Tag: Personal

Computers under my command (3): terra

Final Fantasy VI (known as Final Fantasy 3 in the US) begins with two guys and Terra using some mech-like device to raid a town with the objective to find a creature referred to as an Esper.

You soon learn that Terra is in fact wearing a device inhibiting her free will and that she would never do something like that out of her free will – quite to the contrary.

When the three people find that Esper, the two soldiers die at its hands, but Terra survives.

The rest of the game evolves about her, the balance between magic and technology, love and humanity.

Terra is the main character in what I think is the best Final Fantasy ever done, probably because it’s in a way similar to Chrono Trigger (which is the second-best RPG ever done): Good thought-out characters, very free progression in the game (once the world ends, which is about half into the game), nice graphics and one hell of a story.

What really burns this game and especially Terra into your mind though is her theme sound. Even on the SNES it sounds really nice and in the end it’s what made me really interested in game soundtracks.

Also, I’ve blogged about a remix of that theme song. You should probably go ahead and listen to that to understand why FF6 is special to me and to everybody else.

Even after not having played FF6 for more than two years now, I still can’t get that theme song out of my head.

The computer terra is a fan-less media center PC by hush technologies. It’s running Windows XP Media Center edition and it’s connected to my video projector.

I’m also using it to manage my iPod (and I’m using a script to rsync the music over to shion both for backup and SlimServer access) and sometimes to play World of Warcraft on.

Even though the machine is quite silent, I can’t have it running over night, so it hasn’t that big an uptime: It’s right next to my bed and the sound of the spinning hard-disk and the blue power indicator led both keep me from sleeping at night.

Ever since I’m using the machine, I had small glitches with it: Crashes after updating the graphics driver (fixed via system restore), segmentation faults in the driver for the IR receiver, basically the stuff you get used to when you are running Windows.

I’m not complaining though: Even though the installation is fragile, my home entertainment concept depends on terra and usually it works just fine.

And after all, the original Terra was kind of fragile too (mentally and physically), so it’s just fitting that the same applies to the computer named after her.

PS: Sorry for the bad picture quality, but I only found Terra on a black background, so I had to manually expose her. Problem is: I know as much about graphics software as a graphics designer knows about programming in C. Anyways: It turned out acceptable IMHO.

Nice summer

This is what the Bundesamt für Meteorologie und Klimatologie (basically the official entity to tell us and the world how the weather in Switzerland is) has to say about the upcoming weather.

It shows a certain nicety in this summer: It’s neither just hot (like 2003) nor just cold (like all other years for the last 10 years or so). There are hot days like last week, but there are also the cooler ones like just now where it’s raining at comfortable 22 degrees celsius.

And just when you have enough cool weather and want the sun back, it’s turning around again just to get colder when it’s getting too hot.

I wish every summer could be like this.

Computers under my command (2): marle

While everyone keeps calling her Marle, she is actually the princess Nadia of the Kingdom of Guardia in what many people are calling the best console RPG ever made, Chrono Trigger

Chrono Trigger was one of the last RPGs Squaresoft ever did for the SNES and it’s special in many ways: Excellent Music (by Yasunori Mitsuda), excellent graphics, smooth game play, really nice story and: Excellently done characters.

Robo, Frog, Lucca, Marle, Crono, Magus and Ayla – every one of them has its very own style and story. Aside from Crono which is quite the ordinary guy, every one of them is special in its own kind.

The server marle is special on its own way too.

It’s not as outstanding as shion, but it’s special in its own way: It was the first 64Bit machine running a 64Bit OS I’ve ever deployed.

The OS was Gentoo linux (as usual) and the machine itself is some IBM xSeries machine equipped with a 3Ghz Xeon processor and 2GB of RAM, so basically nothing you need 64 Bit for.

It still was an interesting experiment to get the machine to work with a 64 Bit OS, though all that went completely uneventful.

