funkz.org

I declare that Monday nights require a few drinks. Because some Mondays, like today, are a little bit of a grind to get through. After having a weekend of such fine weather, today was cold and windy and difficult to wake up to. I've had a few Stellas, becasue they go down so easily.

Anyway, I wanted to say that a couple of weeks ago, I began a new undertaking in life, and that's capoeira. It's a Brazilian dance/martial art which is different to anything I've done before. I've done tae kwon do (2 yrs), karate (6 months), shoot-fighting (6 months) and ninjutsu (3-4 months) in the past, but I think this is more for me. I felt martial arts a little unappealing, where after a while, the fun wears away. You're constantly fighting an enemy and it's quite repetitive. Maybe I picked the wrong one to do for a while (tae kwon do), as that is not about culture, inner peace and defence, but big kicks. I know self defence is great but I just didn't find it that fun. After 6 months or so, I would find it a grind to attend classes. The people doing martial arts tend to do it to get tougher or what-not but not just because it's a load of fun. It's also mainly blokes.


(from capoeira.net.au)

Capoeira seems different in that people go because it's fun, the driver is love and respect and you're not trying to kill or take someone out. There's a lot of girls doing it and people laugh and shake hands and there is music involved. We learn how to play these strange instruments and 'bongo' drums. And it's part break-dancing, stand-on-your-head/hands, part cartwheel-on-the-spot, part tae kwon do sweeping crescent kicks. I've found it fun and appealing so far and as time goes on, I want to go more and more. I love cartwheels and acrobatics and pushing my flexibility to the limit. Our teacher is great, too. So that's my new thing now. I go to the school, Filhos Da Bahia Capoeira.

Ness finished her thesis today and is currently out hitting the town. Good luck to her, she's put in so much work, it's really amazing. I think the past month, every hour she's had, she's working on her thesis and it's been a gruelling and difficult journey for her. So I wanted to say congratulations and well done!!! :)

Yeah another blog post! I got to show the world this audio amplifier, for I am in love with it. It is by a Swedish home/car audio company called DLS. I am the type of person who is into high quality sound, and this means for an amplifier, to reproduce the sound as accurately as possible without extra bullshit and flashy things. When it comes to these, I love simplicity and no more than 2 channels (ie, no 5.1 or 7.1 or 98.23).

I found this amplifier, which DLS make and I am sure it's way out of my budget, but look at it!






And it is called Amplifier One. Just listen to that name, Amplifier One. No "TDA-232564" or "7.1 channel home theatre post processing high fidelity dolby surround blow-your-mind effect processing amplifier system". Just the words 'amplifier' and 'one' because its the only one they make. But look, a power button, a volume knob and a selector, the three basic requirements of an integrated amplifier.

I love it. I must find out how much it is.

Also, go watch this music video - Goldfrapp - Happiness, it's really cool.

Probably no US citizens read this, but if you are one, please do not vote republican. For numerous reasons but one which really made me want to tell the world. Wikipedia states Sarah Palin wants to teach creationism in schools. Yeah I'm an athiest, but c'mon, it's idioticy. Christians can delude themselves all they want with their religion for all I care, but please don't try to spread the dogma to kids who are yet to decide for themselves. Creationism is but one of probably dozens of theories about how we came to be here, so why teach it specifically? What about the jews, muslims, hindus? That's what shits me about Christians, they constantly try to spread it like a virus. Creationism is just a story, a fictional piece which some one or more people thought up a long time ago. Just like Noah's Ark, and just like how the world is flat and how the sun revolves around the world. I hope that it's never taught in schools so that scientific fact is continued to be taught to kids and humanity still has a chance to continue moving forward.

Did you also know her husband works at BP as an oil field operator? Coincidence? Pft.

I just read an article about Greek hackers attacking the LHC. Considering the cost and size of this piece of equipment, it's a bit of a worry not to mention the fact that it can do wierd things which even the most advanced physicists cannot predict. A lot of people, thanks to the retarded mass media, believe the LHC can create black holes. I remember reading about this last year, but shortly after reading that the conditions they are referring to are already present due to neutrinos flying through our atmosphere every second and you don't see any black holes opening in your backyard. But it could be damaged or cause harm to the employees or something.

The trouble is, this thing cost EUR10bn (if I remember). And theres no money coming out of it so governments and organisations don't have much reason to fund it apart from the desire to advance human scientific knowlege. So destroying it because the IT systems were not secure enough might deter another being built.

