Date:	2008-04-14 19:45
Subject:	"You know you're a geek when..."
Security:	Public
Mood:	busy
Music:	(None)

(28-Aug-2007)

13:38:06 -!- Irssi: Join to #DeltaAnime was synced in 2 secs
13:38:53 < IceDragon> Hey, guys, where's Viper/Cyph0rg?
13:39:24 < ViciousPotato> IceDragon: not connected
13:39:32 < IceDragon> Yeah, that I've noticed ;)
13:39:39 < ViciousPotato> Hasn't been on for a week
13:39:47 < ViciousPotato> Well, 10 days
13:40:07 < IceDragon> Hmm... Oh well, thanks for the info.. Kinda sad - I live one floor above him
                      and I'm asking about him on an IRC channel rather than just going down and
                      seeing what's going on :P
13:40:12 < Nexon> LOL
13:40:19 < ViciousPotato> ....lmfao

Date:	2008-04-09 09:56
Subject:	Forcing Pocket C# to work with different install paths.
Security:	Public
Mood:	tired
Music:	None

A while ago I've stumbled upon a pretty cool project called Pocket C# - it is a compiler that allows you to create C# programs on your PocketPC. To make life easier, it even came with an IDE program that would deal with configuration business for you as well as building the project. The only problem was that it refused to work unless you installed PocketC# in its default path - in \Program Files\Pocket C#\. Considering that I don't have much RAM as it is, leaving the compiler on RAM was the last thing I wanted to do - there had to be a different way!

After a little tinkering, it appears that as it starts to build the project, pcsharpide.exe makes a .bat file called cc.bat in your Temp folder and inside it, the program sets the PATH variable to "\program files\pocket c#". That particular path is stored inside the executable at offset 0x18eee in a 16bit Unicode format (UTF-16), so the only way to force the IDE to work on a different PocketC# path would be to hex it. That's pretty much what I did...

While I've hexed my IDE with Midnight Commander, you can do this on the PDA itself with a nice tool from SK called PE Info. Since the file is no longer accessible from the official site, here's a link to my webspace instead: peinfo.zip [185,738 bytes]
What you do there is select File->Open, open pcsharpide.exe from wherever it is installed, load it, then go to Tools->Hex view/edit to see the hexdump. Tap on one of the offsets to the left and write 18eee into the text box to skip to that specific offset. From that point, you will start seeing the file path that is used in the .bat file and you can now use the hex editor to change the path to something else. I suggest doing this character-by-character since the zeroes in between have to remain zeroes. Also, your path must not be longer than 24 characters! If it is shorter, replace the remainder from the old path with zeroes (00).

This are rather unfriendly instructions for those who mostly know what to do when it comes to hexing. For others (if there are any besides me), I might make a small app that would do the dirty work of changing the path for you. Not right now, though...

Just something that I found and would like to keep a memory of...

Date:	2008-03-03 19:36
Subject:	New GPG/PGP key
Security:	Public
Mood:	sick
Music:	Craig David - Rise and Fall (ft. Sting)

For those of you who make any use of the PGP/GPG encryption systems and want my key, or already have my key, here's a note you might not want to miss:

Due to a total data loss on 24-Feb-2008, my old secret key went down with the broken hard-drive! This means that I will be unable to decrypt anything encrypted for the old key and it basically became useless now. I've generated a new key pair recently to use from this point, here are the details:

Key ID:	28DF5A52CB650BAA
Fingerprint:	1368 0197 3648 BEF4 FF43 E732 28DF 5A52 CB65 0BAA
Public Key:	icedragon.asc

Sorry for the inconvenience in having to re-import the key, but it's a bit out of control now on my side...

Date:	2008-02-22 15:02
Subject:	Stuffing my time full - with a job...
Security:	Public
Mood:	sore
Music:	Pink Floyd

So what did happen after my service time reached its end in January 24th? Did I stay in the army some extra time? Did I start the MCSE course I've been considering? Did I fly overboard and got a life?.. Nope. Not yet, at least. I've decided not to stay at the army more as it was getting on my nerves so badly that I was about to blow it up on someone - I packed my stuff, said my goodbyes, and quit. There was no future for me in there anyway, just more time wasted than these three years.

