Fascinating problem with SCP

Posted on 2008-06-22 by Oliver

Today I had a fascinating issue with SCP (Secure Copy). I was a bit flabbergasted when several attempts to copy a 800 MiB file failed … after a while. You could see that the transfer rate was going up. Since I was connected via SSH to the machine which executed the SCP command, and apparently the transfer rate of SCP was eating up the bandwidth for the actual SSH connection. At least the SSH connection was dropped every single time until I used -l to limit the transfer rate of SCP. Fascinating indeed.

I hope this will help someone to figure out similar issues.

// Oliver

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Let me know if anyone has problems accessing …

Posted on 2008-06-21 by Oliver

… this blog or any of the subdomains of assarbad.net, assarbad.info or assarbad.org. If this is the case, something went wrong with the migration to a different server. Otherwise you should perhaps not even have noticed. Except if you have one machine that caches DNS names and another which doesn’t. In this case this entry will only appear in the blog on the new IP, because this is the continued one. The other IP will at some point cease to get any requests for those domain names and I am going to take down the files and so on after 24 hours.

// Oliver

Update: Duh, I just noticed that I “defused” delphi-jedi.net by mistake. Have fixed it, but it’ll have to propagate through the DNS system again.

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Hmm lecker

Posted on 2008-06-21 by Oliver

Meinen Reis kaufe ich ohnehin nur lose. Aber letztens habe ich mal etwas eigenwilliges probiert. Ich habe nach dem Kochen Pesto zu meinem Reis gegeben und es schmeckt ziemlich gut. Abgesehen von den Preissteigerungen beim Reis (allerdings habe ich den 5kg-Sack schon davor gekauft gehabt) ist das auch noch billig. Da ich als gebürtiger Lausitzer natürlich (Achtung Stereotyp :mrgreen: !) Meerrettich mag, habe ich dann bei einem der nächsten Male einfach mal etwas davon dazugetan. Immernoch lecker. Hier also das vorläufige Rezept:

– Thai-Duftreis (nach Bedarf)
– Pesto alla Calabrese (nach Geschmack)
– Meerrettich (nach Geschmack)

Vegetarisch und trotzdem lecker. Man glaubt es kaum.

// Oliver (Junggeselle :mrgreen: )

Posted in /dev/null, DE | 2 Comments

When is Opera 9.51 scheduled?

Posted on 2008-06-21 by Oliver

I’ve got one pretty interesting problem which is highly annoying in my opinion. As a fan of Opera, I have of course upgraded immediately to Opera 9.50 when it was released. Experience so far was always good. Not so this time.

First off, I disliked the fact that they have this dark glassy skin as a default now. Well, it may be stylish and nice and all – I don’t like it anyway. Here a comparison (click to enlarge).

Opera 9.27 vs. 9.50

Continue reading →

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DLOAD_ERROR_HANDLER not specified

Posted on 2008-06-20 by Oliver

If you’re using the Windows 2008 Server WDK in order to develop usermode code, you’ll have stumbled over this error message referencing DLOAD_ERROR_HANDLER:

Warning: DLOAD_ERROR_HANDLER not specified in $(MAKEDIR)

I am not yet sure whether you have to give a function name (research leads me to think that), but you can make it shut up by giving some bogus value.

// Oliver

Posted in /dev/null, Programming | Leave a comment

Ich hasse es Fußball zu schauen

Posted on 2008-06-20 by Oliver

Kein Scherz, ich hasse es. Es ist meines Erachtens so sinnlos wie die Liveübertragung von Livekonzerten im Fernsehen. Nun höre ich relativ regelmäßig Inforadio vom RBB, jupp auch auf Island kann man das empfangen. Gestern aber gab es statt dem normalen “informativen” Programm nur Fußball als Liveübertragung. Nach ein paar Minuten hat es mir sogar einigermaßen gefallen (Portugal vs. Deutschland) und man kann nebenbei noch andere Dinge machen, weil eben nur einer der Sinne beansprucht wird.

