comment on god

a nice quote I saw on a documentary:

Asking humans to describe god is like asking fish to describe the water they live in

Worst Restaurant ever?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tanjatiziana/76484944/

isn’t that the worst restaurant ever ?? would you ever go eat there ? Even McDonald’s is better than this crap.

Ho! Ho! Ho!

Open Source is coming to town!

Just take a look at the savings of a school using Open Source compared to what it would have payed if it used MS products!

Schools save with Open Source

That’s a nice present for the educational system economy…But I guess some contracts are more powerfull than a few more computers educating students.
Have you forgotten the contract between Microsoft and the Greek Government ?
Just take a look at all these wonderfull things the Greek Government gains!

  • Instant access to source code for the most current versions, beta releases and service packs of Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows CE.
  • WHO is going to take a look at the source from the Greek Government ? The ministers ? for WHAT ? auditing ???

  • Expansive disclosure of technical information for the engineering-level understanding of Windows architecture
  • Now THAT’s usefull. Learn how a buggy system works. An excellent education plan. Learn from other people’s mistakes.

  • Enhanced ability to conduct security and privacy audits and to design, build and maintain secure computing environments
  • Oh ok..now I feel secure. Our government conducts audits to maintain “secure computing environments”…wow! I guess that could not happen on any other platform..right ?

  • Opportunities for visits by government representatives to Microsoft development facilities in Redmond, Washington
  • Yihaaa!!! Let’s travel to Redmond! Free tickets for the ministers! And their families ? Their little children ? won’t they play with uncle Bill ? …who cares about the rest of the citizens ?

    enough. Get a life and start working for your citizens than your already full pockets.

    A list of interesting things to find on Google :)

    How many network cameras are unprotected ?

    Cameras ?
    No, No, Mooore Cameras
    I was sure there were some more!
    And what about a list with even more cameras with a screenshot of each one ?

    Enough with cameras…I know I can find mp3s on Google, but is there anything more worth searching for ?

    just enjoy the power of Googling 🙂

    Google messed up ?

    It’s the first time I see such a message 🙂

    Opera-ize your Firefox and an awkward chat

    Yesterday I installed a new firefox extension. Fasterfox gives firefox a nice speedup. Now it can almost be compared to Opera. Anyway…I think this extension is already my second favorite extension…after the Bugmenot extension of course.

    Yesterday I had the most awkward chat to date. My friend Charis (aka Charmed[]) was on a plane from US to Germany and flying over the atlantic when he started chatting with me on my Greek Jabber server . I was amazed. That was so cool. Internet on a plane, what’s better than that when flying for hours and hours ? Watching boring movies ? naaah…
    He was more than 30 hops away from me when I tracerouted him, with more than 3 seconds lag, but what the hell…it’s far better than nothing 🙂
    I wish I could have internet here in Greece inside trains, planes, etc. Last time I travelled from Athens to Thessaloniki by train my mobile phone was unable to work throughout the whole travel because there was no signal…Internet on a train here in Greece is like 20 (light ?) years away from the current situation…

    OpenOffice tutorials

    A list of great OpenOffice tutorials on basic and advanced tasks by Bruce Byfield:

    OpenOffice Tutorials

    Warcraft 3 on linux

    I’ve finally managed to play warcraft 3 on linux with pretty decent perfomance…

    First of all install the game using Cedega. Read this one more time…I’ve said C E D E G A. NOT wine.

    After installing using your registration keys, go find a nice no-cd crack from www.gamecopyworld.com. Install that too and you are set. If you have problems patching warcraft to it’s latest version use a symlink from the cedega c_drive c:\Program Files\Warcraft III to the cedega c_drive c:\war3\.

    This small script will make your life a bit easier too:

    #!/bin/sh
    # edit the next path
    pushd /PATH/TO/CEDEGA/c_drive/war3
    #cedega war3.exe -opengl
    #cedega w3l.exe -opengl
    popd

    UNCOMMENT 1 of the 2 cedega lines. The first one is for use with Warcraft III The Frozen Throne and the second one if you use a loader for pvpgn (read below). You HAVE to uncomment one of those 2 lines, OK ??

    If you want to be able to play with friends on your own battle.net server, set up a pvpgn server somewhere and use a pvpgn loader to start warcraft. If you don’t use a pvpgn loader you WILL get an error about being “unable to connect”.
    Last but not least, add these 2 lines to your /etc/hosts:

    X.Y.Z.W uswest.battle.net
    X.Y.Z.W Europe.battle.net

    Where X.Y.Z.W is the ip of your pvpgn server. Have fun!

