition on my home server. Needless to say that it was a piece of cake, including the setup of the software RAID-1 array. I have been able to do everything using the text mode graphical installer. I did a minimal server installation with no special features as I am going to include everything within virtualized guests.
The killer functionality that my friend Allon pointed out in an entry on my wiki regarding the installation of Xen on a Hetzner dedicated server: now we can install under Feisty a completely functional Xen system — including the dom-0, the host — using a single command:
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-xen-server
This is quite nice. Just reboot after the install process is finished and you are ready to setup you individual guests systems (domUs).
Ok, I have another brain-teaser for you guys. Please don’t post the answer in the comments, so the one arriving afterwards can guess as well. You can drop me a line to check if your answer is right (pajai at extrabright dot com).
- It is more powerful than god
- More evil than the devil
- The riches don’t have it
- The poors do have it
- If we eat it, we die.
I have written a small howto regarding the installation of Xen on a Hetzner dedicated server DS3000. The host system — dom-0 in the Xen terminology — is running debian sarge with software RAID1 support while various guest systems (domU) equipped with debian etch and ubuntu dapper drake have been sucessfully tested and used. Any comment or suggestion are welcome.
A prisoner is escaping from jail. At some point on his path, he is arriving at a crossing. He can take either the road to the left or the one to the right. One will lead him to freedom while the other back to jail. He does not know which one. On each side of the road, there is a guy waiting. The prisoner knows that one of them is honest while the other is not. The prisoner is allowed to ask just one question to one of them, in order to find his way. What is the right question to ask?