As I left the military, I've set myself up the following plan for life for the near year:

1. Get a "required job" for 6 months to grab another 8,000NIS from the government by the end of it, as well as getting some money for myself as I go. There will be expenses, afterall...
2. Start improvement of my math by getting courses and subscribing to exams by the end - I'll need it in the university or perhaps in some programming projects...
3. Start learning for the psychometrics test I'd need to pass with high results in order to get to a university as a Software Engineer.
4. If everything is successful at this point, search a good enough university to study in to become a software engineer - could be a highly paying job, and I'm into computers and programming anyway, so why not?..

Date:	2008-02-13 00:57
Subject:	So who here decides where to connect?..
Security:	Public
Mood:	annoyed

One thing I absolutely love about Linux is control - the system is built by the distribution maintainers when you install it, but from there, it's up to you to tell it how to work (should you not be satisfied with the way it operates already). You can go as far as making automatic scripts to control your graphical applications over DCOP without having to be a great programmer. Today I witnessed yet again how deeply can you control your Linux system in comparison to the Vista I have on another laptop.

For the past months, I've had many annoying problems with the wireless networking and the wireless bridge we (me and my brother) have established between the houses - it was hell unstable. Recently, as we switched channels, things seemed to have gotten worse - the wireless network within my apartment became unstable! The signal quality was jumping between 0 and 15% sometimes, regardless of the laptop being a few inches away from the access point itself! Such low signal quality resulted in frequent disassociations and I had no explanation to that. It was hard to believe that the neighboring networks were causing the disruption, especially since scans with airodump didn't reveal any intense activity on the same channel.

After looking at the scanner today, I've noticed that people have this interesting nature of starting from the default channel, which is 6, and always go up - to 7, 11, 13. I don't know how non-accidental this habit is, but looks like the area near my living place works this way. This was a good thing, as that would leave channel 1 completely empty. This channel is the only non-overlapping channel that remained untried, so I've decided to see how well my WiFi connectivity will hold before all the network switches again.

The setup was quite simple: one access point remains on channel 11 and maintains a bridge to the "House of the Internet", an old Linksys router, connected to the access point with a LAN cable, would maintain a network on channel 1 to which my laptops would connect. Same network name and encryption settings for ease of use and switching.

When it was time to configure my laptops to connect to the router on channel 1, I came to a conclusion that I have no idea how to set a preferred channel or BSSID on Windows - the configuration windows wouldn't let me specify this information anywhere! I've tried all my way from the Network and Sharing Center to the Configuration dialog of the wireless device itself and the only channel settings I found there were for Ad-Hoc networks... Next thing was to try the command-line - netsh. I've spent quite a while, playing with that command and at the same time, looking for some help on how to connect to specific channel/BSSID, but it appeared that these settings were nowhere to be found. netsh wlan show networks mode=bssid did show that there were two nodes to my wireless network, but according to netsh wlan show interfaces, Windows was connecting to the wrong one. That wasn't as annoying as realizing later that the connect command (that connects you to a wireless network) accepts only the name you gave your network on Windows, SSID which is the actual network name and interface (your WiFi adapter)... that's it. No channel, no BSSID, no nothing.

Now I have two laptops sitting in front of me - one is running Linux, which I've long ago managed to connect to the right access point by typing sudo iwconfig eth1 channel 1 ap xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx, and one is running Windows Vista, which is still connected to the wrong access point due to signal superiority, and there seems to be no way to make it switch from within the OS! And after all this, I also hear that Windows is more user-friendly than Linux. I guess there are sub-definitions for the word "user", then, because to me, it's anything but friendly - it's not flexible enough to be friendly and was probably coded to think that I - the user - am too dumb to decide which BSSID or wireless channel to connect to.

Hopefully, a new version of Kubuntu will come out soon, deal with the problems I have and I will finally regain control over my new laptop to make it do what I want for a change.

Date:	2008-01-04 23:12
Subject:	Zephyr Power Modification successfully completed
Security:	Public
Mood:	happy
Music:	(None)

As of the 1st in January, after an attempt to fix the power connector in my older laptop (Zephyr), the entire thing could no longer be plugged in power and be charged - as I called it "the Critical State" - a state where the laptop itself is still usable, but for a limited amount of time (whenever the battery runs out on it). Bummer, considering that this laptop contained all my data.

