The Great Canadian

I was walking around my neighborhood of the 6th Arr.of Paris last night, looking for a place to have a beer. Now having been a bartender in the same area, I pretty much know all the bars, and was pretty much getting sick of all of them. I mean you can go to a place only a certain amount of times before you just get bored.

So I was walking down Quai des Grands Augustins, from Rue Dauphine to Saint Michel, and came across a place I didn't know - The Great Canadian Pub. Now this place looks cool - from outside you see the multiple flatscreens alongs the walls, the bar is nicely lit up, but the place in general is quite dim, which is great - Most bar managers have issues with lighting a place properly. Most of the time you'll walk into a pub or bar, there'll be too much or too little light. The general atmosphere appealed to me, so I walked in.



Well the place lived up to the expectation - I took some Stella on tap - nice, cold beer. The atmosphere is great. The guys behind the bar are authentic Canadians (It's good to see a place that has bartenders which fit into the environment). I ended up knowing the owner/manager quite well, from my days as a bartender. He had already opened a place some 7 or 8 years ago in the 6th, called the Moosehead, which mich and I are quite familiar with. The Great Canadian was his own place, and he told me they had just opened, at the end of summer 2005. There is mucho space in front of the bar, so the summertime terrace there will be great, and he told me they serve Sunday brunch ALL DAY - which is not an easy thing to find in Paris. The menu looks good, I saw some stuff that I'm definitely going to try, and the prices are pretty decent for central Paris.

I took this picture whilst leaving the place:


and this is a picture I found here of the same place during the summertime:

In any case, I think I'll be going back to this place. I like the general feel of it, and it's good to have a new place to go to. Plus the bar is beautifully located - I mean you can see Notre Dame from the terrace! Oh yeah, there are also flatscreens just above the urinals - just a detail, but it's pretty damn sweet (I think only men can understand that)

Here's the place's business card!

Closest subway is St. Michel, but Odeon or Cluny-La-Sorbonne should be good as well.

Voila! If you have a chance to drop by, check the place out!

Soekris net4501

Got my soekris boxes the other day.. they are nice little things..


Obviously I forgot to buy some CF (compact flash) cards, so I had to score a 64MB cards from one of my Cisco routers.. I've ordered 256MB CF cards, as 64MB and 128MB might be a bit too tight.. but hey, if 64MB is all I have for the moment, I'll make it work.
I used PHK's nanobsd shell-script to build an image, that I could dd(1) to the CF. Only problem: I do not have a CF reader/writer. So how to get the image over on the CF-card...
Fortunately, the network adapters in the soekris can PXE boot, so I simply setup a diskless FreeBSD environment - and booted up the soekris on the NFS share (granted it took a little while, to make all the things play along).

After booting up the diskless system, I could do the following from the box (connected via console):

# ssh myhost 'cat _.the-disk-image' | dd of=/dev/ad0 bs=64k
(ad0 being the CF card in the soekris)

Et voila:
I will rollout these babies as firewalls in all our office locations.

Opening hours

So I just popped out for lunch to pick up a couple of bottles of wine.. I usually eat my lunch at around 1pm, so I drove over to out local Nicolas wine pusher at around that time. To my big surprise they were closed..
After closer studying the "opening" hours, it seems that they close everyday for lunch !
How incredibly stupid is that ?!?!
So they open from 10am to 12pm (where normal people are at work, so cannot go an shop) - then they close from 12pm to 15pm (where everyone has they lunch breaks, and are able to spend money in the shop) - and open from 15pm to whatever (when people^h^hconsumers are back at work)

On top of that these shops have the audacity to complain about:
1) Their work hours
2) The fact that they work too hard (*cough*)
3) Their turnover

I'm bustin' a vein here, people !

Da "Tech" Workshop

A little project of ours for a while now has been to put up a piece of plexiglass in order to close up the gap left by the aircon exhausts in our server room. This of course was a relative pain in the ass, considering that it let scorching hot air in during the summertime, and rain in the rest of the year.

Well we finally did it. We had the equipment - jigsaw (called a 'bouncing peepee' by the Danes..), drills, screws, and a big piece of plexiglass.

After several hours of head-scratching, jigging, drilling, erasing, gluing and drilling again, here is the result - which i might add, isn't half that bad for a couple of morons..







We're available if you need handymen, just give us a call on 1-800-MORONS-AT-WORK

ciao!

USB key/stick with UFS(GBDE) and FAT32

So, I have one of them USB sticks. I don't really use it much - but I'd like to. I'm just generally against having some (semi)-important data on, that anyone can stick into a MS Windows box and gain access to...
Well, I have my USB stick attached to my keychain, and my keychain is often with me when I'm getting drunk - so the probability of me losing my keys (hence my USB stick) is quite high.

So how to remedy, this most unfortunate situation and make good use of my USB dongle ?
What are my criterias ? I want to be able to stick it in any computer with an USB hub, and have a public place to share files. I also want to be able to have an encrypted part of the key, that I can access with FreeBSD.

First make sure you have the appropriate devices and options in your kernel config (you can find this information anywhere on the net).

When plugging in my usb device, I see the following in syslog:

Dec 13 12:15:48 mich kernel: umass0: SanDisk Corp. Cruzer Micro, rev 2.00/20.33, addr 2
Dec 13 12:15:48 mich kernel: da0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
Dec 13 12:15:48 mich kernel: da0:  Removable Direct Access SCSI-0 device
Dec 13 12:15:48 mich kernel: da0: 1.000MB/s transfers
Dec 13 12:15:48 mich kernel: da0: 125MB (256000 512 byte sectors: 64H 32S/T 125C)

Yeah, I've got one of them SanDisk Cruzer 128MB sticks.

First off, I'll partition the stick - so I have two partitions. One for FAT32 and one for UFS. If commandline fdisk(1) is too complex, you can use the fdisk(1) interface from /stand/sysinstall. (Please know what you are doing here, as you can mess of the partitions on your harddrive - should you write to the wrong device).
Also, I'm asuming you've backed up all data on your USB dongle ! No ? Well, your loss.

