On my train from Chelmsford to Milton Keynes I ran KisMac (wireless access point scanning software) and here’s what I discoverd:
Of the 284 access points:
Many people don’t change the name on their APs:
2WIRE051
2WIRE069
2WIRE089
2WIRE104
I am now on the train back from Milton Keynes and returning home after my interview at Cranfield’s School of Management. I left home this morning with mixed feelings about my aims in doing and MBA there and now on my route back home have even more mixed feelings about committing to a year. I can normally tell what I want to do through my actions and the last couple of days have been almost sabotaging my preparations for an MBA. For example, part of the preparation was to preparae a discussion about cars and their impact on soceity. I only got this done at 10pm last night and was not very mentally alert. I did no preparation for the maths exam today and no interview preparation. I find it hard to do things that I am not intereseed in and this is symptomatic of my actions in getting ready for my trip to Cranfield.I have left today with a depressing sense of dread when I think about living in the neighborhood of Milton Keynes for a year. The place really is as dire as the media makes it out to be. A Bermuda triangle of suburbia. This is especially evident when I contrast Milton Keynes with the beauty of the last couple of months in Munich. There really is nothing endearing about the architecture and I find myself wondering how people can live in such a planned & soulless city.
But the architecure shouldn’t be a significant factor in deciding where to spend a year of my life improving msself. My thinking about doing an MBA is that I will use it to develop the redprompt business plan and spin off the business at the end of it. Perhaps this is me avoiding committment to taking the plunge and committing to setting up my next business venture? I have the money and time now to develop the Redprompt idea furthur. On the way back I stopped of at Bob Morgan’s house and he can’t see why I would want to do an MBA if I don’t wish to climb to the top of corporate managment.
I let them know my reservations about doing an MBA during the interview because I would rather be frank and avoid committing to something they also know is wrong for me. I am not sure what I will do at the moment except that for the last 8 months I have been keen to do an MBA but now, a month after stopping working for the EPO, I am less certian. I have really hated the preparation for the GMAT. I can only hope that an MBA would be better.
No matter how I feel about doing an MBA, I will find out on Thursday whether they want me or not. Perhaps it would not be such a bad thing if I am rejected.
I’m now at Munich Airport after having missed my flight this morning (by only 5 minutes but still missed). Disappointingly after searching around I was unable to find any open wireless access points. The portal based ones were uncrackable and Vodafone wanted €20 to access it for the day. Good thing that the Thunderbird email client has such good off-line capabilities and I have been able to queue up loads of email replies that will get sent out when I reconnect in England.
I have next to me my old Dual G4 Mac that has been freshly installed with Tiger for my mother. It should be more than enough computer for her needs for a couple of years yet. Her computing needs consist of email, listening to missed episodes of the Archers on Radio 4 and visiting Amazon and Ebay. Two beefy CUPs and 1.5GB RAM should cope just fine.
She’s getting this machine which, up until last week, was my workhorse PC. I recently upgraded to a MacBook Pro. After 10 years in IT I finally bought my first laptop having preferred the configurability and expandability of desktops. I’ve never really had the need to work on the road and when I have, have made do with a badly set-up and difficult to use work laptop. So far the MacBook is working out well. I have set-up OpenVPN on it which creates a tunnel back to the Imaginator network in Franzstr 5 and allows me to access iTunes and files securely. At the moment this is done via NFS but I made good progress on setting up Samba to authenticate via LDAP (I hang everything off the Imaginator LDAP tree) and plan on rolling that out tonight or tomorrow.
I have been impressed with OpenVPN but am having some trouble getting it to use the existing DHCP server to hand out addresses and options like name servers. My mother’s G4, my laptop, my neighbour’s laptop and the Slomkowski Compound network all now connect back to imaginator through it. And so the imaginator DarkNet expands…
I decided to take some time off from work to enjoy the summer this year. That and I need to move from Munich back to the UK, finish applying for business schools and haven’t taken much time off from working at the EPO for the last 2 years. I am loving it.
This is a really hot summer and I’ve been hanging out at the rivers and lakes that surround Munich. What a wonderful city that one has the possibility to swim in the river that runs through it. Most other places I know you would be lucky to come out without ome new heavy metals in the bloodstream.
