During the summer of 2008, a couple of Venezuelan Parachute Base Jumpers (Carlos and Pedro) got together with Propela Productions to make a short film about an extreme dream of the jumpers, Jump from the Base of one of the Twin Towers of Parque Central in Caracas, Venezuela.

They format published in YouTube was divided in 2 parts, this is part 2. You can see Part One here.

Very nicely planned, produced, executed and edited (to my taste).

Let’s keep an eye on these guys, anybody knows if they have a site? I just got this from Nosgoth

Best damn funny/controversial show I’ve seen. Seinfeld on steroids for what’s left of the decade.

From wikipedia:

The series deals with a variety of controversial topics, including abortion, gun control, physical disabilities, racism, sexism, religion, the Israeli/Palestinian situation, terrorism, transsexuality, slavery, incest, sexual harassment in education, the homeless, statutory rape, drug addiction, pedophilia, nuclear proliferation in North Korea, child abuse, mental illness, gay rights, bulimia, prostitution, nazism, necrophilia and cannibalism.

Stream provided by Hulu.

With your help, we can deliver high-speed Internet access to more New Yorkers.

What if I told you we could use empty TV channels to connect tens of thousands of New Yorkers to the Internet?

The technology exists today. But some members of the New York City Council are trying to stop us from using it.

The Council has bought into a corporate misinformation campaign, and is now holding a public hearing next Monday to consider a resolution that would keep this technology from the New Yorkers who need it most.

You can help the Council make the right decision by speaking out at the hearing:

WHAT: NYC City Council Hearing on White Spaces
WHEN: Monday, Sept. 29, 10 a.m.
WHERE: City Hall Committee Room, enter at the Intersection of Centre and Worth Streets

The latest front in the battle over universal Internet access is “white spaces” — empty frequencies between TV channels on the public airwaves. In New York City, 20 percent of these television airwaves sit idle. New technology can open this unused spectrum to powerful high-speed Internet services, bringing ubiquitous and affordable broadband to tens of thousands of New Yorkers now left off the grid.

Here’s the problem: Councilmember Gale Brewer and Speaker Christine Quinn have sponsored a draft resolution claiming white space devices could harm the Broadway industry in New York City. They, along with the Broadway League, maintain that white space devices will disrupt the wireless microphones used for Broadway shows. Numerous tests conducted by the FCC show, however, that this is not true.

Meanwhile, lobbyists for the National Association of Broadcasters and cell phone companies have been blitzing federal, state and local governments with misinformation to prevent white spaces from bringing the benefits of broadband to millions of people. They want to hoard this spectrum to stifle innovation and competition. If they win, we all lose.

Too many in this city have been left on the wrong side of the digital divide. The answer to getting New Yorkers connected is right in front of us:

Attend Monday’s Hearing

The hearing will be open to public testimony. Please come and urge the City Council to reject the resolution and speak out for opening up white spaces for a better Internet.

With your help on Monday, we can help deliver the Internet for everyone in New York City.

Thank you,

Timothy Karr
Campaign Director
Free Press
http://www.freepress.net/
http://www.savetheinternet.com/

1. Learn more about white spaces at www.freepress.net/whitespaces

Hats off to the Joost team for a re-launch that went way better than I expected. Thanks for listening to all the suggestions, I know I’ve been a pest.

About Death Note

From Wikipedia

Death Note is a Japanese manga series created by writer Tsugumi Ohba and illustrator Takeshi Obata. The series centers on Light Yagami, a high school student who discovers a supernatural notebook dropped on Earth by Ryuk, a shinigami (”death god”), that allows Light to kill anyone by writing the victim’s name in the notebook. The story follows Light’s attempt to create and rule a world cleansed of evil using the notebook, and the complex conflict between him and his opponents.

It’s been kept on the pouch of my HP 48G calculator for all this time, today I thought it’d be probably a good idea to scan it and upload it.

Click on the images to see in high resolution, maybe one they they’ll be worth something and they’ll lay on a museum, or at least, a family vault.

