I read Triv‘s blog and he reports that his laptop caught fire in the middle of the night.
This is a picture of the laptoy. There are a couple of pictures of his room on the blog.
I wonder what circumstances this happened and if there are actually statistics of events like this. This is pretty scary stuff.
Will warranty cover this? Will Triv ever use an Apple again?
My friends at the secret working group have just submitted Internet Draft to the RFC editor for April 1 publication. Lets hope Bert will have his first RFC in a 14 days.
I have a thing with "new words" so my attention was cought when I was cycling past a billboard that showed the word "Glascorrosie" (Dutch for "Glascorrosion") next to a picture of a somewhat dull glass in the rack of a dishwasher.
The word glascorrosion does not exist in Dutch and its amazing how the marketing people of dishwasher detergent came up with a word that without any explanation has a very clear and threathening meaning. The marketing folk who made that up are amazing.
I do proud myself to have invented a word in Dutch too. Its not in common use and a google query for it actually results in no hits. The word is "Ruksurfen" the closest English translation would be "Wanksurfing" (0 hits in google). Its the thing that young males (not me) do when they are bored and type in that 3 letter word for which Google provides 140.000.000 hits.
I would like to go on record as the person who introduced "Ruksurfen (Ruksurfer)" into the Dutch language, or maybe even the person who introduced "Wank surfing (Wank surfer)" but then again its not something to be proud off. Maybe I should just register wanksurfer.com…
I was just looking at a survey of nameserver software. For some reason Net::DNS::Nameserver seems to serve a significant number of zones. On the other hand it seems to only have 6 installed instances. I am curious. Who would use Net::DNS::Nameserver to serve their zones in production. I suspect these are false positives.
On the other hand Bert’s Secure Reverse Polish DNS Calculator (BSRPDNSC) might have inspired folk.
At the recent Apricot the folk from APEET were selling wireless IP phones for a givaway price. It reminds me of the early times of 802.11 when these devices were made available for about 50-100 bucks.
So having this device inspired me to try and configure an asterisk server on my multipurpose home router/gateway. The machine I run this on is a Dell Power edge, one of these somewhat older machines with only the powersupply van as a moving components. The 300Mhz CPU (if I’m not mistaking), 96M memory. Machine runs Debian Linux and has an EICON DIVA 2.01 S/T ISA ISDN card.
I’ve installed asterisk and mucked about for a day or two, first to get incomming ISDN calls working. Once you understand the ‘channel’ and ‘context’ concepts its pretty easy to setup.
I’ve set it up so that:
So to be able to do this one needs to setup two channels, the SIP and MODEM channel and create a couple of extentions.
In sip.conf i defined the following
[olaf]
type=friend
host=dynamic
username=olaf
context=olaf_from_sip
secret= ****
dtmfmode=inband ; Choices are inband, rfc2833, or info
In modem.conf I added the following:
[interfaces]
context=isdngroup=1 ; group=1
msn=201234567 ; the incomming MSN
incomingmsn=*
device => /dev/ttyI0
device => /dev/ttyI1
In extensions.conf I have the following relevant entries:
[default]
; This is for the incomming sip calls that are addressed to sip@
; off course you need a SRV entry for
exten => olaf,1,Dial(SIP/olaf,100,r)[olaf_from_sip]
ignorepat => 0
exten => 100,1,Dial(Modem/g1:0209876543,100,r) ; when 100 is dialed the ‘hotline’ number is called
exten => _0.,1,Dial(Modem/g1/201234567:${EXTEN}) ; any extention starting with 0 is routed to the PSTN with Caller ID 2012345657
exten => _0.,2,Congestion[isdn] ; see modem.conf
exten => 201234567,1,Dial(SIP/olaf,100,r) ; a call on the isdn line, to 201234567 is rerouted to the SIP/olaf extention.
Setting this up is not hard indeed and it is truly remarkable that his technology is available to home users.
From the script for “Corporate Crime” starring Robbie Williams as James Bond.
Drousley wakes up looks at the window, its open, he walks over and closes it. Looking surprised, that window wasn’t open. He scans the room, nothing unfamiliar. Walks back to the bed and picks up his robe from the bed. Takes some effort to stylishly and correctly knots the belt.
From the bed, walks to the hallway, bends over, picks up the paper. While scanning the headlines, walks to the toilet. Camera zooms to feet, robe falls to the floor, shorts fall on the ankles and Drousley sits down.
Split screen:
right:
left:
right:
Full screen:
The kicking of the legs becomes more violent, while smoke fills the screen, from above. Suddenly the kicking stops. The paper falls on the floor. Headline shown “Drousley new CEO for Gong Inc”.
Silence.
I am in Japan, in a conference hall, and when I look around I see… chairs, walls, blinded windows. If there would have been people the differences would have been more distinct. 
But now I could have been anywhere. Fortunatelly I did have a change to leave the conference center and I am getting introduced to the Japanes Kitchen.
I consider myself a foody, but not a ‘natural one’. I have not been educated as such and a lot of things that I appreciate nowadays I have tought myself to eat when I was in my late 20s.
I have been concentrating on the European kitchen mostly. I am familiar with the French and Italian kitchen. I even pretend to be able to cook. But all this pompus pretention asside I have never been properly introduced to the Japanese kitchen. Mainly because I am not so much of a fish eater. But here I am getting over it. The food is so amazingly well prepared that one just has to taste.
We went to a restaurant two days ago where we had a “surprise” dinner (only 2500 Yen), a wide variety of fish, poultry, veggies and… beef. The best beef I had in years… maybe even the best beef in my life. It came with sesame seeds and a red sauce that might have had some tomato in it but also could have been soy based. Let me not forget to mention the Duck, which appearantly is judged at proper value here too.
I hope I’m abble to find more places with surprises like this…. jummy.
Bert, my most favorite Trend Watcher has produced his first movie on typical technology that will take over the world.
This brings back good memories need I say more…
Recently I became responsible for the maintenance of the perl Net::DNS module. Since the previous maintainer had moved Net::DNS to a subversion directory I decided to give subversion a try. The result…
I am converted. Haleluja.
What got me going for it is that the on-line documentation describes in a very clear way how Branching and Merging works. After toying around for a bit I learned two things:
The most powerfull features, and that has everything to do with branching are the "move", "copy" and "delete" features. The only thing you have to get used to are the order(6) sized version numbers you can end up with.
This is Revision 5923235 of this posting