I usually find Slashdot to be a bit annoying to read in that comments posted for a story often comprise of some lame rant or untrue 'fact' which some know-it-all has spewed. But I've found the more scientific, advanced articles keep these people away and you're left with some good arguments. Getting back to the hacking of the LHC systems:

You're correct (I did an internship recently on data management with the LCG/EGEE network). It's a massive multi-tiered network of datacenters (something like 50k nodes, 15PB of dedicated data storage, but don't quote me on these figures), all required to distribute the enormous amounts of data collected in the experiments to the researchers capable of processing the data.

I'm not going to be an ass and piss too much on the work of thousands of others, because it took quite a bit of effort to set this up, but them getting hacked doesn't really surprise me. The architecture they set up (even for only data-distribution) is very complex, and a lot of software they use has been written in-house or has been forked (years ago). Oh, and it's all open source, readily available for whoever looks for it. With the LHC being such a high-profile target, this is IMHO a security nightmare waiting to happen.

In what I've seen, I'm crossing my fingers that this break-in isn't related to the grid network, and that the next few months will go smoothly, but the grid has been primarily designed for high throughput, not security. Sure, they have certificates you need to access the grid systems, the policies are there, but technically I have my doubts.

He did an internship and so has some internal knowlege of the systems. So it's interesting, and makes you worry a little about it. But then someone else said:

All these machines have connections to the internet. This allows on-call technicians to ssh in to debug a problem remotely, and for facilities management to make checks on the performance of the machine.

It's not like connecting to the control software will present you with a big red button labelled "Black Hole Generator". You'll be presented with a bash prompt, and, if you can figure out the right command, possibly a control screen that you don't understand.

These machines are stunningly complex, and the most likely outcome of some random script kiddie fucking with things is that *nothing* will happen. Someone more knowledgable (or lucky) might be able to find something that will be prevented by the machine protection system, or cause the machine to shut down for a while. Bad, but not as scary as you suggest.

Seriously. Anyone who thinks that random "hackers" can do any real damage, or that these machines shouldn't be on the internet, doesn't know anything about them.

(PS: I'm an accelerator physicist who has worked with several of these machines.)

Which is what I was thinking. It's very true, though hackers may be smart, and ninjas with a unix system, they will look at the complex applications and systems running and will have no idea how to control anything. But some interesting reading anyway.

The weather has gotten better but I still want to head back to the snow one more time. Might go next weekend for my last day of snowboarding for the season. Starting to think about surfing again now. Until next time... ciao.

It's been ages since I blogged. I am not sure how many people read my blog so I'll have to do some thing where you click a button to say 'hey yeah I read it'. I could check the logs, but I can't be bothered.

Anyway a roundup of what's been going on the past few weeks.

Firstly, Ness and I went to Queensland for 10 days. We flew into Mackay on $10 tickets (I think I blogged about that ages ago). Then we spent 4 days on Brampton Island. The 4th night we spent camping on Carlisle Island, adjacent and connected via sandbar, to Brampton. We were there alone on the island so it was awesome from that regard. But it was made a bit shitty because I lost our torch, so we had absolutely zero lighting and weren't allowed to start a fire. So I made one anyway, in a big hole in the sand so they couldn't see it from Brampton and report us. Then in the morning when we woke up, it was windy as hell and raining. Nothing worse when camping, than rain. All other days had been fine so it was a bit frustrating, but we made the most of it anyway. I took some nice photos of things like seagulls.





On the trip we also went and snorkelled in the Great Barrier Reef, which was great, err, awesome. Saw lots of whales on the way as they migrated up the eastern coast of Australia. Spent a few days in Airlie Beach then headed back to Mackay and to cold Melbourne again. Was a great mid-winter get away.






Also during the past month, I went snowboarding a couple of weekends along with a bunch of mates, which was wicked. Ness came the 2nd weekend and got skiing lessons which she enjoyed.

I also bought a Fluke multimeter which may or may not matter much to you, but I wanted to share this because all my life I've been into tinkering with electronic stuff, and fixing stuff where I can. Since I was 12 I had this crappy old multimeter which I made from a kit, and it's done me well, but after always being frustrated with how crap it is and broken it is, I bought a decent one. Fluke is one of the best makers of instruments there is. It's all made in the US.

Here's my old vs new multimeters:



Then yesterday I donated blood for the 2nd time. But this time I didn't almost feint, like I did last time (they then aborted the donation so it wasn't a 'donation'). This time it went great, and I'm quite happy with myself having done it because it's not really a small little nothing thing. Many people hate needles, and it's only natural. Anything that pierces your skin goes against your oldest primordial instincts which you cannot easily control. But anyway I will do it again maybe in 6 months.

I also put up a selection of my South East Asia photos on Facebook for people to see. They have been here on my website for a while now (Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand) but I figured everyone just uses Facebook so I'll just stick a few there too.

Well better make some lunch.

Sorry I haven't put up a post in ages. I been busy/lazy. Will do so in the next few days!