    Current weather Condition at Ioannina,Greece

    just excellent…

    Current Weather at Ioannina,Greece

    I want one such device too 🙂

    no progress…

    Since gcc 3.4 was marked stable on gentoo, I emerged it and even did an emerge -e world. It took me some time because there were more than 600 packages to rebuild. Anyway, mplayer still denies to work with some videos using -vo xv even after the recompilation with the new gcc.
    That’s the error message:

    X11 error: BadAlloc (insufficient resources for operation)?,?% 1 0 32%

    MPlayer interrupted by signal 6 in module: vo_check_events

    I’ll keep trying…

    Btw, I read some rumours that Cisco is going to release callmanager 5 under linux. I hope that becomes a reality because the current callmanager 4.1(3) runs only on windows 2000 and there are times that the whole system freezes for no good reason, or times when IE crashes. The whole configuration of the callmanager is done through a web browser…in order to add a single device you need 10 clicky-clickies…I hope this changes too.

    command to play .asx streams on linux

    aviplay http://koko.lala.org/radio.asx

    this is mostly a note to myself because I tried with mplayer and had no luck for quite some time … 🙂

    mplayer -vo xv or -vo x11 ?

    What do you use for mplayer video output ? I recently had crashes with -vo xv so I switched to -vo x11.

    Oh..and I still have problems with some quicktime videos…

    any help ?

    Med Associates total lack of security

    Last week I went to Athens, Greece to set up a laboratory with a pc connected with 2 mice cages(!). Mice are put inside the cages and then one can monitor their movements through some infrared sensors. Data is sent to the pc where a program (Activity Monitor 5) made by med-associates is used to analyze those movements.
    It was saturday when I tried to install the program. I inserted the cd inside the cd-rom, and started the installation process. After 2-3 “Yes, I Agree, Next,etc” I faced a password entry field. But I was given no password! I checked the manuals and I saw that I should sent them an application form filled with some names, location and so on, to be sent a password via email. I started calling them, but noone would answer at their offices, it was saturday and pretty close to Halloween…so there was no chance of ever finding anyone at their office.
    Luckilly one of my friends was with me and he was looking inside some dlls to check if there was any sign of the password checking algorithm, so that we could extract any infos about it. He didn’t find anything, and then I told him to start looking inside the installer. He started looking for the error message while I was calling a proffessor that I know, that was using the same program. There was a chance that the password for the program the proffesor uses could work for our case as well. After 10-15 minutes I got the password, and when I went to the pc to enter it my friend had located the error message, some garbage beside it and then a string of 8 letters and numbers.
    I first tried the previous password that the professor gave me…it did not work. Then we tried the string that we found next to the error message…GUESS WHAT! IT WORKED! !!

    Was what we did “illegal” or was the company plain stupid ? We had bought the program but we had no password so we had to “hack it”. I think it’s rediculous for a program that costs more than 1000$ to have it’s password hardcoded inside the installer. They could have a password checking algorithm inside the installer and a password generator at their offices. That sounds more “secure”.

    Anyway…it’s a program meant to be used by doctors…its real price should be around 50-100$. There’s nothing really special about it…but hey..doctors have money…they should pay 😛

    howto find music on the net for free!

    1) one nice way is using google to find unprotected ftp and http dirs with indexes…try a search like this:
    -inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent directory” +description +size +(wma|mp3) “Deftones”

    You will get plenty results 🙂

    2) del.icio.us could be handy too…if you are not looking into something really special..
    http://del.icio.us/tag/system:filetype:mp3

    3) Soulseek
    Soulseek started as a netword dedicated to electronic music sharing…It has faced many many problems in the past…but has a LOT of dedicated users that are willing to share. There are many channels and no moderators…so things can easily get out of hand inside the chatrooms.

    Have fun…

    p.s. I really MISS napster…

    sux# strings napster.exe | grep -A 5 Copyright
    Copyright 1999 Napster, Inc.
    Build
    1318
    Release Version
    v2.0

    good old days…

    ser/openser and Cisco ata 188

    I’ve recently installed a ser (SIP express router) in one of my machines (well, in fact it’s more like openser) mostly for self tutoring. The config file was quite a pain to tune. Many many options, many many modules which all look quite usefull, and you can get easily distracted from what you should be doing. Luckilly there are some HOWTO’s (but not complete) around the net.
    What I find about ser/openser VERY stupid and annoying, is that while it’s tools are mostly written in bash they have the default password that comes with the installation hardcoded inside. It would be much easier if the installation procedure asked you for a username/password instead of the defaults “ser/heslo”. Anyway…you can change them later quite easily…but it’s still annoying.
    A tool you might need is sipsak. It’s like a wrapper of some common commands a SIP administrator might frequently need.

    Installing Cisco ata 188 and making it work for ser/openser was trully easy. You have to download the latest sip image (ata_03_02_01_sip_050616_a.zip) for the ata adapter from cisco (you need a password for Cisco’s site) and upload it to your phone (instructions are inside the zip file’s readme file). Inside the zip file that contains the image and some readme’s there are a few other executables that can be used for debugging it. What’s interesting for us linux users? Cisco provides binaries for almost all those tools inside the zip! In fact I upgraded my ata from linux 🙂

    Then go to http://ip.of.ata.given.by.dhcp/dev and you get a very nice menu with quite a lot of options, and some monitors (ethernet, RTP stats) that did not exist in previous versions. Just fill in your username/password, display name and sip proxy server..and you are good to go. The device registers itself without any problems and I was able to make calls to ata 188 from/to Linphone, Kphone and Xten-Lite(both windows and Linux).

    Here’s my testing ata 188:

    cisco ata 188