So - I've split up my key into two 64MB partitions (slices) - one (the first) with subtype 6 (FAT) and the second with subtype 165(UFS). To contruct the actual filesystem, I will use newfs_msdos(1) - like so:

root@mich ~# newfs_msdos -F 32 /dev/da0s1

Now - you will have a perfectly usable FAT32 partition on the first slice. Stick it into a MS Windows PC and see it work. This will function as my public share on the key.

The second slice I'll use for the encrypted part. You should not newfs(1) it, before having created the encrypted device - else you'll be able to mount two different filesystems that will write to the same sectors on the device - and we all know, that can't be good.

Start of by initializing gbde and creating a key. (Make sure you have OPTIONS GEOM_BDE compiled into your kernel, or that you have loaded the kernel module)

root@mich ~# gbde init /dev/da0s2 -i

This will bring up a template with the description of the parameters for gbde. Since I'm using an UFS filesystem, I will change the sector_size to 2048 as it should be set to the fragment size. The rest I will leave as default.
Now you will be prompted for your passphrase:

Enter new passphrase:

Fill it in twice, and voila. (The longer the passphrase, the better the encryption)

Now you can do:

root@mich ~# gbde attach /dev/da0s2
Enter passphrase:
root@mich ~# mount /dev/da0s2.bde /mnt/key

Once you are finished putting top secret files (or your porn) into /mnt/key - you should do the following:

root@mich ~# umount /mnt/key
root@mich ~# gbde detach /dev/da0s2.bde

And your porn^h^h^hdata - is now safely stored on your USB device.

PS. Don't forget your passphrase, or you'll be screwed.

Burn baby - BURN!

How happy I was to leave the office on Friday - I mean a whole 2 DAYS without seeing mich's face - what else could I hope for? Ahhh, finally a couple days of chilling out without having to look at his ugly mug!

So I go home and pick up my gf to go do some christmas shopping. On our way back from shopping, we get off at the Mabillon Metro station, and who - WHO do we cross at the Marché St. Germain? You guessed it! Mr.mich, freshly hairdressed and pretty, and his wife. They were in the area to go get some mexican food, so we gladly tagged along, because no matter what the occasion, Fajitas are always in the house!

We went to Fajitas, a nice little restaurant on Rue Dauphine (Paris, 6th arrondissement). This is one of the few places in paris where the Mexican food is actually good - REAL good.

We went apeshit on the pitchers of strawberry margarita, ordered a bunch of food, and had a jolly old time. 2x 1 liter pitchers and a few tequila shots later (oh, and a couple "Café Mexicains" - Coffee with cream and tequila), we were laughing and basically making tools of ourselves in the restaurant, which frankly was alright, considering we were having a blast!

We took this picture on our way out. It'll help you identify the place on rue Dauphine,were you in the area and in need of some tequila and beans...

Fajitas Restaurant
15 Rue Dauphine, Paris 6eme.
Tel: 01-46-34-44-69
*Reserve on weekend nights, because it gets packed fast.

On the way back from Fajitas, we walked past a promotional truck with a bunch of people that were getting ready to do a promotional stunt for the new Coca-Cola drink called "Burn". Being a bit tipsy, we went straight for them and asked them to fork over some of them drinks, and they did. Surprised by this spontaneous generosity, we took a pic of the group, and told them we'd put them online. Here they are!


Basically, this drink is another one of those "energy drinks". It tastes nice, and actually reminds me of the original kratindaeng we used to drink in Thailand (the original small glass bottle, no bubbles caffeine/taurine drink). Here's the link to the real stuff: http://www.kratingdaeng.info/

In any case, we had an absolutely brilliant evening, the food and company was great!

Me, on the french government

It's time for the 6th republic.

OFF WITH THEIR HEADS.

Oh, and happy holidays.

RATP/ SNCF issues in Paris

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! I am no sick of this damn city! It should NEVER, EVER take me 1:30 hours to get to work!

This is what it's like in the morning:





So I got to work at 9:30, having left home at 8....
That just ruins your day.. when you have to go through that hell in the morning...

Screw those bastards at the SNCF and the RATP - I, as a daily commuter, am sick of their bitching and incompetence.

Ciao,

Dimitri

Bopit

Pretty uneventful weekend - after a successful Broker Meeting with work Thursday/Friday - I *really* needed some "solid-sack-time" to regain my strength. Too much booze in too little time..

Saturday we begun (ever so slightly) our Christmas shopping, *sigh* - I'm not a fan of shopping in December - too many people.. Managed to find a few things though - Most notable the game "BopIt" that I've been looking awhile for. It's excellent entertainment, especially after a few drinks. First tried it out, at Ben's summer bash at Fontainebleau.
After went to the 17th (haven't been there in ages) - Avenue Clichy is not as bad as it used to be, found a nice "Bar a Biere" and had a cold brewskie.

Sunday, we went to Chateau de Chantilly - and spend some time walking around the beautiful park - and visiting the museum. Awesome paintings, and a very old library - definitely worth a visit.


Back to work now - got so much shit to do... The backlog is immense. Just ordered a couple of Soekris 4501's (embedded systems) - I want to play around with them, and eventually set them up as remote office firewalls - upside is, that the OS will be running of a compact flash card, so no harddrive that can crash or overheat etc etc .. Nor any fans, that can get stuck... Also it's a lot smaller, and makes absolutely no noise.