Today, from around 7:30pm till 10:00pm I was at my brother's home where he modded the dangling, broken power connector into something a bit less appealing, but 100% working:

Date:	2007-12-05 13:34
Subject:	IRSeeK decides to refine their operation methods.
Security:	Public
Mood:	awake
Music:	None

It appears that with all the concern from the IRC community regarding their recent "move", IRSeeK has closed their service to modify the way it works in favor of IRC users. You can get the recent news regarding IRSeeK on their blog.

Hopefully, they will correct what seemed to be a rather negative first impression of their service. There's enough trouble on IRC without this... ;)

Date:	2007-12-02 20:10
Subject:	IRSeeK SeeKs to compromise our privacy
Security:	Public
Mood:	annoyed
Music:	None

I have recently found out of a new service that seems to have started itself on a wrong foot and may endanger the privacy of many IRC networks and communities. Introducing IRSeeK:

• Google tries to index content by crawling the web for publicly accessible links, it also follows a global standard for web-crawlers by requesting a robots.txt file which then tells it where it can go and which places it must stay out of. If certain content you don't want to be indexed already was, you can still request its removal - something which didn't seem to work with Freenode and IRSeeK... Google also provides means to clearly identify its bots through the headers it transmits to the web server - same for other public search engines.


• SearchIRC is an IRC network/channel indexing service that is opt-in based - it maintains a list of IRC networks with their publicly marked channels and various other useful information, providing statistics for the said networks, etc. You can opt-in and opt-out from this service all you want and their statistics bots identify themselves accordingly as well as come from their official host rather than random proxy, so we know when do they connect and what do they do.


• From the little knowledge I've managed to gather about IRSeeK's activities, it seems to have already started acquiring information from certain places and according to the staffblog on Freenode, their bots use Tor proxies and randomize their names, making the bots essentially hard to distinguish and remove from channels if IRSeeK's logging is not welcome there. These bots cannot be banned individually if they are not welcome on the network, making their actions hostile! There is no opt-in or opt-out there either and you can't tell these bots where to go and what can they index/archive - they will sneak in and attempt to log everything you say on a channel whether you want it or not. While their activity has already started, there is absolutely no information on IRSeeK's site regarding the bots, their identification and means to get rid of them in case and they are not welcome. Similar tactics are commonly used by hostile IRC users to evade bans, spy on channels or cause other sorts of trouble to places they are not welcome in.

1. IRSeeK.com - Home of the IRSeeK service.


2. Freenode staffblog - Related to Freenode issues with IRSeeK.


3. Will IRSeeK have a chilling effect on IRC chat? - Article on TechCrunch about IRSeeK.

Date:	2007-11-23 22:20
Subject:	Happy birthday, Zephyr!
Security:	Public
Mood:	happy
Music:	Nickelback - Far Away

Happy birthday, Zephy!

You were my closest companion throught all these three years and were all the time by my side at home, in the army, at the watch towers, on my every trip and even when I was under arrest! You were there to connect me to all my friends online, you were entrusted to keep my deepest secrets and important data without backups and you haven't betrayed my trust for a nanosecond! You executed every single operation I gave you to the best of your abilities and tried not to stop in the middle of such procedures. You've squeezed the most out of your battery when I was on the road to entertain me, you let me use your every working USB port till they all failed eventually one-by-one, you didn't die on me when you had a power connector problem, and still don't let the burning sparkles from behind to wear your power jack out. Your LCD has never failed and showed me every pixel in the best way it can, your hard drive has never died or stopped working and your poor ATI Mobility Radeon with 32MB VRAM has given my drivers the best performance it could. You never overheaten - 74C was the highest temperature you could ever reach while having 99C as critical, and your wireless adapter had a strong grip at the access point's signal, not letting go even when I went out of range. You woke me up every morning at the right time, you kept your clock in perfect sync whether you were on, off or underpowered without the need for ntpdate just so I can know what time it is without a second thougt. Even when I disassembled you multiple times, lost some of your little screws and broke a few part of your sensitive plastic, you never gave up on me and continued to be as loyal as you can ever be!

