Charon's activity.log

A new water regeneration system is going to be delivered to ISS by Endeavour shuttle by the end of this week. The brand new technology by NASA is able to recycle human urine as well as the other gargabe water. As the blind test have shown - the quality of recyled water is about the same as tap water.

Seems the end of urine therapy in space :) Did you try?

Find another media coverage of Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in recent Newsweek article. Well written, understandable, but insightfull and funny. By the way ... did you know: "When the force of gravity is tested carefully against the electrical force, it is found to be weaker by a factor of one followed by 40 zeros."

Nokia is trying to remove OGG format from HTML5 draft at W3C. Regarding their position paper OGG is proprietary. Ha ha ha ... transparent and cheap, just check the document for DRM keyword. It's quite clear where the wind blows from.

Nokia has included a SIP client in their business phones - namely E line. All phones have the option to call over the internet, but Nokia does not want to tell you that. They do not want to show the phones at one of the major VoIP/ENUM events in Czech Republic - ENUM Day hosted by CZ.NIC, because they're scared of mobile carries?! Do you understand why someone with 40% market share is scared?

"A vast physics experiment built in a tunnel below the French-Swiss border is fast becoming one of the coolest places in the Universe." [BBC]

Check out more on LHC at CERN or Wikipedia. All the pictures seem to me really impressive. Bad news is 2008 Open day at CERN has been in April :( Hope they will have it next year again, but at that time LHC should be already in operation. So hope nothing will go terribly wrong either this or this way.

The exploit for coffee machine internet connection add-on has been found. It is really serious as it can be used as denial of service attack. And you know such important product as coffee, may hurt performance of the company (particularly in IT industry) pretty much if not available. See the details in bug track at SecurityFocus.

You probably have heard about Hubble telescope, which searches for the black holes in the universe. There is one more Hubble which searches for the black holes too. It is the project of University of Washington and it searches for the internet black holes. It explores IP network prefixes in real time and whether they are reachable by the path which is about them advertised in BGP. If the path is advertised, but the destination network is not reachable by it, the packets end in a virtual "black hole". Good news is there is no such black hole in our local "star system" in Czech republic. Check your self whether the situation still remains the same on the Hubble project page.

Because my generally bad experience with DVB-T (I have bought two different pieces of hardware at different time, but had no luck to get it working), I upgraded my analong TV card to 3Dvision PV-951TF.

Use following options in your /etc/modprobe.conf to set it up properly (autodetection does not work):

options bttv card=42 tuner=28 radio=1
options tvaudio tda9874a=1 tda9874a_STD=6 tda9874a_AMSEL=1 tda9874a_SIF=2

If you need infrared remote, play with i2c_udelay setting of bttv. I read somewhere 16 should be enough. 128 was definitely too much and 8 seems to be too less. As I won't use infrared remote, I don't care.

You probably haven't noticed ... the era of Internet based on currently used IP protocol is coming to the end. There are only roughly 14% of network blocks free at IANA pool. There will be no free blocks left at the end of 2010 if their consumption will stay the same as currently, which is pretty likely scenario as there are no new technologies like NAT, name based virtual hosting or other in sight to slow down this process.

We will have to adopt new IP protocol known as IPv6 (the current is IPv4). There are very few IPv6 enabled and prepared ISP out there currently, so it is hard to get your connectivity, but anyway ... ask your local ISP. I will do the same for moucha.cc. Meanwhile see IPv4 exhaustion online.

Another year is over so as usual check out Wired's 2007 vaporware list.

"Steal it ... steal away, steal and steal and steal some more and give it to all your friends and keep on stealin' ", Trent Reznor/NiN at Sydney.

I had to click on the article title "10 Linux shell tricks you don't already know. Really, we swear." and was surprised the good way - there were some valuable new tricks ... as well as some already known :) Good to learn anyway.

We did it ... Steve Jobs anounced the plan for toxic chemicals phase out and recycling program! Check out for more at GreenMyApple.

Time to change my home computer Linux distribution has come again. After a year of using Ubuntu my annoyance became too big after I was not able successfully get USB WiFi module and DVB-T USB stick working.

First Ubuntu looked like perfect out-of-the box solution, because I don't want to waste my time doing the initial "vodoo&quote; with every piece of hardware and software. But later I found there are no packages for the software I want or they are in lots of other repositories which I must manually add to apt. And the hardware was definitely not plug & play :( And yet not mentioned the pain with upgrades.

So I now tried beta version of Fedora 7 and even Ubuntu 7.04, but non of them was able out-of-the box use WiFi with WPA and the TV was broken too. I also tried Arch Linux as it was recommended to be simple and having rolling updates. I was warned it has simple documentation, but this was too simple for me.

So guess where I moved on the following curve at the end ...

Yes ... welcome again, Gentoo.

The following picture maps system calls done by a web server to server one static page with one picture. Try to guess which one of the maps is Apache on Linux and which one is IIS on Windows.

Find the answer here.