One particular fun thing to do is go swimming in the Eisbach that runs through Munich’s main park. This river enters the Englisher Garten park on the southern end where surfers practise on the standing wave. It’s possible to dive in here and get pulled along through the garden (at quite some speed), sucked into some rapids and then relax on your back, finally exiting near the Chinesischer Turm beer garden. Convieniently there is a tram that takes you back to the start and you can endure the rapids all over again.
The lakes are also beautiful this time of year and I was swimming in the Starnbergersee this weekend. I met up with Ulrike and her sister and we upstream along the Isar. It was about a 3 hour ride on a very hot day. And now I am at the end of my first month off from work. Still have 2 more to go but alas the time is flying by and September is going to be punctuated by morning and sorting out all the administrative crap that goes with changing countries yet again.
My flight to the UK for the weekend is now boarding. But only for a weekend.
Yesterday I finally got motivated and had the mental commitment to go out and shop for all the little outstanding things that have been building up on my list. I was out for about 5 hours and it was very successful. I was thinking about what made it so successful and came up with my Saturday shopping rules. I am not a big fan of shopping. Browsing is more my thing. The commitment to purchasing something that I may spend the next 20 years of my life with such as a new pot is difficult for me.
Here’s my list of commonsense shopping tips that I always forget. Perhaps I will remember some next time.
Well that’s my list. Perhaps I will remember more next time.
Given my proximity to the Munich Street Life festival on Leopoldstr I wandered over last night. Pleased that I did and I managed to get some nice pictures too. Here’s one looking onto a monument whose name I cannot recall. There was all kinds of exotic food on sale and I tried one of the burritos. It will take a lot for me to forget the “Roach Coach” burritos that I feasted on in San Francisco. They were so big that I once had to crall under my desk as Linuxcare and take an afternoon nap to work it off.
This morning I wandered over for a late breakfast and enjoyed some good vegetarian Auvedic food from a bowel made from what seemed to be a dried palm leaf.The Germans seem particulary keen on foreign cultures. They are the most travelled nation and love anything exotic at home, whether it’s husband married abroad or the number of Germans that suddenly became Brazillian supporters during the world cup.
Odd.
Update:Â Franz Buchberger writes in to tell me that the Monument is Siegestor
I am speculating that the recent high temperatures have triggered the 2 disk failures on bunker. I am very pleased to be running in a raid’ed configuration. Data secuity is no laughing matter and so Robin came over and destroyed/extracted the magnets from the dead disks incase anyone should try to ressurect them and extract the data. Also with Robin’s help, 2 new fans have been added to bunker’s case to try and increase the airflow around the disks. Unfortunately the new fans are slightly too large and so I am going to have to buy some more tomorrow.
I was over at Robin and Taska’s house last night – they brought a new media PC and are setting up mythtv on it. Was really impressed with the speed of the new Athlon dual core cpus. Never seen linux install so fast.
Unfortunately we connected up one of the firewire ports incorrectly and when we turned on the PC for the first time one of the controller chips started sparking, smoking and smelling terrible. Found out that some of the firewire controller chips legs had melted right off from the short. We disconnected the offending cable, brushed off the carbonised substance on the chip and the box magically worked, albeit without the firewire capability. The CPU teams get all the kudos but have to say I am very impressed with motherboard robustness!
I have been fighting againt a problem with my VoIP calling setup. The problem presented itself last week and was not accompanied by any software upgrades or network changes on my end. I should first explain a little about my current setup. I use Asterisk as a software PBX. This handles outbound and inbound calls, voicemail and termniation of my London and German and US telephone numbers. Last week I noticed that when I made outbound calls via SipDiscount I would receive no ringing signal and also the call would never be fully setup.
Or so I though. After looking through my logs I discovered that the calls were actually being setup. At first I though that SipDiscount had changed their supported codecs. After searching on the internet it seemed that nobody really knew which were supported codecs. So I setup a list of all codecs that I could support and relied on the SIP negotiation phase to choose the correct one. Unfortunately the symptoms persisted.
On a hunch I then started tcpdumping and analysing the traffic on port 5060 (the SIP signalling port). All this seemed fine too. I saw a common codec being selected and the call setup and tear down completing without a problem.