EuroBSDCon 2005, part II

Saturday was a long day - after the opening session, saw Adrian Steinmann's talk on Single User Secure Shell - it was quite interesting; basically it's a secure shell maintenance RAMdisk environment that can be launched very early in the boot process, fx before mounting the filesystem - it's a good idea, and I think of a few remote boxes where this might come in handy.
Afterwards moved on to Marc Schiessers's talk on hard disk encryption - it was an interesting talk but the first 20 minutes were spent getting kpdf working, so we ran out of time - gbde is a cool tool, and I might start out with encrypting the filesystem on my USB key.
After a long lunch, saw the talk about evolution of the X Window System - Lots of changes, and interesting eye-candy new features - will be very cool (for desktop users that is). They also announced the death of imake, and will be shipping Xorg7 with GNU Autotools - Good luck to the X port maintainer.

Moved on to the Remote User Access VPNs by Emmanuel Dreyfus, and afterwards Ryan McBride's talk about PF on OpenBSD - it was quite straight-forward, however more amusing than the average - especially when he pulled out an axe and chopped up some ethernet cables to demonstrate live failover. Finished off with Massimiliano Stucchi's talk about Filtering Bridges.

We also had a pretty uneventful FreeBSD ports BoF - the usual bikesheds were discussed, and we even found a new one (ports-tags).

Saturday night we had this years social event.. I had lots of beers, let's just leave it at that ;)

Saturday Extreme Rugby

Our rugby team (Big Red Noses) played against the ENA at l'INSEP at 9:30am.

Well that would have been fine, had it been for the weather:


Needless to say, Météo France screwed this one up too (where were you on that one dipshit!) Yes, it snowed around 15cm during about 3 hours.. It was extremely cold (-3C with wind), very wet, and one hell of a game! By the way, what you see in the pic is the actual pitch we played on.....

That evening, Kris and I went to the France / South Africa rugby game at the Stade de France. The Stade de France rocks, it is not the biggest staduim (80,000 places), but it looks real good, and no matter where you're sitting, it seems like you're pretty much sitting 1st row.


Needless to say we beat South Africa, it was a rough game though, almost lost it in the second half.

Voila! So most of the day was focused on rugby... loooovely ;)

Ciao for now

Dim

EuroBSDCon 2005, Basel, CH

So - I arrived in Basel, Switzerland late Thursday afternoon. This time I drove, beats flying !!

Went out and had a bite at hotel nearby. Food was ok, beer was better. Later met up with the Anton Berezin in the hotel bar, for more beers ! Went fairly early to bed, as I was tired from the driving.

Up early Friday for the DevSummit, nothing really interesting to report - I enjoyed Mike Silbersack's talk, about FreeBSD vs Linux and userbility.. I tend to agree with him, that mergemaster is a bit overwhelming for new users..

Friday night I ate dinner at an Indien restaurant with Henrik Andersen, Simon Nielsen, Flemming Frokjaer and Poul-Henning Kamp - the service was rather slow, however that did give us the opportunity to sample the indinen beers (I was particularly fond of the Cobra beer) - I had my all time favorite indie-dish; butter-chicken.
Ended up having beers at the hotel bar, and fairly early to bed.

Today the actual conference started.
Robert Watson was supposed to talk at the opening session, however he had injured his foot and was unable to attend - pity I rather enjoy his talks. Poul-Henning Kamp stepped up and spoke a bit about the his history with BSD, and its history in general - it was quite amusing.

Testing my patience !

So, I found myself having to go to Copenhagen real fast last week, and after comparing prices - I chose to fly with Sterling (previously knows as Maersk Air). Well actually the choice was quite easy, as I could get a round-trip ticket with Sterling for roughly 150€, whereas the same trip would cost me 600€ with Air France.

Sterling is flying out of Beauvais-Tille (located ~90km north of Paris) - So I drove up there and got on my flight (parking is fairly cheap as well, compared to CDG and Orly).

Everything went smooth.

The return "trip".

Flight was scheduled for 7pm, arriving in Paris at 8.40pm. Yeah right...
After going to the gate, they announce that the departure will be one hour delayed.. I hate waiting in the airport, but ok, it can happen. We finally depart, and the flight itself is going well.. Until we prepare to land in Beauvais.. Apparently is too foggy for us to land, so they decide to land in CDG (Charles De Gaulle International Airport) situated ~75km away from Beauvais !
Sterling propose to organise a bus, that will take passengers back to Beauvais, and another bus for passengers going to Paris. Most passengers werobviouslyly going into Paris, so they were happy to that much closer..
Not me, I had to go back and get my damn car.. (oh why, did I not take the bus.. )
The arranged bus for Beauvais would arrive after 2 hours - at this point it is something like 10.30pm.. I find to other passengers going to Beauvais, and we end up splitting a cab..

All in all, I end up spending way too much money on parking, ticket, taxi and whatnot, and I'm not home before 1.30am !!!

Grrrr.. it's a rough day today.

Hand-Job-Dating

I came across a beautiful one today. Check out what was on news.google.fr..



Obviously one journalist at l'Express doesn't know what a handjob is in English.

Just so you know, this article is about jobs for handicapped people... geez.

of CNN, France and Hobos

Well well, hasn't it been an eventful couple of weeks!

I saw this on CNN the other day, and just had to post it. I mean, I would love to meet the kid who did this little graphic for CNN... Where were you on that one, dipshit?!


I have some advice for you:
1. go back to elementary school and start from there
2. once you're done with step one, and assuming you can read and write, open a browser, go to www.google.com, and type "map of france" in the blank. Don't forget to press enter on your keyboard (it's the big inverted L button on your right).
3. When using Google Earth, at least take into account the CITY LOCATIONS!!!!!

Fucking idiot...

New beast

Last weekend we got a new addition to our little family..
Meet Merlin:



He's a Maine-Coon, and a cool little beast - now the challenge is to get him accepted by our current cat..

Riots in Paris suburbs

Damn hoodlums.. Burning cars, destroying other people's stuff..

I fail to see why we do not declare a state of emergency in those areas, and send in the military (the foreign legion comes to mind) to clean up this mess.

