Crispy burnt hungover wreck

It's been a long and rough weekend. Friday started out easily, just softing at home and preparing for the day after...

Saturday was the big day, Göteborg Aero Show 2008 :-P. It's such a damn long time since I was last at an airshow, but it was awesome. I loved it so much. I've seen all the old nice airplanes, heard a lot of news (well, news to me, I've been out of the loop for a long time now). My sister managed to run into old friends of my father, and we got a vip visit to some really sweet airplanes :P.

We also got to see some really nice airshows. I think in general, it was a very nice show, but there was a few kinks. If I understood it correctly, this was the first show that these people planned so I have full respect if a few things didn't turn out perfect (practice makes perfect after all). Also the people planning it didnt anticipate just how big success the airshow would be, which made for some minor kinks as well. None of this was really a big problem. The biggest problem I noticed was that we had to wait 45 minutes in line for food (they kept running out). Also, the spitfire had some problems with the ignition, so they had to cancel that flight during the saturday schedule, which made me very sad as it's always been one of my favourite aircrafts.

Also, a big big big downer, swedish airforce is so horribly low on funds so they can no longer fly their airplanes properly from what I've heard on the news. It showed at this airshow as they didn't fly the jas 39 gripen at all. They had a rather ... weak display of 3 gripen on the ground, that was it from what I saw (except for a few helicopters as well). Privately funded groups, fantasts and hobbyists did more of a show than the military did.. I'm not blaming the airforce, I'm pretty much blaming the idiots in suites running this country. Damn hippies.

Once we left the airshow, unfortunately had to leave 30-45minutes early due to crayfish party and to get ahead of the lines from the airshow, I realized that I had burnt my face to a crisp pretty much.

I got home, showered, switched clothes, and ran down to go to the crayfish party, met my girlfriend in the door, and she started laughing like a maniac and went on to thank me for preparing so vigoriously the entire day for the crayfish party (even coloring myself for it)...

Either way, we went for the crayfish party, I winded up getting overly refreshed, fell asleep on a clapping chair for almost 45 minutes. See image for a demonstration of what kind of chair it was. I'm still sore today from that :P.

And today, we winded up starting the day with cleaning up a bit in the apartment, doing dishes, and so forth before my mother + sister + kid came for a visit. Nice day in general imho.

Long entry :-).

Iptables-tutorial explained

So, time to explain whats happened to the iptables-tutorial, it's been rather dead for a long time now. This is kind of meant as an explanation on what and why things has gone downhill with it, but also kind of a try to define for myself what went wrong back then.

By now, it's almost 8 years since I started writing on it. It all started as a short term project, a real tutorial if you wish. Due to the demand, I was rather amused at keeping it up, writing more material and so forth, but with time it took more and more effort to keep up to date and to add all the material I wanted in it. While the tutorial was at it's high, I had 25 000 unique visitors per month on the main iptables-tutorial site alone, and all that traffic generated questions, and lots of them. At times, I received 70+ e-mails with questions per week, which required hours of attention. Also, Apress contacted me at this time asking me to write a book on iptables for them.

Having that burden on top of a project that was originally intended to have fun, learn and to get more experience makes a project much less appealing. Also, at the same time, me and my then girlfriend broke up, leaving me in devastation. In a sense, I lost my muse at the same time as I was the least interested in writing. I spent several weeks trying to get somewhere, but didn't manage to get 2 pages out of me. This is where I dropped the tutorial the first time. I pretty much went MIA.

Either way, after a while (a bit over 2 years to be precise), I decided to give it another try. I had for a long time wanted to start writing again, and got around to it as I had the time and will. To make a long story short, I got too much to do with school and work and life in general for a while, but managed to get version 1.2.0 out before this happened. Another year later, I managed to get 1.2.1 out, and finally 1.2.2 which was the first printed version at lulu.com. Due to several minor problems, which turned out to become pretty large problems imho, I later decided to pull down the print version while getting my life together again so that I could focus on what needed doing again.

This is where the iptables tutorial is at this time and date. I'm not really sure what I'm hoping to accomplish with this post really, more than generally give people an idea what's been going on around the iptables-tutorial and try to explain why it's been ... well, not keeping up with developments in iptables and netfilter.

I'm not exactly certain what will happen in the close future with the iptables tutorial. I'm currently working on a few other projects which are better defined and that should hopefully be possible to "finish" properly.. Ie, once I've done them, they should stay done. Once those projects are done, I might get back to the whole iptables-tutorial.