There were so many things you gave me during these three years that I probably will never be able to repay you. You were worth every coin of the 6,450NIS that I was trying to collect for over five years and I'm proud that I was given a privilege to be your user three years ago.

While the times go on and new - more powerful systems are created, I feel the need to get a faster and more powerful laptop for the rest of my journey. However, no matter how good, shiny and "speccy" could this new toy ever get, I will never forget you and all the hard work you did for me all this time. I will never sell you away to another person or store you in a dusty closet for the rest of your life - I will take good care of you and spend my time with you until your (or my) last day in this world, and should we ever be separated by a great distance, I will always keep in touch with you over the SSH protocol - over the internet. Who knows, maybe you will be the one who will have to take care of my parents when I'll be working in some big corporation overseas - it will be you who I will have to entrust to keep my family up to date and in contact with me wherever I am.

You've been an irreplaceable help to me - technical and emotional - for three entire years. Hope you will stay with me for as long and even more.

With love, your proud user, Ice.

P.S. Forgive me for not buying you a present in time, my memory is not as good as yours and it completely slipped my mind there. :/

Date:	2007-11-17 01:19
Subject:	Common uses of the Bugge Cavern in Naia
Security:	Public
Mood:	amused
Music:	(Smooth Jazz - sky.fm)

There are lots of rumors about what people use the bugge cave in Naia for. Obviously, none of these rumors involve helping, bugge discussions, meetings or any other official stuff. Since it's our "off-duty" area to relax in and so on, that's pretty much what we do... no?

Date:	2007-11-16 19:52
Subject:	I know what you're wearing tonight!
Security:	Public
Mood:	calm
Music:	(Smooth Jazz - sky.fm)

My family happens to consist of psychic/telepathic freaks and I happen to be one of them! This is rather freaky how these supposedly coincidental things work: synchronous ideas (thinking of something as another and saying it exactly the same at the same moment), long-distance reminders (recalling someone when they think of you a lot), prediction (accidentally predicting an action or guessing something that would otherwise would not be as probable), damage/corruption (unexpected glass explosion, TV screen display messes up), and I have to say that nearly all of these I (or my parents) have witnessed myself if not caused.

I've started really thinking about this today - when my parents told me about how did the older stove that we had break. Apparently, long ago, my father was sitting in front of it and just started staring at the stove "door". At one point, the glass simply shattered - it exploded into little pieces! The stove wasn't being used, there was nobody else in the apartment at that time and the glass was thick enough to resist heat and physical collision with other objects - hell, there was no collision! We can't explain that event even now. Yes - glass can explode in certain conditions, but was it that coincidental that it happened right as my father stared at it?..

Another real (I swear) story: Back in the beginning (or mid) of 2006, I've spent two or even three days summarizing over a year of past that I had in an online relationship with a person I liked. It was back when I visited a small military settlement called "Mutsav `Or ha ner`" (Candlelight Settlement). I was guarding there for a week or so - cute little (and not so environmentally peaceful) place. I ended up having so much free time that I was thinking of all sorts of weird things and that particular summary was one of them - I just got bored one day, looked at my old Furcadia logs and started recalling events - one after another... it lasted for a few days and did pass my time during my guard shifts,so it was cool. The person herself I haven't seen on MSN for nearly a year - never came online and I thought she never will - probably erased me from the friends list or even blocked to hide her online status (which probably ended up as a different MSN name in the end). On the third day something absolutely unbelievable happened - that old MSN account of hers suddenly came to life and she started a chat session with me (I didn't message her yet or anything) - after nearly a year of absence, she suddenly came online and talked to me! Right after I've been thinking about her for several days! I refuse to believe that it was a coincidence - it is impossible...

A similar story was once told by my mother. She does healing massage at a hotel for a job and had a similar event happen to her: One day she recalled one of her clients that hasn't been to Eilat (my home city) for over half a year and what not - he wasn't the most pleasant person to deal with either, so it was a good thing he wasn't there. On the same day she remembered him she was told who her next client for the hour is going to be... after all the time he was absent, they met again... Coincidence?

