Month: February 2007

Musik 2k7 – #3

Now, it’s time, again, for me to list my latest music acquisitions. Be warned about my minimal/techno/electro biased choices. 😉

Umek – Akul // Audiomatique [AM020]

Florian Meindl – Moonchild // Resopal [RSP042]

Oliver Koletzki & Florian Meindl – Kolibri // Flash Records [FLASH003]

Oliver Koletzki – Music From The Heart // Hell Yeah [HYR7003]

Ryan Davis – Transformer // Klang Gymnastic [KG010]

Stephan Bodzin – Daytona Beach // Spiel Zeug [SPIEL39]

Matteo Spedicati – Snowflake EP // Left Out [LEFTOUT001]

Florian Meindl – Reality Is On The Way // Flash Records [FLASH002]

Cornell – Polimer // Minimise [MIN030]

Dejonka ft. Piemont – Headcruise // Klang Gymnastic [KG011T]

Now the things you should pay a lot of attention..

Sebastian Roya – Mi Sistema // Connaisseur [CNS012], to be released on May 7th

Stephan Bodzin – Liebe Ist // Herzblut [HERZBLUT04], to be released on April 23rd

Finance – Money Investing

Hi fellow gee.. ermm.. investors,

Today I finally woke up to a dark reality that affects billions all over the planet: I live paycheck to paycheck!

Being part of the so called “active population”, as in employed-and-paying-taxes-individual, I found myself spending the sunny days of my life sitting in a dark, cold and lonely basement struggling for some bucks (Euro in this particular case) so that I can have, well.. you know what we all need to sustain: food and water, a shelter, electricity, internet, gas, etc.

And that’s it.

I mean that was it! I don’t want to be one of the many small-red-eyed-white-rats running endlessly in a round-vicious wheel just for the amusement of some bigger tenacious cats. No, it’s enough, and instead of blaming the void for the “where’s my money?” qotd, I’ve just made a decision. I’ll now start a new journey in my life, Investing Money.

And that’s what I want to hear about, from you. Yes, you!

I want your tips and suggestions on great books you’ve read on the matter, links for interesting websites and stock services you follow(ed), directions on the software you use to manage your portfolio and follow the market, and whatever you saw fit to fulfill my quest.

Ever wanted to make this world a better place to live? Well you can start by helping me 😀

(Open)T.120 not dead after all?

Hello fellow geeks,

As promised I want to talk about OpenT120. OpenT120 is an attempt to freely implement the ITU T.120 protocol suite which is intended for “developers can create compatible products and services for real-time, multipoint data connections and conferencing. With T.120-based programs, multiple users can participate in conferencing sessions over different types of networks and connections.
Depending on the type of T.120 product, the program can make connections, transmit and receive data, and collaborate using compatible data conferencing features, such as program sharing, whiteboard conferencing, and file transfer.” A more complete introduction can be found at Microsoft website.

T.120 is a huge, in size and complexity, spec, and therefore so its implementations will be. That’s why OpenT120 didn’t reach land, yet.. as it seems to not have quit swimming towards it 😉

In a world where SIP and Web conferencing are getting a lot of attention, I thought T.120 would be a thing from the past. It seems that I’m wrong! I now can say that HP and Huawei, among others, are actively seeking for a way to integrate a SIP-compatible Conferencing Control technology to their SIP products and have reached me to check OpenT120 status even discussing issues like if it was possible to GPL‘ize OpenT120 instead of its current MPL licensing.

Given the above facts I am looking forward an OpenT120 revamp, depending on the current interest of companies/developers, so if you want to take a hike just reach me at pjpires_at_users_dot_sourceforge_dot_net. The current site really needs to be refreshed but let’s take a step at a time.. See below for technical details.

ITU-T Recommendations:

T.120 Implementor’s Guide [as of August 2005)

T.120 – Data Protocols for Multimedia Conferencing (as of January 2007)
T.121 – Generic Application Template [GAT] (as of July 1996)

T.122 – Multipoint Communication Service, Service Definition [MCS] (as of February 1998)

T.123 – Network Stack (as of January 2007)

T.124 – Generic Conference Control [GCC] (as of January 2007)

T.125 – Multipoint Communication Service, Protocol Specification [MCS] (as of February 1998)

T.126 – Multipoint Still Image and Annotation Protocol [as of July 1997]

T.127 – Multipoint Binary File Transfer Protocol [as of August 1995]

T.128 – Multipoint Application Sharing [as of February 1998]

T.134 – Text Chat Application Entity [as of February 1998]

On other news, I’m very excited about the new stuff on WiMAX. It seems that the IEEE guys are targeting a speed boost up to 1Gbit per second while maintaining compliance with previous WiMAX specs. They are calling it 802.11m. It looks promising, but we’ll hear more on that only during 2009.. so see ya’all there.

Operator! Give me the number for 911!