I'm imagining that those idiots would calm the fuck down at the sight of a ready-for-combat-fuck-with-us-and-we'll-open-a-can-of-whoop-ass foreign legion unit..

amaroK-1.3.5 available

I've just updated amaroK to 1.3.5 in the FreeBSD portstree. This fixes the bugs, I mentioned earlier on this blog.

I've also written a patch for the "auto scan music collection" issue, when using postgres as your db backend.

All your base are belong to us.

All dressed up, but nobody to play with..

So Friday night, the big night - the b-i-g night..
My better half has arranged a soiree between friends, in which I'd hate to impose on - and my own plans kinda fell dead due to various reasons, to I'm left with two options:

1. Go back to the office, and catch up on some of my work.
2. Get some super-funky drinks with some cool people..

As I'm having a cold, neither seems to attractive - but I guess I'll have to opt for door number 2. Now if only it could stop raining...

Too bad, there's not any all-night-open driving-ranges, I could *so* deal with hitting the living crap out of some balls now.. oh well, I will definitely go play some golf one of these days, it's gonna feel good !!

On the subject of spam

A couple of months ago, I setup David Schweikert mailgraph scripts for all our incoming/outgoing mailservers. Since end of August, we've received 534278 mails, in addition we tagged 135893 as spam. That's like 1/5 of our incoming mails, are spam !!
Imagine the resources we waste on fighting spam.. Bandwidth, a dedicated server to scan, tag and store messages.

Over the same period of time, we've caught 1046 messages containing vira of some sort, and I've (through postfix header checks) REJECTED roughly 33000 messages.

It's a sad state of affairs.

amaroK 1.3.3

I committed the amaroK 1.3.3 update to the FreeBSD portstree a couple of days ago, go get it !

The amaroK dev team really worked a lot on the stability, and it should be (according to them) the most stable release..ever..

I've already managed to find a couple of bugs.. The amarok port installs two main binaries (amarok and amarokapp), the first one being a wrapper for the latter. If you've compiled the port with libvisual support, you'll have to run amarokapp in order to visualize any plugin, the wrapper will not work.

Another thing is user-defined "smart playlists", they do not work with PostgreSQL support enabled.

I've created bug reports for both issues.

Google Reader Vs Bloglines

Thomas wrote a post about the Google Reader, so I thought I'd give it a try. As usual with Google services I was positively surprised, and have more or less switched to it now.

On the down side (as Thomas mentioned), I cannot easily see how many posts are unread, and to which category they belong - I have a couple of different categories, such as "Read now", "Read later" and "Read whenever".. I hope they'll add this RSN.

The big plus, is that it actually keeps the posts marked as unread until I click on it. In Bloglines I'd usually click on one of my categories, and all unread posts in that category would be displayed - it could be up to 40-50 posts all displayed at the same time - if I'd accidently close this page, or if firefox would crash (yes, it does happen once in a while) - all the posts would be marked as read, and it'd be a pain to read them.

Also, the Reader interface is sexy ;)

Rugby Extravaganza

Hello amigos!

Last week (Saturday morning), I had a little mishap at rugby - head-on collision with some dipshit - and my left eyebrow exploded.. Of course I took pictures, and mich has been begging me to put them up, so here we are.

This is just after the collision, at the 'Urgences' (read ER) of the Ambroise Paré hospital. I like the little drop of blood on my cheek, I think it really 'makes' the picture:


This is after the stitches. Still doesn't look too good:


Needless to say, everyone left me alone for a week, people in the subway would take different subway lines to avoid me.

The stitches are coming out tomorrow, so I don't look like Tyson anymore (well that's my opinion):


Full details: 5 internal stitches, to stitch up the torn muscles. 15 external stitches, to close up the 10 cm gap in my head.

Ciao!

dimbo

EuroBSDCon 2005

Just registered for EuroBSDCon 2005. Yay !
I'm looking forward to seeing a bunch of old (and new) faces, especially as I did not go to the BSDCan (Canada) earlier this year.
This time is takes place in Basel, Switzerland - and there are a lot of interesting talks.

Trying to find a hotel for a reasonable price, got some good offers through the venue and the Swiss tourist office - as the conference itself will take place at a university campus, they've been able to really keep fees to a minimum.

Probably going to drive over there.. it's only 550km or so. Last year, I drove to EuroBSDCon in Karlsruhe, Germany - I believe the distance is about the same.

New FreeBSD.org website imminent

The cool and slick re-design of the www.FreeBSD.org website, should come online sometime within the next 12 hours.

It has been created by Emily Boyd as her Google Summer of Code project.

Update: ... and it's been launched. We've gotten a lot of positive feedback on it.

Tennis

Managed to play a little bit of tennis this weekend.. it's been a while, so as suspected a was pretty trashed afterwards.. It felt good though.

Also, we went to visit some family in the north of France (near Amiens) - I enjoy coming a bit away from Paris, enjoying the peace and quiet (I'm becoming an old fart... ). We had some good food up there, they certainly know how to feed a Dane ;)

Came in to the office this morning, with the ever growing backlog awaiting.. it's getting increasingly tiresome trying to keep up with everything. Have a bunch of FreeBSD stuff I need to do as well, apparently there's still problems getting amaroK and libtunepimp-0.4 to get along. I hope I'll have a few moments tomorrow to play around with it.
Got a mail from Andreas Klemm with a bug-report on sysutils/hackbot. Basically, the path to the datafiles required by hackbot was wrong, so hackbot would bail out with an error... Last time I made a commit to the hackbot port was in March 2004.. Amazingly nobody else pointed out the error..

In other news, I can report that Dimitri looks more or less like a roadkill. He had a rugby playing "accident" and ended up with about 15 stitches in the eyebrow.. It's a sorry sight.

amaroK 1.3.2

Just committed the amaroK 1.3.2 update to the portstree.
New features include:
- A new sexy volume slider
- Improved podcasting support
- Additional context menu for playlist window
- Scrolling through tabs

I built it on 4.x / 5.x / 6.x and -CURRENT.

