we had a 3 hour power outage that affected our whole neighborhood, therefore my server went down too.

luckily i have it connected to a battery backup which after a while gracefully shut down the server. nevertheless after the power was restored, the system complained about one disk in the RAID mirror being dead. funny enough it pointed to another disk after every reboot…

i removed the “dead” disk from the mirror (or better: the disk that it considered dead at that point in time), re-added it and rebuild the mirror … worked :-)

at the same time toppi was visiting us the san francisco international auto show was being held at the moscone center only a couple of blocks from here.
so we decided to go and take a look :) accompanied by hans-martin we visited the show on friday 11/27 … it was also a good opportunity to test my new digicam :)

it was my first show at the warfield and i have to say i really like the location!

opener were “the almost” and they delivered a solid opening act.
after that it was time for “the used” to enter the stage and for oscar & me to enter the moshpit :)
it was a pretty good show, although i have to say that the guys got somewhat tame in the last year… and the audience got way younger in average.

photos are somewhat blurry, but decent enough given that they are from my phone’s camera while 16 year old girls were bumping into me ;)

after the concert we stopped briefly for a drink at “mr. smith's” and then ended up at the “bondage-a-go-go” party in my neighborhood.

all in all a pretty good wednesday :)

do you know the arguments people bring up when it comes to piracy of applications or games?
”i just want to test it, if i like it i’ll buy it later” or “if it would be cheaper i would buy it”?

an iphone app developer has analyzed the usage of his new game “Tap-Fu” in the first week after release based on the high-score postings.
the results are interesting:

• the original to illegal copy rate is 1:5. so for every copy sold on the app store there are 5 illegal copies
• no one who is using the illegal copy did later on buy the game (again this is only based on the first week of sales)
• the top slots in the game’s highscore list are all from illegal copies

And given that this is a 4$ game i don't think the argument “i would buy it if it would be cheaper” is valid either :)

you can find the full article here, it’s really an interesting analysis.

i am not really picky when it comes to food …nor do i need to eat in fancy restaurants. so it really takes a lot to get me pissed off about a restaurant. but schroeders in the financial district easily achieved that.

we had some craving for german food, so we decided to try out schroeders which is the only german restaurant in the city we haven’t tried yet. the average rating on yelp didn’t seem to bad, though in most reviews people were cheering about the fact that you can drink beer out of a glass boot (“das boot”)…. anyway.

to summarize it: we arrived at ~7 PM and were out again at ~7:30 PM, with only half of our plates emptied. that was the worst schnitzel and meatloaf we ever had. and to be clear: i am not bitching about the fact that it wasn’t original german or anything like that (in all fairness a czech owner and a korean cook most likely just don’t know how german food tastes like). i am upset about the fact that a meal that costs 25$ is so disgusting (ok it would have been disgusting for 10$ too).

the only thing really german in this restaurant is the horribly bad service …. ah reminds me of home :)

conclusion: if you want to have german food in san francisco, go to walzwerk or suppenkueche but you should REALLY avoid schroeders.

i found some time today to play some quake live after a long pause … and i have to say i really like the changes they made with the last couple of updates to the stats system as well as to the weapon/damage balance.

i also finally looked a bit deeper into the quake live config system and it’s basically pretty much the same as i know it from quake 3, so re-using my old config shouldn’t be a problem.

i played around a bit and recorded a demo and wanted to export this as video file. unfortunately they didn’t take improvements like the AVI recording function that one might know from  free quake engine modifications like ioquake3. instead it’s only the old stock quake3  functionality of “cl_avidemo”. it basically will export the demo you are playing as screenshots, which you then can use to compile a video out of it. i usually want to have a source material of 90 fps, that would make it 90 screenshots of ~2MB per second… *sigh* i need a bigger hard drive :) i also looked into using screen capture tools like FRAPS, but the results are not really high quality.

so i ended up with this procedure:

• record the demo in quake live. just type “record filename” in the console to start the recording, type “stoprecord” to stop it.
• start quake live in practice mode (against bots), open the console and type “demo filename” to load and play your demo
• when the demo starts playing, immediately type “cl_avidemo 90”. you can change 90 to whatever you want the framerate of the recording/screenshots to be.
  the playback will start to stutter but no worries :)
• when you are ready to stop the export, bring up the console again and type “cl_avidemo 0”
• the screenshots are being saved in %APPDATA%\..\LocalLow\id Software\quakelive\home\baseq3\screenshots
• now start virtualdub and first align the framerate to the number you used with cl_avidemo earlier (90 in my example). you can find that setting in virtualdub under VIDEO –> FRAMERATE
• now just take the first screenshot from the screenshots folder and drag it into the the virtualdub screen
• you can now just save it as an AVI. i usually save it without any compression and then use expression encoder 3 to get it into the format i want.

here is a sample of what the output looks like (after youtube down-scaled it again ;)):

video

i will start creating a specific movie config for quake live to bump up the video settings, remove the HUD and add shortcuts for all the console commands i mentioned above.

another problem i have to tackle is getting the sound captured… that will only work with an external tool.

while creating a backup of my laptop hard-drive before kicking off the bitlocker setup, i found the original header graphics for my old homepage.

so as you can see i decided after a long inactivity to update my blog again and create a Sharepoint CKS:EBE theme with the original graphics.

maybe this will motivate me to post more frequently again :)

just a quick note that the server crashed on saturday and it took my the whole weekend to reinstall & recover data.

it might take another couple of days to have all features enabled again (e.g. FTP configuration, etc).

yes, the last backup was of course too long ago and especially recovering the sharepoint sites just from the database files was giving me some headache last night. i will maybe post a bit more extensively tonight and explain what happened, what problems i encountered and what solutions i found.

since a couple of days our phone (connected with a Grandstream HT486 VOIP adapter) is ringing randomly several times throughout the day while displaying a “MeucciSolutions” as callerID. The calls are not listed as incoming calls on the sipgate servers (sipgate is my German VOIP provider), so i assume they are made directly to the SIP endpoint, maybe discovered via portscans. my router log also shows changing IP addresses the SIP calls are originating from, so i assume this might be either a distributed spam attack or even worse the code to do this might even be embedded in some kind of malware/virus/trojan.

Needless to say that “Meucci Solutions” (a provider of VOIP analysis and monitoring equipment) has nothing to do with these calls. They even have a complaint form on their site.

if my theory is correct and these are direct SIP initiations resulting from port scans, i hope my countermeasure of changing the default port for SIP signaling (usually 5060 UDP) to something different works.