Note: The following text is a quote of the article on Roger Ebert on Wikipedia (see the original text here).

The Boulder Pledge is a personal promise, first coined by Roger Ebert in 1996, not to purchase anything offered through email spam. The pledge is worded by Ebert as follows:

“Under no circumstances will I ever purchase anything offered to me as the result of an unsolicited e-mail message. Nor will I forward chain letters, petitions, mass mailings, or virus warnings to large numbers of others. This is my contribution to the survival of the online community.”

Ebert coined the term during a panel at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Conference on World Affairs in 1996. He wrote the text which appears above and encouraged everyone to take the pledge. It was subsequently published in the December 1996 issue of Yahoo! Internet Life magazine, where Ebert had a regular column, under the title of “Enough! A Modest Proposal to End the Junk Mail Plague.”

The songs, normally pop into my head or I listen to them on a commercial, on the radio, or are a suggestion that a friend made like a casual thing. Most of the time, I think of the song as if it could be a “soundtrack” for a said moment, and when they pop into my head it’s the “… hmmm, what’s the name of that song again? …”, as if it was in some kind of radio inside my head, sometimes It takes a lot of effort (and friend’s effort) to properly “tag” them.

Songs (you can listen to them via grooveshark, it’s awesome ):

• Toque Profundo – Cria Cuervos
• Tenacious D – The Metal
• Royksopp – Remind me
• Cake – Never, Never Gonna Gonna Give You Up
• Epica – The Obsessive Devotion
• The Prodigy – Poison
• Queen – Another one bites the dust
• Metallica – Eye of the Beholder
• Metallica – Am I Evil?
• Real Life – Send Me An Angel
• I feel pretty (West Side Story soundtrack)
• L. Carlton ft. Lee Ritenoir – Closed Door Jam
• A Perfect Circle – Pet (thanks to redzkull for sharing)
• Paul Simon – You Can Call Me Al

The words (or terms). Be them news, messages, forum posts, stumbled upon links, comments people say, I ALWAYS find an interesting word, be it new or known, if it’s still in my head by the end of the day, that was the word of the day . Sometimes a day has more than one interesting/awesome word, I use them as spares if the other day’s word isn’t as interesting.

Since I’m bilingual, I’ll have to apologize for the “mixed” words in english and spanish.

Words/terms:

• cochlea
• stem cell
• paranoia
• waffle : I ate wafflecakes (a mix between pancake and waffle; and btw, waffle > pancake)
• galantear
• acurrucarse
• cuchifrito : via a friend on twitter (mishyfu)
• groundhog : a friend at the office called another a marmot, a groundhog is a type of marmot.
• procrastinate : via two friends on twitter (redzkull and selene82)
• half
• snazzy : was mentioned in the ABCD’s (A Basic Course on Dvorak) first lesson.
• earthquake : sad day of the 7.0 quake near Port-au-Prince in Haiti, January 12, 2010.
• foster
• freno

Pictures are on my Project365 set on flickr (feel free to leave comments/critique there or here), some numbers are mismatched between the day of the year and the number of the picture, but that’s because I either didn’t take a picture on that day (for whatever reason), or I took a portrait or a picture that had a brand name in it, and I don’t wish to make free publicity OR shatter someone’s privacy.

The purpose of taking these “Project365″ pictures is to learn to do stuff with my camera or practice what I already know, and being able to produce one shareable picture a day sounded like a good challenge. The pictures in the set are at most just slightly edited (added the watermark, cropped, resized, and maybe some tint or hue manipulation).

Pictures:

My conclusion… hope is very ugly!

Esperanza/Katydid/Tettigoniidae on my ceiling

Tartan pattern on one of my favorite shirts

A friend reminded me of my comfy-wear today. Here’s a short description of what I call comfy-wear.

• Tartan long sleeve shirt (pattern shown in the picture), preferably in full cotton or similar soft cloths, with the sleeves rolled up to just above the elbows and not tucked in, with a white full cotton t-shirt under it, and normally one pen and a permanent marker on the pocket.
• Thick and semi-loose cotton pants with big pockets, or soft loose jeans.
• Brown thick leather two-strap sandals with a back strap, these had a very comfortable-like-a-sneaker-shoe feeling to the straps, not the usual leather-to-your-skin sandals.
• All these in dark colors, wine-red, green, blue, brown, black.
• No rings, watches, bracelets, or other jewelry-type thingies.
• My backpack with all my stuff. I have, over the years learnt to consider it part of my clothing.

So this is how I used to go to school, and I loved it. I have had to stop using it because now I have a job with a big business/corporate atmosphere and go to school from work.

