Marlamin

It’s been a while since my last blog post, mostly because I’ve been busy interning again. (Did I tell you about this yet?) It’s going great and I’m hoping to start my first assignment this week.

Hopefully my internship stuff will take off soon and I’ll be spending full days working on my projects.. for now it’s just waiting and doing secondary assignments.

On the CDR part of things, I added ads and pages on my CDR site so I can actually keep paying for this server. Sorry! Adblock all you want, I won’t hate you.

So, I was thinking about my personal life. Everyone has this once in a while, when you just sit on a calm Sunday morning and think about your life. I somehow just discovered that I have a huge amount of friends, and that I have stopped making the distinction between friends I have “in-person” and my group of friends all over the world. I’m not sure whether this is bad thing or not, and would like to hear other people’s opinions about this down below in the comments.

This blog post was originally much longer, but I was spouting too much emotional crap and decided to cut it back a few.

Yay! I’m all better. I need to bike more to get my condition up to speed again, but otherwise I’m fine. Some random shitty virus, apparently.

In way more awesome news, I’ve been updating the Cataclysm Google Maps recently.

I like making changelogs. Here’s a changelog.

• Got rid of the gall-peters projection and switched to coordinate based tiles allowing for huge maps of different sizes on the same map interface.
• Completely new interface, map now takes up full page size.
• Added copyright notice to Blizzard because I’m not a dick.
• Hopefully resolved the locations changing between builds starting now.
• Re-rendered Azeroth.
• Added Outland.
• Added Development map.
• Added PVP maps.
• Moved all tiles to a seperate tile server running nginx configurated for only serving these tiles.
• Catch all 404s on said server to return pixel.png instead of a 404 error.
• URL bar update.
• Started work on database backend for markers and other things (read as; flight paths, points of interest, etc)

Things I want to do:

• Automate map making progress
• Taxi paths
• Points of interest
• Reading from DBC
• Reading from MPQ (!)
• Even better interface
• Faster tile speeds
• MORE MAPS!

I’ve been sick for over a month now. It all started Tuesday the 8th of November. I fainted during dishwashing and felt crap afterwards. Oh well, can happen even though I usually don’t have these kind of things happening to me. It’s been building up for a while though, constant headaches and having faint moment when getting up from bed/my chair but I just dismissed it as not important.

When I fainted I knew something was really wrong, I was tired most of the day but never expected to faint. When I went to the doctor they first thought it was diabetes, I had to get my blood tested for it. One week of headaches and being really tired later I got the results. No diabetes. Yay I guess. Back to the doctor again.. told me it might be a neurological thing and told me to go to the hospital. I got a CT scan there but again – nothing. I’ve been sick for almost a month now and got the results for the CT scan last week. Nothing. Yay, I guess. Next up: another blood test! Testing for liver related things and pfeiffer.

Today was my first day at school again, luckily school is being very supportive and has allowed me to only come in from 10-2 instead of 9-3. Results of the latest blood test will be done next week. Oh well, we’ll see!

I always start on things, and then leave them be while developing because I find something else interesting to do. This is a really bad habit of mine, and I should really really really try to fix this “issue” with myself.

So I’m making a list of random projects I have started and never properly finished, be it in a working state or not. Here we go!

Steam CDR database

Steam uses a “Content Description Record” to distribute lists of their games and their information to the Steam clients across the world. It is also able to access these without actually having a Steam client, so I decided to make a parser for this. It downloads a XML file every hour of every day to and throws this into a database. The result is having an up to date database of Steam Apps and Subscriptions.

App database

Sub database

Who said Valve couldn’t count to 3? They counted to 6 already!

World of Warcraft minimap viewer

During the WoW: Cataclysm Beta, I wanted to see the terrain differences between different beta versions and made a minimap viewer for this. It uses the Google Maps API. The process of actually updating it is really annoying. This is how one “easily” updates it to the latest patch version:

• Open Art.MPQ
• Patch Art.MPQ with all patch MPQs.
• Export all BLP tiles (WoW tiles up minimaps in this format: map_x_y.blp so the bigger the map the more tiles) from the MPQs.
• (Optional) Use XNview to batch convert all BLPs to PNG.
• Use a minimap compiling script made by the lovely Dinnerbone that eats BLPs (slow, faster to convert to PNG first) and PNG/JPG/etc and compile all the tiles into one big image per map.
• Open the compiled map images in Photoshop and place them correctly so it actually looks like “Azeroth”.
• Save it as PSD in case Photoshop dies during the next step (it does this from time to time).
• Run a tiling script made for tiling big images into Google Map compatible tiles.
• Create a new version in the map viewing application itself pointing to a web server directory containing all the tiles generated in the previous step.
• Upload all tiles generated by Photoshop to the web server directory.
• Hope the result is not broken, if so go back to the PSD and find out what’s wrong retry the tiling.

Check out WyriMaps, a proper WoW minimap viewer made by a friend of mine.

That’s it really, there’s more of these that I’ll probably save for another post.

So.. Serious Request 2011. (What? Check out this post for an explanation and a report of last year)

This years edition starts on December 18th, and my vacation starts on December 24th. So I won’t be visiting it in full force like I did last year, hopefully I will be able to check it out during the weekend though but that remains to be seen.

The goal this year is to raise as much money as possible for mothers that have been struck by war. Sometime this month they will announce which DJs will be participating this year. Based on the result of this announcement I will decide whether to go or not. Oh well, time will tell!

I managed to recover most of the pictures I made at EuroBSDcon, apparently Android is not entirely retarded and actually saves pictures it finds in “not allowed” (root folder) in another place. Sadly it did not manage to save all of them, but most of them have been recovered. I have added them at the bottom of this post.

