Mean.net – We still hate everyone

It’s been a while now. Well, stuff has happened. Started my new work last week, which seems interesting. Also I have been studying for the CCSA exam on Tuesday. Checkpoint got some strange answers like the purpose of hide-nat, ‘Hide behind an imaginary IP’. I would really like som imaginary IP’s, I guess it’s those from CSI.
Managed to attend two weddings and a couple of birthday parties in August so now I think that my wedding quota is filled for this year. Two swedish and one vietnamese wedding seems to be enough. And thanks to Olivia I got a flat decently close to work, thank you
I am also beginning to hate the software raid in Linux. Seems to be endless obscure problems like just dropping one of the disks randomly in a raid-5 set. This happened when I upgraded my filserver to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. The only good outcome of that is that my laptop, running Windows 7, can talk to it over IPv6. But it smashed the raid-5, made my Popcorn hour not be able to use my old SMB mount and of course it took some fiddeling with VMWare to get it running. Feels more and more like Solaris is a good solution.

Today I got around to try to sell some shirts att spreadshirt.se. More exactly http://facehugger.spreadshirt.se. Just got two designs so far, more will come, trust me. They will all have some attitude At least that is the goal. Facehugger.net is my pet design project, haven’t happened much there so far, probably since I actually don’t have a decent computer to work on. Also I went to a trackday with some friends last week, didn’t ride anything though. Should have taken his KTM RC8 for a spin but he managed to bend both brake disks while trying to change front tyre. But now I really need to get me a streetbike

Now the summer is here for real.  It’s almost like Asia back home now, not that damp though. Pretty much like Hoi An. Hue was much drier and Kuala Lumpur was very damp. Almost got 34 degrees today and I am waiting for some thunder and rain. Got around to cut the grass today and realized that the guy at Electrolux that has designed my lawn mover has probably never owned a house. And is probably about 150cm tall.   I got a collector to gather all the leftover grass which is so badly designed that you cant back up your lawn mover without holding the collector or else it will end up in the cutting knives. Way to go! And I guess everyone that has a Briggs&Stratton knows how ‘reliable’ something constructed in the UK is. Should get me a Honda based one instead. It will probably last forever. At least I got around to graphing the disk temperatures in my file server using smartctl. I got snmpd run the following script, and yes it is ugly as hell since it does not tell you the name of the disk. Doesn’t really matter for me, since I already know in the cacti snmp template.

#!/bin/sh
for i in  `ls /dev/sd[a-e] `
do
smartctl --all $i |grep Temp | cut -c88-90|tail -1
done


Today the typical summer weather came with rain and wind.  Good that I spent the whole day at work.  At least I didn’t have to go to the Muppet mountain today.  Spent some time reading stuff on http://textsfromlastnight.com. It more or less confirms the stupidity of people. No matter how idiot proof you build stuff, someone will always build a better idiot.  At least I got to toy around with some OpenID and noticed that Linked In had removed the ability to log on with OpenID.  That kinda sucked. Now I am just waiting for some of the big sites to adopt this, like Google

So, switched jobs finally. I have not really noticed the economic downturn with at least three jobs to choose from, probably four. It took some thinking before deciding which one to choose, and I hope I did the correct thing.  I guess it will show in this autumn. So now the studying begins to be able to pass the CISSP exam. Just need to find somewhere to live during weekdays, but that will probably solve it self.  Things usually do somehow.  Now off to watch Avatar on BlueRay.

The other day the Facebook developers uploaded the Hiphop php sourcecode to the Github. This is appearantly not built for Ubuntu,  also their wiki says Ubuntu 9.04 build is experimental. I tried on 10.4 and ended upp with gcc dying with a compile error, “c++: Internal error: Killed (program cc1plus)”. I built good on Fedora Core 12 at least so I will have to do some testing on that.  This machine will get an upgrade any day now

After a day of traveling I am now in Kuala Lumpur. Managed to get both Visa cards blocked in Saigon thanks to a broken machine at the restaurant and some Vietnamese people.  Thankfully I got some money wired here, cash, and I also got my third and last credit card. So tomorrow I will go collect my 400 EUR from the local Western Union office at the airport. Mostly because I need to pay my hosts at this bed and breakfast with cash and to get to the city and the airport.  This bed and breakfast is actually muche better than the hotels I stayed at during this trip except the 5 star in Bangkok. The only thing missing from this room is a TV but I am only staying for another night so it is ok. Things seem to be pretty cheap here, dinner cost 8 MYR, which translates to almost 2 EUR. Also finalized the VIP booking for the MotoGP races in Qatar which includes full paddock access and pitlane walk. Gonna be awsome!

Just 3 more days in Vietnam. It is actually going to be really nice to go somewhere else.  Went to a Vietnamese wedding today, which felt like karaoke night with a lot of food and beer and deafening volume on the stereo. Vietnamese seem obsessed by marriage and food. They eat almost constantly it feels like, and there is endless talks about ‘Shouldn’t you marry a nice Vietnamese girl?’. No I really don’t want to. But since No is somewhat unfamiliar to everyone here they keep on suggesting that. Yeah, and keep stuffing food on my plate. I think I will never eat chicken again after this trip.  Chicken, fish, duck and whatever small animal you are eating is always chopped like bread with the bones. Which means that there is bone splinters everywhere in  the meat. Cow and pig is to big for that treatment so there is usually no bones in beef dishes.  After a couple of days of thinking that my stomach was ok this morning it was not. Still same stats quo so I went for some antibiotics that the Lonely Planet guide recommended for travellers diarrhea since there seems to be much witch doctor over the hospital care here. My hosts seem very unwilling to go to the hospital, so I guess I will take care of that in Malaysia or Qatar if these Ciprofloxacin does not help.

Last couple of days have been pretty slow.  Been going around a bit and looking at stuff. Apparently there is a Old Time Festival each full moon which was yesterday. With some traditional singing and stuff so I saw some strange variant of bingo. Did not quite understand but it was described to me in a way that reminded of bingo. After three weeks of travelling and the last one of mostly eating at places that you can’t imagine the filth level I finally got sick. So today I got two stacks of pills to take. Which I figured out was carbon pills, antibiotics and some anti bacteria that the rest of the world stopped making in 2003 and a magic purple pill. So now I can really say ‘I took the purple pill’, wonder if I will wake up outside of the matrix tomorrow. One can only hope.

Today is second day with weather as in Sweden.  Well, as a decent summer day, 23 degrees and cloudy. Should be like this until monday I think. Feels kinda nice actually, be able to breathe normally and not constantly sweat.  Had some really local experiences yesterday with karaoke on Vietnamese and later on coffee at a ‘nightclub’ or something with a girl DJ playing house music mostly from Europe. Still a strange feeling since everyone sat down and had coffee or beer instead of dancing as it would have been back home. Also realized that almost all Vietnamese songs sound about the same and goes in the same speed. Kinda like folk music back home, or danceband like Vikingarna. Should get me an air ticket for Da Nang to Saigon also. Tomorrow we are going to see some fireworks competition in Da Nang, should be fun since China is close and they kinda invented fireworks.