So, I was this guy, going around on those clothes, long hair worn loose and beard, with glasses, and on bad-hair days a simple loose ponytail, and/or a baseball hat without any logos in the same tartan pattern or plain, same dark colors mentioned before.

Yes, I’m a geek, and that’s how I like to dress since it is as comfortable as it gets, and no crummy/crufty/untidy aura that might be related to such loosely worn garments, needless to say I always remain clean good smelling.

And yes, I like tartan/plaid/checked-patterns on clothes.

“Short Skirt/Long Jacket” by Cake:

I want a girl with a mind like a diamond.
I want a girl who knows what’s best.
I want a girl with shoes that cut,
And eyes that burn like cigarettes.

I want a girl with the right allocations,
Who’s fast and thorough,
And sharp as a tack.
She’s playing with her jewelry.
She’s putting up her hair.
She’s touring the facility,
And picking up slack.

I want a girl with a short skirt and a long jacket…

I want a girl who gets up early.
I want a girl who stays up late.
I want a girl with uninterrupted prosperity,
Who uses a machete to cut through red tape;
With fingernails that shine like justice,
And a voice that is dark like tinted glass.

She is fast, thorough,
And sharp as a tack,
She’s touring the facility,
And picking up slack.

I want a girl with a short skirt and a long… long jacket.

I want a girl with a smooth liquidation.
I want a girl with good dividends.
At Citibank we will meet accidentally,
We’ll start to talk when she borrows my pen.

She wants a car with a cupholder arm rest,
She wants a car that will get her there,
She’s changing her name from Kitty to Karen,
She’s trading her MG for a white Chrysler La Baron.

I want a girl with a short skirt and a long jacket…

Read more at Wikipedia:Short Skirt/Long Jacket.

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Note: This post turned out to be pretty long for my own reading/writing standards, feel free to take bio breaks while reading. There’s also NO TLDR version.

First of all, credit to whom is due, Rappelz is a game by nFlavor/Gala-Net Inc, and all the graphics and screenshots are of the game and grabbed/taken by one of my best friends (their character names on the screenshots) of the Tortus server.

I’ve started playing a new (for me) mmorpg, Rappelz. I have three friends playing it, specially two of my best friends, and enjoying it, and since it’s free I dediced I’d give it a try.

I’ve not gotten to level my character too high, but I’m working on it and have gotten at least a taste of what the game is. At the moment I have a Gaia Fighter, at level 32, and job level 30 named Deneor in the Tortus server, he’s on the process of being an Archer.

I decided to write this review for a couple of reasons:

1. As feedback to my friends that already play the game, so that they know the awesome things we have on the game they are playing and the things we are missing in it.
2. As feedback for the game developers (see #1).
3. As an overview/introduction for anyone that approaches this game without knowing anyone that plays it.

From Wikipedia:Rappelz:

Rappelz is a free-to-play massively multiplayer online role-playing game. The game is developed by the Korean company nFlavor, and published by the Californian company Gala-Net Inc.

…

Rappelz is set in a medieval fantasy world, dominated by three races: the Deva, who represent light, the Asura, who represent darkness, and the Gaia, humans that possess an affinity with nature.

Before anything else, screenshots, everyone loves screenshots.

I’ll give an overview of the ‘facts’ intertwined with my views of them, if you need more info or raw facts, well, read the wikipedia article cited above.

general notes…

The game has above-par animation and graphics, has a less-than-desired movement system (point to click), customizable and flexible graphics and controls/key-mappings. Has a rather standard party and guild system, as well as a friends/ignore list.

There’s no pluggable UI extensions or scriptable interfaces, there are UI actions that can be done via the “console” with /commands (slash commands). And a rather responsive and spammable button/hotbar oriented interface.

The game has a very high emphasis on pets to complement your character in different situations. It has as a non-instanced dungeon system, as well as a very consumable-intensive gameplay system, in which you use hp/mp recovery potions and scrolls, attack/cast/movement speed potions, resurrection and anti-poison scrolls, stamina potions and stamina savers, food, boost chips, etc.; and a rather interesting pvp system that I haven’t explored yet so I won’t mention anything else in this article, join the “Panthera” server if you want to know more .

on races and classes…

This game has three races, those three races can choose 3 paths and are very similar in the roles they can perform but with their perks and twists to them. And these three paths branch off as shown below:

• Phisical
  • Tanking
  • Damage
• Magical
  • Healing
  • Damage
• Pet
  • Well… Pets…

the top level (Phisical, Magical and Pet) are “general” classes, “Tier 1″ if you want to call it that, and after that you can specialize even more after certain amount of levels to go to a Tier 2 class.