I have yet to test it with the much anticipated libtunepimp 0.4.x version.

FreeBSD work

Supporting FreeBSD 4.x is becoming more and more of pain, I wish we'd drop that branch soon - so we can focus on 5.x / 6.x. - many ports needs heavy patching and quirks to be able to compile on 4.x..

Anyways, I managed to commit the long awaited amaroK update (1.3.1) the other day. I haven't received any bug reports yet, so I guess all is good. The amaroK dev team, just released 1.3.2, so my tinderbox is happily building away testing the build on different branches.
Akode engine support has been dropped (unfortunately), and Helix (realplayer) been added. PostgreSQL support has also been added, and it seems to work really great.

The aterm-1.00 update created a bit of noise, since most of it has been completely rewritten. Managed to solve most of the problems, there still a few loose ends though - Pav's been reporting some weird flickering behavior, that I've been unable to reproduce...

I also ported two new KDE apps; databases/ksqlanalyser and databases/ksqlshell. I'm particularly happy with the first on, as I'm now able to work on our ERP, MS-SQL powered server without vnc'ing to it. The latter is similar to the first, but created a nice GUI front-end for PostgreSQL and MySQL.

Long time no see.

Yup, we haven't really been around for a while.. For my part, I was on vacation for 3 weeks in the south of France, and the south of Italy, so frankly I could't be fucked posting anything on no god-damned blog.

I'm back now though, and in an attempt to kill time between now and 5pm, blogging comes in handy.

I've finally made it over to the enlightened side! I now have FreeBSD installed on my HP DV1100 laptop, and so far it's been pretty damn cool. It's nice to have a system that is free, boots in 15 seconds, is stable as hell, and had a bunch of really cool apps (which are once again, totally free). OK I have to admit, not everything worked off the bat after we installed FreeBSD. Getting 1280x768 resolution to work on my widescreen was fun, as was trying to figure out why some my mouse buttons weren't responding. There still are a couple things i need to figure out, like how to get my cd/dvd burner burning and my Compact Flash Bluetooth gizmo communicating, but I guess dealing with that shit is the price you have to pay!


I'm also running the coolest media player ever, maintained by that jackass of a buddy of mine. I must say Amarok was part of the reason I switched over - It was like a toy mich had which I could never, ever have. Well now it's mine. And it rocks.

Well that's all for now... ciao!

Long time no blog

Not getting too much blogging done these days, I guess I haven't got that much too report on..

Been reading a couple of good books lately:

- Blink: The power of thinking without thinking, by Macolm Gladwell

- A dogs life, by Peter Mayle (This is an excellent read)

and most recently Naked by David Sedaris. It's outright hilarious, and an easy read. Next in my queue is "The art of war" by Sun Tzu. I've been wanting to read it for a while, so I'm looking forward to it.

Hitchhiker

On my way home last night, I discovered this hitchhiker on my car:





He's pretty hard to make out, as my phone cam resolution is sooooooooo crappy.. but rest assure, he's there ;)

Tinderbox

Spend some time last week setting up Joe Marcus' tinderbox scripts. Works really well, and enables me to test ports builds on different FreeBSD branches. In addition, it makes installation packages that I can deploy over my servers, hence saving build times.

I've setup build environments for: RELENG_4, RELENG_5 and the newly branched RELENG_6.

Spent some time HTMLizing the README file, here it is.

Read more and get it here.

Pimp up da Firefox

Just came across a splendid article, on how to do fine-grained tuning of Firefox.

Give it a try.

Mom, can i have some Reebok Pumps please?

Mich and i just had a coffee /smoke break, and we were discussing the pros and cons of being a single child (as i am) as opposed to having siblings (like mich).

We came to the unanimous conclusion that being a single child rocks.

I tried to argue that being a single child was ok, but very lonely since you ended up growing up alone (which leads straight to multiple personalities). I would have loved to have had a bro or sis, (to beat the hell out of the bro, and kick the shit out of the sis' boyfriend), just so i wouldn't have had to play everything on both sides of the board. Conversations like this were common in my room at the time:

Dimitri: "Hey man, you want to play checkers"
Dimitri2: " Sure bro, I'll be red"
Dimitri: "No i want to be red, and i get what i want because i'm an only child"
Dimitri2: "Screw you jackass, go SABO. I'm having the reds."
Dimitri: "I don't want to play with you. You suck"
Dimitri2: "Right back at you buster."

On the positive side, you are the center of attention, and you get pretty much everything that you want, well, almost everything. I mean I didn't always get what I wanted, but in 90% of cases, I got the damn Matchbox car if i really wanted it (crying, yelling, pouting, anything would work).

Now there is something I never got and always wanted being a teenager. I mean I could have gotten them, but my dad's job didn't permit me to get them. Here it is: Reebok Pumps.

You remember these right? Every kid had them, and they were the ultimate sign of middle school coolness. All the cool kids had them, and of course all the dorks (as I) wanted them, so they could get one step closer to that impossible dream: being cool.

Well here's the deal. Why couldn't I get these? Why wouldn't my parents buy them for me?

At the time, my dad worked for Adidas. I had 25 pairs of trainers in my closet, but none of them were Pumps, and that sucked!

In addition, i was not allowed to wear anything but Adidas, that was it. I couldn't buy anything that wasn't Adidas. Any Nike shirt or Reebok accessory was forbidden. The problem is: at the time, Adidas was not cool, it was boring, passé, it had joined brands like Converse, - the definitely NOT cool shoes. I was not only laughed at for being fat, I was ridiculed for having dorkish shoes...Of course a couple years later, when my dad didn't work for Adidas anymore, and I had grown 15cm and couldn't fit in any of my 25 pairs of trainers, Adidas was the shiznit - everyone wanted them.

