+ 7 - 2 | § ¶News
Friends started asking me if I stopped writing here. Maybe this does look like a dead blog, but I have no intentions of abandoning it. The thing is, we implemented a very fundamental form of blogs on email.si a few months ago, which turned out to be quite an interesting social experiment. There is something different about writing on a blog you know will be read by thousands of people than writing just to yourself and for yourself, so many of
my writings there look more like activism and preachery.
I've been also active on the RC scene with
f5j.eu. I'd like to get more writers, but language barrier seems to be a real challenge here. Looks like not may young, english speaking folks are interested in flying model planes over in Hungary or Slovakia ...
+ 7 - 2 | § ¶Can't sleep ...
In nights like this, when my biorythm is synced to some place on the other side of our planet and my mind is wandering around, I usually take a nice long night walk in an attempt to follow it.
+ 7 - 3 | § ¶Crows
Something very interesting has just happened. My workplace is located
5min walking distance from the train station and I usualy cross all the
rails on my way. There's also a lot of electrical cables laid above the
rails and my path leads me near the point where they all come to the
ground.
Today, I found a dead crow there. A beautiful grey and black bird,
probably young. I guess it got electrocuted on the wires there. I
deceided to have a closer look at it and while I was turning the bird
around, the whole flock gathered out of nowhere and started circling
above me and yelling at me. They must have been very aware of the loss
of one of their members, as they are very social animals. And
smart too. Two of them even followed me all the way to the building while constantly yelling at me.
+ 7 - 2 | § ¶Densha otoko
Not really an anime, but still coming from that land of the rising sun
... But let me begin this story with a movie from the west.
+ 3 - 5 | § ¶Steamboy
Kakšno razočaranje. Iz nekaj malega, kar sem o filmu slišal, sem pričakoval vsaj nekaj originalnosti. Tako pa ...
Če že delajo politično motirivarne filme, naj jih delajo tako, da te
tolčejo po glavi (Arjuna) ali da te ujčkajo (Miyazaki) ... takole nekaj
vmes pa zgubijo vso resnost in ostrino ter ne ponujajo nobenega užitka
ob gledanju.
Poleg tega je cel film še neprijetno temačen.
+ 3 - 5 | § ¶Juuni Kokui - Dvanajst kraljestev
Te dni že drugič gledam to serijo. Fantasy sicer ni moja zvrst, vendar
je ta serija izjema. Poleg razvitega in pestrega sveta vsebuje ravno
dovolj osebnostnega razvoja likov in njihove introspekcije, da me
pritegne. In ko me pritegne, se vživim še v svet in zgodbo. Sledi samo
še užitek ob gledanju :) Priporočam.
+ 1 - 3 | § ¶Software "design"
It all started with me having too much free time at my workplace.
So I started researching about homebrew autopilots for model planes, that led me to software that runs avionics onboard the real planes, which ultimately led me to programming practices used to write such software. These two blog posts say most of the things I wanted to write here.
+ 1 - 2 | § ¶How I see modern Air Traffic Control
A few years ago I started expanding and overlapping my hobbies. Obvious overlap between being a system administrator (and integrator and architect) and flying is Air traffic control or ATC. I joined the
virtual flying community and observed the procedures there and visited
Slovenia Control and
Ljubljana airport with them. I'm also reading
AeroSafety world online magazine and am following
aviation-safety.net and
flightglobal rss feeds. If it is worth anything, I've also watched all AirCrash Investigation tv documentaries and IVTV dvds. I also asked our ATC for their SOP documents but was understandably denied the request as they're internal documents.
The most pressing problem of ATC today is how to increase the capacity of airways to safely carry more planes (=passengers) from point A to point B. Based on the little information I have available, I put together a sysadmin's view on how I think it should be done.
+ 5 - 2 | § ¶My thoughts on antispam
Everyone knows spam today. There are estimations that it makes more than 90% of all email traffic. Judging by my personal spam collection, spam is on constant increase.
I have always filtered spam out of my inbox by hand. I played with almost all antispam technologies out there today and haven't found any to be perfect. They're either too hardware resource intensive (long list of daily updated regex rules) or too users' time intensive (manual training of statistical filter). Two tecnologies that made me think some more were greylisting and one-time email addresses.
The only way to stop spam is to increase the cost to spam, which basically means to decrease its efficiency. I came up with a concept that does this extremely well, while offering end user perfectly transparent and easy-to-get-rid-of-spam mail expirience.