So, having mentioned the twists and perks that each race gives to it’s classes you should know that if you take the “Phisical/Tank” of X race, he may not have the same abilities or effectiveness vs. a certain type of mob or on a certain situation as the “Phisical/Tank” of Y race. And that maybe your “Pet/Pet” of X race focuses more on healing, and on Y race more on thanking. For example instead of the Tanking and Healing roles for Asuras, there are damage roles instead, so that class doesn’t really heal or tank. And Pet classes for the three races are very different in what they do with and to their pets.

on pets…

Another thing that’s important to note is, that all classes and races use pets extensively. And that’s a very interesting aspect of the game and that to my point of view is a GREAT way to promote diversity in the soloing/grouping aspects. This is because pets can fulfill any of the 4 roles mentioned above (that aren’t the “pet” branch, otherwise the same as characters). So you can complement your character with any number of pets you can find, tame, and level up.

Maybe a Healer is not that good at soloing by itself because it can’t deal that much damage or gets hit too hard by mobs, that healer can use a tank or damage pet for soloing situations and a healing pet for grouping purposes and give the final oomph on the healing.

on character progression…

On the game you have two major “experience” type of… hmm… stuff. These two are Job Points (JP from now on) and Experience Points (Exp from now on). Exp is not actively used by the character, it’s just something you earn by quesitng or killing mobs, and once you reach certain amount of it, you level up (or down if you die/lose Exp).

On the other hand, JPs are used actively by the player to “buy” Job levels and progress. Be it to buy “Job Levels” of your current job/class, or to buy skills in your tree. So that’s one of the sweet things in the game, and probably one that makes newcomers some headaches. You don’t “have” skills until you buy them, and you aren’t able to buy them all from the start, so you have to read a bit to decide which skills to buy or not.

Note the “or” in bold in the previous paragraph, you either buy skills or you level up your job, but there are skills that require you to have a certain job level. Because of this small fraction of the progression system I just described, you can infer that maybe two characters of the same race on the same job, may have the same character level, but probably not the same job level; and if they do have the same job level, they might not have the same skills “purchased”.

One of the cool things about the game is the almost countless ways you can improve your character, let me throw a list of the ones I know (including the one described above for completion’s sake):

• Character level with Exp.
• Job level with JP
• Skills with JP
• Pet level with their own Exp.
• Pet skills with their own JP.
• Weapon/Armor (more on this later) levels.
• Weapon/Armor enchantment (pluses)
• Weapon/Armor socket with gems that have different stats.
• Skill enhancement with cards.
• Skill card enchantments (pluses).
• Pet-on-belt bonuses (pets when unsummoned are “cards” that can be put on your belt to give you stats).
• Job transfers to higher tiers, and pet evolution state.
• Pet or Class “overbreed”, that’s when you can change class or evolve your pet to the higher “tier” or evolution but you choose to continue on that tier or evolution for some more levels for extra stats and job points (for pets).
• Getting new pets for other roles or rarer pets.
• Getting more/different decoration pets.
• Getting decorative items like costumes, etc…
• Getting a new or better mount.
• Maybe more…

on grinding and questing…

This game has an awesome thing about armor and abilities and that is the “rank”, armor and weapons usable by the character are determined by its rank. Rank 1 is from character levels 1-20, Rank 2 is from levels 20-50, and so on. Which removes the drag of having to look for X or Y armor item for your new level. If you have a Rank 2 armor, it will last you (unless you break it trying to enchant it) until level 50. So your “rank 2 armor” will go up to for example “+5 rank 2 armor Lvl 10″ and you have to change it for a rank 3 armor.

So, having mentioned the (known to me) ways a character can improve/progress I’d have thought that they’d put a lot of effort to not drag the player into a grinding odyssey, I thought wrong.

I won’t say this game doesn’t have a story, it certainly does, but it isn’t explored enough on quests (at least not as engaging as I’d expect, up to level 32).

The types of quests I’ve seen up to now are four:

• Kill an amount of certain type of mob (creature) and come/go to an NPC.
• Kill a certain type of mob and gather an amount of a certain item they drop and bring them to an NPC.
• Gather an amount of an item that’s on the floor on an area and bring them to an NPC.
• Go talk to certain NPC or take a provided item to them.

So basically you can do two things in this game (at this point in time at least). Either kill mobs (be it alone or in groups of players), or run errands for NPCs (to kill mobs most of the time).