So yeah, being a single child rocked, but I still have a regret - not having those pumps. Overall though, I can't really complain, i mean life wasn't too rough for me as a child...plus, whenyou have a schyzophrenic half to play with, who needs siblings?

I need to help this person in the Ivory Coast

Dear Readers (or non-readers)

It has come to my attention that this young lady needs some help, so i have decided to help her out.

Here is the email I recieved:
----------------------------------------
Aisha Kone,
Cocody Abidjan,
Ivory Coast (Cote D'Ivoire)
E-mail: konea@latinmail.com


Bonjour,

C’est avec un plaisir que je vous écris, mais je ne
vous force pas à le faire pour moi

Je suis Aisha Kone. j’ai 19 ans , je suis la première
fille de Monsieurs et Mme Kone
Mon père était un homme riche (vente de cacao) en COTE
D’IVOIRE

Mon père s’était rendu en France pour ces affaires et
il est mort mystiquement sans Qu’on ne sache les
vrais raisons de sa mort le 12 FEVRIER 2002 et pour
finir on S’est rendu compte que c’est notre propre
oncle qui l’a tué .

J’ai perdu ma mère quand j’avais 4 ans ce qui fait que
j’avais tout l’amour de mon père . Avant la mort de
mon père le 12 FEVRIER 2002, il appelle son secrétaire
étant à l’hôpital Et lui dit qu’il a déposé la somme
de 2.500.000. US dollars dans une première banque à
ABIDJAN

Etant toujours à l’hôpital , il dit à son secrétaire
que l’argent qui se trouve à la banque porte
Son nom et il charge son secrétaire avec une lettre
pour la remettre à son avocat , puisque Tous les
documents se trouvent avec lui

Actuellement je suis à l’université , j’ai 19 ans et
je ne sais pas comment faire par ce que je veux
transférer l’argent en EUROPE à cause des problèmes
politiques dans mon pays .

Je voudrais que vous me veniez en aide .
Je voudrai vous posez quelques questions .
1.Est ce que vous pouvez m’aider comme étant votre enfant ?
2.Est ce que je peux vous faire confiance ?
3.Et si on arrive à faire le transfère sur votre
compte la bas combien de pourcentage voudriez vous ?

S’il vous plait considéré ma note et faite moi
parvenir une réponse
Merci pour votre attention
Mlle Aisha Kone.
-----------------------------------------------------------

Get a fucking hint man, this shit does not work, stop spamming us you fucking idiots.

Go stick a banana up your poohole.

Warm Regards,

A picture's worth a 1000 words..

Mich found this little beauty. Exceptional shot, I must admit.


We're thinking about finding this lady and picking up a couple shirts - these will be collector items in a couple years.

Great news

Two absolutely magnificent things happened today:

1. EU rejects patents directive. Bloody marvelous, if you ask me. Don't know why it took them 4 years though.

2. London wins Olympics 2012 bid. Wonderful, we won't have to deal with an even more overcrowded city, and stupid tourists.

New Mobile - Bye Bye Orange/Itineris/France Telecom

Got myself a new portable device ( which is always loads of fun) because by crappy Samsung T100 died a horrible death last week... so I decided to change the whole subscription - called up Orange to kill my membership, and got the best service i have ever gotten of them. On saturday afternoon, i went over to a Bouygues shop and got myself a new subscription with a Nokia 6230i for 49€. Due to a promotion they were having, I got 40€ off, so the phone ended up costing me 9€... Although i didn't particularly care for a phone with a camera (I think it's just a damn gadget), the damn thing has one, so I put it to use.. here's one of the first pictures. I thought it deserved a warm spot on our blog.

Serbian - "Parce que je le veux bien"

It's Friday, and I just got home from hell^H^H^H^H ehh.. work..

What better way to relax, after a hard day - than with a delicious home-made Serbian Ice Tea ? Well, I can't think of a better way. So without further ado, I give you "Michael's end-of-the-week treat" :



Tomorrow, we are throwing a small bash for friends (and Dimitri) - I'll probably end up stone-drunk, AGAIN.. oh well, you can't teach an old dog new tricks - isn't that what they say ?

Bottoms up - see you on http://ghetto-net.blogspot.com tomorrow..

SOCKS and friends

So you're sitting at some random cafe, having a cold beer - whilst surfing your favorite porn, using some semi-public WiFi access-point, in the vicinity of your local beer pusher. How to login to a non-https site, without all the other suckers around you sniffing up your password ?

Quite simple actually, you'll use ssh(1) and it's local "dynamic" application-level port forward - ssh will simply act as a SOCKS server.

On your laptop (running some sort of Unix - obviously), do the following:

ssh -v -D 8989 -N user@host

-v: Verbose mode - in order to see what the is going on
-N: Tells ssh, not to execute a remote command (optional)
user@host: should obviously be replaced by credentials and a box, you have access to.

Next, open your browser (Firefox, obviously) and go into "Preferences" and open the "Connection Settings" dialog box. Click "Manual Proxy Configuration" and enter "localhost" and "8989" under SOCKS.

Voila, you are surfing through the box you port-forwarding to - and traffic between your laptop and your remote box is tunneled through ssh.
Obviously, the traffic from the remote box, to the site your are sending your HTTP request to is not secure, but that's another story.


You can most likely do the same with a windows box, but I'd be fucked if I know how - go ahead, and google it.

Monsoon - Paris Style

I must say we had a greatly entertaining day yesterday.

The day started off with a bit of golf at 12 (I wasn't really awake before then anyways). The weather was FAN-Tastic (35° C, not a cloud), and we were enjoying every bit of this delectable moment.

Then all hell broke loose.

At around 3:45, Clouds started coming in from the SW, big clouds. Within 40 minutes, we had gone from full sunny daylight, to almost pitch black darkness. You know when day becomes night that shit is about to hit the fan, and it hit that fan real hard.

At around 4:30, this is what paris looked like:

The clouds opened up, and we got hail and heavy rain for around an hour....