+ 2 - 6 | § ¶Job satisfaction
Not long ago I had an interesting discussion with my coworker about our jobs. As a sysadmin I often get requests from people that know me to help them configure their server, set them up a web page, mail account, etc., for a small fee. Or from some small company that does not have the expetrise to maintain their own server. But I gladly pass all such requests to the coworker, because I can's stand the feeling that any of those people would have the right to bother me at $random time of day because of some irrelevant problem, like spam getting through or somesuch.He offers them his price and then they deceide if they want him to fix their systems or not.
On the other hand, if someone ask me to teach him how to do all the system administration and is willing to learn, I'm more than glad to help. I don't even ask for a price, I just say if he feels like paying me, he can pay whatever he feels is the right price for the knowledge I gave him. But just the satisfaction of teaching someone is more than enough for me. I guess I got this after my father :)
+ 2 - 7 | § ¶Sad state of linux filesystems
Faced with a need for a reliable, well performing file system, a linux admin today is in a bit of a trouble. Ext2 is still in the kernel just for academic purposes, ext3 is "good enough" for majority but uselessly slow for what I want from it, reiser3 is in "don't tuch if it's not b0rken" mode but suffers from BKL use which limit its scalability, xfs and jfs are nowhere near a reliable state and reiser4 is "almost there" but due to Hans arrest, one wonders if it will ever be finished.
The more I think, the more I see there are only two usefull options for me: use Veritas VXFS, which recently
became free for "smaller" installs or dump linux altogether and go with ZFS in Solaris 10. Or maybe Nexenta.
One wonders if so much choice really does make sense ... because these days it looks like FS knowhow is too much spread out and not focused on making just one, but really good FS ... As much as I despise RedHat for sticking with just ext3 in their RHEL line, at the end it would seem that was the right longterm choice.
Now if only
chunkfs would become a reallity sooner ...
+ 3 - 5 | § ¶Rants ...
Recently my iBook was stolen (straight from my office, no less) and I took a look around if there's any notebook that I could replace it with. I'm looking for a light and small enough notebook to carry around that can run on its batteries for the longest possible time. I think I'd also like to have the ugliest notebook around (so no one would be tempted to steal it) and if it is in persoalised and unique in some obvious way, even better. Panasonic toughbook comes pretty close to that, but it is waaay too expensive.
But what I wanted to tell you is this. I checked web sites of all major notebook manufacturers and were shocked at how bad they were. I know what I want to buy, so I want the web site to let me input my requirements and then show me the products that match my requiremets best. None were even close to that. Shame.
Then, because I know how to translate my requirements to specific hardware configurations. I expected those web sites to select their models by the hardware. Again, no luck. All they do is offer you a list of their models (name + number) and then you have to dig the small print to get the hw specs. But I don't care about names and model numbers! I want a notebook with such and such configuration and I want a choice based on that.
Thinking over this again, I see a large business opportunity here :)
And there's more ...
+ 6 - 3 | § ¶Job offer ...
What do you do when you get an invitation to a selection process for a job from the most desired company to work for? I was very suprised when I got an email from them and also a bit confused as how they found me and why they invited me. It was clear to me from the start that my chances were slim, but I deceided to try it anyway. Just to see how it feels to be questioned by the people who really know things they do. Instead of a long description of what all I went through,
this episode of anime Windy tales, apropriately titled "Audition Chronicles", show it best. And yes, my story ended in much the same way as in this anime.
+ 2 - 7 | § ¶This time, planned downtime :)
You've probably noticed (I sure did :) how stable this adsl link is.
Almost wants me to set up some mrtg to show the percentage of time it's
down ...
But this time, I'm going to reorganize my network layout a bit, because
I want to test certain firewall product in reallife. Mostly
configurability, obviously I can't really test throughput :) So expect
some more downtime in the following days.
+ 5 - 4 | § ¶Eye candy vs. usefulness ...
Yesterday we had an interesting talk at our weekly meetings of a
local web community,
regarding flash vs. standard html pages. I won't comment the talk here,
but rather mention some thoughts that started floating in my head as a
result of the talk.
+ 4 - 6 | § ¶Sunny week
This week has been full of Sun all over the news. They officialy
released their Niagara cpu as an Ultrasparc T1, released first Solaris
builds with their new ZFS filesystem and of top of everything, offered
their ide/compiler/tools Studio 11 for free. Looks like Sun is rising
back from the ashes ...
