Sybreon Ones Nought

The DVD has been out for quite some time in Malaysia and I had actually bought it about a month ago. Unfortunately, I have not had the opportunity to actually watch it until today. Personally, I think that it was an extremely good movie and deserving of every award that it had won last year. I do not really know how to classify the film though. While the main theme is an undying romantic love story, the romance barely took up 10 minutes of the entire film.

Regardless, it was the highlight of my week – extremely inspirational.

According to initial reports, at the end of the election day in Iran, the communications black-out in Iran began. Citizens reported problems with using mobile networks and the Internet. Externally, people outside of Iran detected massive re-routing of the networks that connect Iran to the rest of the Internet. All these indicate that there is a communication outage happening in Iran. This has later been confirmed by further analysis. However, Iran hasn’t been disconnected from the Internet. It has merely been routed through specific paths in order for traffic to be better monitored and controlled.

All this control began to make sense once you factor in that various social networking sites have been blocked in Iran during the run-up to the elections such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Control is much easier to maintain if the Internet is forced to go through specific information pipes on the Internet. You know that the cyber war reached new heights when the US State Department steps in and asks Twitter to defer their regular network maintenance in order to prevent outages in Iran.

So, the Iranian government tried to put a lock on information getting out. Unfortunately, governments are never very good at blocking the Internet.

See, our crazy-ass god-father of the open-source movement has painted a big target on his back by being the front-man for ‘NedaNet‘ (named after the lady who died in the previous video), a network of proxy servers to allow Iranians to gain access to the rest of the Internet. He has asked for others to sign up voluntarily. I was curious and checked out the configuration settings that he had provided. This got me laughing.

It seems that the Iranian government is happy with blocking a number of different sites and services. But god forbid that they block online games. Goodness knows that the country will be thrown into turmoil if the people were cut off from games. Seriously, the way in which the Internet traffic is currently getting out of Iran is by piggy-backing on gaming services. Let me say that again. Iran is blocking a lot of traffic, but not gaming traffic. In fact, researchers have confirmed that WoW and Xbox traffic is not being blocked at all.

From the configuration file given, other games that are on the free-access list are the likes of Heretic 2, Hexen 2, Baldur’s Gate, Asheron’s Call, Anarchy Online. Users have been advised to select other services as the Iranian government cuts off these games one by one. In fact, it also lists out the IP blocks owned by the Iranian government in order to block those out too. Hilarious!

Seriously man. Who knew that playing a game of Warcraft could actually help contribute to fighting Internet censorship.

I just read about this thing, where the dead have helped co-author an academic paper. Yes, the dead was listed as a co-author to a paper. It was just a reaction to the XKCD comic on the right – where crazy mathematicians got dead mathematicians to sign off on their paper.

By the way, there’s no need to wait until the end times to write papers with dead mathematicians. One example of this is the paper “Higher algebraic K-theory of schemes and of derived categories” by R. W. Thomason and Thomas Trobaugh, which Thomason wrote with his deceased friend Trobaugh after Trobaugh appeared to him in a dream:

“The first author must state that his coauthor and close friend, Tom Trobaugh, quite intelligent, singularly original, and inordinately generous, killed himself consequent to endogenous depression. Ninety-four days later, in my dream, Tom’s simulacrum remarked, ‘The direct limit characterization of perfect complexes shows that they extend, just as one extends a coherent sheaf.’ Awaking with a start, I knew this idea had to be wrong, since some perfect complexes have a non-vanishing K_0 obstruction to extension. I had worked on this problem for 3 years, and saw this approach to be hopeless. But Tom’s simulacrum had been so insistent, I knew he wouldn’t let me sleep undisturbed until I had worked out the argument and could point to the gap. This work quickly led to the key results of this paper. To Tom, I could have explained why he must be listed as a coauthor.”

That’s just fun! Simulacrums rule! (Now, if only Megan Fox’s simulacrum would pay me a visit!)

I saw a video clip on Youtube today, a very graphic video clip – of a young lady dying on the streets. According to the stories, she was shot by the Basij, a volunteer paramilitary force in Iran. While the rest of us may not realise it yet, Iran is at the brink of civil war.

She fell to the ground with her eyes locked on to the camera. Forever the sceptic, I had actually thought that this might have been staged. Then, came the blood, dark and thick. Oozing out uncontrollably from her orifices. They flowed and pooled onto the ground around her, bathing her face in an eerie stream of red. There was just too much of it to pass off as spit and non of the convulsions that accompany regurgitation. That’s when it struck me. This is real. Her final moments on this earth captured, and forever immortalised, on the Internet.

It kind of disturbed me. I just needed to get it out of my system.

DISCLAIMER: GRAPHIC VIOLENCE. NSFW

Unless you have been asleep or blind, you would have noticed some changes to this humble blog. In fact, if you were an avid reader, you may have even noticed that this blog was incommunicado for a whole day. The fact of the matter is that I have faced a few more issues with the server and my hosting company recommended that I clean and reinstall everything. I had been putting it off since the last time that they recommended it. But I guess that things have caught up to me.