There are many other small cases where I managed to guess or come by a precise answer to a problem/question that had more than 5 different options, accidentally guess what somebody else was doing on the other side of the phone call of someone else, looked at someone on MSN who hasn't spoke to me in a while and get a message from them soon afterwards... Know it when somebody does something offline while in contact with you on Furc or a messenger and unknowingly, you feel like doing (and do) the same thing just to realize what happened later on? It happened to me as well - two days ago even!

Today I looked at the TV set in our living room and noticed something unusual with it - the picture wasn't too wide for the CRT screen anymore (some messup it had a while back), but looked like this!:

Date:	2007-11-11 19:59
Subject:	Plans for the future
Security:	Public
Mood:	blah
Music:	Peter White (Jazz)

There it starts - the time finally flies through as I get closer and closer to my release date - 24.Jan.2008. Perhaps the only issue with this is that once I'm released on that date as a soldier, I might have to re-enter the army. While with [relatively] better conditions than I currently have and less mandatory stuff, I'll still remain at the same place, probably doing the same thing for approximately one more year. Now even I sometimes say "What the hell are you doing, Ice? You've always dreamed to get out of here and never return, nobody can hold you against your will now - what is wrong with you?!" and the answer to this, while simple, is rather complicated - this may be the best move I can make towards my future...

A while back, I was considering what would be the best step to take. I have three choices in front of me - programming, web-development or network administration. All of them I'm not so bad in and I like to do, and it's only recently that I've completely decided to walk towards network administration first and leave the rest for the future. There are several reasons to this and while they may not be true, that's the impression I've got on the subject at least:

1. NetAdministrators are needed more than programmers in the industry - there would be a need in more people that are capable of operating the existing computer systems properly than those that make new ones. This would mean that network administration would give me a higher chance to get a decent job somewhere.


2. Requirements to become a successful programmer are set too high - while I know how computers work and many scripting languages as well as some ASM and C/C++, the programming they teach in universities now would involve a lot more - mathematics, physics, etc. To get into a university like that I would need to prepare myself and pass something called the "psychometric test" with a decent grade - something like IQ that would measure my knowledge on subjects like English, Hebrew (words with very limited sanity), Math and other stuff. Beforehand, however, I would need to complete my maths to a sufficient level and learn enough Physics just to get accepted - that's a lot of money already, not to mention the costs of the studies themselves! In comparison with the expensive MCSE course, I'd be spending a lot more time and money on just meeting the requirements for the studies! When it comes to MCSE, the basic requirements I already have, so all I need is to know how things are done and I'm ready to work!


3. Programming involves a lot more thinking and guarantees some serious headache every now and then. While the payment is obviously higher for this, I sometimes wonder if it's really worth the investment and what not...

• Transportation - Buses/Trains from one city to another in order to get to the course, from it and home. I'd get free transportation that would otherwise cost me quite a damn lot if done for the entire year.


• Living Quarters - Being in Eilat places me far from pretty much everything - it would take me around three hours to get to the closest city from home and considering that the classes would be more in the center, I'd have to rent a place to stay in or waste money on transportation to and from eilat twice a week - again, living at base saves quite a lot of money otherwise.


• Food - Yet another expense I won't have to worry about, since the army takes care to feed its residents, too...


• Income - While this course and the peripheral stuff would only cause expenses for me, there would be no real income if I leave the army! I would totally drain my parents as a result. In order to save time, I could also work at the army, doing what I already do, and this time I'll be getting quite a good income as well - this would cover up many things than sitting there doing nothing - I'd already be earning money along with all the benefits while I'm still not "suitable" for netadmin work! Once I'm done with the course and the army, I'll be ready to work in a better place and will have a good sum to start off with.

Date:	2007-11-10 23:23
Subject:	Where did that Utils folder go?!
Security:	Public
Mood:	tired
Music:	Marc Antoine - Concache (Sky.fm - Smooth Jazz)

For the sake of freeing up 1.5 - 2 gigabytes of data, I've decided to burn all my collected PocketPC games and apps to CDs. A DVD would be a better solution, of course, but my laptop doesn't have a writer for it, so no DVDs for me yet. No problem however, I simply split Games and Software to different (more-less equally-sized) CDs and get rid of all that crap on my laptop afterwards!

