AK's weblog

Today I made real contact with the probably worst router that is available on the free market, namely the BinTec X1200 II with IPSec license (yes, you need to license IPSec functionality). The IPSec part is totally broken (more on that later), and the router crashed hard during router configuration, which meant I had to start over two times.


Now the details: my employer currently does a project with another company where we need an IPSec connection. So far, so good. The other side of the IPSec tunnel is some Cisco hardware. So far, so good. Not so good is that our router's (the BinTec thing) IPSec support is totally broken. It took me and a technician from the other company 1.5 hours to get it up and running. The other technician had to work around bugs of the BinTec router, which seems to have problems with a lot of encryption/hash algorithm combinations for ESP, doesn't seem to know about hosts (hosts are always expressed as sub-nets *gna*), and a number of other things I can't remember anymore.


So, people, try not to buy BinTec hardware, if you want to keep off problems, and better invest your money into better things.

Look how well Elisabeth Gehrer's pants burned in the "Offen gesagt" TV discussion when she (as member of the current government) claimed that their politics is so social while in fact it isn't. Look, dear government, just repeating a lie doesn't make it any more true. Only in the people's heads (that's what's usually called "spin doctoring"), and it seems like that's the only thing you want.


What I also hate is the Americanization of the election campaign, where the opposite side's candidate (in this case, Heinz Fischer) is being dragged through the dirt with extremely old stories from his political past (that - in the end - showed what crude and undemocratic ideas about secret voting Benita Ferrero-Waldner has), and where so-called "cheering persians" (coin termed by Dirk von Lowtzow, and refers to the people that were engaged to cheer loud and happily whenever the Persian Shah went somewhere) with big signs are cheering for the cameras while in the foreground an interview is going on, and continuing cheering even while Benita Ferrero-Waldner was obviously clearly losing. Without being cynical, this reminded of the "keep the course 'til the Endsieg" slogans that the young HJ-recruited soldiers were told in the weeks before the Germans ultimately lost WW II, even while everybody knew that the Third Reich was going to lose.


Well, at least the right person won in this day's elections. Hopefully, honesty soon returns into politics.

Yes, finally, vocational school is over. While I was ranting about it in the beginning, because it sucked, I had quite some fun there. What I especially liked it when I had the chance to expose a teacher. *evilgrin*

What I also miss are the endless hours of playing Simcity 2000. I have to admit, I never played that game before, but at school, I really had a lot of time having fun with it instead of doing work assignments.


But even while I played more than I actually took part in the educational part of the school, I finished this class with a perfect report, i.e. perfect grades (= 1) in all subjects. I hope this is something that I can complete next year, too, where it would be more important.


Another thing I will miss are the breaks, that we spent with drinking yummy yummy ice tea from the vending machine, yummy yummy Schnitzelsemmerl with mayonnaise, yummy yummy donuts with chocolate icing and lots of chatting, doing stupid jokes and simple fun.

I will also miss some of my classmates I had a lot of fun with in the last 10 weeks. I hope I will see them again next year, with this year's insider jokes ("Host an Kaugummi?", "Droooogeeeen!" aka Lord of the Weed imitations, and the ever-going "hah?!?!?") all returning then.


Anyway, when school was over, we went to Linz, had a few beers, and then went to Donaulaende, to enjoy the great weather there. Later then, I met with Paula, and the others went home, while we stayed there until it got extremely windy. And because I had taken painkillers in the morning, I decided not to drink anything until the afternoon, that means I survived this day without being too drunk.

Today, I bought the new CD "Stille Post" by MIA, a German "alternative" band from Berlin. They have a really nice sound that sounds (to me) unique, and not comparable to other bands. The lyrics are pretty good, and quite unique, at least totally different to other German alternative band's lyrics. But one song, "was es ist", has some kind of German nationalistic influence, saying

Ein Schluck vom schwarzen Kaffee macht mich wach

Dein roter Mund berührt mich sacht

In diesem Augenblick es klickt

Geht die gelbe Sonne auf

[...]

Es ist was es ist sagt die Liebe

Was es ist fragt der Verstand

Wohin es geht das woll'n wir wissen

Und betreten neues deutsches Land

But well, that's something I have to cope with, since I'm totally fine with all the other song's lyrics.

As I see links to del.icio.us more and more often, I also created a del.icio.us account, which you can view here. To explain del.icio.us in detail, I would like to point to an excellent article written by Tim Pritlove about del.icio.us.

Look here. It's really stupid to auction a picture of a (valid) Diablo II CD key and then show the picture itself in the auction description. Too funny.

Right now, I'm testing NetNewsWire together with b2, but it doesn't look too sexy. Especially the category stuff doesn't seem to work. I wish I would be able to select the category manually, and enter the title into NetNewsWire's title field, and not the body. But well, I have to dig a bit more into b2's XML-RPC interface, then I will probably find out which weblog type I have to configure in NetNewsWire, since b2 isn't supported natively.

So far, everything was pretty smooth. About one hour after my lower right wisdom tooth was removed, I took one of those painkillers, and so far, I'm totally pain-free (probably the excellent Schilcher wine prolongates the effect of the painkiller ;-), and that's pretty good. What I didn't write in my last postings was that my dentist explained all details about the wisdom tooth removal, including some kind of disclaimer that he told me what he's going to do and what the risks are. He doesn't like these US-american "traditions", but he has to say it since a few months or so.

Fortunately not. My lower right wisdoom tooth was removed, and the doctor prescribed me painkillers. Fortunately, my dentist is pretty good, so he did a good local anesthesia: the right side of my lower lip and the chin is totally dumb, and so far, I don't feel any pain.

Tomorrow (no, actually today, April 21st that is), I will have a nice visit at my dentist, where I will mount his "torture rack". I already fear it, since my teeth are not in the greatest state (well, most of them are, except for the wisdom teeth, which are partially caries-afflicted), and my lower right row of teeth is hurting so badly that I feel the pain in my right ear, which pretty much sucks. So, I already feel that this is going to be a big mess tomorrow, and if not tomorrow, then in a few weeks. Well, at least my dentist is humane, and gives me a local anesthesia, unlike those butcher-like sadistic dentists you usually find in public hospitals.

According to the GCC 3.4 ChangeLog, UnixWare support in GCC has been obsoleted. This is really great news. Totally unrelated, SCOX's stocks are going down the drain. Yahoo! Finance has a nice overview over the last 5 days, while NASDAQ gives you a nice 3-month overview.

Last Chaos Communication Congress, Harald Welte of netfilter fame presented a number of methods to find out and prove GPL violations in Linux-based firmware images that today can be found in a number of end-user hardware. Today, I found his new page gpl-violations.org, which currently only houses a few mailing lists related to GPL violations, but which will (IMHO) become an authority for GPL violation reports and how to fight them.

... formations of 4 Saab 105 jets of the Austrian Airforce fly by your home low and fast. Not recovery.

...use Latin or Greek salutations and closings. This page names a few and shows examples on how to use them. I especially like the "salutem plurimam dicit" and the "cura ut valeas" phrases, since they're even elite within Latin, where "salve""and "vale" are commonly used (well, at least when I had to learn latin in school).

I found this really funny piece of email scam: the author of this email claims to be the brother of a Nigerian astronaut, who was on a secret Soviet space station when Soviet Union broke down, and his seat in the return capsule was used for cargo instead of him. Since then (i.e. 14 years), he's being supported by Progrez support flights. And then comes the usual "lots of money on bank account, need to transfer it blablabla" stuff. But the first part is really funny.