There are no crafting/trade/gathering skills as of yet. There are no rewards for exploring that I have seen, nor do players get a tangible reward for “collections” like getting more decorative pets for example, other than the pets themselves and the warm/fuzzy feeling they give you.

suggestions/feedback for the developers…

1. Explore the main lore/story of the game a lot more with the quests with key items obtainable by questing. And reveal a lot more of the back story, please.
2. Make exploration quests fun (not the “take an item to a certain NPC onan area” without specifying where the NPC is so that the character explores it). Maybe do a scavenger hunt type of quest, or a clue-based quest to find a hidden treasure, or landmark visiting quests.
3. Let a player choose what her character wants to do and make those decisions impact the way the character “sees” the world by creating mutually exclusive quest lines. For example, two rival NPCs request something and helping one would render the quest by the other NPC unsolvable. This makes the players involve themselves a bit more in a story.
4. Create craft/trade/gathering skills, buyable with JP or whatever else you choose, but give players something to do that’s not killing mobs. When you have such a high number of consumables in the game, why not let someone make those, other people make weapons and other people make armor for example? That’d lover the costs in rupees (the currency in the game) of almost all aspects of the game, reduce the grinding for consumables, weapons and armor for example by a LOT, generate an alternate way for players to generate money, and give them something else to do other than grind.

Everything below this line is a re-post from OpenBSD Journal – Tunnelling out of corporate networks (Part 1), credit to whom is due.

Tunnelling out of corporate networks (Part 1)

Contributed by sean on Thu Sep 3 16:45:07 2009 (GMT)
from the slacker-of-the-year dept.

Mark Uemura (mtu@) writes in:

Read on to find out more about SSH VPN tunnels:

After discussing tunnels with Ryan McBride (mcbride@) and its implications for security and/or policy violations, he made a comment that he has yet to see a network that he was not able to tunnel out of. There are various tools in ports to do just that, assuming that you are not using IPsec or SSH. However, before I get into corporate policy violations and back-channel malware tunnels, I should back up in time to give some perspective and my experiences with VPNs.

At C2K6, I was working with Hans-Joerg Hoexer (hshoexer@) on IPsec failover VPNs using sasyncd(8). I also had the pleasure of sitting pretty close to Reyk Floeter (reyk@). He was the first person to introduce me to VPN tunnels using SSH. Reyk had a SIP phone that he was carrying around to call home with a SSH VPN using the tun interface. He developed this SSH VPN functionality with bits of code from Markus Friedl (markus@) and merged it into OpenSSH at the end of 2005. Since then, we have had the ability to create SSH based layer 2 or layer 3 VPN tunnels all handled at layer 7 .

It wasn’t until last year that I started experimenting with this in earnest. Normally, I use SSH port forwarding with authpf(8) and key/passphrase authentication for most things and IPsec with authpf where port forwarding is not practical. Generally, with OpenSSH VPNs, you don’t have to worry about Maximum Transition Unit (MTU) issues or firewalls getting in the way of the VPN. For the record, I’m not a fan of PKI so I have never gone down the ssl(8) VPN path.

SSH VPNs do their magic at the application layer (layer 7) without the headaches and baggage that come with traditional IPsec VPNs. Now, I can use OpenSSH to do what IPsec used to do for me in the past. IPsec on OpenBSD is really simple to set up but became more problematic with other Operating Systems. Yes, you need to work through this and familiarize yourself with IPsec implementations for each OS but it seems more complicated than it needs to be. OpenBSD has really simplified the setup and configuration of IPsec VPNs.

Unfortunately, in the real world, you often come across firewalls that block ESP/AH or ISAKMP/ISAKMP-NAT-T. Moreover, packet fragmentation caused by MTU issues were always a concern. If you didn’t get the MTU just right, the user would run into fragmentation issues making the VPN really slow resulting in a negative end user experience. Lowering the MTU is really important in order to avoid this issue but in doing so, you inevitably reduce the maximum throughput of non-IPsec traffic. However, too many networks block icmp(4) or TCP MTU discovery which at times can cause “speed issues” with the road warriors you need to support. Well, with pf and scrub you can compensate for this but when you are dealing with Windows, changing the MTU is an all or nothing dilemma.