Well, it seemed to have worked fine - both CDs were burnt and seemed to work, but as the Murphy's Laws go, there was something I apparently overlooked. Today as I was looking through the software CD for the latest KeePassPPC version, I realized the horrible truth - my Utils folder was completely empty - blank - contentless!! Perhaps the largest folder of useful programs apparently wasn't burnt to the CD and was gone with my wipe afterwards. Sounds great, doesn't it?.. Oh well, at least I still have some of those utils on my PocketPC device at least. I should just take care not to lose it from there...

Lesson of the day
When possible, prepare a separate folder that would contain all the contents you want to move to a CD. From there you will move the entire folder structure as it is to disc (this I have already done though). Once done, to verify that the folder structures don't miss anything, we are going to be using the diff like this:

Date:	2007-10-27 01:27
Subject:	Unexpected surprises
Security:	Public
Mood:	frustrated
Music:	Seal - Amazing

Considering that Kubuntu 7.10 was recently released and I already downloaded the CD image, I've decided that I will install it over Vector tonight. Now I don't have much against Vector - it seems like a nice distribution and it hasn't failed me yet as well as being pretty fast on my old 800MHz Pentium3 desktop machine, but being based on Slackware, it has a very poor repository where I can barely find any software that I need. I couldn't easily make it perfectly synchronize with Kubuntu on my laptop and some of the limitations this imposed on me kind of annoyed me to a point where I felt like trying the latest Kubuntu out...

Alright then - let's begin: I burnt the Kubuntu image to a CD, backed the necessary files up to my mobile hard-drive, shut the box down and connected one of the CD-ROMs. I boot the machine up and realize that the disc doesn't want to boot - it keeps on being read for quite a long while (after which, Vector's booter starts, pointing out that the boot from CDROM has failed). I checked the disc on my laptop and it worked, so it's clearly the CD-ROM that's broken.

"No problem", I thought, I have another CD-ROM installed underneath! I've connected that one instead and figured that the lower CD-ROM doesn't want to open up and some tray-forcing will be necessary. Forcing the tray out got me a rather nasty surprise - one of the ripped rubber stripes came out along with the tray, showing a clear fact that this drive is also not operational. That got me rather annoyed since the 3rd CD-ROM I had laying somewhere, had its BIOS messed up and wouldn't work. A better-than-nothing attempt to plug it in and use it confirmed that little fact for me.

So there I am now - 3 CDROMs, all broken supposedly, and no way to install Linux tonight. PXE is something I prefer not to mess with 'cause I feel this will cause me a good (and I mean bad) headache too and I don't need it in the middle of the night... I effectively give up for tonight and will have to wait for my brother to wake up tomorrow. Hopefully, I can borrow a drive from him for this purpose. If he has no spares, I'll have to do some shopping...

Conclusion: Mission Failed

Date:	2007-10-12 21:42
Subject:	Extracting the RCH2.0 file from furcsetup.exe
Security:	Public
Mood:	creative
Music:	F.P.S - Angel

And so my exploration about the furcsetup.exe program continues. So far, it reached the point of me making an extractor program in C++ to take the Furcadia package out of there and the program itself is shown below. I felt like practicing C++ a little while I'm at it because while Python scripting is sure nice and easy, I also want some experience in a real programming language. Thus, every now and then, I try to make things in C++ to see if I'm old/experienced enough for it. ;)

So far I know the following things about the Furcadia installer used by DEP:

The Furcadia installer is a program made by sanctimonious many years ago in order to automatically install Furcadia on a Windows machine. The program contains a package file of Furcadia's RCH 2.0 format within itself at a specific offset (0x30000 at the time of writing). The files within the RCH2 package are extracted into the specific filepath that is chosen in the installer earlier by the user (or c:\Program Files\Furcadia\ by default).

