KasperBlog

I had almost given up on my quest to find a club in Aachen that'd play decent music. While the "Apollo" offers "Rock, Grunge, Independent, X-Over" on Monday nights, and the "Club Nightlife" offers "Alternative, Crossover, Metal, Punk, Rock, Ska" on Thursday nights, they both only (pretend to) offer good music on weeknights, and then mostly play the softer side of things, always the same old "popular" songs, and if you're lucky to get one or two good songs that are a little more aggressive, next one will surely be some soft rock song (quite likely newly popular Brit-Rock or on a really bad night even "Surfin USA" by the "Beach Boys"). I don't know whether to blame the DJ ("DJ Manni" djs in both clubs) or whether the club owners force him to dj as badly as he does.

But a while ago some guys must've been as sick of all this as I am and started organizing an event called "Start The Fire" at the club "New Water", offering "Metal, Hardcore, Emo", happening every second Friday of the month. I've been there three times now and I must say it rocks. The music is excellent, the people are nice, you can ask the DJ to play a song you like and he'll play it for a change.

See you there:

I bought the new Tool album 10,000 Days a few weeks ago and I absolutely love it. I can't stop listening to it. I can't really describe what I like about it, but if you like that kind of music I suggest you check it out.

I decided to redesign my weblog and homepage and started adding some structure and even a little bit of content. The design is not very fancy but should be legal XHTML and CSS. I hope you like it. If you have any suggestions, just let me know.

Normalerweise höre ich ja eher die Richtung Metal, Industrial und EBM, aber ab und zu darf es auch mal etwas Hip-Hop sein, besonders angetan haben es mir in letzter Zeit die Beginner.
Denyo, einer der Beginner MCs war letzten Freitag mit seiner Band "The Denyos" und DJ Mad (auch Beginner) im Musikbunker in Aachen. Vorher traten noch Doppeldecker und Nico Suave auf.

Die Doppeldecker haben mir recht gut gefallen, daher konnte ich nicht umhin mir vor Ort deren Album zu kaufen (nur 5 Euro, ein Schnäppchen). Nico Suave hingegen war überhaupt nicht mein Fall, obwohl er alle anderen Besucher scheinbar begeistert hat wollte ich eigentlich nur, dass er endlich aufhört. Naja, man kann ja auch nicht alles mögen...

Denyo dagegen war genau mein Ding, er hat der Menge nochmal richtig eingeheizt und wenn ich mich richtig erinnere alle Stücke von seinem neuen Album "The Denyos" gespielt (performt?), dazu noch ein wenig von seinem ersten Album "Minidisco" und auch Teile einiger "Beginner" Songs. Nach zwei Zugaben hat dann ab Mitternacht DJ Mad noch ein wenig aufgelegt...

Alles in Allem ein sehr gelungenes Konzert.

I managed to compile the SILC plugin for Irssi 0.8.10 on Debian stable. Whenever I tried that before, stuff failed. I wonder why it worked now, but here it is: a build of the SILC plugin for Irssi 0.8.10 compiled on Debian stable

I started to toy with last.fm today. But I'm too lazy too figure out what it's all about and tell you about it. All I found out so far is that you can listen to music grouped by "Tags" ("powered by" Audioscrobbler) and that they have a native last.fm-enabled music player for FreeBSD. So far so good.

There's also a plugin for Serendipity which shows you what songs I last listened to and such (It's called "Audioscrobbler Plugin"), see the right column...

Finally, in our third attempt, we won the UCSB CTF (after scoring second place, twice). Check out the final scores

I would like to thank UCSB for organizing yet another fun++ CTF.

Some photographers put our honorable chancellor Angela Merkel's head onto 40 different celebrity photographs.

See Angelina Merkel


In case you didn't know, this is how she really looks like:

I'm really looking forward to participating in the next UCSB CTF as part of the RWTH Aachen Team "0ld Eur0pe" which is coming up on December 9th.

From the UCSB CTF Website:

The UCSB International Capture The Flag (also known as the iCTF) is a distributed, wide-area security exercise, whose goal is to test the security skills of the participants from both the attack and defense viewpoints.

The Capture The Flag contest is a multi-site, multi-team hacking contest in which a number of teams compete independently against each other.

Each team is given a virtualized server installation (for example, a virtual Linux server). The server provides a number of services. The services have a number of undisclosed vulnerabilities, which have been included in the server's software by the contest organizers.

The goal of each team is to maintain the set of services available and uncompromised throughout the contest phase. Each team can (and should) attempt to compromise other teams' services. Since all the teams receive an identical copy of the virtual server, the task of each team is to find vulnerabilities in their copy of the server and possibly fix the vulnerabilities without disrupting the services. At the same time, the teams have to leverage their knowledge about the vulnerabilities they found to compromise the servers run by other teams. Compromising a service will allow a team to bypass the service security mechanisms and to "capture the flag" associated with a service.

During the contest a scoring system keeps track, for each team, of which services are available, and which services have been compromised.

I participated in both international CTF contests organized by UCSB so far and really enjoyed them. Not only were the vulnerable services fun break, I also think the virtual servers' "evil company" themes were awesome and integrated all the services into a nice and consistent setting.

The topic came up in ##freebsd on the FreeNode IRC Network. So i thought i'd share some of the webcomics i enjoy:

Webcomics i try to stay current on:
Megatokyo
Something Positive
Marilith - looking for a new Artist, no updates in a while
Others, with somewhat less continuous storylines:
Diesel Sweeties
Mac Hall Comics
Applegeeks
Krakow

Discontinued (finished) webcomics:
Demonology 101
Queen of Wands

Other great webcomics:
User Friendly
Dilbert

Unlike other weblog software i tried to install so far, Serendipity was surprisingly easy to install. Great.