SolarScale Blog

Saturn, Mars, Venus alignment on the 21st

I found this article on physorg talking about the alignment. So I fired up xephem and changed the time to 10 PM on June 21st in Frankfurt, Germany and this is what the western sky at an elevation of 41 degrees looks like when zoomed in a bit.

It may make a good snapshot. Also remember that the 21st is the Summer solstice. So the date is easy to remember.

My Internet-Registration Nightmare

So I bought windows 7. For 199 euros. How stupid of me, let me explain why. When I bought Windows 7 I also bought vmware Workstation 7 as an upgrade to Workstation 6 so that it would make use of the graphics cards accelleration. Back then I still had my Athlon 64-3500+ and graphics accelleration didn't work on it. Anyhow back then I couldn't run 64-bit vm's either and I had to install Windows 7 in a 32-bit vm. When I got my new computer that changed. I copied the vm over to it and ran it for a while with no problems. So a few days ago I installed the 64-bit version of Windows 7 and gave it the activation code and didn't notice it didn't accept it until today (4 days later). When trying to activate with my activation code repeatedly it didn't work. So then I tried to get Microsoft support and they wanted a Product-Id (PID) code from me. Their website only showed how to get it for XP, Vista but not for Windows 7 so I painfully found it and entered it and then they said it expired. So I booted the 32-bit windows 7 vm and their website blew up.. it then said the other PID expired as well. So now I'm pretty well stuck with 32 bit windows 7 (boohoo) since it's at least activated. (What do people do when their computer blows up and they have to reinstall?). If you think that was all that's nothing. When I moved my anti-virus over it disabled the anti-virus on the 32 bit windows 7 and there is no knob to turn it off and give the subscription back to the 32 bit anti-virus. So now I got a 64 bit un-activated version with a working anti-virus and a 32 bit activated version with no working anti-virus. This is a major mess in my view and I'm not to blame, I simply tried to make use of a product I paid for and switching from 32 bit to 64 bit version is as innocent as it gets. This cost my mental health, I hate Microsoft for it. And for the first time with online registrations the Internet is as useful as a dead doorknob.

Random Hackepedia

The RH for this week is Tor.

New Computer, New tasks

I totally forgot to blog about it. The computer that I "conceived" of as written below, well I got it. It cost more than I had hoped. Anyhow now I got a four core CPU and I want to put a bit of load on it. So I went back to seti@home and I'm running their windows 7 client. It's nice. I'm using all four processors in windows 7 with 25% load so it turns out about the same load as one core. I've already finished 2 workunits and I'm pretty happy.

Also notice the goldflipper image has changed. Before was ripped from somewhere and this one I drew all by myself.

Registered Goldflipper.NET

I registered goldflipper.net which was way overdue. I had this name on my VPS in Panama for a while and never registered the domain name. Well I did now and it does provide some IPv6 glue that I never had before, which is grand.

   Server Name: GOLDFLIPPER.NET
   IP Address: 2001:A60:F000:99:0:0:0:2
   IP Address: 200.46.208.61
   Registrar: CSL COMPUTER SERVICE LANGENBACH GMBH D/B/A JOKER.COM
   Whois Server: whois.joker.com
   Referral URL: http://www.joker.com

Nothing really changes, the domain is served with wildcarddnsd and points to the VPS in Panama and the IPv6 is served from my DSL.

Dan, Rest In Peace.

You were a true friend. I'm saddened by your death.

"I wonder what life 500 years from now will think looking back at this period of time, and what it is we take for granted as fact now that will be proven ignorant somewhere along the way. Cool. :)" - Dan Moschuk, August 2009.

Added a bit of style (CSS)

I've been attending 3 classes of learning how to use CSS (cascading style sheets) and I've learned a bit. These are the changes I've put in place after the first class and I like them. Notice the hovering on the right side that's new. Also if you went through this site a little you may have found the hackepedia backups which I've attempted to translate to german. That has a bit of style as well. Enjoy.

BTW have you noticed the changes on the english wikipedia as well?

OpenBSD 4.7 Install movie

Like I usually do I make an install movie with vmware of the latest BSD. Here is OpenBSD 4.7:

• OpenBSD 4.7

Too be honest I attempted this movie 3 times. There is some things I noticed while making it. First if you specify the X server to start immediately it's sorta hard getting a config file since "Xorg -configure" won't work with a running server. Second vmware seems to slow down with every attempt at making the movie so it drags on, just fast forward the parts that are slow.

Article in the BBC about IPv4 address exhaustion

I think I've blogged about this before. The predicted date is September 9th, 2011 when all IPv4 addresses are given away. Here is the article. To quote the article...

Companies are being urged to get working with IPv6 now, to forestall any problems caused by the shortfall.

My new computer: conceived

On january 27th, I blogged about my 24 year old history with computers. I have now decided on a new computer and it'll take a considerable chunk of my savings. The computer is going to be built with upgradeability in mind, so that 3, 5, 7 years down the road I can upgrade it to what is decent then. Basically I'll be getting an Intel Core i7-930 with 8 GB of RAM (2x4GB DDR3 modules) and a 160 GB Intel SSD , BluRay burner and a wicked socket 1366 motherboard. Also I'll get a semi-decent graphics card with 1 GB of RAM. The store I got an estimate on priced it all at 1625 Euros, and since I have to get some other things like speakers I'm counting on paying around 1700+ euros.

This computer by no means is a top-of the line, but it's powerful nontheless and I think I can call it my own personal supercomputer. ;-)