The RCH2.0 format is as follows:

Date:	2007-10-09 21:06
Subject:	Things you should never type into the terminal
Security:	Public
Mood:	sleepy
Music:	Daft Punk - Discovery

Yesterday night I was doing my holy task of spreading the word of Linux among the common folk still unaware of it. This time it was one of my friends that left the army already and came back here for a couple of days. He seemed fascinated about the idea of free software and the entire operating system with what it is capable of, so I've spent the entire evening showing him around - what's where and how both Ubuntu and Kubuntu look like on the 7.10beta Live CDs.

Everything went fine until I've got excited enough to show him that only root can mess up the entire system, so I showed him how a user has read/exec-only access by trying to delete a file, then proceeded to do the forbidden as root: I typed rm -rf * from within the root directory. It seemed to be a pretty harmless trick, considering that it all was in the LiveCD which was on a temporary filesystem, so I typed that and we started to watch the process - how programs stop launching, how the wallpaper disappears and how disastrous this procedure can be if you still have your external media drive mounted!

I realized it too late - the data LED lit up on the media drive and it took it a couple of seconds to wipe my 35GB collection of music and the rest of the media along with it - the XFS filesystem that the media drive used has proven how fast and effective it can be at such a task - now if it could only undelete files... But alas, I've made a mistake, I've started showing off and the effectiveness of my own systems has taken down gigabytes of data in a matter of seconds! Since the filesystem doesn't support undeletion, I've decided to accept the loss of my media and start from scratch rather than digging mp3 parts from within the hard drive - it really doesn't worth the hassle, at least for me...

To look at the event from an optimistic point of view, I now have a lot of free space for more recent (and possibly better) music and data - that "unforeseen cleanup" is something I might've needed since knowing us - we tend to grab lots of music, then istead of cleaning up the songs we don't listen to, we stockpile them on the drive and keep on adding to it on a daily basis until the space runs out. When that happens, we obviously buy a bigger drive instead of freeing some space - it's easier! Of course it's a pity that some of the movies are gone (Resident Evil for instance), but it's not like I can't find them again anywhere. Looks like this weekend will be a weekend of rebirth - rebirth of my media collections!

The morals of today's story: Never type rm -rf /* on the terminal - even if it's [supposedly] controlled and it's fun to see what happens, the Murphy's law can fire up at any moment and your critical data may become lost. I could've had my entire laptop wiped clean, too, should I have mounted it, but I was very lucky there. I normally don't do "redundant" things like these, but sometimes you've got to try something like that for the sake of curiosity of something, no?.. :P

Date:	2007-10-06 21:25
Subject:	Command-line Furcadia Installer - Thoughts and Reasons
Security:	Public
Mood:	thoughtful
Music:	mind.in.a.box (Crossroads album)

Today I've been thinking about a way to optimize my Furcadia updates. Being in the army on a very limited GPRS connection (100 MegaBytes/month) has its own little impact on downloading Furcadia installers and applying updates, and if such updates are mandatory and I'm out of spare bandwidth - I'd be rather stuck. Now since I don't really want to be stuck, I've got to come up with something better - I need to do what I was born to do and find a solution to this particular problem.

As of right now, Furcadia updates are anything but optimized - meaning you've got to download the entire package again and install it over the older one in order to update. A more space-conserving method would be to download only the files that are different, but implementing something like this for some 6-7MB would be bothersome and it would also attract additional problems that a common computer-illiterate user would encounter (and, therefore, cause), so no "intelligent" updates for us in the near future!

As a Linux user, I enjoy cheap, fast and powerful remote control capability (as obviously the SSH terminal takes a lot less bandwidth than Remote Desktop on Windows and can take even less if compressed) and have access to a bunch of fast servers as well as the one at home, so I could theoretically make one of the fast machines download the installer, install Furcadia, then transfer me only the files that actually changed - something that I'm sure would take significantly less bandwidth than transfer me the entire thing. The only problem is that I have to use wine (which server machines obviously don't have) and the graphical interface to click "Next >" all the time. I can't just do the setup from the command line - there is no such option!

So what do I do? While I can launch wine from home, I can't waste my bandwidth and time to wait for every graphical item to refresh itself - it would take as much as downloading furcsetup and doing it myself! Asking DEP to produce a command-line installer is out of the question - while sanctimonious will be in a very amused mood for the entire week, he won't do this. Asking Ash-Fox to install Furc every time and copy the files to one of his servers would be absurd, so the only thing left for me to do is to try and extract the data from within the installer, then process it so I have all the files in their original form where they should be. Since the latest installer seems to have bzip2 file headers within itself at around the offset 0x30044, chances are that this particular task is something that I will be able to do and even automate.

