The Blog of Harald

In a discussion about the latest energy-for-free scam, Someone pointed out a couple of useful resources:

Junkscience.com — Main Page All the Junk That’s Fit to Debunk.

Crank Dot Net cranks, crackpots, kooks, and loons on the net

Thus proving once again that you can find anything on the net if you look hard enough.

Charlotte: “Mummy, he should say please take me home!”

Gareth (at age 3): “That guy’s an idiot!” (pause) “I’m helping daddy drive from the back seat.”

Finally we know Why the earth floats in space!

Update:The Vancouver sun article has been deleted, so Here’s a link to Google instead.

Scientists have discovered vast quantities of hydrogen gas, widely regarded as the most promising alternative to today’s dwindling stocks of fossil fuels, lying beneath the Earth’s crust. The discovery has stunned energy experts, who believe that it could provide virtually limitless supplies of clean fuel for cars, homes and industry.

Seriously, if this pans out, the next couple of decades will be interesting for entirely different reasons than running out of oil.

Three related articles describing a Palestinian daily commute.
It gives a new perspective on my rush hour traffic complaints.

For some reason, all of the science fiction B-movies that I watched as a teenager came to mind when I read this article.

AP – Researchers find 3,600-mile ant supercolony – April 15, 2002

Gareth: “Mummy, are we downtown?”

Mummy: “Yes…”

Gareth: “Holeee! It’s just like in the song!”

So I’m a networking geek. Even in my spare time, I have to play with networks.

So just to play, I’ve setup a pair of IPv6 tunnels, one to Hurricane Electric and one to Viagenie’s Freenet. I have a bunch of different computers running IPv6, so I’m running OPSF6 (using zebra) to maintain the routing tables.

Unfortunately, about the only thing I can reliably do is SSH. Well, and SMTP; RedHat Linux 7.2 comes with some of its applications IPv6 enabled.

But no more! Apache has released the first non-beta version of 2.0, which has IPv6 and SSL support built-in! I built a copy, configured it up, and now this webserver is IPv6 capable.

I can hear you all rolling your eyes as you read this.

Now I’ll have to sit and wait (and wait and wait) to see if any IPv6 hits show up in the logfiles.

Writing this, I noticed just how many large, open-source software packages are involved. This would have been impossible on a closed platform, since I’ve had to apply (or invent) patches to work around several problems in the process.

Yay open source!