News archive 2003 - Koos van den Hout

Linux kernel 2.6.0 out and mirrored again at work: http://archive.cs.uu.nl/mirror/Linux/kernel/v2.6/.

SCO Unixware 7.1.3 review (SCOX). Besides SCO being a pain in the neck of the Linux community their products are lousy.

Current e-mail spam rate: 243.5 spam messages per day.

This week I had the 'pleasure' of reviving an old MS-DOS system.

First of all, the only backup I had was under Linux, so I wanted both
Linux and MS-DOS to boot. I threw in a simple IDE disk and let the
bios detect it and set it up.

Linux is fine with that. MS-DOS isn't.

I formatted a primary partition on it under MS-DOS 6.22, restored
the MS-DOS backup via Linux, booted MS-DOS and it came up with a
corrupted C:. Read something about FORMAT of MS-DOS 6.22 being
weird, zero-ed out the first block of the partition, formatted it again
with FORMAT of MS-DOS 6.22, booted. Corrupted C:.

Got annoyed, this was costing me serious time (once, ages ago, this
Pentium-90 was 'blazingly fast'. But even Linux catches up.)

The fix was to setup the disk correctly in the BIOS. 'Normal' mode worked
a lot better. Used 'SYS C:' to restore MS-DOS 6.22 once more without
reformatting, made sure with SCANDISK that my data was there again and
readable.

Getting an IDE cd-rom to work under MS-DOS is easy, once you get the
drivers for ide cd-rom under MS-DOS.

Ja ik ben lang en ik fiets lekker door, maar daarom kan ik het nog niet waarderen als je minder dan een halve meter achter me fietst.

Updated Kismet Log Viewer so the generated pages use mapquest URLs which are a lot more useful here then US census URLs. Results show nicely in that second train trip from last weekend.

Sitting in a train with my laptop running Kismet and enhanced with a gpskit I logged several wireless networks and even managed to get a location fix for part of them on the second day. Kismet log view from the first trip and the return trip. Tip: GPS reception in a NS train is flaky, try the upper level and stick the antenna to the upper part of the window. Do note the logged speed from the GPS: the train went up to 144 km/h.

The first really public RSS feed I created is for The Virtual Bookcase where I created an RSS feed of new reviews.

Made my first RSS feed (not of my homepage, because then it would be a blog which it isn't). Using available modules, that is quite simple. The resulting RSS 1.0 feed shows dublin core metatags, which reminded me of web projects at Cetis ages ago.

Created findnumber to look up phone numbers (from isdnlog) in the backup of my Palm addressbook.

Installed mod_gzip on the webserver serving you this page. Checking results for output from The Virtual Bookcase where large html pages are served a lot.

The Friday Afternoon URL page has been enhanced with a linkchecker.

Mirjam has her own homepage with favicon.ico (don't miss it).

Warbiking around my house in Utrecht. Three access-points with default as ESSID and WEP disabled.

Write-up about my experiences with installing Linux on the Dell Latitude C640.

First experiences in wardriving/warwalking (finding wireless networks). Walking around in the Uithof, Utrecht from one building to the other and driving Utrecht-Uithof to Culemborg and back. Data gathered with Kismet and converted to HTML with Kismet log viewer.

Programmed all TV channels in my TV. Counted them. 35. Tried them all. Nothing on.

I got a load of topsitez spam today and found a nice page which confirms that topsites are sending spam for their directory listing scam. Don't fall for this scam!

New things at The Virtual Bookcase. The first feature article about a quite interesting book Weapons of Mass Delusion: America's Real National Emergency. The article framework uses HTML 4.01 and the first stylesheet (finally.. stylesheets).

Removed the last of the coax network at home. But my cat Vlekkie disagreed on the total removal and I took a picture.

Quagga coolest ever open source routing software replacing Zebra.

Yes.. I have a girlfriend. *bounce* happy.

For the last months a demolition project made me adjust my route
to work so I can see the daily progress.

A row of houses on two sides of a road in Utrecht is being demolished
to be replaced by modern houses. The houses look like they are from
before 1940 but I am not sure about that. Separate doors for the
upper and lower houses.