Page 1

Page 2

I recently had the privilege to attend the US Open for the first time in my life, and as with everything I started questioning things:

Scoring

What’s with the ilogical scoring? Who came up with 15,30,40,Deuce, Advantage…
Why such an almost random sequence… why not, 1,2,3 ? or if anything 15,30,45!!!

Why when a set is tied 5-5 do they have to do it till 7 (tie-break)?, just let the first to go to 6 win that set, as if the matches weren’t long enough.

Callings

So 0, is not called zero, it’s called Love? wtf
Update: Simon expained it’s “L’oeuf“, which means “Egg” in french, probably a relationship between the shape of a “0″ and an Egg.

When a serve hits the NET, they call it LET? wtf

And when they go into “deuce” it always sounds as if they’re calling the players Douchebags…”Douche!!”

Other than that, it’s one hell of a game, one of endurance, precision, technique, focus, strategy, excitement, I loved it.

Thank you wifey for taking me there for my birthday, it was awesome.

It’s official, I’m retarded compared to the guys that built this technology.

So, here it goes, thanks a lot for taking the time to send a shout, pretty cool to know there’s so many people that did so:

- My wife
- My wife’s parents, who came before midnight and gave me a drill for my toolset as a birthday gift.
- My mom
- My dad
- My sisters
- The Swaman
- La Tati (via SMS)
- Raul Hernandez, now in UK
- Fitim Blaku
- Hugo Londono
- Guillermo Amador
- Rhona Bucarito and Luis Ramirez
- Laura Borman, now in UK aswell
- Felix Rios
- Eduardo Torres
- Javier Chauran
- Marcelina Knitter, my sister in law
- Nacarid Lopez
- Honack Villanueva, the most responsible team mate when I was in school
- Gabriela Noriega, it seems now all over the place (CCS/CDG/MAD/LUX/CDG)
- Adelaida Moubayyed, now in Spain
- Felix Berger
- Jose Lopez Brett, aka Nosgoth
- Gabriela
- Adriana Fulchini
- Daibory Trujillo
- Sue Geissenberger
- Maria Cione
- Roger Kapsi
- Ale Penichet
- Cristian Radu
- Angel Eloy, who wrote me a very nice email
- Antonio Jordana
- Gabe Perez
- Stephanie Alvarez
- Katay Santos (before in China, now in CCS)

This probably means:
- No StumbleUpon toolbar :( (I’m a stumbleupon.com addict, I feel crippled with chrome because of this)
- No Cool Iris
- No Twitter extensions
- No weather extensions
- No firebug-like extensions
- No toolbars of any kind
- No Synced bookmarks

This means a lot of businesses would die if people were to embrace an extension-less browser. I think it’s a little scary when you allow one of the most important websites of the world to run the browser industry. Let’s hope people will stay distributed around IE, Mozilla, Safari and chrome, and that they don’t become the defacto browser, cause then they would really run the show.

Remember Google, don’t be evil, right?

Update:
Confirmed, no extensions as of this writing are available.

Taken from the Chromium developer FAQ:

Q. How can I develop extensions for Chromium like in Firefox?
A. Chromium doesn’t have an extension system yet. This is something we’re interested in adding in a future version.

To Mac Geeks
If you want to build it for mac, you can (supposedly, I’m in the process off, I’ll post screenshots or video if I manage to do it sucessfully)

Here are instructions

Google today releases a beta of a new multi-process web browser, which makes it look like a mini operating system in itself.

Instead of the old model where you’d have web pages, scripts and plugins running on the same process memory space (with threads for certain things, like images and plugins), now they’ve built a browser called Chrome which puts every tab on a different process.

This is in a way a scary move in terms of how big google is getting (they already pwn Firefox), and how they’re starting to push to us a web operating system, I bet this thing will come with lots of google pre-installed (Google Gears, and what not)… but damn it, this is one of those ideas where you can’t help to say… “Why didn’t I think of that, it’s such an obvious thing to do, put each tab on a different process, and make javascript run in its own damn thread”, so this is why it looks like this will be a trend setter for all of the browsers, in the end competition is good and we can only hope the Firefox team already knew about this and we’ll see similar updates in the future for Firefox. The other thing that doesn’t make this all evil, is that chrome is also open source.

