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!

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.

No title

Nico felt pitty for my weekend. This was a very interesting subjecftt as other have seen my latest posts. They believed that I had a lousy weekend.
Contrary I would say. I had a wonderful weekend. I felt like staying home and doing almost nothhing, cutting any link with the outside world. Why? Because I was quite sick and tired of human interaction. Therefore I felt into myself and I analyzed some of my latest actions and future plans...

Another movie weekend

It snowed yesterday and I felt like not going out. Partly because of a mild hangover...
So I stayed home and I watched some movies:
1. Mr. North - interesting cast for a so-so morning movie. Funny but too idealistic
2. 12 Angry Men - the 1957 original movie. Excellent.
3. The russians are comming - light commedy about the cold war paranoia. The russians are nice characters
4. Matador - no comment.
5. The shape of things - a movie that makes you think about the fargility of human relatonships, about art, morality nd thir limits. Intriguing.

Movie Weekend

Lazy in he bed untill noon. Shopping. Feeling sick. Took an aspirin.
Than I watched two movies:

Zeitgeist - Interesting but still too fictional

The Hot Fuzz - funny but quite idiotic sometimes....

Sleeping afterwards...

What happened to Sun?

I have been working with Sun hardware since I was in university. Although I did not like Solaris until it's tenth version I liked the hardware manufactured by Sun.
Sun workstations and servers were ahead f time. Powerful processors, good networking capabilities (remember their slogan - The network is the computer), excellent management capabilities and storage options. All those at an accessible price (no wonder that they are the dot in dot com)....
Until recently...
In the last years their workstations became ugly beige towers, they lost the touch of nice design they used to have. In the current line of Sun workstations there is no nice looking one. I have home a lovely SparcStation Classic...
I cannot help myself thinking of the MacMini. It has the same simplicity and minimalistic design as the Classic Sparc... Sun has now the new T1 processors that re silent and reliable. Putting one of those processors in a slim workstation with a size in between Mac and Classic an package it with a Solaris 10 or some polished Linux distro might make it a hit. It could be marketed similarly as MacMini (BYKDM :)
Theonly problem I can see here is the market for it. While Mac is aimed for designers and trend setters Sun is a geekish toy. It is designed for engineers mainly and not or the common user. Still if enough good open source software is packaged with the toy it might be sold to companies as a PC replacement marching both on the advantages in terms of size and power consumption as well as on the aesthetics of the computer not to speak about "holly" things as manageability, security and other things not really present in Vista :)