I was booking train tickets from Vienna to Budapest this week and noticed the following absurdity: My train from Vienna to Budapest leaves at Wien Westbahnhof and arrives at Budapest Keleti pályaudvar. In other words, I’m leaving from the western train terminal in Vienna and will arrive at the eastern train station in Budapest. So […]
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Numerology and Haider’s death
I spent this weekend in Carinthia and got treated to the local press. The KTZ had on their front-page a story about a numerologist who had calculated that Haider was in great danger during October and November. She had tried to warn him, but they didn’t manage a meeting before his date with a concrete […]
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Dusting off old files
Today I was trying to free up the IDE disk of my old PC to be used inside an USB enclosure as external disk for our laptops. This is pure archeology: backups of prehistoric home-directories are contained in disk-images of slightly less ancient hardware. Some of the files are there in duplicates, as I made […]
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draft-lendl-speermint-background-02
This time I manged to publish a new version of my speermint thesis-like I-D in time. Phew. Spending time in trains is sometimes the best way for me to focus on a single subject. That used to be easier; now with 3G on the phone I can connect to the Internet while riding trains which […]
This is one of the simple things which required more searching than I expected. I note the solution here in the hope that it is helpful to the next person searching for an answer. The problem: We’re running plain Ubuntu installations (gnome) with Kmail (for Kolab). Clicking on links in emails opens a shell window […]
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Statistics and the Wall Street crash
I stumbled on an article about Nassim Taleb’s book “The Black Swan” recently. Quick summary: It’s very easy to make mistakes when applying the mathematical theory of statistics to the real world. Not everything in the world can be described as independent random variables with clearly defined properties. So whenever you put real money behind […]
This is just Google-fodder: If you use the lenny (beta2) installer to setup a system which uses / on LVM on dm_crypt on raid, then the first reboot fails with something like “cannot find LVM volumes”. After a few minutes you get dumped into a busybox shell. Getting the system to boot Run cryptsetup luksOpen […]
I’m using the AvantGo client on my nokia phone to read newspapers on the subway from/to work (and while waiting for Clemens to go to sleep). Yesterday, it stopped working. Today I debugged it and discovered that the nameservers of A1 (Mobilkom Austria) simply cannot resolve avantgo.com. The domain is fine, and IP connectivity towards […]
This is one of the “simple” problems which always take longer to solve than expected. The goal: Script RTIR to generate Investigations associated with an Incident. In order to do that, I needed to solve the following who subproblems: Being able to use the “edit” feature in the command line “rt” client and capture the […]
In April I speculated about the impending doom of the DNS. Now we know what was in the works, and yes, it’s not a pretty picture. My idea from april doesn’t work 1:1, as the attacker doesn’t attack a single target, sondern arbitrary other hostnames in the same domain. Anyway, I spent the last days […]