Jan-Piet Mens

Quite unusual for a Sunday, shops in Bielefeld are open in the afternoon today. Since the sun is beating down on us and it is 20 degrees outside, we're off on a little outing to town.

Im Bereich rund um die Bielefelder Universität ist heute Morgen für zwanzig Minuten der Strom ausgefallen. Betroffen waren die Gebiete Rottmannshof, Wellensiek, Lohmannshof und Teile von Hoberge-Uerentrup. Ursache war ein defektes Relais, das die Abschaltung eines 10.000 Volt-Hochspannungskabels verursacht hat.

My client has SAP servers listening on "funny" TCP port numbers, including port number 53, normally reserved for domain services (DNS). When you try and access that service (and others) from a Mozilla browser, a warning is presented to the user that the feature is disabled for security reasons. Already in 2001, Mozilla disabled these ports prompted by the CERT

Time change

For the last six months, I've been using a Linksys NSLU2 on my network and I am one very happy customer. After playing around with the Unslung firmware, I reverted back to the vanilla Linksys firmware, because I wasn't really interested in the additional features contained in the former. What I like about the NSLU2? It is completely silent, has scheduled backups, can copy the whole primary disk onto a secondary disk, and it just works

If you want to see what else I use, feel free.

Just noticed that Technorati lists over twenty million blogs known. Wow. And this is just one of them.

I've been hacking a tiny bit to get Amex' Secure Transfer Utility to transfer credit card submission data to and EPA back from American Express. The accounting dept is very pleased because these transfers over the Internet will make an expensive Datex-P connection obsolete.