Friday, December 28, 2007

Update 28.12.2007

1. Heading for Prague. Long way in front of me.

Update 27.12.2007

1. I left Sighet by car. An awfully long road (10h maybe) by car in ugly weather. Driving lone is sad and gets me sleepy.

2. I finally got back my card from BRD. The branch manager apologized... It was a small victory against them - I have nothing personally with the bank but they should learn that they have to SELL products to me in order to increase their profits.

3. I adhered to a private pension fund. I ope I did a good choice... but who knows.

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Update 26.12.2007

1. My nephew's Tudor birthday. Many 12 years old boys around playing a concerto on their mobile phones. Funny and annoying in the same time.

2. Visit to Barsana Monastery and to Botiza. We were warmly welcomed by Ionuc and his grandparents.

Tuesday, December 25, 2007

Update 25.12.2007

1. We had lunch at my sister's. It was a kind, warm atmosphere... We have sadly remembered Tata Dan as it is the first Christmas without him. Afterwards I have played with my nephews.

2. I went to the cathedral where the excellent choir sang beautifully. Year after year they get closer and closer to perfection. I have to remark the effort of Mrs. Carmen Oprisanu the choir's conductor and Mr. Marin Pihuleac - an excellent soloist with an impressive voice!

Update 24.12.2007

1. In order to reach home I had to buy winter tires for my Chevy. I settled on Nokian W (as they seem to be related with Nokia) because I was in a nick of time for this action.

2. Driving home - okay because of the above mentioned tyres. Only on some portions there were jams and and ice on the road. Anyways the road was full of accidents and I got pretty tired along therefore I was close to make some mistakes as I am not an experimented winter driver.

3. In Sighet I had (again) bad experiences with the ISP (UPC in my case). The internet did not work at all therefore I posted this from my GPRS mobile connection (kudos to Vodafone).

4. BRD is a bank ran and populated by morons. I had to change my credit card and I went to the local branch. Although I was notified by the bank that my card arrived already they refused to give it to me. I called the BRD call center and they confirmed me that the card was sent since December the 13th. I am glad that I made Internet banking with them because in this way I will interact as less as possible with them.

5. The choir of the Baptist Church in Sighet came also in this year to sing carols for us. They are a constant presence in my family's holidays bringing us joy and peace in souls.

Merry Christmas!



May the light of His birth enlighten your souls!

Sunday, December 2, 2007

Netwide freedom

I have recently discovered that the network on the building I am working on is severely filtered. For example I cannot access my webmail or youtube...
This made me quite angry and I had to find some solutions. Luckily I did came up with several of them:

1. VPN
I was able to tunnel VPN traffic through a HTTP proxy server using OpenVPN and Hamachi. Although OpenVPN works nice on Windows XP and Linux I had problems wit it on Vista. On the other end of the tunnel there is my own private computer that is connected to the net on a DSL link.The traffic performance is awesome. I needed administrative privileges for this one

2. SSH tunneling
Using only PuTTY I was able to make a tunnel to the same home computer and use the local endpoint as a SOKS server. This one works in almost any environment regardless of the administrative rghts.

3. HTTPtunnel
Maybe the fastest solution - but I cannot run it in every place

4. NetCat
This handy nifty tool saved my day on a customer's site. I was able to use it as a forwarder for sme apps.

After those xperiences I am always carying the tools(binaries/sources) with me everywhere... You may never know when they'll come handy again.