News items for tag shiny - Koos van den Hout

One of our users at work reported today that he noticed the 'Previous Versions' tab in windows explorer being active and showing what we think of as the snapshots of the NetApp fileserver. I tried it myself on the windows 2008 terminal server and it works as it should. As my boss noted this is a very important step: having snapshots available is one thing, but having them available in the standard interface which (experienced) windows users can use makes quite a difference. Helpdesk page about filesystem snapshots updated.

Todays xkcd is very amusing! As a system administrator I can imagine the need for making sure important infrastructure like the blog of a cat.

Friday, time for the Friday Afternoon URL page which you can also follow on twitter as @fridayaftURL to get fresh Friday Afternoon URLs in your twitter feed!

Even with my head clouded by a serious cold I had to create my lolcaption when I saw this picture and caption at ROFLRazzi Goes Romantic…ish. My take on it: Dingdong! .. Nobody home!

The first friday with the friday afternoon url page using Twitter @fridayaftURL to deal out the weekly dose of Friday afternoon fun.
Technically it all worked. But with myself and only a german url shortening service following it there isn't much of an audience yet! Time to do something about that.

Sheldon explains the cloud.

I'm happy with my B+M ixon iq light on my recumbent bicycle but some people need more light, for example when cycling through the woods in Finland: Jukan put together a 24-watt 1680 lumen led light monster.
Found via Unreasonably bright bike light apparently hunts deer - Hack a Day (although the deer that seems to be in the resized picture is some bushes in the original picture).

I just put a printout of the Google homepage under a barcode scanner and it indeed says: Google.

Van de volkskrant site, een video over de Land Rover Defender:

Als ik dat zo zie blijf ik er bij dat de Land Rover Discovery meer mijn keuze zou zijn als ik er veel geld voor beschikbaar had en te maken had met het soort weg en terrein waar zo'n soort auto zin heeft. Voor de aardigheid, een promotievideo voor de Landrover Discovery er bij:

I'm typing this while sitting in the Thalys high-speed train between Antwerp and Brussels (so no 300 km/h yet). The first class has free wi-fi Internet access. I had to lower the mtu of the wireless interface to be able to use ssh and screen to access my normal home environment, so path mtu discovery is probably b0rken somewhere. I appear from a Belgian IP, no idea how they do the uplink from the train.
Update 2009-03-06: Found on the Thalys website: WiFi - Internet access for everyone! with an explanation how satellite Internet and UMTS/GPRS are used to tunnel the Internet to the train. The whole tunneling thing is probably what is causing the mtu problem.

I made my own lolcat: Tender was sleeping on the couch near the laptop charger. I first tried to setup a picture but she was annoyed at my attempts to put the cable near her but 5 minutes later she went to sleep again. Recharging: 95% complete.

I got reminded of my Alcatel stats again and some google searches and some combining of clues (the logical place would be in the 'td call' command) led me to the right answer at DMTv7 für Speedtouch 516 536 546 585 608 706 716 780 to get the dsl linestats from a Speedtouch 546/546i: :td call cmd="tdsl getData all". Trying it:

*              ____/
*
------------------------------------------------------------------------
=>:td call cmd="tdsl getData all"

=====================DISCLAIMER======================
 Access to expert commands is intended for qualified 
 personnel only.                                     
==================END=OF=DISCLAIMER==================

Vendor Information
   phyType=2  phyMjVerNum=4  phyMnVerNum=0 
   phyVerStr=B2pBT004.d15b 
   drvMjVerNum=14  drvMnVerNum=20482 
   drvVerStr=15b 

And suddenly lots of data including the signal/noise ratio per carrier. So after stopping gathering Alcatel Speedtouch graphs in 2005 because I switched to a Speedtouch 546i I can now gather the stats again and create the graphs daily. In the mean time gnuplot changed a bit but with some tweaking of the plotscript I now have the first S/N graph of the 546i as I want it.

It being Friday afternoon I fired up vlc to see if there were any interesting announcements of multicast streams. And yet another university, this time one in the UK was leaking their entire TV program lineup (all UK terrestrial programs, which is quite a list). I tried the programs but nothing worked until I tried the last one: BBC HD. This one does work, giving over 20 megabit of video in HD. Screenshot of the BBC HD logo animation (1600x1080px)

High level of friday afternoon in this one: Microsoft research came up with songsmith software and 'promotes' it with a very very cheesy video (notice the brand of the laptop?). Songsmith is software to add music to signing. What people started doing is taking voice tracks from existing music and letting songsmith add new music, leading to the most interesting ways to make you cringe: We Will Rock You - Queen versus Songsmith, "Beat It" by Michael Jackson, and a metal rickroll just to be sure.

