After three and a half years of ownership and > 40,000 miles driven across almost all of Europe, last Friday we finally said goodbye to YK03 DPV.  It was an extremely tough decision, mostly because there’s few cars that can touch the E39 M5 for what it is.  Practical, refined and yet still capable of thoroughly upsetting 911 owners, it took some beating.  And then there was the sound of that V8…

Nostalgia aside, there were a number of big-ticket items on the horizon that would have wanted doing should I have decided to keep the car, and so instead it made more sense to look at something newer.  I did briefly debate a Cayman S and even perhaps an Elise, but after looking around eventually decided on an E46 M3 (ideally a CS) instead.  Largely because I know the marque, but the Cayman doesn’t really do it for me and the Elise is just a tad too extreme.  A Megane R26 was also briefly considered but come on, that would have been pretty depressing coming from the M5.

With VMware’s latest update to vSphere they’ve started to include their own copy of the sky2 driver and some support for various Marvell-Yukon NICs.  However, out of the box the onboard NIC on my Asus P5K-Deluxe - an 88E8056 - doesn’t appear to be recognized.  At first glance it looked  to be as straightforward as creating an updated oem.tgz with an amended /etc/vmware/simple.map containing the relevant hardware ID but alas, that doesn’t work.  Loading VMware’s sky2.o module with vmkload_mod just throws an error regarding unresolved symbols, which suggests that the scope of supported hardware by the driver isn’t quite as broad as you’d hope.

Some digging around revealed the steps necessary to create this homebrewed version. The author provides a link to a precompiled version, but this doesn’t (yet) have the necessary ID in place in order to pick up my 88E8056.  One quick amendment to the aforementioned simple.map and we’re in business though, and I’m happy to report that this particular NIC now works quite happily under 4.1. To save anyone else the effort and headscratching here’s a copy to drop in place on your installation: oem.tgz

How’s this for a milestone in your life:  A few weeks ago, I bought my first TV.  Yes, that’s right - 32 years of living and I’ve only just gotten around to actually owning one.  Personally I think that’s a good thing.  I’d like to say that my life is packed to the gills with extraordinary social demands, much like my cousin, but most of you know that I’ve been something of an itinerant and so the reality is that I’ve basically just watched other people’s all this time.

Anyway, yes.  That wasn’t my point.  This new telly, which is really nice but thoroughly underwhelming, is ‘Internet-ready’.  I hooked it up with a piece of RJ-45, logged into my Youtube account, and for some reason searched for Atari ST (honestly, it was a mindless search).  I then noticed one video in particular, chuckled to myself, and hit play.

Rox walked into the room, snort-laughed, and asked me what on earth I was playing.  It’s just a shitty low-resolution scroller with a digitised (mono!) version of a chart-topping 80’s dance hit.  But the thing is, this demo is one of the first examples that I can remember of hearing ‘proper’ music (i.e not synthesised) on a computer.  Think about it.  This is long before the advent of Fraunhofer’s cash-cow (the MP3 format) and its subsequent ubiquity on almost every device known to man.  We take all that so much for granted now, but once upon a time it was a genuinely amazing thing to behold, at least to my then 14-year-old ears.

I know, I know - you can go back way further than that to before computers made any sound at all, to when it was all black and white and so on, but what I’m driving at is this:  When was the last time you were genuinely amazed by a piece of technology?  Like you actually stood back and thought “holy shit, this is amazing!”.  Maybe I’m just old and jaded, but that never happens these days.  Sure, Apple’s iPad is awesome and I understand its potential implications but it didn’t give me a boner in the same way that playing IK+ on the Amiga for the first time did, or seeing the 3Dfx technology demos did, or hearing that demo.

The irony of all this isn’t lost on me: I’m sat here on my Apple laptop, milled out a solid billet of aluminium, with a dual-core processor and 4GB of RAM, effectively running a portable datacentre inside virtual machines.  18 years ago I’d have never imagined such things would be possible (mind you, I don’t think I’d have come up with something so mundane), and it SHOULD be amazing but somehow it isn’t - the magic of these devices and the advances in technology just don’t seem to be what they used to be.

I remember when it was all fields around here…

It’s fairly common to want to run SSH on port 443 these days, especially if you need to connect to your server from behind a restrictive company firewall that only allows egress connections to port 80 and 443.  This is all well and good, but what happens when you want to use SSL/TLS on your webserver as well?

This is where sslh comes in.  It’s a really simple tool that wraps incoming connections to these ports and then depending on protocol redirects it onto sshd back on port 22, or to your httpd on localhost:443.  With me so far?  Good - it’s easier to configure than it is to explain ;)

Our mate* Rob has recently qualified, after many many years studying and hard work, as a bona-fide doctor.  Many’s the time along the way that we’ve questioned his chosen career path (not that it’s our place to, but such is the Internet), as his attitude towards people in general isn’t really in line with what you’d expect from someone who is going to have the life of others in his hands.  Odds are that this is just general Internet bravado, but you never know.

Anyway, Rob is a top chap and has recently found himself newly qualified in the field of whatever it is that doctors have after six or eight years of study.  His recent forays into IRC have sounded pretty grim to say the least, but this latest outburst is a real winner:

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[19:37] * rob has joined #quake2.uk
[19:37] [rob] hi
[19:39] [nick] hi!
[19:39] [nick] how's work??
[19:40] [nick] killed many people yet?
[19:44] [nick] no answer :/
[19:44] [nick] can't be a good thing :/
[19:48] [rob] ://
[19:48] [rob] i stuck my 1st finger up someones arse today as a doctor :/
[19:48] [rob] came out all covered in shit
[19:49] [rob] even before i stuck it in, there was diarrhoea like shit smeared all over her anus
[19:49] [rob] and no she wasnt hot, nick.
[19:49] [rob] she was 84 :/
[19:49] [rob] kill me now :|
[19:50] [rob] on that note, im gonna go to the gym and work the anger out of me :|
[19:50] * rob Quit (Quit)
[19:50] [nick] jesus :///
[20:35] [Durz|lnx] rob realising its not like off the TV :/
[20:35] [Durz|lnx] i missed the episode of ER where they stuck a finger up an 84 year olds ass

I think I’ll stick to IT.  Which, ironically, Rob already has a degree in (Computer Science).

• someone on IRC that I’ve been speaking to for > 10 years but haven’t actually met.