c0t0d0s0.org

The webservice sleepingtime.org is a good example about information about our habits we give to the public without explicitly publishing them. 11pm to 5 am is astonishingly precise.

The german IT news portal Heise linked to an interesting paper: "Anonymous Bluetooth Probes for Measuring Airport Security Screening Passage Time: The Indianapolis Pilot Deployment".

An interesting concept: Anybody who just start the Bluetooth scan on her/his notebook knows that there are several mobile phones on almost any given location with a large audience propagating a unique id to the world by their MAC address. Using this information to derive some useful facts from it (for example: Duration of the average TSA massage) looks like as one of the more worthy targets for tradeoffs on privacy vs. useful services in favor to the second one. Especially as it's really easy to evade from this data collection: Just switch off the bluetooth function of your mobile.

PS: I would like a bluetooth scanner in the aircraft itself ... it's really interesting how many mobile phones are running inflight. Such a scanner could send a vcard containing "Just switch off your fscking mobile phone". Did that once a few minutes before takeoff ... that was very effective

No ... i'm not talking about a new, more effective CPU hog. I'm talking about the so called "ultimate wing load test". This is an important test in the development of an aircraft. A wing will be bend with a load of 150% of the maximum expected load in operational service. The structure has to hold it this load at least 4 seconds. It's an important milestone for a new aircraft. The 787 wing has to go through this on March 28th as some well-informed websites report. Will be an important moment for the program, especially as the fuselage at the centerbox... well side-of-body ... made some problems in the last test.

I took several thousand photos in my life. Walked miles for them. Got on the ground for them. I published many of them. Now i found out, that the most viewed photo is a mere simple snapshot i've made in Chicago. Over 100.000 times. I don't think i'm expected to understand this.

It's just a single track i want to recommend today: It's Animal Collective's "My Girls" from their album "Merriweather Post Pavillion". I heard this track yesterday while watching a documentary about the free solo base jumper (climbing hills without ropes and doing a base jump instead of falling to death) Dean Potter. Somewhat strange music, but i like it ... especially the second half.

There is a neat trick in the case you have an serial adapter, but no terminal programm at your disposal, your mobile data plan don't allow a larger download. Well, just open a shell:

screen /dev/tty.<whatever>

At least for a Sun ILOM serial mgnt port it works right out of the box.

PS: Don't use the original MacOS X driver for Prolific based USB/Serial converters, the open-source variant is a much better alternative (implements BREAK, installer doesn't freeze) . You can download it from the sourceforge project page.

I've reported about the PSARC case a while ago, but now it's in the code: This putback introduced the fast reboot feature to SPARC. It's implemented a little bit differently at the moment, as it doesn't totally circumvents POST, but it shorten POST substantially by skipping parts of it.

Das Wort, das FDP-Generalsekretär Lindner wahrscheinlich verwenden wollte, war machtgefährdend, das er eigentlich meinte, als er anmerkte, das Kritik an Westerwelle demokratiegefährdend ist. Kritik an Herrschenden ist gerade das, was Demokratie ausmacht. Alles andere nennt sich Diktatur. Wenn man einen Politiker nicht mehr uneingeschraenkt kritisieren und jede seiner Aktionen hinterfragen darf, sind wir einen Schritt zu weit in eine Richtung gegangen, in der wir schon mal waren.

The COMSTAR target is in OpenSolaris for several versions. So a PSARC case was introduced to remove the userland implementation of iSCSI in Opensolaris. Today the change found it's way into the codebase. There is just one thing that i don't like about it: There is no shareiscsi=on anymore, as the new administrative model doesn't really fit into such an option. But otherwise the new implementation is much better and versatile.

A reader with much better eyes than mine (think i should really visit my ophthalmologist) found an interesting reference to Solaris/SunOS in the new Tron Legacy Trailer:

It's at 1:12 in the trailer. SolarisOS 4.0.1 Generic_50203-0<somedirt>un4m i386 Unknown.Unknown The architecture is interesting: sun4m. That's something in the range of a SPARCstation 4 to SPARCstation 20, several Lunchbox systems had the same architecture and finally SPARCserver 630MP, 670MP and 690MP were sun4m, too. The production of those systems started in 1989.

Watching this movie:

(click here to view)

(click here to view)

I really thought we were through this snow thing for this year.