The multi process approach takes an initial toll on your memory, due to the overhead of allocating new processes for every tab you open, but it guarantees more stability, no single page will crash your entire browser since each one will run independently, and once you destroy a page, the OS will truly claim back the memory space.

In any case, you’re better off reading the explanation from Google, brilliantly done in a comic format (which at the beginning sort of scared me, sort of looks a bit like commie propaganda, but it has its fun parts). Leave comments if you want to discuss the subject.

It will only be available for Windows for now, so I’m gonna have to turn on my Windows box to try it, grrrrr.

Happy uploading, more upgrades on the way

MyBloop.com Playlist Creation Demo from gubatron on Vimeo.

“The unpopulated area of the Sahara desert is over 9 million km², which if covered with solar panels would provide 630 terawatts total power. The Earth’s current energy consumption rate is around 13.5 TW at any given moment (including oil, gas, coal, nuclear, and hydroelectric)”

Source: Wikipedia.org

The internet has changed the life of many people, you’re probably an example since you’re reading this geeky blog that’s mostly intended for geeks, the curious, and technology lovers.

But the internet won’t really reach it’s maximum potential, that is, until it’s almost everywhere just like electricity or TV.

In February 2009, by order of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) all TV transmissions currently being done over VHF have to cease, and all those TV channels will go only through digital signals. This means that one of the most versatiles spectrums will be up for grabs.

This spectrum (ranging anywhere from the 55MHz to 88MHz if I’m not mistaken) has the power to reach much larger distances than your 2.4GHz WIFI router, the distance actually depends on the height of antennas and somewhat visibility (you can see the formulas for theoretical distances on wikipedia)

Google, Motorola, Microsoft, Philips and many companies are asking the FCC to keep all this “white space” spectrum to be freed for anyone to use, just like WiFI’s 2.5GHz, which has extended somewhat the accessibility to the internet.

There are other companies however that want to license the spectrum and have it exclusively for them, an example are the companies that make wireless microphones (which didn’t seem to have any problem with whoever was broadcasting TV, so interference can clearly be fixed). Google has even proposed to keep an open geographical database of whatever signals are allowed to license smaller frequency ranges of the spectrum, so whatever transmission your computer will make will not interfere with them.
This would probably mean that smaller tv stations could transmit locally without interfering with anyone if they had license a subrange.

Anyway, I just ask you to sign this petition to the FCC and spread the word out for other to sign it, so that we can have internet everywhere we go on top of VHF signals, or as how they’re calling it WiFI 2.0

Here’s a video from google in case you didn’t understand me.

Just imagine how many more visits your site will have if EVERYONE will have access to the internet from anywhere. It will truly change our lifes in one way or another.

Purchase this album if you like it

Another great find for my Drum n Bass needs. Don’t miss the 14th song, “Still Grey”

From Amazon:

Eagerly anticipated 2007 sophomore album from the awesome Australian Drum ‘N’ Bass trio. Hold Your Colour is packed with 13 bold and diverse tracks, from anthems to emotional journeys inspired by nearly every genre of music in existence. Check out furious dancefloor smashers ‘Slam’, ‘Hold Your Colour’ and ‘Tarantula’, the smooth and soulful ‘Plasticworld’, ‘Streamline’ and ‘Still Grey’ and the Latin-Rock-80’s-Electro fuelled Funk of ‘Girl In The Fire’. Breakbeat. 2007.

We didn’t find any results for “apple google microsoft”

Some reasons might be…

* a typo. Please check your spelling.
* your search includes a term that is very rare. Try to find a more common substitute.
* too many search terms. Please try fewer terms.

Finally, try to think of different words to describe your search.

Does this have anything to do with the way they index content (supposedly cheaper and faster than google), or just a small bug on their logic once keywords are received?

God is an imaginary friend, for adults

Morgan Freeman

Here’s the making of Sausaguy

He also made the intro animation for BlogHogwarts.com videos

His Blog here.

Mael, we’d like to talk to you for some work related opportunities

With only 2 weeks listed on download.com FrostWire has made it to the first place for Mac users on download.com - Thanks to all the mac user base.

