Hace mucho que no escribo en mi blog porque últimamente estoy mucho más activo por Twitter, pero es que esto me ha hecho mucha gracia.

Resulta que mirando los logs me he dado cuenta de que hay tres direcciones IP que por algún motivo están haciendo peticiones a este blog aproximadamente cada 30 segundos (olvidándonos por ahora de los típicos ataques automatizados que llegan hora sí, hora también). Son pe
ticiones como estas:

Las tres IPs que se repiten en el log son estas tres:

194.179.118.78
213.99.31.12
217.124.174.7

Lo gracioso es que estas tres IPs pertenecen a la Oficina Técnica de Seguridad Industrial del Ministerio de Defensa, dos en Madrid y una en Granada:

Por mi parte, orgullosísimo de que los imbéciles del Ministerio de Defensa consideren mi blog personal como un asunto de seguridad nacional.

:-p

Today Sander Zuidema (snout) has published a note about me and the MSX Association in the MSX Resource Center. Here it is:

(Click to enlarge)

This msx.org post contains a few wrong assumptions.

I’ve received already several emails regarding this from MSX users around the world (mostly Brazil, probably because of the time zone), so let me correct the wrong statements before I get too many emails to reply one by one:

The MSX Resource Center (most commonly known as MRC) is currently the biggest MSX user community on the Internet. It started when Sander van Nunen in the Netherlands registered the msx.org domain around 1996. Search results for “MSX” or “MSX computers” on Google show the MRC near the top because their domain name matches the search and also because it has been around for so long.

This is unfortunate, because the MRC is a toxic community and it keeps harming the MSX scene.

The latest incident happened just yesterday. What started as a post about Brazilian MSX users taking a stand against piracy ended in a heated discussion when the user foobarry81 attacked the game developer Kralizec. The MRC moderators did nothing to stop this user, resulting in continuous attacks agains Kralizec and several users publicly announcing they were leaving the MRC for good.

In other words, a shitstorm.

Original post (Click to enlarge)

Keep reading for the details.

(Update: Kai stole the ship graphics from here. See below)

(Update 2: I was wrong about Kai stealing the ship images. He has shown proof that he purchased these models back in November 4th. I apologize to Kai for asserting he had stolen these two images, when he did legally purchase them)

For the last ~20 years I’ve been a user of the MSX Resource Center, but differences with the msx.org staff made me leave yesterday. To be precise, I cannot accept the childish behaviour of one of the administrators: Sander Zuidema (snout).

The problem revolves around the user Oscar Albero (Kai Magazine). To summarize:

• Oscar is releasing a new game called Life On Mars, which he’s selling for 39 euro (about $42).
• Life On Mars uses graphics stolen from Nintendo’s Metroid Fusion and at least two other sources.
• User Arkhan (Andrew Darovich, who is himself a game developer) notices the stolen content and calls Oscar out on this.
• Oscar evades the point, going on a tangent on how much work he has put on the game (he claims “over 1000 hours”) and lying about having created “over 90%” of the content.
• Admin snout joins the discussion, insulting Arkhan calling him a nutjob and posting an offensive image.
• Meits (Jelle Jelsma, another admin) joins the conversation and takes sides against Arkhan. Arkhan is forced to defend himself from the insults of Oscar, snout, Meits and Grauw (Laurens Holst, who joins the others).
• Arkhan obviously gets more and more frustrated.
• snout makes things worse by childishly posting a log from the #msxdev IRC channel at Rizon. The log shows that users on IRC are also discussing Kai stealing the Metroid graphics.
• One of the users on IRC happens to be GuyveR800 (Patriek Lesparre), who snout has personal issues with.
• snout bans Arkhan from msx.org because of his association with Patriek on #msxdev
• I join the thread and explain how I agree with Arkhan’s point (the graphics ARE stolen), and that he shouldn’t be insulted (and much less banned!) for telling the truth. For this I get put down on the thread while simultaneously other users are insulting me on a closed MSX-related Facebook group for agreeing with Arkhan.

I will not put up with this childish behaviour, so I’ve left both msx.org (I’ve requested them to delete my accounts there) and also the MSX Boixos Club Facebook group.

“Imagine how much more fun we would be having if we plugged it in!”

MSX Magazine (Japan), November 1984 issue

On February 4th 2014 there was a debate between Bill Nye (American scientist known for his The Science Guy educational program) and Ken Ham (the creationist behind the Creation Museum and Answers in Genesis). The topic was:

Is creation a viable model of origins in today’s modern, scientific era?

The whole debate is available online here (warning: it’s over two hours long), but this is not what I want to write about this time. During the debate, Matt Stopera from BuzzFeed asked 22 creationists to write a message or question to the other side. Most questions were quite dumb. This one is my favourite:

I thought it would be fun (for me) to reply these questions, so here are my answers (keep reading).

Just as I finished the previous post, this pops up in my Varnish log:

A script kiddy using a host in Italy to bruteforce my WordPress password. What a waste of time and bandwidth.

My friend, please try something more sophisticated. I’m sure there are some holes on my system somewhere just waiting to be exploited.

Something you see very often on the Internet are people talking about things they know nothing about, or intentionally just posting information they know is wrong (these are know as trolls.) It happens very often on online forums, or in the comments section of news sites. From time to time I join the conversation in order to clarify. And to prove that I’m smarter and always right, of course.

Today I went to Shinjuku and ended up inside Tokyu Hands. This is a chain of big stores that sell a variety of products: from furniture to joke articles for parties, fitness equipment, kitchen tools… And there’s where I saw something that reminded me of a discussion on Slashdot a few weeks ago. In an article about Japanese police asking ISPs to block Tor exit nodes, a guy named ShanghaiBill started spreading bullshit about restrictive laws banning owning axes, requiring licenses to own scissors, and implying that it is illegal to own a knife with a blade longer than 5cm:This is obviously not true, but I didn’t waste my time replying back then.

Keep reading for the rest of the post…

No, I haven’t turned gay (but hey, I don’t know about what will happen in the future). This is actually about a Japanese woman who decided to start looking for a boyfriend on GitHub, of all places. For those of you who (unlike me) aren’t computer nerds, GitHub is a hosting service for software developers who want to store their projects online using the Git revision control system. I know, it sounds nerdy because it is. The point is that by posting something like this on GitHub, it is likely that she has ensured remaining alone for the rest of her life. Or not. There are lots of desperate male geeks out there too.

Her original application (in Japanese) is here. I woke up and couldn’t go back to sleep, so I translated it into English for you.

Enjoy

Background

I’ve been getting old without being very interesting to men. I’ve started to feel afraid of not being able to ever get married. Because of this, I’m sending this application for a life partner.

Requirements

Remember this post from a few days ago? I got very upset because Facebook keeps messing with its users’ personal information. In this case, they replaced everybody’s email address with a @facebook.com address. That was too much for me and I decided to leave, after removing my personal information from there.

I must admit defeat. I’m sad to say this, but Facebook wins.

My intention was to go through my friends’ profiles, write down the contact information and other data I wanted to keep (mostly birthdays), and then leave.

However, I found that I couldn’t get any contact information for most of my friends, because almost nobody has changed back to their real email address. Nice lock-in there, Facebook.

Also, during these days I’ve kept receiving friend requests from people I know in real life, messages from my family (even though I told them to email me instead), event invitations, etc. I admit it: it’s difficult to leave Facebook. So that’s it, I admit that I suck

As a damage control measure, I’m removing as much personal information from there as I can, but I’ll stay.