Going to Säve airshow tomorrow o/

Tired of Javascript/CSS

CSS is not my strong side, actually web development isn't at all, yet I have this bad habit of wanting to learn things I don't know since before. That being said, not sure if i got this right. Putting an absolute object (div for example) inside a relative object makes for an unhappy combination. Problem is that the outer container does not resize for the absolute object (depending on how you interpret the standards, I guess this is correct behaviour).

Take the following rather long example:

<html>
<head>
<style type="text/css">
.hump
{
position: static;
width: 400px;
}

.lala
{
position:relative;
background-color:blue;
width: 400px;
}
.hoho
{
position:absolute;
background-color:red;
left:0px;
top:0px;
width:50%;
}

.rofl
{
position:absolute;
background-color:blue;
left:0px;
top:20px;
}

</style>
</head>

<body>
<div class=hump>
<div class="lala">ewrio
<div class=hoho>lala</div>
</div>

<div class="lala">
<div class=hoho>lala</div>
<div class=rofl>hejhopp</div>
</div>

</div>

</body>

</html>

You have two options.

1. Add height attribute to lala (making it static height).
2. Write a javascript to dynamically change height of the area depending on how large content is. I'm currently working on this as I really want this solution.

There is probably a much better solution to this, so if you know of a better way, please let me know!

Could use some help with css positioning. Absolute positioned div inside relative div does not change size of relative div.

British boffins perfect process to make any item '100% waterproof'

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/08/27/new_waterproofing_technology_pioneered_by_uk_firm/

This looks cool, damn that has applications from hell. I wish I came up with stuff like that. Well, more than the general idea of "oh, lets make everything hydrophobic", to the "hm, if we do like this, then maybe we can make anything hydrophobic". Ideas are easy to get, to actually implement and get an idea on how to do it is harder. Maybe if you've spent as much time doing physics and chemistry, as I've spent doing computers, it gets easier... "Turn on the flux capacitor Mr Scott!"

Plusenergi continued

Just called them, money received. But now they want the fees also. I'm refusing. If they had sent the bill to the right address to begin with, this wouldn't have happened.

In other news, making a new linux x86/qt4.4 compile of the tanker demo. Build environment setup, should have a binary able to run on the target platform within a few minutes. I'm having a blast with QT to be honest, as I started coding in it a while ago, and I'm really just starting to "get it". The fast prototyping ability of new graphical user interfaces is awesome, and the customizability with both stylesheets and inherited widgets.. I like it :-). I usually avoid changing widgets, it's a bit of a mess since I'm still rather new to the language, but I will do my best at it soon ;) .

Cuckolding electric utility company

Just wanted to say, f***ing electric utility company, they're pissing me off so much right now. Plusenergi has done pretty much every single thing wrong that they can. When we moved here, they tried charging me for the actual apartment, and then my girlfriend for the basement (owned by the landlord). Then it took several phonecalls to get that right.

This time around, they've sent my electric bill to my old apartment. So, they send my bills to the right address for almost a year, then all of a sudden decide that my old address should have it, but still sends the bill for the right electric installation?

Anyways, I got the second notice about electrics last wednesday, paid it asap, and just checking it with my bank, it was paid this friday, and the money was docked. Today, I got a debt collection mail from svea inkasso, so I call them, tell them I've paid the bill, they tell me that they've made a remark about calling to check with plusenergi before taking any further steps (yeah right).

Not satisfied, I call plusenergi directly to ask them what's happened. Oh, they have _hopefully_ fixed my address again, that was the first order of business. Then I went on to ask if the bill was paid, nope, it's not according to them. Double check account numbers, reference numbers and so forth, everything checks out. Their final word "can you call us back tomorrow, maybe the money will be here then".

No wonder Electric utility companies are so doing so freakishly well these days. The people who used to turn into pirates are today turning into representatives and executives of the electricity companies. Whatever you _ever_ do, avoid plusenergi, I've had it with them.

Refactoring some more lousy webpage code

Keeping promises

Well, I did. I did write today again. Hah! :-)

All work and no play makes jack a dull boy,
All play and no work makes jack a mere toy.

Working again, working on a report of some kind, how to do an embedded linux project properly. It's hard to define. I know how I would love to have it, but defining it in words is not. I know it should not be hard, but it is. A paper that is very good imho, Tips for planning an embedded Linux project. It gets all the errors down that we made, but it doesnt really define what makes a embedded Linux project great, or even good for that matter.

