Wilmer's stuff

Thanks for making Linux drivers for the on-board graphics stuff on my mainboard. Next year, could you please not publish them as a .... .EXE file???

Yep, another birthday passed, and I celebrated it with my father and grandparents, here in Dublin. My grandparents never travelled by airplane so far, so it was quite an adventure. Unfortunately they had to get to know the great Irish weather here. But then again, it isn't all that different from the Dutch weather...

So a little while after my complaint about NTL blocking traffic to some sites, they now block access to all sites ... they cut me off. :-) Still waiting for my ADSL. This is Ireland, so if they say it'll take two weeks to ocnnect you, you do have to add two more. (That's how it works with appointments at least, I'm told. If you have an appointment at x, make sure you don't actually show up before x+15 min!) Oh heck, fortunately most bigger cities know these things called "security-unconscious neighbours" and "open access point"... ;-)

Still want to do some BitlBee snapshot release, maybe tomorrow. The new Jabber groupchat support works very well, it's working perfectly at work for over two months already, and I'm actually not even the only one who uses it. :-) And who knows when this will become a stable release... Clearly I've been too ambitious with adding new stuff, and too lazy to finish all the details to make it worth releasing. :-(

Oh yeah, and the new website rocks! But I suppose most people saw it already by now.

So in my new apartment I currently have an NTL Internet connection. It's what the previous occupant used, and I haven't had time to replace it so far ... but I definitely will.

One interesting thing is that it routes all traffic via Amsterdam, even traffic to Ireland and the UK. Surely that's not very efficient, but latencies are acceptable so far. What bothers me more is that they seem to dislike Web Archive. I can't use that site. I haven't been able to load it at all here.

Things are just suspicious if:

--- web.archive.org ping statistics ---
84 packets transmitted, 83 received, 1% packet loss, time 83034ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 197.106/200.818/210.630/2.764 ms

the round trip (both with ping and traceroute (which shows >30 hops)) seems to take 0.2 seconds while:

09:56:06.312106 IP 192.168.9.106.41612 > 207.241.233.253.80: S 2524718098:2524718098(0) win 5840
09:56:06.343849 IP 207.241.233.253.80 > 192.168.9.106.41612: S 1027425240:1027425240(0) ack 2524718099 win 5792
09:56:06.343916 IP 192.168.9.106.41612 > 207.241.233.253.80: . ack 1 win 183
09:56:06.385372 IP 207.241.233.253.80 > 192.168.9.106.41612: F 1:1(0) ack 1 win 5792

Meanwhile a TCP connection gets ACKed and then FINed in 0.03 plus 0.07 seconds. How did that website suddenly get so close?? ;-)

So for anyone who thinks of going here and doesn't like it when companies try to judge what you can and what you can't see: DON'T TAKE NTL BROADBAND!!! I'll have my PSTN line in a few days and will get Magnet ADSL instead.

UPDATE: traceproto is cool. It's a traceroute-like program that can also use TCP packets to find a path:

ttl 15: ICMP Time Exceeded from pc-62-30-249-10-ha.blueyonder.co.uk (62.30.249.10)
28.267 ms 30.866 ms 31.304 ms
ttl 16: ICMP Time Exceeded from pc-62-31-0-204-nm.blueyonder.co.uk (62.30.0.204)
30.421 ms 32.453 ms 40.027 ms
ttl 17: TCP Syn Ack from web.archive.org (207.241.233.253)
40.422 ms 35.247 ms 31.637 ms

If I traceroute to any other port on the same machine, the 17th hop is another blueyonder.co.uk machine (and 13 more hops follow it). So it looks like it's actually BlueYonder causing problems here. While BY claims in their FAQ that they don't censor anything, except if the police ask them to do so. Really?....

It's a week ago already since I moved into my new apartment. I managed to find one very close to work. I can pretty much walk from my desk at home to the one at work in five minutes. :-) It's not that I'm lazy, I was actually looking for a place a bit further away, but this apartment is pretty big and I like that. Might make some pics later.