It goes without saying that Météo France didn't know about this'light drizzle' before it was in sight (literally), and therefore didn't really warn anyone.

We lost power for about a minute, so did our local McDonald's, and all the traffic lights in the area went out of service, reaking havoc everywhere.

Overall I tend to love chaos, so I was loving it from the start. I would have loved to have seen a cow go flying by like in Twister, or see some cars (with their occupants) being thrown around, but i guess just seeing people panicked and scared is pretty cool too..

Guess what? 'They' say that we should have a storm today too.. sweeet!

In the sign of golf

This week, has really been in the sign of golf - and I've got a feeling that so will the weekend.


Dim and I, are now zooming out to the driving-range in our lunch break. We've discovered, that have exactly enough time to shoot 1,5 bucket, and make it back to the office in time.

On Wednesday night, be went out and practiced bunker shots, and putting as well. It's good fun, and gives us an opportunity to profit the great weather.


Btw, it's nice to see that Blogger has added an image hosting service, so you can upload pictures directly to your blog.

Fete de la Musique - Paris, France. June 21st 2005

Well here you have it, another successful "Fete de la Musique". We walked around the Latin Quarter of paris from 8 to 2am, listened to A LOT of loud music, drank A LOT of beer, had A LOT of fun, but didn't have enough merguez sandwiches for my taste. In any case, it was a blast!

Fete de la Musique

Well, well well... it's that time of year again. The annual Fete de la Musique bash is tonight - for the love of god is blows my mind, why this event is not scheduled on a weekend - cause, you *know* that everyone will get shit-canned tonight.

I'm not a huge fan (like everyone else), primarily because of the whole transportation issue. It is impossible to bring your car, and the metro/bus system will be flowing with vomit and fucked up folks. Getting a taxi is less than likely..

I checked out the program for tonight. Not too much that peaked my curiosity, unless you're in to new-wave-tree-huggin' fusion music. Oh well, there's always cold brew and plenty of merguez around - so I guess it won't be a lost cause.

Firefox extensions

Over the next couple of months, I'm going to blog about my absolute favorite Firefox extensions. It might be useful for some people ;)

GreaseMonkey
One of my most recent extensions (and already one of the most useful). GreaseMonkey enables you to "load" any given piece of DHTML while loading a page, hence enabling you to change the behavior of the page. Fx. a small script is Linkify (if you have GreaseMonkey installed, you can right click on the link and press "Install User Script"). Linkify well crawl through all the contents of the loading page, and change all URLs that do have an <a href=... tag - so that you can click on them.

There are hundreds of ready-made and ready to run scripts available here:
GreaseMonkeyUserScripts

The Dim-needs-a-golf-license-but-is-too-broke Fundraiser!

Hello Dear Friends,

I am writing you about a very serious subject. It takes up a vast part of my life and is of utmost importance to me. Of course I am talking about golf. I love it, everything about it. I love hitting the living crap out of that stupid little ball, I love breaking tees, I love hitting 'warning shots' to the group ahead and see their pissed off faces when my ball lands 20 yards in front of them, I love caddies, I love the childish way us men buy our clubs like boys with new toys, I love the cold beer after finishing up a round. I'm sure you've understood, I love golf.

Here is the problem. I can't play golf. I mean I can play golf, but I can't actually go out on a course and play a round, because I do not have a Federation Française de Golf license. I am confined to the premises of our local driving range in Rueil-Malmaison, hitting basket after basket of wasted balls, balls that go up and land, but have no meaning, no "raison d'être*" I do not have a license because I do not have the money to buy one, not because I am cheap, but simply because I am broke.

Hence my request to you, my dear friends and virtual companions. I need to gather 43 € (yes, ONLY 43€!) in order to buy myself a license, and an additional 30€ to play my first round. Any help from my beloved entourage** is welcome. Please contact me if you can help me in any way, or go to the FFG website and buy my license for me. You can also click on the google banners on the blog, hence making us some money. This is my goal in life right now.

You can make my dream come true.

Thank you


Dimitri
(golf-ball-wacker-guy)


*"Reason of being", in Swahili.
** "entourage" means: "the fuckers that hang around with me, or have the luck of knowing me.

Store Wars

For once that vegetables are good for something...

A buddy of ours sent this link to us yesterday- it's too good to not be posted. I admire the ingenuity of the people who made this little film - absolutely amazing, and hilarious. I'm still not going to give up meat and cheap industrially produced vegetables though.. screw that!

AdSense

Yeah, I've put a google text-ad on the sidebar. I invite you all to go click on it, so I can buy more alcohol.

In the hope that I can soon retire, and live (like a king) on my banner earnings alone.

New clubs

Yesterday, Dim and I had the exquisite opportunity to try out our newly acquired clubs. It was good fun, and one of those moments where the "ordeal" is well worth the while...

Dim picked up a Big Bertha 4 iron, with a regular flex graphite shaft. Quite interesting, as we normally play with steel shafts. Here's the clubface:

I picked up a Big Bertha Warbird 3 Wood - also with a regular flex graphite shaft. Very nice indeed:

Both excellent clubs, that gives you a joy - whilst hitting the living crap out of the ball.

The Concorde Lafayette Panoramic bar

Well that's a view in a half! Yesterday, after a long night of Serbians, a keg of beer and various other beverages, mich, myself and our ladies went to the top of the Concorde Lafayette building at Porte Maillot for some coffee.. I must say that although a Grand Crème is 6 euros, it's well worth it considering the view. I recommend the Panoramic bar on the 34th floor - well worth the dosh.

Hello Piratebay!!!

Haha, you devils you!! Piratebay is back online, bigger and better than ever. They even have different languages and everything now. You tricksters you. Well, back to downloading stuff....

Bittorrent replacement

The government (and their friends the lobbyists) are finally catching up with the popular BitTorrent p2p filesharing application. BitTorrent depends heavily on "tracker" sites that will show you the availability of torrents. As many (read: all) those sites are being shut down by the authorities, it is becoming increasingly difficult for filesharers to find the torrents.

