Posted on

Bitcoin – the slippery slope down

I’m going to call it, the exchange rate between USD and Bitcoin has started its downwards path and will not get to the heady heights it has recently been again (however, I can guarantee some collusion here with some nutty seller agreeing with a nutty buyer to exchange at USD20 or something stupid, I’m talking about long term averaged daily prices here).

I’m not sure how it logically could have gone up to the high experienced on 18 May of high of USD8.40. Actually, my understanding is that logic has a limited impact on markets like this because people tend to get swept up in the whole hype of it all. Perhaps it was the greater fool principle showing here, one person ripping the other off until the market takes a breath and asks its self, what the hell can I buy with bitcoin and why should it be worth so much now when late last year it was worth USD0.095?

Oh well, its been interesting seeing a bubble play out in front of my eyes. But perhaps I’m just grumpy I didn’t buy when I first heard about it when it was USD1, could have made a bit of $$$ but who was to know.

Posted on

I think I’m going to the cloud

Well, I calculated the cost of hosting the lump of hardware that you can thanks for allowing you to view this page today, its about AUD580 per year an dthat is a crap load.

Amazon now has some super cheap micro instances which will drop this cost to around $200 per year and with that I think I am off to the cloud.

Its been a great ride but power prices are going up and my mate will soon run out of ptience with me and the licensing server issue sI get on my ESX box that hosts the machine that hosts this blog.

I’ll let you all know when I move and how it went., Im sure perhaps 2 people will read it!

Posted on

Bitcoin – WTF!

So a couple of months ago I listened to a podcast on security now about bit coins, at the time the Bitcoin (BTC) to USD exchange rate was at around parity, now I look at the exchange rate and its about 3.5 USD = 1 BTC. Is this a bubble or what?

Posted on

Where have you been Martin?

Its been a while but so much has happened since my last post.

If you have been reading my Milan – Taranto blog (and why have you not been?) you will now I had a 2 week trip to Italy in early July and ran in the Milan – Taranto rally on my MV 350B motorbike.

I returned to Australia mid July and started work straight away which came as a bit of a shock and its taken me a couple of weeks to stop wishing for Italy any longer.

I have doing little, just bits and pieces around the house, messing about with my computers (building a new mythtv box) and thinking about building a new webserver virtual machine to take over from my old one that has been running now for perhaps 3 years. I’m worried its a bit exposed.

What do people recommend as far as a flick the switch web server goes? Just down load a LAMP server from VMware and fire it up?

Meh, I don’t know. I’m thinking of going lightweight web-blog as well, wordpress seems to me to be the most bloated of all weblogs, I’m thinking nanoblogger.

So, suggestions on webserver VM and blogging app please.

Posted on

University……tick

After 6.5 years I sat my final exam, assuming I pass the unit (Law – Torts) I will have my BA Commerce – Woot!.

That didn’t take long.

Big thank you to my wife for putting up with me.

Posted on

MV Agusta – Update 4

Well after many, many hours of putting it all back together, yesterday I ran the engine for the first time. Its would be very interesting to know how long it has been since this engine last ran, I dare say 20 years. It started in about 4 kicks and ran very well, idling fine and making no strange noises.

Just need to get the tank back from the painter now which should be next weekend then take it for a run – can’t wait!

Posted on

OpenID

I’ve long been a subscriber to the openID idea – I just think its a gracefull way of being able to prove who you are without the site owner actually having to do anything or actually being involved in the process.

This blog now supports comments being left by using your openID credentials – should make it quicker fro comments to be left.

Posted on

Sipdroid and trixbox – it works

Thanks to a few helpfull soles on the sipdroid site I have been succesful in getting sipdroid to register with my Asterisk server AND be able to make calls.

The trick is (thansk to Adrian)
In your sip.conf, comment out “secret = …”. Instead use the following: auth=username@password@host

I also made a change to the extension sipdroid runs on in asterisk and changed: qualify=no

Sipdroid registers to my asterisk box fine and is able to make and receive calls fine. As for the call quality – well that is another thing – keep in mind my testing to date is over Optus 3G.

The first issue I am having is that if I call someone’s mobile I loose the first say 10 seconds of the conversation, ie, I miss them saying “Hello” which starts the conversation off on a failry bad footing, the person I called is usually first heard by me saying” Hellllloooooo, any body there” or something to that effect – not great. Secondly there is still some lag. This is odd becasue I thought the lag I experienced using pbxes.org would reduce given the server I am regsitering to now is local and not in Japan.

Lastly, you need a very stable and good internet connection. I believe now that my data usage has doubled for calls I make as effectivley my asterisk box uploads and downloads from sipdroid AND it uploads and downloads to my VSP. Given the codec used in sipdroid is G711 data usage is high so keep that in mind – 80kbps up and down times two = 160kbps up and 160kbps down for a phone call.

Anyway, best of luck for anyone deploying sipdroid on their asterisk server. Let me know how you go.

Posted on

A lesson learnt, don’t mess about with stuff on your mail server.

Today I got interested in mucking about with emacs, it always facinated me and I thought I would mess about.

I logged into my web/mail server from work and prceeded to install emacs. I noticed that it had the ability to read my email which I thought would be very cool so I ran RMAIL. Before doing so I thought – eh, she’ll be right, I was wrong. It dragged all my email in my INBOX (I use IMAP thask to Dovecote) and dumped it into a file called RMAIL. In effect, it hossed my INBOX!!!!. Chnaging permisision, ownership and file name of this new RMAIL file didn’t help.

A few heart punding minutes later I realised my nightly backups will save me and I replaced the hosed INBOX with a backedup one.

Thank god for nightly back ups and scp.

I’m still interested in emacs.

Posted on

Arch linux and open box

The other day my laptop borked. I think it was a combination of a file system error and a dodgy stick of RAM. In any event, my arch linux installation didn’t work so I thought it a good oportunity to installa fresh one and completely change the way I use it.

To this end I have decided to go very light weight

Openbox WM (this thing is just great, bare minimum, customisable greatness)
Mutt (with side bar patch!);
Firefox (not light weight I know but elinks just doesn’t do what a browser I use needs to do);
Mktorrent;
Screen;
Urxvt (cos I want to be l33t);
No dock or pager or login manager bloat just unclutered goodness;
Moc;
Feh.

I think that’s it. It is now practically unuable by anyone but me which is in a way fun.

I’m at uni studying and am bored.