Yesterday i did something which i would never do in a normal world :) Recently our network bought a neighboring network with around 110 clients and we were in the process of connecting them to our network. But yesterday something unexpected happened - the MAN provider refused to leases the optical fiber to them and about 90 ppl stayed without net for half a day. As a quick solution to the problem we connected out fiber connectedly to their office and i tried to SNAT their net to our router but for some reason (it always works doesn’t it?) i didn’t succeed to do that :( So the best solution was… DD-WRT :D Since the office they have is used as a warehouse now we had a couple of Linksys WRT54G, i grabbed one and quickly flashed it with fresh DD-WRT v24, NATed the old IPs and routed them through our router. I didn’t expect a miracle to happen but it it all went nice and smooth - the network was feed up with Internet again. For the whole day poor Broadcom worked just fine caring around 30mbps/10mbps up/down traffic, but as the evening approached things got worse and worse :( Around 22:00 when the peak traffic came (about 50mbps) the router stopped to forward packets but i was still about to SSH it. When i tried to reboot it it died. As i said in the beginning i didn’t expect a miracle but a total death was not expected, i think i will do some other probes and try to ask the guys at the dd-wrt forums what could have caused the sudden death ?

Help Firefox to set a new world record - pledge to download it on the download day !!

Yesterday we had a very strange incident in our network which has happened not for the fist time and this time i was blamed for everything :/ The fiber optics that we rented to airbites suddenly died. And i was pulling my hair for two hours but couldn’t find any sense in that situation. Last time when things went wrong there it was not my fault! One guy (a tehnician) decided to show them how to arrange the equipment on their racks, and he accidentaly (or maybe not?) switched patch cords. Before i was informed about the whole thing - Boby the guy at airbites tried everything including re doing the switches configurations. Finally at 2 at night i decided to go to their NOC and do it by my self - it turned out that the port at his switch miraculously changed its state from trunk to access, we changed it and everything worked. But this time this was not the case :/ In the end it turned out that the main cause was faulty media converter that they installed in out server room. So after two ours of no internet i got a phone call from their managers from Romania screaming that we never had such problems bla bla bla… only with your company we have such difficulties! Well you probably have never used such cheap media converters like here !!! ASHOLES !

Finally and at last they arrived :) After one long month of waiting two pieces of DELL PowerConnect 5424 are here. The First one is already carring an insignificant amount (for that device) of traffic at refresh-lan, and i am working on the second one currently to become a part of the medicom core network. That device has a super low price compared to other gigabit-only devices and the capabilities are enormous !

So as one can see the site is back again :) Yesterday i was looking through files to delete and a ooooold back up came out, well it did not occupy a lot of hard disk space so i decided to use it rather then sent it to /dev/null !

On May 30th 2007 Last.fm was sold to the American giant CBS for not a small amount of money - 280 million dollars !!!. That’s a lot of money, lucky you guys, you can drink champagne now till the end of your life and be rich and happy all the way :). But don’t forget about us the users of the site. OH NOES UR SELLIN MY SCROBBLES!!1!! — Don’t panic. The openness of our platform and our approach to privacy won’t change. That’s what the official last.fm blog says, so there is nothing left but believe and keep last.fm running !! :)

Yesterday Armin Van Buuren and his weekly radio show - A State Of Trance, began to celebrate its 300th episode, and 6 years of existence. This week the first part of episode 300 was broadcasted, containing many classic tunes from the past. Next week in Den Bosch in Holland, the celebration will continue with a free party with some very imporant guest from the trance music world:

• Aly & Fila
• Sean Tyas
• Menno De Jong
• Marcel Woods
• Markus Schulz

And of course Armin Van Buuren himself. As written on Armada Events “The Best Things In Life Are Free”. Well i like that very much but the distance to Holland, and my wallet are exactly the opposite - Holland is far away and my wallet is empty :(

May 8th was a great day at TT, the main reason for that is -

6 (six) is the natural number following 5 and preceding 7
6 is the number of strings on a standard guitar
Jack Bauer has been on the air for 6 seasons
It was the 6th day when God created Man
It has been 6 years since us Gods formed a group
Here to please… here to achieve… here to rule
Today we celebrate… and how do we celebrate
By dropping some bombs, coz that is why we are here
Amen


In other words TGX celebrated their 6th birthday, and TT sorta had a b-day too since the bombs mentioned in the cited NFO above were real ones. The biggest of them were

VA-Anjunabeats Vol 5 Mixed By Above And Beyond-2CD-2007-TGX VA-A State Of Trance 2007 Mixed By Armin Van Buuren-2CD-2007-TGX Now when i have listened to both of them… Well i like the Anjunabeats product much more. The tracklist is simply wonderfull, mixing perfect as always from Above and Beyond - i loved it from the very beginning to the end. ASOT 2007 is not bad either, it’s a must have for any trance listener. CD2 is way better than CD1, lots of good tunes on both of the compilations but in the end Above and Beyond did a better job ;)

UNBELIEVABLE !!! Di.fm is currently the biggest and in my opinion the best radio station in the internet. I just noticed on their blog the following:

THE ISSUE:
In March the United States Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) made a decision on what the webcasting royalties should be going forward and dating back starting with 2006.

The new fees, making us owe literally more than *two million dollars* due July 15th, do not take any realistic business model of a service such as ours and most others on the web into account. The short story translation is that Digitally Imported the company already owes just for 2006 many many times more in royalty fees than all combined revenue generated. Imagine a picture similar to if for every $1 we earn before even any expenses, we actually owe about $5 in royalty fees.

To make an analogy, imagine there was a law passed on an ice cream tax, and the tax rate depended on the number of visitors visiting your store rather than how much ice cream the store sold. So imagine the tax does not care if ice cream buyers came just to hang out and get a little bit of icecream - all ice cream stands would go out of business except those who sell wholesale mega packs to a few visitors in places like Sams Club or Costco, or Walmart if it was willing to loose money just to get you into their store.

The CRB judges completely ignored independent webcasters such as us and our business models, and adopted only a very high per song performance fee, without any kind of a provision for a percentage of revenue.

Full post here

WTF is that? I can not believe that Di.fm can be shut down, 2 milion $$$… where the hell should they get this money from? And if it does happen where will all of us listen to our weekly State of Trance ? :( If you live in the US, there is a site that describes what you can do to help the Internet Radio - Savenetradio.org. The new laws will be in effect on July 15th, and i am going to US on July 7th - i will call the f#$%$ing representative on the very fist day i arrive there, so U.S. Representative Thomas Allen - be prepared for a looooong phone talk :)