Ever since deployed, marle is running at a customers site without crashes or other problems.

marle ~ # uptime
     11:56:13 up 265 days, 44 min,  2 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.00

Not much happening there currently I guess. Also, it’s amazing how quickly time passes – installing that machine feels like it was only yesterday.

Computers under my command – Issue 1: shion

Picture of the "real" Shion Uzuki

After yesterdays fun with one of my servers, I thought I could maybe blog about some of them – especially when they are kind of “special” to me.

Of course, the first machine I’m looking at is my PowerPC Mac mini which I called “Shion”, after the girl Shion Uzuki of the Xenosaga trilogy.

I don’t really have a very advanced naming scheme for my servers, but the important ones get names I tend to remember.

First it was people from Lord of the Rings (with Windows servers having names belonging to the evil people). Then, after I ran out of names, it was places in LotR and after I run out of those too, I began naming (important) servers after girls in console RPGs.

And of all the names, I guess shion is a very fitting name for a server. In the game, Shion is a robotics engineer and the inventor of that android called KOS-MOS.

And in my network, shion has a special place:

I initially bought the machine to run a SlimServer on it as my previous NSLU solution was not really usable as hardware for the heavy, perl-based slim server.

After I replaced the slim-server, I obviously installed a samba server on shion to serve the non-music files as-well. Back then, I only had one external drive connected to the server.

Next thing to get installed was OpenVPN which I used for quite a nice configuration allowing me transparent access from and to the office.

Shortly after that, I finally found a USB ethernet adapter which made shion replace my ZyAir access point. I also had to buy a USB hub back then and I decided to use the remaining two ports of that to plug in additional hard drives, leading to shion’s current disk space capacity of roughly 1.2 TB.

Then I installed mp[3]act (I’ve also blogged about it) and shortly after replaced it with Jinzora due to mp[3]act being quite bug-ridden and not in development any longer. (update 2013: links removed – mp[3]act is now pointing to a porn site and Jinzora is gone)

In all that time (one year of operation), shion never crashed on me. Overall, the stability of my home network went through the roof since switching all tasks over to her: No more strange connection losses. No more rebooting router and cable modem when lots of outgoing connections are active. No more inexplicable slowness in the internal network.

Shion does a wonderful job for me and I would never ever go back to any less flexible or stable solution.

Lately, I thought about maybe ditching her for a more powerful intel-based Mac Mini, but in the end shion is fast enough for my current purpose and I could never ditch a machine as nice as this one.

Flexible, Stable, Fast, Quiet and quite inexpensive. A machine worthy of being referred to with a name and a female pronoun.

Evening leisure

You know what’s one of the greatest things to happen on the evening of a workday?

You come home, select ‘Play Movie’ on your Harmony Remote and watch the speedrun that downloaded itself while you were on the office. (using Windows Media Center. Sorry, but that has the advantage of just working).

This is the future. This is like watching TV with the full control of the program.

Why should I watch TV only to see programs I don’t want to for most of the time? Why should I cope with advertisments every 10 minutes? Why should I be forced to watch all the movies in the german synchronized version?

Not with me. This is what the internet is for. This is why I’m running a linux server at home.

Domain grabbers – love’em

Well… pilif.ch is gone. I forgot to pay the renewal fee for one single day and the next day, the domain is in the hands of a domain grabber. I’m sure, nic.ch has some sort of deal with them to automatically forward expired domains.

I’m really grateful for that. And I’m also grateful that I did not get a warning in advance (which happened because of a wrong address in their database – mea culpa).

So: Visit lipfi.ch for my personal webpage.

To be honest, I would not have resurrected the thing if it was only about http://www.pilif.ch, but I had lots of other services running on subdomains, services on which I depend on (like the administration tool for this blog)

Well… if you are one of the users of any of those services, replace pilif.ch with lipfi.ch and continue to use them as usual.

Stupid domain grabbers

Just incredible

Maybe you know it: There’s a big community about remixing video games music at ocremix. Additionally, there’s an ogg-stream available here which is what I’m currently mostly listening to while at work.

