Category: English

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The Prodigy “Invaders Must Die” New Album And UK Tour

Yesterday night Liam Howlett, the mastermind behind The Prodigy, announced that the band’s 5th studio album will be named “Invaders Must Die” and will be released March 2nd. Additionally, an “Invaders Must Die” UK tour dates have been announced.

By pure magical coincidence, the tour dates overlap the dates I plan to be in the UK in my upcoming 3 months trip, which I haven’t mentioned so far on this blog, but I will.

The UK tour has 9 dates:
April
5th โ€“ Cardiff International Arena
6th โ€“ Newcastle Metro Radio Arena
7th โ€“ Glasgow SECC
9th โ€“ Birmingham NIA
10th โ€“ Manchester MEN Arena
11th โ€“ Nottingham Trent FM Arena
13th โ€“ Sheffield Arena
14th โ€“ Brighton Centre
17th โ€“ London Wembley Arena

If you’re interested, you can see the locations on this map.

I will attend the shows on the 5th, 9th, 14th and 17th. If you’re looking for tickets you can get them in the next 2 days before they are in major box offices in The Prodigy’s Tickets online store (the link was sent to fans registered to The Prodigy’s website.)

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Idea: Human Anti Spam

I doubt I’m the first to think of that, but this idea might help cleaning the Internet of some spam. The idea is that people will install a small program on their computer that will send them from time to time (according to their preferences) some text that was publicly posted somewhere on the Internet. It could be anything: a blog post, a wiki edit, a forum post, a YouTube comment, whatever. The person will then click to say if this is spam or not.

The same content will be sent to multiple users, so that the system will not be easily gamed by people that are paid to create spam. If there’s a user that keeps marking almost everything as “not spam” he/she will be kicked out of the system (or even given data that is surely spam to test if we maybe have an “evil” bot.)

Hopefully we’re only talking about the “maybe spam” that was returned from an automatic spam filter, like Akismet. This will reduce the number of messages to check greatly. Regardless, this kind of system can only work if the number of “good” users exceeds by far the number of “evil” users, but since everyone hates spam and it’s a minimal effort I believe enough people will join in. Search engines can use this system to test if a fresh new blog is just a spam blog or a real one.

Unfortunately this will not work for any type of private communication, like email, simply because email is private and you can’t let other people see it.

So, do you think it’s a good idea, or did I miss an obvious way to game this Human Anti Spam system? If it’s good, maybe I’ll send it to Google’s Project 10 to the 100th.

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4 Years Of Working Out

4 years ago I went for the first time into the gym. I almost never missed a workout, which means that for the first 18 months I was at the gym 6 days a week and then I switched to 4 days a week – a more maintainable schedule, considering that I had a girlfriend at the time and also my body was developing some pains that wouldn’t go away and I associated them with over-stressing it.

Over the past year my weight stayed about the same (~89 Kg) with some minor fluctuations up and down. I look pretty much the same – sturdy with some extra fat around the stomach. I wish I didn’t have that extra fat, but I’ve learned to accept my appearance, as much as a former “fatso” like me can accept his looks.

Aerobics-wise I still do 2 days HIIT and 2 days moderate-level running. The difference is that now I run 11.5K in one hour instead of just 10K. I guess this is a nice improvement from last year… I kind of feel proud of myself now :) I intend to go further and make it a 12K run in the following year.

My muscles have stopped growing. Obviously I don’t invest the required time and effort to grow in this sense, but even though I like to see myself improve, I don’t want to become extremely muscular – I don’t think it’s a look that will be good for me.

Over the past year I switched 2 gyms – one time because the place I used to go to went bankrupt and another because I didn’t like the new gym provided as a replacement for the bankrupt gym. I don’t like changes in that sense – different equipment requires the body to adjust and the HIIT workouts need recalibration, but I think I managed it well and I’m very happy with the current gym.

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Enabling Public Wireless Access With ZoneAlarm Z100G

A while ago I got as a gift a wireless router – a ZoneAlarm Z100G. When I got it at first I defaulted to securing the wireless network from public access (by following this article). Then I thought about it a little and decided to be nice to my neighbors who want to access a wireless network. I mean – why not? Sometimes I try to find a wireless connection with my laptop and it’s very frustrating when I realize that all networks are secured.

Still, I only wanted to enable web access to outsiders using my connection. I don’t want them to use file-sharing on the account of my very limited upload bandwidth.

The “trick” to configuring such a setup is using the rules system (select the “Rules” tab under the “Security” main menu item.) On my network I have a desktop connected to the router with a network cable and a laptop that I occasionally connect through WiFi. Both computers are defined as known network objects and are named “desktop” and “laptop”. See how that is done in the documentation on how to add a network object in the Z100G (hopefully the link is still valid when you’re reading this) or simply click “Help” in your router’s main menu.

The rules I use are as follows (the order of the rules matters):

  1. Allow, source WLAN, destination WAN (Internet):Web Server
    This allows the public web access to all.
  2. Allow, source desktop, destination ANY:Any Service
    This allows my desktop computer access anything.
  3. Allow, source laptop, destination ANY:Any Service
    This allows my laptop computer access anything.
  4. Now there are a bunch of forwarding rules I use for file-sharing and SSH access to the desktop. They are not related to this topic, but it’s important that they will come before the next rule.
  5. Block, source ANY, destination ANY:Any Service
    This blocks all other traffic.

Note that this configuration is very restrictive – with my current rule configuration, if I try to connect another computer with a network cable to the router it will not get any access and I will have to define it as a network object and specifically add a rule for it like I did for my desktop (rule #2). You can be less restrictive with the rules, for example by replacing the last rule with 2 less strict rules just for WLAN (blocking all access to and from the WLAN) and an additional rule to allow anyone who is connected with a cable to access the internet (after all, you probably trust that computer if it’s physically connected to your router.)

A nice feature in the Z100G router is that the wired and wireless LAN are separate. You have to bridge them to allow them to access one another. For security reasons, I bridge the networks only when I have to. When I’m done with the bridge I remove it.

Another important setting is to not allow different wireless stations access one another. Unfortunately here the default is to allow such access. The setting to disable this is in Network->My Network->Click Edit next to WLAN->Click “Show Advanced Settings”->Change “Station-to-Station traffic” from “Allow” to “Block”.

Hopefully I correctly configured my router to allow public web access only. If you think I made a mistake, please let me know in the comments.

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www.g66g3e.com

A friend of mine called me to tell me that some of the characters on keyboard were now emitting numbers to the screen. It was the classic “your NumLock is on” problem on a laptop.

I thought it would be a nice service to take the domain g66g3e.com and provide it to geeky-enough-people who type “g66g3e” in their browsers instead of typing “google” and then press Ctrl+Enter, which would normally complete the address to www.google.com, but in this case will end up being www.g66g3e.com. Unfortunately, that address is already taken and for that very same reason.

And I thought I was original :S

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Cypress Hill In Israel: 10 Years Too Late. Still Rock

Yesterday I went to see Cypress Hill, the rap band I really liked 10 years ago and the one that is responsible for my Internet nickname. While rap is not the kind of music I listen to anymore, the show itself was great – these guys can really make a crowd jump up and down with their selection of hits from the 17 years they’ve been around.

I’m glad I went to see Cypress Hill live. I’m only sorry they didn’t come 10 years ago. Considering that I didn’t know the new songs and that I forgot most of the lyrics of the old songs, I probably would have enjoyed the show much more. Going to see them yesterday was like going to see really really good live rap. It was loads of fun.