You might be a nerd if: You write a perl script to count sheep for you…

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… in binary.

I couldn’t seep last night, so I decided to count sheep. Counting reminded me of the time my brother mentioned that one could count in binary on ones fingers. That sounded pleasantly meditative, so I set my brain to work on figuring out how one might do that. Before long I had counted quite high, and was fascinated by the way the system worked. Naturally my brain wandered to: “how might a computer do this simple task?” By now I had completely lost interest in sleep, so I sneaked out of bed, turned on the laptop and cranked out a little application to count in binary for me. I was then a free to go back to sleep, having automated the tedious task of counting sheep.

The code follows:

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Are your digital memories going to be there when you’re old?

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I have recently been reading (auto)biographys of famous musicians. (Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Gerald Moore) One of the things that makes these books so enjoyable to read is the quotes from letters that they wrote or received. This lead me to consider how the historians of tomorrow will chronicle our lives and interactions. Not only that, how will we remember our own past?

I am sure that we all have a box somewhere of love letters and mementos of the intimate moments in our lives, but increasingly our correspondences are not written down on paper. Perhaps your email client (Outlook, Mail, Thunderbird) saves all your emails and that seems like a good enough way to keep your memories. But what about when you switch to a new mail program/computer/operating system? Will you make an archive copy of these emails so that you can read them when you are old? Do you know how? Its not that easy. And it gets worse. More

How to actively connect to a local Verlihub

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Ever since I moved my DC hub to my apartment, I have been unable to connect to the hub in active mode from a client on the local intranet.

The solution:

Set the Verlihub database’s alternate_ip variable for your user to your external ip.

The command I issues was:
!regset captbaritone alternate_ip 67.188.34.158


This allowed me to connect to the hub (from the local network) in active mode, without getting kicked for my reported ip (local ip) not matching my “real” ip (external ip).

The only remaining problem, is that I will have to manually change this each time my external ip address changes. I suppose it would be possible to write a deamon to check the address every now and again, and update the mysql database if it changes. But thats a lot of work.