Thanks to musicaymas on plurk I found about this black dot that shows up on the top left corner of Gmail.

I took a couple of screenshots of it
www.flickr.com/photos/gubatron/2636812888/?hasignored=1

and posted the link on digg, 12 hours later it was on the home page, now this is a screenshot of it on the top of the Technology-Images digg home.

Here’s the digg page
digg.com/tech_news/Do_you_see_a_black_dot_on_your_GMail_too

as of now with 2524 diggs, and 424 comments. My email is full of digg.com fan requests, it seems all the digging has paid off. Let’s see if subsequent submissions will be popular again.

As of today, flickr reports over 130 thousand views on the image. It’s awesome to get digged.

Maybe a smaller system could be done for your car. It’d draw power from the alternator to break hydrogen into a tank, once that tank’s pressurised enough with hydrogen, when you press the gas, hydrogen could be released and sent to the engine’s cylinders (instead of Gasoline, or with Gasoline), helping you save gas.

Another way would you could use the hydrogen would be using a hydrogen fuel cell in the car, using the hydrogen and chemical reactions to produce electricity to charge another batery, and have electric engines on the wheels, when the bateries are charged enough, the Internal Combustion Engine rests and the other engines take over.

Now, if this thing succeeded, I wonder how fast we’d run out of water, we don’t have enough fresh water as it is in the world, but you could probably save up to 30% gas (pulling number out of my ass)

On Both Firefox 3 and Safari, on 2 different GMail accounts I see a black/grayish dot on the top left corner.

Google only indexes Google groups talking about the subject as of today July 4th 2008

Do you get one too?

Please leave comments if you find out what this is about.

Here’s a Smashing Pumpkins playlist I put together in less than 2 minutes (including sign up time)

SeeqPod - Playable Search

Here’s the video on Joost, the sound quality is great.

Saimim shows how to heat things up a bit with their funky anthem, Heater. Taken from continent to continent, this is not one to miss out on.

How do you verify the upgrade has been done correctly?

As root, issue the following comand:

# mii-tool
eth0: negotiated 10baseT-FD, link ok

If it doesn’t work (for debian or ubuntu), make sure you have installed the net-tools package (The NET-3 networking toolkit)

In short, it’s a twitter clone, a time waster, with a little more thought into it. Is it more complex? Maybe not, sometimes the right added functionality makes life easier for people.

Why you should try it?

I tried Jaiku, Pwnce, FriendFeed and Twitter, and stayed with Twitter. I’m actually proud to say that I’ve sent 6,801 Twitts that have landed me 390 twitter followers, and this is probably the hardest thing about switching from Twitter to another competitor, as good as it may be.

But from last week I’ve been hearing about Plurk, and today after some good web-reputable friends joined I decided to give it a try (see the power of web-prestige?), before they joined I just thought… “another twitter competitor”.

The added functionality might make things better, it’s probably the evolution of micro-blogging happening, and twitter needs better competition in order to get better.

Read the response by the Joost Support Team:

Hi,

We’re currently working on improving the performance of the PC and Mac
versions available today.
Although there has been demand for a Linux version of Joost, we have to
prioritize our business objectives. As a result, we do not have plans to
release a Linux version at this time.

Kind regards,

Lodewijk
The Joost Support Team.

They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but this has turned into a “I rather go to hulu.com” comment party on digg.com, and some users say one thing that is absolutely right:

dazparkourdazparkour

They use linux servers. They use free software.
If they wanted to, they could have drafted in volunteer programmers.
They take from FOSS with one hand and they give us the finger with the other.

Joost could have at least put a subversion repository for open source developers to mess around with the open part of the code and at least give some instructions to run from source in Linux. As a devil’s advocate, yes, they run on XUL, yes they run on FFMpeg (with lots of different codecs probably), but there are portions of their work that are propietary and probably not ported to Linux yet.