// Oliver

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Not a flop then, it seems

Posted on 2008-06-19 by Oliver

The Firefox 3 Download Day was apparently less a flop than it seemed at first glance (i.e. within the first two hours). They got more than 8 million downloads in 24h, but for some reason the start and end times were apparently really shifted by approximately 105 minutes. Perhaps due to the outages in the beginning.

I finally got the new version and one of the stranger things is the check of the certificate of some pages. For example some pages with a perfectly fine SSL certificate get the “medium” value (i.e. blue) instead of green. No idea why or how this is meant to be. I liked the yellow address bar for this purpose better.

// Oliver

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Yep, polar bears are definitely endangered now!

Posted on 2008-06-18 by Oliver

While the Icelandic police had my understanding with shooting the first polar bear in twenty years, after it had approached a settlement, this is definitely just stupid now. There is no excuse for the killing of the two polar bears that were sighted on Monday this week. Tranquilizers should have been available this time, instead real bullets were used again.

And guess what, not the hostility of the (second) bear (this week) was the reason for it being killed – it was the stupid curiosity of journalists. Once the bear started approaching the journalists, it was shot. Nice job!

My proposal for the next time: let the bear kill one or two journalists in order to give the journalists the necessary impressions to develop some respect for such an animal and then you’ve bought yourself some time to get the tranquilizers and the cage to transport the polar bear back to Greenland or to some zoo alive.

// Oliver

Posted in EN, Island/Iceland/Ísland | 1 Comment

Firefox 3 Download Day 2008, a flop? (update)

Posted on 2008-06-17 by Oliver

The download day for the world record attempt in the number of downloads by the Firefox community seems to be(come) a flop. It’s now 45min after the whole thing started and apparently the servers can’t handle the number of requests.

Or is something going on in parallel? Such as a DDoS of their webservers?

Update: Their site is back, although slow.

Update #2: So they’re prepared? Fun fact, I get offered the version 2 in the language which is set as primary in my primary browser (which isn’t Firefox). Wondering whether the world record attempt will even be valid in such a case …

Update #3: Okay, screw their world-record attempt. I have some sympathies for them, although it is not my favorite browser, but it’s simply getting ridiculous. I am getting offered version 2 as version 3 (screenshot below) and their download page for other languages and operating systems lists only version 2.0.0.14 (other screenshot) for any language. It’s definitely the worst-prepared world-record attempt. Maybe it will make it into the Guiness Book after all, although under a different category than anticipated?!

Update #4: It looks like they sorted it out now.

// Oliver

Posted in EN, Software | 5 Comments

SpeedCommander 12.20 released

Posted on 2008-06-16 by Oliver

If you’re juggling files beyond the desktop and still use Windows Explorer, check out SpeedCommander. The new version has gotten even better and unlike another popular “commander-like” file manager it has full Unicode support and even has a native x64 version.

Link: www.speedproject.de

// Oliver

Posted in EN, Software | 5 Comments

Polar bears in danger

Posted on 2008-06-16 by Oliver

Today two more polar bears were sighted in the North of Iceland. Let’s hope this time there is a veterinarian with tranquilizers, not like last time. My father told me even the German yellow press reported about the polar bear being shot recently.

BTW: No polar bears have been sighted here on Iceland in years before this summer. So it’s a somewhat similar situation as in Bavaria, where a bear was shot after visiting briefly. He was the first in more than 150 years.

// Oliver

A clip about the killing of the first polar bear. The subtitles are not an exact translation of the parts spoken in Icelandic, in case someone wonders.

Posted in /dev/null, EN, Island/Iceland/Ísland | Leave a comment

Searching electronic devices at the border

Posted on 2008-06-15 by Oliver

Following a court ruling, the EFF and several news sources world-wide have reported about the practice to search through the data on electronic devices at the US border. Bruce Schneier has picked up the topic in his latest cryptogram (a newletter). So far everyone seems to have ignored or neglected another possibility: targeted spyware.