There’s some techno in there I really dislike, but I usually just close my ears (mentally) then. But mostly it’s really great sound – especially if you know the games.

Well… And just some moments ago, I listened to Death on the Snowfield which is a remix of Terra’s theme from Final Fantasy VI.

I’ve always been a big fan of the music in said game – IMHO it’s the best thing Noubo Uematsu has done so far. Terra’s theme is the best part of a the best composition of the second best video games composer… you could say that it’s pretty good ;-)

But what made me write this entry: Said Remix is so beautiful – it made me cry (and listen to it over and over again). I really recommend you to get that mp3 and see if you like it aswell.

So good!

Fresh Air

pont04.JPG

Already another year has passed.

It’s fresh air time for me!

Hopefully (though not likely unfortunately), the weather will be better this time, but in the end I suppose it does not matter. It’s about nature, free time and Evelyn, the best girlfriend in the world

As of tomorrow, I will be off for one week of holiday.

PS: I wonder how many points of rested bonus this will get me in WoW :-)

Hacking Hiltl

The Hiltl is an excellent vegetarian restaurant in the middle of Zürich. I eat there quite often because the food’s great, the waitors are friendly and they always have space for you despite being constantly full of guests (others seem to think the same).

What’s interesting from a technical point of view is their ordering system: All waiters are equipped with a Windows CE device by Symbol and use WLAN to communicate with a central server (two actually, but see later) to process your order, send it to the citchen and finally print out the receipt for you.

What’s even more impressive is the seemingly perfect user interface: The waitors are actually faster with those things than they’d ever be using the old-fashioned paper-way. Even if you have special whishes, they can enter them in an efficient way.

The only time papers are involved is when they print your receipt. The system automatically selects the nearest printer.

This is one of the secrets behind the incredible efficiency of the Hiltl allowing for an incredible throughput of guests while still giving them all the time they need to eat and chat. Actually, a table is ready for the next guest only about one minute after the previous guests have left.

The restaurant is devided into two floors. Both have a master-waitor which has control over all the tables. They communicate via radio.

So you see: This is the restaurant for a geek to visit: Good food and good tech in one.

Now, the Zyxel access point they had mounted to the roof of the restaurant somewhat itched me. I mean: It’s WLAN after all. And I know the devices they are using – I wrote some lines for them too. So, maybe I can get some insight, I thought.

Armed with a notebook and the right software, me and Christoph took our meal in the Hiltl today.

The bad thing first: They don’t even use WEP for their network. They just created and empty SSID but don’t even hide it. So we did not have to use a WEP cracking equipment.

The devices communicate via SOAP over HTTP on a non-standard port. Additionally, the server often pings the known clients to check if they are still there. Then there’s a misconfigured router sending out IPv6 packets which are not used in any way. Oh and a Win9x-machine is there too, announcing itself as a network browser.

There are two servers: One for ordering, the other for printig.

Unfortunately, the SOAP messages (especially those to the ordering-system) contain much binary data, so there’s not much one can do there without isolating one device and doing some known steps on it.

Unfortunately, our equipement was not running until after our order was taken, so I don’t even have a reference point.

The printing though, uses some clear text XML-parameters. I think, I could be able to print some funny messages to all of those printers.

As I see it, no authentication whatsoever takes place – besides a hard-coded registration of the devices IP-adresses. ARP-spoofing could help about that though.

Now… what do I want to say with this? I’m certainly not going to attack them as I really, really like their food and want to return there often for my nutritial needs. Then, it’s a matter of honor: They are so progressive and efficient that I just can’t punish them for their (quite obvious) security problem.

Still, for educational purposes, this little experiment was very useful. Maybe, another day, I will even try to decode those binary parameters – just to know how it would work, not to hack me a cheaper meal or so ;-)

The last thing to do for me on this posting is one thing: I ask you kindly to do the same thing as I do: Don’t crack the network there, but go there to eat. It’s really worth it.