Maybe this part of their technology has to do with modified versions of their P2P technology. If you fiddle a little bit with their binaries you’ll see references to Skype libraries (which works in Linux), but they must have done lots of optimizations for video streaming (we’d hope)

In any case, as much as I love Linux, we’re still a “desktop minority” (probably thanks to this same stupid circle of companies not wanting to develop software since we’re a minority) in comparison to the universe of Windows PCs out there. Joost is a company on a tough market, they came in early and they may have a technological advantage over their competitors, they’ll be able to scale for being p2p based, their bandwidth costs will probably a third of hulu’s, for now it will be a game of waiting for their web based version and a much needed redesign on their content navigation and search.

We’ll see if they get another round of funding this year, it’s been over a year since they received $45MM, a hell of a lot more content is available now, there’s a limited number of ads, I certainly don’t hope they’ll pull the plug, p2p tv is one of the ways to go, the product just needs to evolve.

I can’t stop playing this remix, here’s the file page at mybloop.com

With the help of the last post on how to ban an IP, and the following python script, you’ll be able to have a cronjob that runs once or twice a day and automagically bans all the offending ips from ever trying to brute force their way in ever again.

touch and make executable a file called “detect_ssh_hostiles”

touch detect_ssh_hostiles
chmod +x detect_ssh_hostiles

Then copy the following code inside:

# Usage:
# python detect_ssh_hostiles [auth.log file path]
#
# Requirement: There should be "ban_ip" and "unban_ip" command availability on the path
#
# Note: you gotta have read permissions on the auth.log file and sudo
#       permissions for the script to ban the ips.

#If an IP meets this number of failed login attemmpts it will be banned
BAN_THRESHOLD = 7
SUSPECTS = {}

#Put here IP addresses you trust, could be making genuine login errors
SAFE_IPS = ['81.73.111.49','101.73.111.160','72.31.171.235','72.36.23.234','82.36.180.210','202.132.82.16']

import os
import sys
import re

BANNED = {}
def loadBanned():
  '''
  This function will load all the banned IPS into the BANNED Dict.
  It will also count how many times (by mistake) the same IP has
  been banned, and it will unban it, so that it will appear only once.
  '''
  global BANNED
  command = 'sudo iptables --list --numeric'
  try:
    p = os.popen(command,'rb')
  except Exception,e:
    print e
    sys.exit(1)

  line = '-'

  while line != '':
    line = p.readline().strip()

    if line.startswith("DROP"):
      parts = line.split()
      ip = parts[3]

      #add hit or register banned ip
      if BANNED.has_key(ip):
        BANNED[ip]+=1
      else:
        BANNED[ip]=1

  #Make sure banned IPs are banned only once
  for ip in BANNED:
    if BANNED[ip] > 1:
      print "IP %s has been banned %d times" % (ip, BANNED[ip])
      n=BANNED[ip]-1
      while n > 0:
        os.system("unban_ip %s" % ip)
        print ("unban_ip %s" % ip)
        n=n-1

  p.close()

# ---- here we go ----
loadBanned()

#read auth log
logfile = '/var/log/auth.log'

if len(sys.argv)==2:
  logfile = sys.argv[1]

command = 'grep "Failed password for " %s' % logfile
#print command

try:
  p = os.popen(command,'rb')
except Exception,e:
  print e
  sys.exit(1)

line = "123"

while line != '':
  line = p.readline()

  #Sample line:
  # May 25 03:29:49 main sshd[6933]: Failed password for root from 202.118.236.132 port 54863 ssh2
  pattern = "(.*)(from\s)(\d+\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+)(.*)"
  matchObject = re.match(pattern, line)

  suspect = None
  if matchObject is not None:
    suspect = matchObject.groups()[2]

    #skip safe IPs
    if suspect in SAFE_IPS:
      continue

    if SUSPECTS.has_key(suspect):
      #add a hit
      SUSPECTS[suspect] += 1
    else:
      #add first hit
      SUSPECTS[suspect] = 1

p.close() #close the pipe

print "=="*30

import time
t = time.localtime()
#(2008, 6, 6, 9, 35, 21, 4, 158, 1)

timestr = "%d-%d-%d@%d:%d:%d" % (t[0],t[1],t[2],t[3],t[4],t[5])
print timestr
print "--"*30
if len(SUSPECTS) > 0:
  for suspect in