I banged my head more and then decided to double check my firewall log. This seemed unnecessary since my VoIP calls had all been completing fine for the last year.
Mar 1 19:07:15 bunker DENY2: IN= OUT=ppp0 MAC= xsrc=62.245.233.186 DST=194.120.0.163 LEN=200 TOS=10 PREC=0x00 TTL=64 ID=693 DF PROTO=UDP SPT=17820 DPT=57344 LEN=180 Mar 1 19:07:15 bunker DENY2: IN= OUT=ppp0 MAC= xsrc=62.245.233.186 DST=194.120.0.163 LEN=200 TOS=10 PREC=0x00 TTL=64 ID=694 DF PROTO=UDP SPT=17820 DPT=57344 LEN=180 Mar 1 19:07:15 bunker DENY2: IN= OUT=ppp0 MAC= xsrc=62.245.233.186 DST=194.120.0.163 LEN=200 TOS=10 PREC=0x00 TTL=64 ID=695 DF PROTO=UDP SPT=17820 DPT=57344 LEN=180 Mar 1 19:07:15 bunker DENY2: IN= OUT=ppp0 MAC= xsrc=62.245.233.186 DST=194.120.0.163 LEN=200 TOS=10 PREC=0x00 TTL=64 ID=696 DF PROTO=UDP SPT=17820 DPT=57344 LEN=180
That seemed odd since my firewall script read:
iptables -A INPUT -p udp -s 0.0.0.0/0 -d $VOIPIP --dport 10000:20000 -j accept-log iptables -A OUTPUT -p udp -s $VOIPIP -d 0.0.0.0/0 --dport 10000:20000 -j accept-log
Hmmm. What had happened is that SipDiscount changed their reception port range to something outside the normal range for SIP calls. Normal SIP port ranges are 10000-20000. A quick change of my rules fixed the problem and I now have telephone calls with audio.
iptables -A INPUT -p udp -s 0.0.0.0/0 -d $VOIPIP --dport 10000:20000 -j accept-log iptables -A OUTPUT -p udp -s $VOIPIP -d 0.0.0.0/0 --sport 10000:20000 -j accept-log
After 2 years of on and off attempts to get MythTV working, I can can now confirm that it has been running well for the last couple of months. It’s currently recording TV shows (via dual tuners) and playing back DVDs and videos that I’ve collected. Although I’ve enjoyed not having a TV for the last couple of years, sometimes it’s nice to come home to the latest Simpsons episode or a recent news broadcast.
I ended up building a diskless system that boots from my main server. This allows me to run a virtually silent system and utilises already avaliable managed disk space on the backend server. Although slightly more complicated to setup, I’m particuarly fond of running workstations disklessly. It allows snapshotting of the filesystem before a big upgrade of trying untested software and makes replication to other systems easy. I had a couple of hickups with the NFS mounts and optimising them but they seem to be working well so far. Eventually I plan on ditching NFS and moving everything to Samba or if I’m in a particualry machioistic mood, OpenAFS. Ideally all systems will use Kerberos for authentication of mounts but I am still a little way off that goal. Naturally the MythTV box is fully LDAPified.
MythTV comes with a neat feature that will scan recorded TV shows for commercials and insert skip markers where is thinks commercials are beginning and ending. Most of the time this works remarkably well (and when it doesn’t there is always the fast forward button). Another neat feature is the option to play back shows at up to 1.5x the original speed. I sometimes use this feature at 1.2x for Startrek episodes with too many repetitive “can you raise the shields” scenes.
To actually display videos and TV I hooked the MythTV box up to a LCD projector via a (30M long) HDMI cable. I have the MythTV box running at a fixed 1280×720 resolution and do all video scaling on that rather than trusting the projectors onboard scaler. I figure that a beefy video card GPU will do a better job than some integrated scaler. The results are rather impressive. NASA has loads of HDTV clips and, after a long download, I my initial sceptism of HDTV melted away. The details, like seeing the astraunauts through the shuttle windows at launch time, made me realise how much information SDTV throws away.
I’m still controlling the MythTV box with a keyboard although I have bought a Microsoft MCE remote and keyboard. One weekend I will get around to actually installing them.
Should Anyone Ask 