Google announced Ice Cream Sandwich a while back, otherwise known as Android 4.0 (or the other way around, who cares?!). ICS is supposed to be the result of Android 2.3 used on phones (Gingerbread) and Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) used on tablets. One OS for two different devices, I’m happy that they decided to do this because the differences in app compatibility between my Galaxy S II and Galaxy Tab 10.1 is rather large.

It’s not an original idea, as Apple’s iOS has the same OS (mostly) for their i-series. The source code for ICS should be released this month, and I’m guessing it’ll take one or two months before a stable custom ROM is out. I’m expecting Samsung’s official ICS builds for the earlier mentioned Galaxy devices in January/February.

Time for all EuroBSDcon pictures!

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The final day! I decided to sleep late, and arrived during lunch. Lunch was great as usual! First panel was “History of Sendmail” by Eric Allman, it was quite interesting. Basically he just hacked something together because he needed it. It got released and became immensely popular. Shows that “hacked together” software can still be extremely successful. A quote;

“If you don’t know what you are doing, it’s useless to start designing it up front.”

Couldn’t agree more, even though this goes exactly against what we are being learnt at college (which is actually community college in english). Up next was “High Available Storage for FreeBSD”. This explained how to have multiple systems use the same filesystem for redundancy reasons. After that, another filesystem talk; “Improving system management with ZFS”.

ZFS is a really cool filesystem I learned about during internship. It allows for easy snapshotting of systems, increasing/decreasing the size of a partition, and more! This talk pretty much re-explained the basics and then focused on snapshots. Really interesting stuff!

After this we were all assembled in the main stage room for a quick update on what’s going on in the BSD world. This was very short, and we quickly continued to the closing ceremony. Everyone was very happy with how the conference went, and so am I. It was extremely fun (I had no idea a BSD conference could actually be fun; shows how much I know!) and the organisation did a very good job!  Thanks, EuroBSDcon!

Day three was the biggest day so far, it started with an extremely interesting keynote by Hans van de Looy about the recent data breaches and what we can learn from them. Sadly I have lost most pictures (don’t ever make a folder in the root of your android device with important things in it.. it deletes it after restart), so I can only show ones I have recovered and/or the ones I uploaded to Twitter. Anyhoo, after the Keynote I went to ” An update on IPv6 in FreeBSD”. IPv6 is progressing nicely on FreeBSD. After that I was at “Webcamd”, which is a variant of FreeBSD with added drivers and utilities for video and audio manipulating. It looked really cool, but it’s not that useful for me. Next up was FreeBSD + nginx by Sergey Osokin.

Nginx (Engine X) on FreeBSD has progressed far more than I expected, it runs extremely well and (as expected) is outperforming Apache on most if not all benchmarks. The speaker was russian and had trouble with English, but other than that it was a very informative talk! And then the last normal talk of the day, “Virtualization under *BSD: The Case of Xen”… which was utterly boring because I had no previous knowledge of Xen whatsoever. Oh well!

And now the last “normal” event of the day.. the “History of BSD” by Marshall Kirk McKusick. Marshall Kirk McKusick has an amazing way of telling the story of BSD. The guy is absolutely hilarious, while still staying informative! He had to cut short his whole speech, but recommended us to buy his DVD.

So, Kirk’s talk was over and everyone was wondering what would happen next, the schedule says “Social Event”, but the organization is refusing to comment on where we are going. They did keep saying something about requiring swimming clothing.. thankfully this was just a joke, and after only a few minutes of driving we arrived at the Railway museum! Major surprise! It’s been like 7 years since I’ve last been there!

The evening started off with beverages (mostly beer), we had Spaghetti for dinner and had a tour through the museum. It was actually quite interesting, and obvious geek questions such as “Does this train have free Wi-Fi?” or “How do the doors open without electricity?” while being on ancient trains were quite common this evening.

After the official tour, we (an acquaintance and me) ran into Marshall Kirk McKusick and Eric Allman, both pioneers in the Unix community. We went and explored the museum, which was mostly dark as the tours had already ended. Naturally, we got out our smartphones and uses the flash LED as torches. Found some pretty cool stuff in the outmost corners of the museum, a postal wagon and a semi-crashed train.

That’s pretty much day three, I only was able to retrieve one picture from my android, sorry!

(I’m lagging behind on blog posts, it’s actually day 4 at time of writing!) Day two consisted of one tutorial: Building the network you need with PF by Peter Hansteen. The handout was a mighty 211 pages! Will be very useful when building a network! The food was also really awesome, just like the first day. Not much to add really. Here’s some pictures!

I’ve been using Ubuntu (not BSD!) on my own server for a while now, and can say that I know the basics by now. BSD however, I’m new at. I have been regularly using FreeBSD now at internship, seeing the servers there run it. During said internship I got in contact with a BSD guru whom hosts the servers there. He told me about EuroBSDcon and how I should totally go there. At first I was skepical, what would a noob like me doing at such a convention? Here I am though, and I have already learned a lot. On the first day I attended the “pfSense 2.0 tutorial” by Chris Buechler & Ermal Luçi. Here’s their own description of it:

pfSense is a free, open source customized distribution of FreeBSD tailored for use as a firewall and router. In addition to being a powerful, flexible firewalling and routing platform, it includes a long list of related features and a package system allowing further expandability without adding bloat and potential security vulnerabilities to the base distribution. pfSense is a popular project with more than 1 million downloads since its inception, and proven in countless installations ranging from small home networks protecting a PC and an Xbox to large corporations, universities and other organizations protecting thousands of network devices.

It’s pretty awesome and will be used at internship in the future. The web interface is extremely handy! Here’s some pictures of the day!