I also read anatomy of a hack earlier, it's some interesting stuff, but I'm not sure this is what I would give out to people who really needs it. I've tried handing that short thing to a few relatives, we'll see if anyone of them gets it.

Also, this is the real kicker today, I love Ted Dziubas writing, it's the best tech stuff I've read in quite a while :-). For an example, read his Cloud computing: A catchphrase in puberty.

I'm turning into a real blogger, ain't I? :-P

Easy stuff

Ok, I started recoding frozentux.net today finally. It's rather ugly and messy code, so i'm starting by cleaning it up a bit. It's kinda nice getting a goal again, I've lacked a bit of it. Also, I must say, this feels soooo easy. PHP code is a breeze, and way to forgiving, especially without 10+ guys looking over your shoulder once in a while to make sure your code is good enough *cough* .

That said, I'm not planning to use too much cross site stuff or any other heavy stuff, so it will be easy to get it to a working state again. Basically, I'm going for a simpler design, with larger flexibility as I want to add a lot of small code samples and projects to the website in the future (I kinda locked myself down there last time).

Also cleaned the fan over the stove, built more on the model (wow, you can almost see that it's an airplane body right now :P ). I got a lousy glue (so sorry mac and heather, it was an awkward glue you gave me :)), need a new one, and I also need some sandpaper. Taken a walk, looked at an episode of systm. A cool show about mythbuntu tbh.

Workweek ahead. See if i manage to get into a habit of writing here or not?;)

Slow grasswidow evening

What do you do when you are home alone a saturday evening? Personally, I web2.0'd my life (i got facebook, a blog, remember the milk, dipity, evernote, and decided to rewrite/update my webpage). Also, I really got started building the Fokker DR.1.

To update frozentux.net, I screwed around a bit with eclipse pdt. I want to do this since I think the whole site looks pretty awful. I was ok with it "back then", but not any more. I've been using eclipse for a few months to code c, c++, qt and I've grown rather fond of it. My first time with eclipse left me... well, let's just say i went back for a few years to vim and loved it. Still wish there was a decent vim/eclipse plugin as i love vims command/edit mode.

I digress. Basically, what I did was Install subversion, make a copy of frozentux.net in subersion and a few other projects in there. I setup subversion with apache2. I know I suck that haven't done this before. After that, I installed pdt, subclipse and a few other modules in eclipse and got it all working together. I think I might like the subclipse module, but still got a few things I need to find out.

I'm gonna get started on rewriting frozentux today I hope. Now, going for a walk first.

First entry (a.k.a. I've joined the dark side, I'm blogging)

Ok, I'm blogging? Now what? ;) . Nah, I'm hoping to use this site as a place to collect information about what I'm currently working on etc. Maybe an introduction?

Yes, I'm the idiot behind frozentux.net, yes i wrote the iptables and ipsysctl tutorial stuff a long time ago. It's unfortunately a long time ago, and rather rusty. I grew very tired of it during the last update of the iptables tutorial (even earlier actually, but lets keep it simple). I'm not sure at this point if i will try to get it rolling again, but it is possible, depending on how much work it will be to update it.

Other projects i've been boring myself with as of late:

• Coding (trolltech qt/qtopia calculator, notepad, other stuff to learn the qt api etc). I love QT to be honest, wonderful so far, and you can do hilarious stuff with the stylesheets. Need this for work.
• Working on some model aircrafts (a balsa built RC one in the countryside which i only have access to very seldom and a guillow's balsa scale Fokker DR.1 at the moment). I need relaxation from computers once in a while, this is _awesome_ stuff to relax with.
• Still some general security stuff, been a while since, feels nice to be back on homefield once in a while.
  
• Started web2.0'ing my life, Ie I now come with shiny buttons and instead of tcp sockets i come with a http api. Seriously just trying this blogging, twitter, dipity, ping.fm stuff, some stuff will stay, some i'll get bored with. EverNote will stay, _awesome_ stuff. Remember the milk will be investigated... it has potential;).
• Some testing to do with my HTPC, using ubuntu and mythtv... this will get a lot of attention soon as I got seriously pissed at mythtv some time ago. To those gurus at it, apologies, but it sucks as far as ive seen so far, and it was a while since i did any work on it, but it needs to be revisited. Graphics was horribly buggy, some weirdness with unpacking/loading images etc which took close to 5-10 minutes on startup and so forth.