Since I was going to do it all over again, I decided to take the opportunity and to make some experimental changes to this blog.

I had discovered something called “Google Friends Connect” recently and I thought that I may want to give it a try. So, I’m hoping that you all would take part in this little experiment to see where it goes. It is supposed to be a set of “social networking” tools that Google had made for external sites and blogs. I’m hoping to use it to further engage with you, my dear friends. I’ve started off by merely embedding a couple of widgets. Once things get going, I may embed a few more.

You don’t need a Google account to use them. However, you will need to sign up as a member of this site. You can use the sign-in or join buttons located at the bottom of the right side-bar or at the left end of the bottom task-bar. You can either use your Google, Yahoo, AIM or OpenID logins to sign up. Once that is done, you will be able to leave comments and also recommend articles. That’s for starters.

Thanks for following this blog!

I loved the anime. So, when I found out that the film was out, I decided to go watch it tonite. I didn’t expect too much because these game/anime/book migrations tend to suck. Well, this one didn’t suck that much. I have actually seen far worst films in the cinema. In fact, I actually found it fairly enjoyable overall. However, I do have a few tiffs with the film.

Firstly, they have successfully ruined the image of the lead actress, Jun Ji-Hyun (from My Sassy Girl). What’s up with the name “Gianna Jun” anyway? I guess that they were afriad that the English speaking crowd would have trouble saying her name. Plus, she’s always been famous for her strong (but quirky and emotionally damaged) characters on-screen. But this time, she plays a monster slaying vampire who just seems constantly pissed off at the world. Ruined!

Secondly, the language. They have lots of issues with accents. I found it very funny that Ji-Hyun (aka Gianna) spoke Japanese with a Korean accent. You can definitely tell that she doesn’t speak Japanese fluently. At one point in her dialogue, I had totally expected her to finish off the sentence with ham-ni-da. Then, they got the Japanese supporting-actress to speak in accented English instead, even while she was at an on-sen. Again, the dialogue did not flow smoothly for her either.

However, the biggest problem with the film is the local film censors. These days, they have upgraded their method of slicing off bits of the film that are controversial. They will vary the frame-rate around the point that needs to be cut-off. As a result, the audio still runs smoothly but the visuals seem to speed-up and slow-down randomly. You may actually think that this was an intended special effect. I doubt that it is though. There’s actually more blood in the trailer than in our Malaysian sliced up version of the film!

I wonder what other ideas are the western film-makers going to rip-off the Japanese. Another Production I.G. anime – Ghost in the Shell – would make an excellent story, as long as they don’t ruin it with bad acting and a horrible script.

I spent most of the last week, setting up and configuring a bunch of virtual servers using OpenVZ. I had a need to do some server maintenance at home and I thought it was a good time to experiment with a little virtualisation. Considering the fact that I only had low-powered VIA boards to work with, my virtualisation options were quite limited. I was not going to be able to run anything like KVM or even Xen. So, my only option was to go with either OpenVZ or VServer.

These virtualisation solutions are considered ‘light-weight’ ones. They are similar to BSD Jails and Solaris Containers. They are not the same as VirtualPC, VirtualBox, VMWare or Xen. They run using one single OS kernel and share the machine resources and hardware in a more transparent manner. According to the websites, each solution only adds about a 1%-3% overhead to a regular server.

I finally went with OpenVZ and installed it on a server with only 256Mb of RAM and a 533MHz processor. This is more than enough to run OpenVZ (according to its minimum requirements). Everything proceeded quite smoothly except for a couple of things and I thought that I should note them down here because it was not easy getting the information from the Internet.

Firstly, I could not use the stock OpenVZ kernel that came with Debian Lenny. It was a 686 kernel but the VIA processor that I was using did not have the CMOV instruction. I tried compiling my own kernel several times but had problems. So, instead of wasting my time, I just downloaded an older 486 kernel for Debian Etch. This worked without any problems and is, by far, the easiest way of getting OpenVZ to run on older platforms.

Secondly, after getting things up and running, I wanted to tweak each server’s private resources. Unfortunately, the OpenVZ came with only two sample configuration files and had lots of arcane formulas that are needed to work out the parameters. So, I started tweaking around but never seemed to get things right. Looking on the Internet didn’t help and it seemed that there were few example config files available for OpenVZ.

Then, I finally read the documentation and found out that I could generate a custom configuration based on my own server using vzsplit, which is a utility that came with OpenVZ. So, I ended up generating a config suitable for running about 12 virtual servers on my low-powered VIA machine. That got things to work splendidly.

I managed to learn a few new things about Linux from setting up and observing these virtual servers run. I finally got to monitor the boot-up process in real-time.

The beauty of having this system set up is that I can now freely experiment with new software. All I needed to do is to create a new virtual server, test things out. Once done, I could just wipe out the virtual server. Furthermore, I could migrate these virtual servers from one host server onto another. This will mean that I would lose minimal down-time if I ever need to upgrade the server. All this will definitely come in handy in the future.

Virtualisation is the way to go if you need to administer stuff in a manageable way.