More people considered programmig twitter, and thinkgeek sells a device to make your plants send a twitter message when they need water.

I have a twitter. Somebody invited me for reasons I don't know but I thought "why not". It is so inviting to hook this up to some scripts so I can auto-process homepage updates or other automated scripts. Or hook it up to some sort of ticket system at work (probably on a separate account) so our users can follow our network changes.

I watched Wargames: The Dead Code (2008) this weekend. I'm not the movie reviewing type, but for this time I'll write something reviewish.
Why? The original: WarGames (1983). It must be the movie that influenced me most. It got me more interested in computers, taught me about modems, which led to BBSes, which led to Internet. I must have seen the original Wargames at least 30 times, if not more. Once in a movie theatre (probably in 1983/1984) but years later I taped it from TV and that tape was wearing out by the time I bought it on vhs tape and a few years later I bought the DVD.
This (Wargames, the dead code) is a weak remake. The original may not be a cinematographic masterpiece but this one has a lot less of a story. They try to build a number of parallels with the original but on some occasions that starts to look quite artificial.
At the end the big storyline is the same: big computer tries to take over US air defense and is about to cause total annihilation, hacker kid makes the computer think again by running a high number of simulations and finding out the best strategic move is not to play.
Transplantation from the 1980s to 2008 was done ok: cold war threat and parents that were unaware of their kids situation because of two jobs were replaced by terrorism threat, a father gone under suspicious circumstances and a single working mom. A lot of the 'the computer is watching you' stuff seemed to me right from 'Enemy of the state'.
I really missed a high-ranking officer saying "I'd piss on a sparkplug if it would do any good!"

Just seen in the ntp stats: A peak of 3271 packets/second of ntp traffic on ntp.cs.uu.nl.

Good to very good radio conditions at the moment. I just picked the following out of the air in the attic:

tune to: 674000000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_8_MHZ:FEC_AUTO:FEC_AUTO:QAM_AUTO:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL_AUTO:HIERARCHY_NONE
Network Name 'WDR D'
0x0000 0x0064: pmt_pid 0x1330 ARD -- MDR S-Anhalt (running)
0x0000 0x0081: pmt_pid 0x1320 ARD -- NDR FS NDS * (running)
0x0000 0x00e2: pmt_pid 0x1340 ARD -- SWR Fernsehen RP (running)
0x0000 0x0104: pmt_pid 0x1310 ARD -- WDR Düsseldorf (running)
0x0000 0x0109: pmt_pid 0x1350 ARD -- WDR Wuppertal * (running)
0x0000 0x010b: pmt_pid 0x1360 ARD -- WDR Duisburg (running)

Totally unviewable due to all the errors, but the service list is correct. This should be the transmitter in Wesel, Germany at 113 Kilometer distance. Later on I realized how special this was: several hours later there wasn't even a hint of signal on 674 MHz. This was probably due to tropopsheric ducting, I saw an active area forecasted on William Hepburn's tropospheric ducting forecasts from roughly the center of the Netherlands going to the east.

I also saw Dutch Mobile-TV at 522 MHz (Utrecht), 530 MHz (several locations, weak signal), 570 MHz (several locations), 658 MHz (Lelystad).

A complete scan at the highest point in the house gives me several more instances of Digitenne signals. As mentioned before, at 618 MHz Digitenne bouquet 1 with TV Noord-Holland, but also at 786 MHz and 826 MHz bouquet 2. These can come from a number of locations, I can only find out with a directional antenna. Due to the way several stations broadcast exactly the same program at the same frequency there is no way of knowing which station is transmitting it. The fact that the signals have to be exactly the same to avoid interference means there can be no identifying bits somewhere within the dvb datatream. I think it is way cool that transmitter technology is this far that we can transmit the same signal from different locations without interfering with eachother. It is probably the robustness against multipath interference that makes this possible: having more transmitters with the same signal is a form of multipath interference. DVB experiments page updated with these latest experiences.