To the point, with SSH VPNs, you’ve got one of the most trusted of SSH implementations, OpenSSH, and all the security goodness that comes with it. Here’s a simple config set borrowed from ssh(1):

How to use OpenSSH-based virtual private networks
-------------------------------------------------

(1) Server: Enable support for SSH tunneling
            (/etc/ssh/sshd_config):

	PermitTunnel yes

send the hangup signal (SIGHUP) to reload the new sshd_config

(2) Server: Restrict client and assign the tunnel
            (/root/.ssh/authorized_keys)

tunnel="1",command="sh /etc/netstart tun1" ssh-dss ... my_id_dsa

(3) Server: /etc/hostname.tun1

	inet 192.168.5.2 255.255.255.252 192.168.5.1
	!/sbin/route add -inet zzz.yyy.xxx.0/24 192.168.5.1

(4) Client: Configure the local network tunnel interface
            (/etc/hostname.tun1)

set up the layer 3 tunnel on the client:

	inet 192.168.5.1 255.255.255.252 192.168.5.2
	!/sbin/route add -inet aaa.bbb.ccc.0/24 192.168.5.2

(5) Client: Configure the OpenSSH client
            (in /root/.ssh/config)

	Host AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD
        	Tunnel yes
        	TunnelDevice 1:any
        	PermitLocalCommand yes
        	LocalCommand sh /etc/netstart tun1

The following network plan illustrates the previous layer 2
configuration.

zzz.yyy.xxx.0/24                            aaa.bbb.ccc.0/24
----------------                            ----------------
    |                                               |
    |                                               |
zzz.yyy.xxx.www                              AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD
+--------+            (          )             +--------+
| Client |-----------(  Internet  )------------| Server |
+--------+            (          )             +--------+
    : 192.168.5.1                          192.168.5.2 :
    :...............................................:
         Forwarded ssh connection (Layer 3 tunnel)

--- real connection
... "virtual connection"

AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD   "Server public IP address"
aaa.bbb.ccc.0/24  "Private net behind above public IP add"

zzz.yyy.xxx.www   "Client private IP address"
zzz.yyy.xxx.0/24  "Private net behind above private IP add"

(6) Client: Connect to the server and establish the tunnel

	# ssh AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD

when successful, you should see the following
interface created on the server:

tun1: flags=51 mtu 1500
        groups: tun
        inet 192.168.5.2 --> 192.168.5.1 netmask 0xfffffffc

(7) Client and Server: pf needs to be configured to allow
and perhaps hide networks on either side via NAT.
Essentially both the client and the server have become
VPN peers. The Client above is not directly connected to
the Internet.  It is on a private network behind some
Internet router.
Imagine the client inside some corporate network.

I went a little crazy to see how far I could take this. When forced to use Windows, I would configure VMWare and install OpenBSD as a guest and then create the SSH VPN. I could then pass traffic to and from Windows through the tunnel using OpenBSD and OpenSSH as the conduit. I’ve done similar things with Mac OS X but David Gwynne (dlg@) informed me that there are more elegant hacks that can be done when using a Mac. Obviously, running OpenBSD in VMWare just to create a VPN to tunnel out of some restricted network seems a little much and dangerous for many reasons but it is not too difficult to do. Alternatively, you can create the SSH VPN tunnel on a different machine running OpenBSD and turn it into a router for other machines to enjoy the tunnel too.

Now the benefits are that you don’t have to worry about firewalls as most networks don’t proxy SSL connections. Configuring your SSH server to listen on port 443 and/or port 53 eliminates firewall issues most of the time. Since we are using OpenSSH for this VPN, we also don’t have to worry about fragmentation issues . Thanks Reyk!

The above discussion is background info for another article that I have in the pipeline. In the meantime, I would be very curious and happy to hear what others have to say about their experience with SSH VPN tunnels using the tun interface. I am also interested in what packages and efforts you go through to break out of supposedly secure proxied networks.

Mark T. Uemura

What a tease! Thanks Mark for explaining this underused feature of ssh and we’re anxiously waiting for the second part!

According to wordnetweb.princeton.edu:

Moron: S: (n) idiot, imbecile, cretin, moron, changeling, half-wit, retard (a person of subnormal intelligence)

<rant>

Due to some moronic rules/policies or the people that came up with them… or the people that weren’t fit for a “loose” system made the system tighten… now I see a message like this:

Content is blocked by your organization

Reason: This category of ___________ is being filtered: Social Networking and Personal Sites

URL: <URLHERE>

Funny that on some sites something like this reads:

To view sites on this category, you must use your quota time. You are provided with 60 minutes of quota. Click on the button “Use quota” to begin to use your allotted time in periods of 10 minutes to view this and other sites on categories limited by quota.

So, now we see that the system was too loose for some (immature) people, and now they made the whole thing tighter to the point of making the misfits as well as everyone else uncomfortable, everyone, including those who did NOT abuse their freedom which is why I find this moronic. Now I think the one that’s not fitting is me.

What will I do? Use the channels that the system lets me to, until I can find a way to change the system, or to change systems altogether.

</rant>

Note: Will update this later with the correct/linked definition from the princeton.edu… yes… it’s blocked too so had to grab it from somewhere else.
Edit: Done.