Da Nikon D70S - yeah baby!

Ahh, after a month or so of craving a new digital camera, it's here!

We opted for the Nikon D70s kit with a 18-70mm lenses, and were right - it's a pretty sweet beast ;)

What is there to say - Boys and toys...


Now I have to learn how to use it!

ciao!

Post a picture (or two) day

The phrase "useless slacker" springs to mind ;)

Bike !

Went yesterday to pick up a bike in Decathlon - it's amazing how cheap it is to get a bike these days.. It's a sweet ride, and as of now I'll be riding it to and from work every day.

Here's how I've shortened my daily commute, so far:

With car: 25-30 minutes
With bus: 20 minutes
On bike: 9 minutes
I'm expecting that to go slightly down once I get into the routine (and shape).

Here's a couple of pictures of the beast






Obviously I also picked up a bicycle "computer" - with loads of nice functions..

Pimpin' Ride .... and Pimp My Ride

Yo! A buddy of mine just gave me a car (yes, gave)! Ok ok, it's not the most recent thing, but it rolls, and gets from point A to point B (I think).

It's a Renault 25 GTX from 1986 - totally an 80s car, but it's got some cool specs (rofl) - 2.2 liter engine, electric windows and sunroof (yes! a fucking sunroof!), and basically everything is working. I have to change a couple tires, and fix the radiator (well, someone has to fix the radiator, I don't know anything about damn cars), but apart from that it's in relatively good shape - Oh yeah, we need to clean it too, it hasn't driven for 2 years, and has been sitting in a garage, so there's 'a bit' of dust.. check out the pics!






We're thinking about getting in touch with MTV's Pimp My Ride Europe, because this is totally the kind of car in need of a Pimpin'.

Anyways, I'll get this thing out of the garage, fixed and cleaned up, and post some 'After' pictures soon. Ciao!

Dimbo

What the hell ?!

I was just reviewing my fine post earlier, when I notcied the Google ad in the right pane :



Feminine blogs ?!? What in the living crap is that about ?

Easter is coming..

Enough said.

Picture of the Day

I think this picture says it all.... at least for today...


ciao!

4000W AC Power Supply!

Hello!

I just loved the look of this little beast!


This is a Cisco Catalyst 6000 chassis 4000 watt power supply. I would just loooove to plug this baby in.

(rest assured, there is absolutely nothing, I mean NOTHING sexual about me liking this thing... nothing I tell you..)

Anyways, tata, laddies!

Sunday at the Sorbonne

We were walking around yesterday in our neighborhood, and decided to go over to the Sorbonne University to check out the damage the recent anti-CPE riots have bestowed up it, and of course we took a couple pics.

Here you can see they have severely barricaded the university:


Suddenly I noticed this dude dressed in orange in front of the barricades. I decided to get closer...


Look at this DUFUS! This "Syndicalist" from FO (Force Ouvrière - a workers union) was standing there, on a SUNDAY, dressed in ORANGE, with a GREEN FLAG, and you know what, he was happy about it (look at him smile)!


This is a snap I took over the barricades, at the CRS trucks in front of the university:


This is Rue St. Jacques, which is usually a really busy street...:

Tomorrow the anti-CPE riots are pretty much taking france as hostage, as all the workers unions are going to block up ALL PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION, which mean I'm going to have a hell of a time going to and from work, and mich is going to have a HELL of a time getting back from Denmark.

I hate them all...

Münich re-visited

So I'm back in Münich as part of my upgrading corporate firewalls world-tour. The weather is pretty shitty, I could swear I saw snow falling down this morning. It's cold, grey and boring.

On the upside, had a couple of brewskies last night, I have got to give it to the Germans, they do know how to serve a tasty beer:



Spend a considerable amount of time on the phone with Deutsche Telekom... my god, what an ordeal. Apparently very few employees with T-Kom are able/willing to speak English - and, unfortunately, the ones that say they do, are complety incomprehensible.
We are converting our Office-Connect line, to a T-DSL business line - not a big deal, right ? Wrong !
They are obviously removing the Office-Connect router, and setting up some DSL equipment. Only they installed a DSL-modem (without router functionality) - so in order to get it working, we would have to install a Windows XP box directly on the modem... *sigh*..