At first the deterioration of the houses was postponed as much as
possible. Curtains where left in, giving the houses the look of
being lived in up until the moment that fences were put up around
them.

It is interesting to see how modern 'demolition' is in fact a
complete recycling work. A big crane, perfectly capable of making
one of these houses dissapear by driving through it does the work.
But, bits and pieces are removed, separating wooden beams and wooden
windowframes from metal (heating, pipes) and any stone (the walls).

The wooden floors are actually removed as a whole and people remove the
nails (!).

I took some pictures of this whole process.

In the first picture a garden shed is taken apart. Someone's pride
and joy which took years to perfect (probably) is carefully separated
in concrete blocks and wood.

In the third picture, a wooden beam (part of a windowframe) gets removed.
The crane uses its very controlled power to just grip the beam and remove it.

The work is done by Van Vliet Sloopwerken.

Back from another trip.. I've been walking in Iceland. Mail for URL for the pictures.

Visit the [URL expired] Madonna remix project.

Pictures from my Scandinavia trip are on-line now. Mail for URL.

Back from a camping trip around Norway and Sweden. New northernmost location I visited: N66'49" E15'30" Mapquest link.

Topsnelheid op mijn fiets wind mee helling af was zondag 49 km/uur.

I have a 3com 3300 switch at home, very nice to have for VLANs and enough
ports.

But for home use it has one disadvantage. Noise. It is geared towards
being used in cramped cabling spaces where it needs to blow a lot of air
to get itself cool.

In a home, that is too much noise.

First step: finding instructions how to open it.
(Thanks to Neil Hoggarth)

- Remove rack mount flanges
- Remove any expansion module
- Invert the case
- Remove 4 torex bolts from the underside
- Open plastic tabs (careful) and lift system from case

Second step: finding the fans

It has 2 Papst 612 NG fans on the inside (12V, 200mA). Size: 60x60x25 mm.

And a generally nice and clean design on the inside too.

Papst has a really nice website with catalogs (pdf format)
of their products. So I downloaded the catalog.

It denies the 612 NG fan. It does show several other 612-fans (all
60x60x25 mm and 12 volt supply). The most interesting in this row
is the fan with built-in automatic speed control by temperature,
either the 612 NGMI (sleeve bearing) or the 612 NMI (ball bearing).

Update: bought a new 612 NGN fan. It now uses only one fan (is
enough, given the temperature of the outgoing air). The main cause
of the noise seems to be the way the fan is seated in the housing,
which leaves a lot of room for resonance.

Sign the petition against a remake of the movie that is one of the true classics: Casablanca.

Digitenne geeft een mooie steek onderwater naar upc in haar nieuwsbrief: In Amsterdam kunt u dan ook zonder satellietschotel aan de gevel weer naar Discovery Channel en Eurosport kijken, en nu zelfs overal in en om het huis dankzij Digitenne. Digitenne begint 23 april met DVB-T (Digital Video Broadcasting) in de regio Amsterdam/Almere.

Write-up of our April 1st joke: the helpdesk autoreply AI bot.. using the bofh excuses.

By popular demand, my picture site has been updated with a main index of the public stuff.

Fixed the focus on my webcam so you can see again what is happening. My best guess is my cats have touched it again.

War, what is it good for? absolutely nothing, other then interesting creations here, here and Collected by jwz.

I bundled the scripts I use to collect ntp stats in mrtg so other people can enjoy them too.

My snowboard report card (anyone for a translation?)

I AM GEORGE WALKER BUSH, SON OF THE FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA GEORGE HERBERT WALKER BUSH...

Back from a week snowboarding in Les Gets. Deeeeeep powdersnow and my snowboarding has improved.

I got mentioned on slashdot.. sort of.

An explanation for the white stuff outside. It is snow.

Cool Mozilla trick: bookmark http://teletekst.nos.nl/gif/%s-01.html and then set the keyword to txt. Typing txt 192 in your mozilla bar will give you teletekst page 192.

Happy new year to all visitors.. with the fireworks image from my webcam.