Assorted updates, week 18

This week has been mostly about preparing for the move, which will take place at the end of the month. The new apartment is hopefully ready at this time (the day it is supposed to be ready is 16.5). If not, well, then we have 100 square meters of stuff with no place to go. Maybe i’ll dump it at the office….

Speaking of the office, there’s been a lot of cool stuff happening there as well. New hardware coming in, new stuff to learn. It doesn’t seem to be slowing down toward the summer just yet. Lately, i’ve mostly been learning more things about IBM hardware, VMWare and installing a very cool piece of IBM Power7 hardware. Work is more interesting than it ever was!

But back to the other stuff. Moving is arduous business. There are papers to be filed, documents to be signed. And the packing of the god-damn boxes. So far i’ve:

• Canceled the old rental agreement
• Signed the new rental agreement
• Sent in a paper to the maintenance company to take our names off the door etc. by the end of this month
• Sent in a paper to the new maintenance company to put up our names at the new place
• Arranged for the transfer of my power contract
• Arranged for the transfer of the home insurance to the new apartment
• Official moving announcement to the magistrate
• Ordered 30 boxes to put our stuff in
• Arranged for a van (thanks B)

And i’m stressed out of my mind.

On top of this, i’m participating in a research on early detection of psychoses (as a control patient. don’t worry, i’m not that crazy just yet..), which included an extensive neuropsychological questionaire and test, an MRI scan, and some labwork. The MRI was fascinating business. The device was a 3 Tesla scanner, by General Electric. That’s a pretty powerful magnetic field it can generate, there. The scan took a little over an hour, and consisted of one anatomical “classic” scan, at a high resolution and different angles, and then two different fMRI’s (functional MRI), which measure brain activity during (in this case) answering questions, and watching a 10 minute clip of a movie. The scanner takes one (quite low resolution) image every 2.3 seconds, and then makes a “gif” out of the activity, which can be correlated to whatever question or thing you were watching at the time. This was then processed by a very powerful HP workstation (an xw8400 if i’m not mistaken), and then burnt on a disc and sent to a radiologist. I was allowed to look at some of the images, and boy was that cool! Turns out i do have a brain in there!

I sold my aquarium, and it’s being picked up on saturday. This means i won’t have to move it ever again. It’s kind of sad at the same time, but i’m glad to get rid of it. It’s been with me since 2005, and i’ve had an aquarium for the past.. what.. 15 years or so? The last original fish, an armored catfish, had survived for about that time, died a few months ago. It was probably more than 15 years old.

I came into posession of a Linksys WRT54G last week, but to my dismay, it was a version 7, which has the Atheros chipset, instead of the Broadcom, and is therefore about as useful as a cock-flavored lollipop. It’s not supported by any of the major distributions of “router linux”, openwrt or dd-wrt, and there are i think no plans to add support either. A bit sad. But maybe it’ll get a good home somewhere, or i’ll figure out a way to put it to good use. My OpenBSD router/pf machine crashed last weekend, i think due to a faulty secondary hard drive. I didn’t spend too much time debuging it; instead i just took out the drive (a Western Digital Green-series 1TB drive..my second of this type to break), and put in a smaller drive. Since 4.9 just came out, i decided to upgrade to that while i was at it. Install went well, and pf config was mostly intact from 4.8. I think they corrected some feature with the built-in egress-macro (?) , because it now worked better than in 4.8, where i decided to use my own macro instead.

Ubuntu 11.04 is also out, but i clicked “Don’t upgrade”. Unity can suck my ballsack, and i don’t think i’ll ever upgrade to that. It’s very possible that 10.10 is the last iteration of Ubuntu i will ever use, unless they somehow magically decide to backtrack to a sensible UI. KDE isn’t an option, and well, while i like XFCE, i don’t think i would run that as an everyday WM. I have been looking into Arch, and it seems like a solid choice. I have been using Linux for 12 years now, so maybe it’s time to take the training-wheels off anyway..

I got my Sony fail-mail last friday along with, oh, 77 million other people. I don’t own a PS3, but i have used PSN on a console, and registered for an account. I didn’t use a credit card though, luckily, so at least i won’t have to cancel that. And i’m lucky in that i very, very rarely use the same password anywhere, so i won’t have to worry about that either. But still, it’s nice to be a part of something bigger than me! Sony started blaming Anonymous a while ago, due to, alledgedly, a file left on a system that has the words “Anonymous” and “We are Legion” in them. That qualifies as proof i guess. And hey Sony, maybe if you play the blamegame long enough, nobody will notice that you (alledgedly) had an unpatched box on your fucked up network that enabled the attack in the first place!! I mean, if it was Anonymous, then who the hell cares about anything else, right? How about this instead: You man the fuck up, and say: Hey, we had an unpatched box, and we stored and trafficked data in an unsecure manner. We’re sorry, and we’ll work to create a better system. And try to be open about that new system, so people can test it, and point out flaws while you’re at it. Instead, i’m hearing that they are “fixing problems and coming out with a “new and improved PSN” very soon!”. Which means, they are spending didley-squat on security, audits and whatever, and just concentrating on getting back online ASAP. Which means, sooner or later, you are going to get fucked over again. But maybe that’s someone elses fault as well, and it won’t matter that you just lost the personal information of like half of the worlds console-gamers. Wake up, Sony. This alone is a good excuse not to buy one of your shitty, propietary consoles. If only it weren’t such a good bluray player..

There’s a 2600 meeting happening everywhere today, so go there. I’m going.