WhiteRabbit's Braindump

This is my last post on this blog. It's been fun, and I thank all of my readers for reading.

See, the thing is, blogging is just so yesterday. It's uncool. It's just so passé . In today's fast-moving, proactive, paradigm-shifting world, one does no longer blog, but one tiddles. So I've started my own Tiddly Wiki which effectively obsoletes this blog.

You'll find all the same rants and whatever, except it'll be easier to find old posts, and will serve as a much more efficient notebook for yours truly. To quick start, just look at the 'timeline' panel on the bottom right corner of the page, where you'll find the history of posts, which is essentially the same as that of a blog.

There is no way to add comments yet. I'll look into it soon.

See you there!.

And I mean it. LASER rules!

Tax time has come.

Narelle is self-employed, which means she has to deal directly with all the administration. And by 'she', I mean 'I'.

So as a quick remainder, we deal with 4 organisations regularly: RAM (health insurrance), CIPAV (pension), URSSAFF (Social security type thing), and RSI (Social security type thing... not sure how they are different from URSSAFF). Apparently for taxation we need to declare Narelle's income to RSI, and some others I may have forgotten, and of course (?) Inland Revenue. Now, for Inland revenue, Narelle's income is part of the "family revenue" which is composed of my income, Narelle's, and any other revenue we may have (share dividends, bank errors in our favour and so on).

Family income is declared on a famous 2042 form. This form has an appendix 2042C for self-employed people like Narelle. We're supposed to fill it in first, and the rest of the taxation shall be deduced from that. And by 'the rest', I mean RSI's. RSI's form actually tell you to look up figures in your 2042C. 2042C shall be available on May 1st. RSI's form is due for May 1st.

Wait a minute. How do I do this again?

Okay, with a toolchain I could compile more modules for the kernel, namely the loop.o driver. With that, I could install a swap file over NFS on the disc server.

So, starting from base2_2.tgz (unfortunately Debian doesn't seem to provide base tarballs anymore -- shame really, it's the easiest way to install when you have no local storage and no compiler), I chrooted to it through NFS, added a swap file so apt-get wouldn't choke anymore (the box only has 32Mb of RAM, which isn't enough for apt-get apparently), and upgraded to Etch accidently. I meant to stop at Sarge, but 'stable' changed in my back. Hmpf.

Then installing madplay and I can play MP3. First step, done.

Next step: Building Tremor (the fixed-point arithmetic version of ogg-vorbis) and a player so I can play OGG file.

Barely 2 hours to build the toolchain. I guess computers are faster these days, I know what I am doing, and I found the right link. The only failures I had following these instructions were related to problems in my kernel headers (including a missing symbol -- go figure).

I finally got around to digging a VP882 I have. The VP882 was IndigoVision's most powerful MPEG4 codec at the time I left in 2005. Today I want to use it for the following purposes:

• My disc server is hidden in a room where it can be as noisy as it likes to be. I want the silent VP882 to be able to access my MP3/OGG collection and play it in the lounge. Bonus points for getting a nice interface like that of mpd.
• Connect a camera to the VP882 and do at least picture capture, at best video streaming, probably using VLC, to have a cat-checking Web cam type thing.
• Run all the servers from the VP882 so no-one can attack me using x86-based exploits. Ok that's not possible, the VP882 won't be enough to serve anything more than plain files.

Unfortunately I won't be able to use the MPEG4 encode hardware, as I'd have to speak VBTP or something for that to work, and those protocols are Indigo property. Oh well.

After playing around, I'll be damned: I'll have to build a cross-gcc toolchain to recompile the kernel so I can have loopback interfaces so I can have NFS swap so I can natively compile (and do actual work).

I'll be back in a week I guess :/

I fed a couple of firebugs to the plants. The VFT seemed to love it, and so did I, witnessing the closing of the trap over the helpless bug *muhahahhaha*. I'll have to make a video of that some day.

On the other hand, neither the Ping nor the Sarracenia seemed sticky enough to keep them. I guess I'll have to find them smaller feed. Shame, firebugs are everywhere at the moment.

Idle chatter is not talent.

Suppose you have a service listening on port x, but unfortunately you can only connect to port y (probably because of some proxy or firewalls). You want to connect port y to port x so that a connection to port y gets redirected to port x. Right.

The proper way to do that is probably iptables, but it means you need to be root, you need to have uptables installed and working, you need to know how to use it.

Let's just do it with netcat then. We'll create a small script that connects to port x, then a netcat that listens to port y.

cat > redir
#! /bin/sh
nc localhost x
^D
chmod 755 redir
while true; do nc -l -p y -e ./redir ; done

The 'while' is necessary because nc dies after each socket closing. Obviously you can also use this to connect to a different machine.

It's 2007 and there is STILL no O_STREAMING in Linux?! What's the big idea? Am I doomed to have crappy behaviour as soon as I have a bittorrent running?