In fact I am not just talking about the usual spyware, but software that was written with the sole purpose of going undetected as long as possible and possibly being able to transmit as much data as possible. Spyware in a literal sense.
Continue reading →

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British humo(u)r at its best :)

Posted on 2008-06-15 by Oliver

A very nice prank call. Graham Norton talks to Greta with Grosse Titten via an interpreter … :mrgreen: :mrgreen: :mrgreen:

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Fucking, Austria ;)

Posted on 2008-06-14 by Oliver

Just a hilarious clip: on Youtube.

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The laughable “democracy” of the European Union

Posted on 2008-06-14 by Oliver

Now that the Irish have rejected the Treaty of Lisbon in a plebiscite, European politicians suggest to leave the Irish behind and ratify the treaty regardless with only the consenting member states. This is a notable development because it shows all too well how the European Union (EU) works. The parliament as the body that represents the people has been overruled more than once by other non-representative bodies of the EU … and alone the fact that only around 4.2 million people out of more than 420 million are allowed to decide about their fate shows how “democratic” the EU and the states of which it is comprised really are.

// Oliver

Posted in /dev/null, EN | 1 Comment

Powerful reinforcements for the Icelandic church

Posted on 2008-06-11 by Oliver

The Icelandic church received support from a … forceful ally but wasn’t all too interested :mrgreen:

And in Icelandic. Some pictures from the photo-shooting on Flickr (also as a slide show) 😉

// Oliver

Posted in /dev/null, EN | Leave a comment

Der Schauprozeß hat begonnen

Posted on 2008-06-07 by Oliver

Hier mal ein Experiment in dem die Bedingungen im Lager in Guantanamo nachgebildet werden. Wohlgemerkt, die brutalsten der von der US-Regierung erlaubten Methoden wurden hier nicht benutzt, da sie als zu gefährlich angesehen werden.

// Oliver

Posted in DE, Gedanken | 2 Comments

Unzufrieden mit der (Schein)Demokratie

Posted on 2008-06-07 by Oliver

Laut einer ARD-Umfrage sind 52% der Deutschen nicht mehr mit ihrer “demokratischen” Gesellschaft zufrieden. Rein rechnerisch kann man es nicht mehr allein den Ostdeutschen zuschieben, wie es noch vor einigen Monaten möglich war, als bereits eine Mehrheit der Ostdeutschen sich ein anderes Gesellschaftssystem als unsere “repräsentative Demokratie” wünschte. Zu dumm.

Aber vielleicht hat der Rest ja inzwischen begriffen, daß Demokratie etwas anderes ist. Bei den alten Griechen gab es zwar Sklaven und die hatten natürlich nix zu sagen – genau wie Frauen – aber da Sklaverei heutzutage abgeschafft und Frauenwahlrecht (etc.) eingeführt sind, lohnt sich der Vergleich durchaus. Auch die Zahl von Bürgern ist kein Argument, da zumindest inzwischen technisch eine weit repräsentativere Demokratie möglich wäre. Aber unsere Volksparteien haben ja sogar ein Problem damit Volksabstimmungen auf Bundesebene einzuführen …

// Oliver

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Chernobyl the second in Slovenia?

Posted on 2008-06-04 by Oliver

The European Commission issued an EU-wide radiation alert late on Wednesday after Slovenia began shutting down a nuclear power plant following a problem with the cooling system.
(Source: interactive investor, deutsche Leser gehen hierher)

Don’t panic just yet. The amount of information is scarce and from the first comments it sounds like it’s all under control.

Update: BBC also reports now. So there it looks more like it’s a preliminary warning that something worse might follow.

Update #2: It seems everything is under control and it was just to warn in the case something happens. But an EU-wide alert is obviously unusual, given how big the EU is and that “only” cooling water was supposed to have leaked. More info (deutsch).

// Oliver

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Argh …

Posted on 2008-06-03 by Oliver

The patches pertaining to the Debian key rollover are only available in the security repository. I just found out the hard way, that one of my machines denied access to another one, although I had “freshly generated” private keys. Ooops … until I figured that the repository for security fixes should have been in there. Now it is and the keys have been replaced.

Checked the logs and no one got in. Luckily this server is still in the preparational stage and I am always stopping sshd when disconnecting … that should be a pretty high hurdle for any attackers :mrgreen:

// Oliver

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