Hi fellow geeks,

Sorry for the absence lately. Been moving for about two weeks now and it’ll still take some two more weeks to get things half placed. Anyway I have no Internet connection, no cellphone, no watches, not even an alarm clock, so life has been pretty ..errmm.. exciting. Also I have some projects pending so all in all, time for blogging has been all but plenty.

During the next week I’ll be posting about T.120, an ITU recommendations set for developing “”compatible products and services for real-time, multipoint data connections and conferencing””. The ones of you that know this will probably tell me “forget it, it’s dead”, but I assure you it’s not! Some people at HP, Huawei and others have reached me because of OpenT120 trying to know the status of this project, showing lots of interest in using it in some SIP/Conferencing applications. (Check it out but don’t take in mind the .NET side of things since it’s not viable).

Hey, I’ve bought a new computer too but you’ll have to wait for the next post to know more about that! For now I leave you with 50 funniest Homer Simpson quotes. Citing:

[Looking at a globe map…country being Uruguay]
Hee hee! Look at this country! ‘You-are-gay.’

Terramoto: Teorias de uma conspiração..

Camaradas Inbictos,

Escrebo em Portoguês para que percebãum claramente o que bos estoue a transmitir. O sismo registado no quadrante sul do nosso Portugal, bulgo “Terra dos Mouros” (se é que os Mouros têm alguma coisa!), não foi probocado pelos Super Dragões, como muito mouro nos quer fazer crer.. Não meus amigos, isso é tudo uma cabala por parte dos lampiões, ainda aziados com a jogatana do Barzim, contra esta nossa naçãum que é Portogal!

Entãum e de quem  é a culpa? A culpa é do sim ao Aborto! Acreditem no que bos digo, porque bem de fonte segura. Estamos perante um castigo dibino!

Sem mais a dizer,

Um bosso compatriota!

N800 hidden kewl features!

It’s all over the news! Nokia N800 bundles some very cool features that have not (officially) been publicized. According to a member of a famous mobile-stuff-forum it has been identified so far two chips which handle FM Radio and USB-OTG support respectively.

As you may know Thoughtfix has previously dissected his N800 to find out that most chips were hidden by some soldered-on RF-shielding, and just now someone had the guts to remove them and watch inside! One question arises: why has Nokia got this hidden?

1) Lack of software support?

2) Marketing?

3) They didn’t even know that was inside N800? :-p

It’s a lovely day for N800 lovers 🙂

Hight Network Availability – VRRP || HSRP || CARP ?

Hellow fellow geeks,

Today I ran across this small article titled Using VRRP on Linux improves network availability. It got me curious! The last time I remember hearing about it was around 2002 when I was looking for a way to keep my firewall/router failure-proof.

Briefly VRRP [Virtual Router Redundacy Protocol], HSRP [Hot Standby Router Protocol] and CARP [Common Address Redundancy Protocol] are meant, individually to enable a failover redundancy for firewalls and routers by mainly sharing some kind of virtual MAC address and an IP address between then. This way when your primary firewall/router fails, some other firewall/router (slave) pre-configured will take its place almost transparently.

Not wanting to get into more details on the protocols themselves, I would like to point some stuff to all you sysadmins out there.

VRRPd is compatible, as any standard implementation should be, with other VRRP implementations (i.e. Cisco, Juniper) but as you can see, it has been some time now (4 1/2 years) since the last commit. Is it good? Guess not..

CARP on the other hand is not a standard but an impressive implementation to have in mind. Citing Wikipedia/OpenBSD.org:

As a final note of course, when we petitioned IANA, the IETF body regulating “official” internet protocol numbers, to give us numbers for CARP and pfsync our request was denied. Apparently we had failed to go through an official standards organization. Consequently we were forced to choose a protocol number which would not conflict with anything else of value, and decided to place CARP at IP protocol 112. We also placed pfsync at an open and unused number. We informed IANA of these decisions, but they declined to reply.

The reason for this is that no specification for CARP has ever been written. The closest thing to specifications is the implementation in OpenBSD.

Note that VRRP also uses IP protocol 112, having been assigned it by IANA.

Quick notes:

1) HSRP is a proprietary protocol patented by Cisco;

2) VRRP is the result of an IETF effort that solved some HSRP issues. Still Cisco claims it as its own;

3) CARP is the result of OpenBSD developers effort to implement a protocol like described above, while avoiding problems with Cisco patents. IMHO they are doing a great job!

What matters to me the most is that OpenBSD offers something more than CARP which happens to be packet filtering rules and connection state sharing between CARP’ed machines. More on that on the next post 😉

Iranians cracked Vista, the sensationalistic politics journalism

According to The Inquirer [via Tiago Farrajota] some Iranian company(ies) is (are) claiming to have cracked Windows Vista and are selling fake-legal copies of it at price 8$USD. Ridiculous must I say! It seems a Microsoft PR move, another one.. LOL!

Can you imagine an economy where you have to crack Windows to sell it at such a low price, but you don’t have to worry with the revolting hardware specs that Vista requires to run properly (if that’s even possible?!)?

The Inquirer, you had better days..