Enter Rodi.

From slashdot:

Rodi is a small-client P2P application, written in Java, that improves on BitTorrent by allowing both content searches and full anonymity. It's released under the General Public License (GNU). Even your IP address can be hidden using Rodi through a process called "bouncing." That is, if A wants a file from B, they get C to agree to stand-in on the exchange. B gets C's IP address, not A's. Through IP Spoofing A can even hide their identity from C. Rodi can also be used from behind corporate firewalls and LANs using Network Address Translation (NATs), something most home gateways have.'

Bye Bye PirateBay

Well it finally happened. The PirateBay website was finally brought down by the Swedish anti-piracy authorities.. I guess they made fun of the legal letters one to many times....

The French NON

Well, well, well - so the (majority) of the French voters, opted for NON to the constitution. Is that because 55% of the voters were extreme right-wing or extreme left-wing (as the media apparently will have you believe) ? Not really, it's a desperate scream for change in the French administration. It is a shame, that a the referendum had to be sacrificed - but I do not see it as a big problem.
At worst, the EU constitution will be slightly delayed. On the positive side, it might force the politicians to amend the current "draft" to something even better ?

Oh well, what the hell do I care - and could not cast my vote anyway.. (why is that by the way ? Since, I am an European - that works, lives and pay tax in France - why should I not be able to cast my vote ? )

Another wedding

Last weekend we went to the wedding of Sabrina and Stephane. It was a beautiful ceremony held at an old manoir in the north of France (Manoir de Bloisonville, between Honfleur and Deauville).
We had booked a room in a small hotel in Barneville (5-6 km from Honfleur), called "L'Auberge de la Source". It was very nice, especially as it was located well out on the countryside close to a forest.

I'll see if I can grab some photos from somewhere to put up one of the following days, as I (as usual) forget my camera...

Star Wars - Revenge of the Sith

I finally got my shit together, and went to see the "masterpiece" ! It was great, the CGI was awesome - and a lot of loose ends were explained/tied up.
I think, I'll watch episode 4-5-6 in the upcoming days, perhaps it'll be interesting watching them with a different background..

A few things, about it - I loved that we actually saw the homeworld of Chewbacca, also we saw that Obi-wan Kenobi is a hardcore motherfu**ker - and last but not least, it's great to see Yoda in some one-to-one combat.
The only thing, that bugged me a bit - was how easily Anakin was turned to the dark side, I know we are suppose to believe that he was "blinded" by his love for Padme - but hey, as a Jedi - he is trained to resist the temptation.

If you haven't seen it yet, then you should definitely go and see it - it's one of those movies that really needs to be seen on a big screen.

Google Portal

Tonight (I believe) google will change the frontpage, so you can switch between the classical google page (as it is now) and the new portable-like customizable google page.

It integrates Gmail (should you use it) and Google News. You can also include stockquotes, quote-of-the-day, NYtimes headlines and BBC news headlines.

Check out the preview here.

A few cocktails before the weekend

So i've finally decided to post something, and what else could it be but a few cocktail recipes. Here we go

Jack and Sam

This is one of our favorite shots, when we get to the point of ordering these at the VD, it's basically the beginning of the end. I think this shot makes you blind, deaf, stupid and angry. This is a real man's shot, none of that "creme de mure" or manzana flavored sissy crap.

Very simple to make.
- In a shot glass, pour in half Sambuca (Greek aniseed liquor).
- Layer Jack Daniel's to fill the second half of the glass.
- Shoot that shit.
- note: if you don't have or can't find sambuca, some Uzo will do, or any Aniseed based liquor. The advantage of Sambuca is that it tasted just right, and has the liquory consistency which enables an easy layer, which is handy when you're canned.

Another great way to have sambuca in a shot is to fill a shotglass with sambuca, throw in a couple coffee beans, light the beverage on fire for a couple second, and shoot it (I hope you choke on the coffee beans mich).

Irish Car Bomb

This is a variant of the Flaming Dr. Pepper posted earlier. The principle is the same, half a glass of beer (except THIS time it's not lager, but Guinness or another stout) and a shotglass of alcohol (in this case it's half whisky, half Baileys). So it goes something like this:

- fill half a pint glass with Guinness, Beamish Stout, or any equivalent Stout. Let it settle.
- fill a shotglass with whisky and baileys. You don't have to layer it.
- drop the shotglass into the beer, and chug.

That's all for now, more to come.

Ciao!

Back to work

Back to work as of yesterday, and it is definitely harder than I thought.

The wedding of Thomas and Karine went perfect, and I believe everyone had a great time. We all met up in a small village about 10-15km outside of Toulouse. This is were Karine's family live. The couple were wed by the assisting mayor, whom also know Karine (and her family) since her childhood - which made for a very "cozy" ceremony. It was particularly fun, when he tried pronouncing Danish names ;)
After the official wedding, we were transported another 5-10km out on the country, where the church wedding were to be held. I am personally not much for going in church and whatnot, but I have to admit, it was a very pleasant ceremony, and the priest actually seemed very nice (especially when he cranked up the volume of the Ray Charles CD that was playing..)

Afterwards, everyone drove (while honking their horns like crazy) to the place the reception and dinner would take place. A very nice place, in a remote area - where the kids could play in the outside area while the adults could get loaded on the (excellent) punch.

Dinner was excellent.. fois gras and magret de canard among other things. I, as usual, got plenty of good wine, and finished off nicely with Armagnac.
Met a bunch of cool people, both Frenchmen and Danes - but also brits.
Looking forward going back to Toulouse, hopefully it will be a little bit less stressed for Thomas and Karine so we can chill out, and drink some pastis and play some petanque.

Ripped off from http://ledanois.blogspot.com

Anyhow, congratulations to the newly wed.