Also working on BitlBee Jabber MUC support again, and it works pretty well already. Actually I use it all the time at work by now. No more need for crappy GUI Jabber clients. :-D

Today I finally thought of making multiple pictures of things too big to fit in one picture, to merge them into one image at home. The results are pretty cool, I think. I walked to Saint Stephen's Green first, you can see the center of the park on the picture. There's one easter egg hidden here, you can see a father with two girls walking here twice. Thanks to Roel for finding that one. :-) On this picture I didn't force the same exposure settings for every picture, so it looks like the grass isn't the same colour everywhere.

I also passed by the department of the prime minister. Although the exposure is fixed here, the picture is a "bit" distorted. There's a second version, which is kind-of straight horizontally, at least. Not really perfect, though.

So yeah, I'm back in Dublin. Spent a few days in .nl when I came back, but it's time to go back to work, and find a house. I tried to get something last week, but someone else applied for the house before I did. :-( I hope to get something soon though, it's time to stop living in hotels all the time. :-/

cp: Pink Floyd - Comfortably Numb (live) !!!

¡ʇdıɹɔs uʍop-ǝpısdn 1ooɔ sıɥʇ ɹoɟ ʎuoʇ sʞuɐɥʇ

But I'll write normally now. :-)

Friday I'll fry back to Europe. I spent over eleven weeks here. Over 20% of 2007. Almost a whole quarter. I'm glad to go back soon. My TODO list isn't empty yet, but I'm getting tired of living in hotels and temporary apartments with just a full suitcase by now. Changing environments from time to time can be nice, but having your own home with all your things is nicer. So that's my TODO for the rest of the month. Find a cool home and move in.

And, of course, work. But I'll have some days off for the relocation. I missed four Irish public holidays and I'll get them all back. They'll be very useful for the relocation. I still don't know where to live. In the city center, or a bit further away? I'm not used to living in big cities, so I'm tempted to stay away from the center. Commuting would take a lot more time from there, though...

Oh heck, this is too much loud thinking for a blog. :-)

Coolest thing of the week that just passed: A concert of The Bad Plus, with the last song being a cover of Aphex Twin - Flim. Possibly even cooler than a metal cover of Come to Daddy (by Dillinger Escape Plan). :-D Thanks for taking me there, Tony!

So I guess good blog software doesn't exist. In general s9y works pretty well, but the markup modules are horrible. I liked the TextWiki thing, but it had many problems. And now I couldn't figure out how to make a clickable image.

So now I use the bbcode plugin and just wasted 10-20 minutes on fixing all old posts. Lots of fun. Meanwhile it's over 30 degrees (Celcius, don't bother me with Fahrenheits, miles and feet, mmmkay? ;-)) here, so WHAT AM I DOING INSIDE?

Going outside now. Cya later.

Oh yeah, and I managed to get the airplane back, in case anyone wondered.

And in the park this morning I finally managed to make a good picture of a squirrel. There are many of them here, but they usually don't want to get close. This squirrel is now the logo on the gaast.net webmail server. :-)

cp: The Mars Volta - Cassandra Gemini (via last.fm, but I should really get one of their CDs...)

There are two things in nature here that I don't like. The ever-strong wind that slows me down when I cycle to work ... and trees! I bought this radio-controlled airplane yesterday and went to the park to try it out. The flight went very well thanks to some help from ... well, the wind. The result?



(Try to find it on the big picture, it's not too easy. :-))

Something I really do like here is World Market, though. They actually sell this candy we call "drop" in .nl, and it tastes pretty good:



I just wonder why the German pack says "katjes" instead of "kätzes" or something like that. And there are fishes inside, not cats. They're pretty tasty though, so I don't care.

Work is still going well, my main mission for during my stay here is done. I got two more weeks here before I have to go back to Dublin, so that's well in time. It'll be nice to be back in Europe, at last...

In other news, worked on BitlBee a bit more again in the last few weeks. Worked on the API a bit, so the next time someone says porting Gaim modules to BitlBee is easy, please don't listen. It's a lie. ;-) And there's basic support for Jabber chatrooms now! Just for the non-anonymous ones, unfortunately. (And the majority of Jabber rooms I know of are anonymous.) Will work on that support later, unfortunately it'll be very complicated and hackish.

And this weekend, besides "dropjes", I'm enjoying eye candy from Beryl on Ubunty Feisty. Wobbly windows and all the other stuff. Hey, I wanted some of my OS X eye candy back, okay? ;-)