Had to find a T-Kom store, and go fetch a DSL-Router... Sinus 154 DSL Basic SE.. With integrated WiFi and configurable by a "nice" web interface.. that basically only works with IE... *sigh* *sigh*

Obviously this beautiful web interface is only in German, and completely illogical. Anyway, managed to disable WiFi, NAT, and the builtin firewall - and in addition, point the fixed IP that we've purchased , directly on our own firewall (running FreeBSD naturally).

Today, tidying up - cleaning out the old firewall, and helping the sales staff here, with their small tech issues...

Back tonight, and leaving for Denmark on Sunday...

Attention to detail...

Hello!

I was watching a concert on tv, and realised that some jackass working at W9 had misspelled the artist's name...

The dude's name is Gérald de PALmas, not PLAMAS, you jackass!

The mistake was up for most of the concert, then the whole line disappeared. Obviously it left me enough time to take a picture...


BTW I played some rugby this morning... and scored a try!

It doesn't happen often, so I had to mention it...

plus I didn't get hurt, which is pretty exceptional as well...

ciao!

Snippets for vim(1)

For a week or so, I've started to look into Ruby on Rails for web application development - it's very nifty and has a lot of potential !
Watching the online tutorial videos, I'm becoming increasingly jealous of the OS X users and their super cool TextMate editor ! Being a vim(1) man myself, I set out trying to reproduce some of the textmate behavior - specifically the snippets functionality. After searching a bit around on google, I found the snippetmagic project, which does exactly that ! It add snippets not only for rails projects, but also:

• actionscript
• asp
• c
• css
• django
• f-script
• gri
• haskell
• html
• java
• javascript
• latex
• logo
• markdown
• mips
• movable type
• objective c
• ocaml
• odcompletion
• perl
• php
• phpdoc
• propel
• python
• rails
• ruby
• setext
• slate
• smarty
• source
• symfony
• tcl
• template toolkit
• text
• unixshell
• xhtml
• xml

Pretty friggin' awesome !

Cool 7940 phone.. and real cool ringtone

Hello!

Mich is currently checking out a VoIP solution using the world renowned Asterisk, an Open Source PBX.

Well he got Asterisk installed on a "server" (aka - spare parts sitting around the office thrown into an old Compaq Deskpro chassis), and in order to test this fab solution, we got ourselves a couple Cisco 7940 IP phones:

Now these babies are hot - real hot! I don't know if you've recognized them, but they're practically the same suckers they use on "24" - and guess what? We have the unofficial "24" ringtone! Yes sir!

We are such geeks...

ciao!

Danish Muslims

So the aftermath of the whole drawing the prophet Mohammed in a Danish newspaper, is resulting in an Imam in Denmark trying to organize all Danish Muslims to burn their Danish passports on the central square in Copenhagen.

Well, go ahead... a new passport costs 500,- DKK (roughly 70,- EUR)

I think there are more intelligent ways of showing discontent with the publications..

Charlie Birdy - Revisited

Back in the 90s when I first arrived in Paris, my usual hang out would be Chesterfield Cafe on rue Boetie, in the 8th. It was a pimpin' place, with lots of cool people and taking the party to the max until the early morning. There was actually a rumor going around, saying that at that time - Chesterfield Cafe was the busiest bar in Europe. I do not know if it is true, but there sure used to be a lot of folks.
At some point in 2000 or so, Chesterfield got sued for the Chesterfield trademark - probably by Philip-Morris or some other lame-ass tobacco company. So they changed the name to "House of Live" - I do not know if management changed as well, but the place just wasn't the same. I've only been there a few times since then.
Yesterday, I found out that they had changed their name (once again) to Charlie Birdy - and a friend of mine got a job as bartender there - so we went their last night for a drink and some food.

The place has been cleaned up, and do put it a lot of nice deco - and I'm happy to see that they kept that huge cool-ass mahogany bar. They are definitely going with a more upscale look, than their predecessors.
The food was ok, and the drinks too (has some Mojitos) - but the waitress was slow as hell, and the hostess was not too friendly. Also, I did not have a chance to visit the restrooms, but both Chesterfield and House of Live were notorious for their absolutely disgusting restrooms..

Go check it out:
Charlie Birdy

Today is post a picture day

Dimitri, on the whole "work" thing:

Agilent N2X

The other day, my esteemed colleague and myself went out to the Agilent Technologies HQ in Massy, France - for a demonstration of their N2X product, and I must say - it kicks ass !



Only downside is the price... it is priiiiiiiicy...

Selling my car

I'm selling my wheels..

It's a Peugeot 307 XSi 2.0 - it's in excellent condition.. well, more or less.