+ 1 - 2 | § ¶How I see modern Air Traffic Control
A few years ago I started expanding and overlapping my hobbies. Obvious overlap between being a system administrator (and integrator and architect) and flying is Air traffic control or ATC. I joined the
virtual flying community and observed the procedures there and visited
Slovenia Control and
Ljubljana airport with them. I'm also reading
AeroSafety world online magazine and am following
aviation-safety.net and
flightglobal rss feeds. If it is worth anything, I've also watched all AirCrash Investigation tv documentaries and IVTV dvds. I also asked our ATC for their SOP documents but was understandably denied the request as they're internal documents.
The most pressing problem of ATC today is how to increase the capacity of airways to safely carry more planes (=passengers) from point A to point B. Based on the little information I have available, I put together a sysadmin's view on how I think it should be done.
+ 4 - 4 | § ¶F5J is happening
In the last three or so years battery & motor technology has
matured enough to power RC sailplanes and quickly, F5J was born.
Following mostly F3J, it tries to combine soaring skills of the pilot
with his knowledge about how to use available battery energy in the
most efficient way for the climb. Just check
the images from our last meeting ... pure joy.
Now the problem is that almost each country wants to combine soaring
& electricity knowledge in their own way. Therefore it's kinda
difficult to establish one set of rules that all will follow and that
would eventually be recognized by FAI. But I have some ideas about that
too ... hope they materialize soon.
+ 3 - 6 | § ¶Pa je poletel!
Štrk
namreč. Se mi je zdelo, da ga že kar predolgo zanemarjam ... no ja,
glede na to, kako dobro leti, mi ni zameril :) Gre za popolnoma iz
kompozitnih materialov narejen jadralni model s 3.3m razpetine in težo
nekaj čez 2.3kg. Leti precej pohlevno in prijetno lenobno, kot se za
velik model spodobi. Zaradi gradnje odpadejo "manjša" vzdrževalna dela,
kot so raztrganine folije, tu in tam vdrta ali polomljena balsa, itd
..., ki so redni spremljevalec lesenih modelov. LiPo pogon pa mi
omogoča, da je model vedno pripravljen na polet.
+ 5 - 3 | § ¶Spet limanje ...
Potem ko sem pošteno ojačal trup pod krili, kjer je začel pokati, res nisem pričakoval, da bo naslednji
konkretno popustil
nos. Zanimivo pri vsem skupaj je to, da sem že nekaj dni prej čutil, da
bo šlo nekaj narobe ... vendar ker si nisem mogel predstavljati
polomljenih kril ali česa drugega razbitega, sem šel vseeno leteti. Pa
tudi onesposobljen model bi mi prišel prav kot izgovor za nekaj drugih
zadev :)
+ 6 - 3 | § ¶Drevje vabi ...
Končno je tudi mene doletela čast
parkirati model na vrh drevesa.
Prva napaka: že cel dan sem slutil, da se bo zgodilo nekaj zanimivega,
vendar nisem točno vedel kaj ... zato sem slutnje ignoriral. Druga
napaka: preveč novih sprememb na modelu, od drugačnega težišča, večjega
propa, do drugačne razporeditve komand na oddajniku, kar mi je
onemogočalo, da bi v krizi pravočasno odreagiral pravilno. Tretja
napaka: let s takim modelom na novem, neznanem terenu. Četrta napaka:
ko sem videl, da je model za drevesom in ne pred, kot sem domneval, bi
moral odviti ven od hriba in pognati motor, ne pa upati, da bom
priletel do cilja skozi prostor za drevesom in pred gozdom.
Kot pravijo, vsaka šola nekaj stane. Predvsem se moram naučiti v
trenutku presoditi situacijo in se odločiti za bolj varno možnost ...
+ 6 - 4 | § ¶Runway
"It lies still and quiet and is so simple: a field of asphalt.
What is it then, that gives a runway its misterious, almost eerie
quality of the unknown? It is the stepping stone to flight. [...] From
this place more than one boy has flown to fulfill his dream of looking
down on the clouds." So says Richard Bach in one of his short stories.
I agree :)
+ 5 - 4 | § ¶I have wings again :)
Recently, I started flying again. A certain kind of competition with
electric powered gliders is getting popular here and around the world,
so I deceided to try myself at it.
Here
are some photos and a description of my model. So far I have made five
flights and the trimming is almost good. It's about time I try catching
some thermals.