Let's hope that the present Furcadia installer remains for quite a while - this would be the next place that I haven't yet explored in the Furcadia realm. ;)

I will probably write down the progress on this here, so if interested, you can watch...

Date:	2007-09-27 15:32
Subject:	Crossroads
Security:	Public
Mood:	cheerful
Music:	mind.in.a.box - Redefine

My music listening variation during the past three days has been reduced to just mind.in.a.box and for a reason! Their 3rd album called "Crossroads" is now out and it brings one's dormant addiction to this excellent music back to life - for people like me, even to a point where mind.in.a.box all they listen to all day long! Crossroads continues the everlasting storyline of the MIAB world and brings the fans of such a unique electronic music more fresh content to feed their lust on.

My personal favorites in this album were the Stalkers song and Redefine which brought chills through me with its seemingly perfect combination between electronic music and the computer-processed vocals.

For more information about mind.in.a.box, check out their website at www.mindinabox.com or the Wikipedia article here.


I was first introduced to the music of Stefan Poiss (MIAB) many years back through the Parsec Project which featured his music. It was downloadable from that very site for free at a good quality, too! My brother followed the project for quite a while to see where it goes as it was also something that we like - space shooters! This was a multiplayer one, though it doesn't seem like it managed to see the light unfortunately - the project went open-source, the site is all frozen and the last news entry dates back to year 2003. Shame, I would like to try it out, considering that it's a cross-platform toy. Right now it's only LAN-compatible, however and something tells me that trying it over Hamachi will still be a bandwidth issue...

Needless to say, besides the nice graphics, my brother liked the music and so did I. From that site I then stumbled over the mind.in.a.box project and hearing the demo songs on that site, got instantly addicted. Back from their first album "Lost Alone" me and Ash were known to memorize the entire "Change" song (my favorite in that album if you didn't notice) and say its words in turns on IRC, Furcadia, everywhere! It was that good and catchy! Now I carry the words of Redefine in my description on Furcadia instead of the original description of my character (Reference) - am I going insane? Probably not in comparison to some others, but I sure am addicted to this music yet again. ;)

mind.in.a.box is known to play on some web-radios, namely those which play Industrial music, though when I listen to some other industrial music, this particular music differs from the rest - I find it somewhat less "annoying" and more long-lasting when you repeatively play it. Hell - I'm doing it right now and I'm yet to get tired of it!

Who needs drugs if there's mind.in.a.box?.. ;)

Date:	2007-09-24 12:10
Subject:	Bending the rules
Security:	Public
Mood:	bored

Out of all the people on my airforce base, I must be one of the few who managed to break nearly every single rule of guarding, not only at their base, but also at the two-week remote guard in another base. Throughout these years in the army, I've broken so many of these rules in all sorts of unique ways that I simply lost track!

These two weeks' rules and violations include without limitation:

Date:	2007-09-24 08:20
Subject:	And so I return...
Security:	Public
Mood:	tired
Music:	None

Well now, how long has it been since I last used LJ? Four years? Feels like it was longer than that. I left this place, somewhat taken away from writing and later on decided to make a web log of my own on my personal webspace. In a few words, that project failed due to me underestimating my laziness and today, something pushed me back here to try again and see if I can do something more advanced with this...

I'm not going to summarize what happened to me throughout all these years - quite a damn lot to write about and my memory isn't that organized for this book. Those who were with me would know the story while the others don't have much to miss out of it. All I can say is that it's been fun, yet lots of time was wasted on the army and the work that I do there, which is completely unrelated to what I am and where I'm trying to go. Oh well, the army times are about to be over - in about three months. Then, I will get back on track slowly and continue pursuing my technological destiny.

Meanwhile, I'm playing with Python, XML-RPC and LJ, so things are not yet solid. I will probably get the layout up to scale tomorrow when I'm back home. There will be no bandwidth restrictions for me there (that I'm violating quite a lot already).

Stay tuned!