Drop me a mail if you are interested.

La Defense

Took this picture on my way home from the "Solutions Linux" expo at the CNIT.


It's a nice building, huh?

Nike Airmax 360 - Running on Slaves?

I was coming back from the FNAC on Friday evening after a nice cold beer at the 'Relais Odeon', when I noticed an ad for the new Nike Air Max 360.

This is how the situaiton went through my head.

- Nike, huh, cool
- shoe kinda looks nice, although i don't really like Nike
- Airmax 360 - alright.
- Nike Airmax 360 - Running on Slaves - that's a bit of a bizarre ad.
- Running on Slaves? huh, what the...!

Well apparently some anarchist losers had been there before me, taken apart the lit billboard, added a bit of their own to the ad, and put it back together. This is what it looked like:


As you can imagine, this ad really got a crowd quick.

I wonder how long that was up before someone was notified and it was 'cleaned up'?

In any case, I got the pic!

ciao for now,

dim

Useless parking

In my building (where I live) I have a parking, so I can basically just take the lift down to the basement, and I'll be by my car..

The other morning when I went to work, a couple of cars looked like this:

click for a larger picture

Apparently, during the night a bunch of thieving bastards had gained access to the parking, and managed to run off with 12 tires. In addition, they broke a couple of windows to get inside to steal gps equipment etc..
Amazingly, they did not touch my car, though they broke windows on the cars in front and behind mine - I guess it's because mine has a nasty alarm.

In light of my previous blogpost, about the price of tires and whatnot, I'd like to stress the point - that I did not, I repeat, *not* have anything to do with this little operation.. really....

Tired of tires

Evidently I have to change the two front tires on my car.. (being that they skid every time I accelerate, and don't even get me started on the breaking.. or lack thereof)

This is where I get screwed for driving with 17" rims..

So the other day I went to my local Midas for an estimate. It was a most unpleasant surprise.. with the cheapest tires, it would cost me around 550 EUR for both tires ! Sweet mother of all that holy !!! For crying out loud, it's rubber we're talking about - not plutonium.

Spent some time yesterday, calling around to find a cheaper solution. Here's my findings:

All places are 15 minutes or less away from my home. Classed from cheapest to most expensive.

Tire reference: 205/50 ZR 17 89W

1. Jumbo Pneus (Genevilliers)
Cheapest tire: 150 EUR / tire
Medium tire: 170 EUR / tire
Michelin/Pirelli: 210 EUR / tire

So a couple of average tires (including "montage"): 340 EUR TTC

2. Euromaster (Levallois-Perret)
Very nice service - on the phone, anyways.
Cheapest solution (including "montage") : 388 EUR TTC

3. Speedy (La Garenne)
Cheapest solution (including "montage"): 463 EUR TTC

4. Midas (La Garenne)
Cheapest solution (including "montage"): 550 EUR TTC

5. Peugeot (La Defense)
This is where I purchased the piece of shit car I have.
First off, the service was absolute crap - I was transferred 3 times, and had to call back
another number, because he didn't want to transfer the call.
Montage: 60 EUR HT
Tires: (263 EUR HT/ tire): 526 EUR HT
Cheapest solution (including "montage"): 700 EUR TTC


Perhaps I'll just find another 307, and "walk off" with a couple of tires in the late night hours..

New digital camera

I had the misfortune to turn 29 a week ago or so.. We "celebrated" the occasion with lots of booze and whatnot - once I get a scanner working (cough, cough Dimitri) I'll scan and post the ticket from the police for "Tapage Nocturne" (Nightly commotion) as proof for the festiva.

Anywho, people gave me a bunch of money so I could finally get one of them modern digital cameras. So last weekend I went to Fnac to pick one out.
I settled for the Fuji Finepix F11 (holy crap there's a lot to choose from). It's a nice little beast.

6.7M pixels (whatever the hell that means) and best of all - it came with battery, charger, XD memory card and a carrying case.

Pretty sweet..

Meet the colleagues

Say hello to Pietr and Carlos:

Hard hitting journalism

Roughly translated it goes :
"26 year old survives death-jump"
"A 28 year old man from Odense survived.... bla bla"

So is he 26 or 28 - or are they talking about two different people ?

Real smooth Bt

Happy New Year

Happy New Year everyone.. Let's hope 06 won't suck ass like 05 did.

I'm just about getting over my new years hangover..

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.