After work, Colin came over, to check his results amongst other things, and we went off to a free Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill gig in Temple Bar’s Meeting House Sqaure.

It’s been over a year since I’d seen Hayes live, and it was an absolutely brilliant gig, and the atmosphere was great due to the lashing rain at this outdoor gig. Also managed to meet old friends Éanna and Sorcha there, which is good.

The Bouzouki

The bouzouki is an instrument that was introduced to Irish Traditional Music in the 60s, most notably by Donal Lunny (crap) and Andy Irvine (superb). Originally, it’s a greek instrument, though the modern version has been heavily modified, and most feature a flat back to the soundbox, rather than a curved one.

If you’re a complete nerd like me, you’ll be intrested to know that it’s tonal range is suprisingly bassy, and goes from 220Hz to 2.3Khz, in the tuning I use (ADAD), though in GDAD the lower range is extended downwards to 196Hz.

It’s a double-stringed instrument, with 8 strings in total tuned to 4 seperate tones. Unlike some double string instruments, most players keep the double strings in-tone rather than seperated by an octave.

It’s used mostly for modal music, which is why it’s tuned in fourths.

Google for Bouzouki

For years I’ve been mulling with the idea of Joining a political party. I’ve been involved in politics for a long time, and I was an electoral agent at the last election, but time constraints mean I’d be better off joining a party.

The party that mosts aligns with my own politics is the Greens, but unfortunately I have the rather inconvienent conviction that nuclear power is actually the greenest, safest power source going and we should be there already. So they get tetchy every time I try
to convince them.

Finally got a working ACL compiler for NSD written today, next onwards to the module building!

These people are unreal, they offer full Linux UML’s, running Debian, Gentoo or DeadRat for 15 Sterling per month. They come with 3GB of disk space, and a 7.5GB (yes that’s a big B) transfer rate, all uppable by paying a little more.

As if that wasnt enough, they also give you an ssh account on the machine hosting the UML, so you can reboot and restart your server on demand, connect to it’s serial consoles, tell how much bandwidth you’ve used .. and more. Oh, and you set up SMS notification and
automatic actions such as reboots if services suddenly go down.

And if that wasnt enough, the UML kernel they use supports IPv6, and you can get up a 6to4 tunnel without any trouble!

So, needless to say, I ordered one, and set about migrating kilmainham.stdlib.net to the new server, called castlerea.stdlib.net. It took less than an hour, in fact if your reading this on www.stdlib.net, it’s coming from castlerea. Over IPv6 if you support it (shame on you
if you don’t!).

In other purchasing madness, I bought all 3 seasons of Family Guy on DVD from play.com yesterday, can’t wait for them to arrive :)

In nsd related news, looks like the NSD team may implement plugin support, which I’ll be using to implement ACL’s, it’s all working out very nicely indeed :)

As a result of my work on NSD, I now have some useful generic routines for turning strings such as

193.1.219.0/24
193.1.0.0/255.255.0.0
127.0.0.1/8
192.168/16
::1/64
::ffff:169.172.1.2

Into useful network-order binary representations. There are also some macros for doing efficient subnet checks, whether an address is within a subnet, whether a whole subnet lies within another and so on. It’s reasonly good, taking 6 seconds on my 2Ghz laptop to
check every possible IPv4 address against a subnet, it takes 22 to the corresponding ammount of v6 ones. The implementation is relatively foolproof, with all networks being stored in IPv6 format (V4′s get mapped), but there are efficient V4-only tests in
the header.

• 1	<a href="/~colmmacc/nsd/subnet.c">subnet.c</a>

• 1	<a href="/~colmmacc/nsd/subnet.h">subnet.h</a>

My patches to nsd have been applied, and should be in the nsd-1.2 release. I’m working on adding ACL support for queries, we’d like to be able to deny queries from non-HEAnet subnets for a specific zone. The NSD people are talking about developing a modular plug-in standard, that would suit me down to the ground, but in the meantime I’ll hack it in.

I have a working compiler for the ACLs, which compiles the subnets into a file for NSD to read later, I’m going to see how best to integrate it with the NSD side of the equation today.

/. have a story up about QNX, the kickass OS, there’s a new fortune article on it up. It’s nice to see mention of QNX, which many of us have been using for a long long time, but it would have been nice if the article had been accurate.

It includes such gems as “QNX has been the only company so far to commercialize a microkernel OS”, someone really should tell the guys at Apple! It would have been nice if they’d mentioned the fact that the QNX microkernel was proven Mathmetically uncrashable aswell. Ah well, can’t have it all.

net/network.o: In function `irda_device_init’:
net/network.o(.text.init+0x2c70): undefined reference to `toshoboe_init’
make[1]: *** [vmlinux] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/kernel-source-2.4.21′
make: *** [stamp-build] Error 2

As usual, Linux people don’t have a clue what they’re at!. Still, I’m in a happy mood, maybe because I’m just back from the pub, but also because today I finally finished a project which has been “in progress” (to use that term loosely, for the best part of three years. Though I must point out, only 5 months of which were officially on my desk!

Still it’s done and boy am I happy about it! Now to patch NSD to work properly on Linux and support AXFRs, oh and migrate HEAnets news-service ASAP.

From: “Jonathan Steinberg” <gone>
Reply-To: <gone>
Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2003 09:23:24 -0400
To: Colm MacCarthaigh <gone>
Subject: dell ap

Read your report on the Dell AP. Could you run a captive portal on it.or
better yet redirect a user when they first log onto the AP to a specific
URL?

From: Colm MacC�rthaigh <gone>
Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2003 15:18:33 +0100
To: Jonathan Steinberg <gone>
Subject: Re: dell ap

On Wed, Jun 11, 2003 at 09:23:24AM -0400, Jonathan Steinberg wrote:
> Read your report on the Dell AP. Could you run a captive portal on it.or
> better yet redirect a user when they first log onto the AP to a specific
> URL?

Sure, it’d be trivial. It’s running thttpd which you could configure
to do it, or just use inetd and cat, something like the following:

HTTP/1.0 302 Found
Location: http://yoururl
<blank line>

–
Colm MacC�rthaigh

From: “Jonathan Steinberg” <gone>
Reply-To: <gone>
Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2003 10:52:15 -0400
To: ‘Colm MacC�rthaigh’ <gone>
Subject: RE: dell ap

After that first initial redirection would the user be free to surf any
sites they please?

If you buy the access point and input the URL I request, I’d pay you $20 on
top of the AP price. This would be a great favor to me as I am not much of
a programmer…