Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Perching Planes

Found this interesting article.

Looks like some smart people at MIT have been studying the aerodynamics of birds and planes, and have designed a Glider that can perch on a wire (like a bird).

Read on to watch a video of it in action.

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Seacom problems

Or the alternate title of “Why your inability to access international content is your ISP’s fault, and not Seacom’s”
Or “Why your cheap-as-chips residential ADSL Broadband account is broken, and why I don’t care”

I could go on with all the complaints that I’ve heard over the last 24 hours, and all the stupid reasoning behind those complaints. But I won’t. I’ll try and be helpfully informative.

So we’ll start with the facts:

• Seacom is one of the Submarine fiber cables that connect South Africa to Europe.
• There are other ways out of South Africa to Europe, that do not rely on Seacom.
• Residential ADSL users are quite far down the list of priorities for most ISP’s.
• Business users on leased lines account for significantly more income than ADSL users.
• You get what you pay for.

Your choice of ISP should take all of these facts into account:

• Does your ISP have multiple international circuits?
• Are these circuits physically diverse (ie: not the same cable).
• Are you actually paying for a service that will make use of the backup circuits in the event of a failure?

Chances are, unless you have a leased line service, and you pay something in the region of R20000 a month for it, you will be affected by the Seacom problems.

It would be incredibly naive of any ISP to expect that a single upstream provider will be up 100% of the time. Seacom do not promise a 100% uptime, so how can you expect that level of service if you rely solely on them?

The solution for the ISPs? Use one of those other forms of international connectivity. Such as the SAT3-SAFE cable. Sure, thats expensive, so only use that for your “premium” customers. Like those guys paying R20000+ a month for their leased lines. They’ll get what they pay for.

And that there, is the difference between the R900 you pay a month for 4mbit ADSL, and R20000 per month for 4mbit leased line.

You get what you pay for.

mini-guide: Basic OpenVPN Server

This post is especially for Rommel. He saw my last mini-guides on OpenVPN on RouterOS, and wanted to know how to set up an OpenVPN Server on Linux that operates the same as the OpenVPN Server in RouterOS.

So, this one will be short and simple, as there are a thousand different ways to do an OpenVPN Server on linux, but this way will make it work the same way its configured in my mini-guide.

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News: HOWTO

BBC, Sky, RTE. They all seem to have the same News story format.

So, here’s the template that they all use. (Caution, contains a few naughty words)

No dust-bunnies were harmed during the making of this post

I cleaned my desk today.

I’m so proud of myself, that I’m posting pictures to celebrate! Read the rest of this entry »

This is not a Hack

I’ve noticed an annoying trend lately, and its starting to get on my nerves.

Every 2nd person who figures something out on their own, is writing up a HOWTO.
This isn’t a problem. Its the fact that they’re calling it a “Hack” thats getting on my nerves.

A Hack is where you take something, and make it do something it was never designed to do. Not using something that was designed to do something, to do something slightly similar. Thats not a hack, thats an adaptation.

Well, thats my rant for the day. If anyone wants to sponsor some real gadget hacking, let me know and I’m sure we can work something out

Funding? Anyone?

I have so many nifty things I want to do. So many Ideas floating around in my head, from the nifty to the bizarre.

And they all involve gadgets of some description…

Anyone want to fund my exploits?

Possibly cooler than Photosynth

Yes.

Now my little stick figure drawings can actually look decent.

This is possibly the coolest thing ever.

Researchers have come up with a way of taking your stick figure drawings (and keywords), and using them to find actual images that match. Then compositing them to create the complete image you were thinking of.

From Crunchgear

I feel better now

I’m not sure about you, but I’m glad that someone has taken the time to do this research.

I link you to a paper titled, “When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical  Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection” by Philip Munz, Ioan Hudea, Joe Imad et al.

Thanks guys, I believe this paper is a step in the right direction. The better we understand our enemy, the more prepared we are to protect the world from the impending Zombie Apocalypse

(Thanks Dave for sending me the link to the paper)

Numb

Its my on-call week, and its been a killer so far.

At the moment, I’ve got a guy on-site transferring a new IOS image to a Cisco Router (which is long looong past its End of Life date), over a Serial cable with XModem. This is going to take a while (its 1am).

Last night, I was up from 00:30 until 03:00 trying to figure out why a router dropped off the network. Only to be told this morning that it was due to planned works being carried out by a 3rd-party. Oops, we forgot to tell you.

So, I’m cranky, sleep deprived, and can barely focus on my screen. But thats fine, I’m only oncall until Friday.

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