Mosha temporarily down

Mosha will be brought down for the Holidays, because I am too busy having fun to keep managing the server. I will be monitoring this post for comments, and my apologies for the inconvenience. It should be up after the first week of January again.

Nanowrimo winner

I finished my novel just in time to make the deadline for the NaNoWriMo 2009. Here is my award. Of course, it will need considerable editing before anyone else gets to read it, but if you want to help edit I might be able to send you a copy. I will expect pretty serious feedback in that case, though.

Pre Technics LEGO gears

Before LEGO came with the "LEGO Technics" (of which many parts are used in LEGO Mindstorms) they experimented with different gear systems. Displayed is the one I used in Europe (I understood that a different version was released in the USA). The gears can be combined at a 90 degree angle as well. The gears have 21, 15 and 9 pins, allowing gear ratios of 7:5, 7:3 and 5:3.

Even though the axles are white, they are still compatible with Technics. Similarly the bricks, wheels and stop bush are all still usable, although they have different colours. Not all the stop bush have the same shape: some are intended to be stops, others are intended to be used with rubber bands. The metal pins are used to connect the system to the 4.5V and 12V motors that existed at the time. The threads allow attachment of regular LEGO parts, unfortunately most of the pieces of the thread got lost.

Museum expanded

After getting some feedback from a co-worker I decided to reduce the amount of rust slightly, and add more hints that it is a museum setting. I also made the floor less distracting by adding a plate, which would also ensure that the marble wouldn't be damaged by the engine itself.

Steampunk time continuation

I think this version makes my idea much clearer, and probably needs less explanation, which is good.

Raytracing competition entry

The Internet Raytracing Competition has as current theme "Steampunk Time". Instead of creating a time piece, I'm creating a steam (punk) style machine that has suffered through time. Here is my first real rendering of it, it undoubtedly needs more work.

Travelling and moving, Mosha down

Due to travels (going to Rochester and driving back to California) and moving I decided that I didn't have enough time to supervise Mosha, and therefore turned it off for the time being. Hopefully everything will be fine after the 26th of May and Mosha will be back online. My apologies for the inconvenience.

Levan Polkka

Here is some music that will stay in your head...

New Cashimor website

This is Cashimor's blog, and Cashimor now has a separate website. It's still under construction, and I got way too much space (10 GB) to put anything sensible there. I will move my old website there, and possibly part of Mosha, although users of Mosha shouldn't notice this.

Mosha is more and more alive

The most important service of Mosha, the HTTP2telnet gateway, is now operational. I haven't yet started sending out registrations, and am actually planning on changing the mechanism to an allow list, with a list of sites that will be able to connect regardless of the origin. This will make things slightly more convenient for people, and especially easy to try out the service. However, the list of accepted targets will be limited.

Also note that the current Mosha server makes a rather large amount of noise, and since it is sitting in my apartment, this means I can get annoyed by it, at which point I will turn it off (this is prone to happen at night). I have been told that the solution is to buy an EEE box from Asus, which are quiet as a whisper, however, there is still the little detail with regards to the money. They are inexpensive, but even $250 is something. Feel free to comment and give suggestions.

Mosha dead, long live Mosha

As this is still the place for Mosha updates, I can announce that the old Mosha is completely dead. Both the motherboard and the processor are done for, and will never work again. As donations have been insufficient to replace Mosha with a new computer, and ad income never exceeded $100, I have to resort to using an even older system to run the gateway on. I'm currently in the process of instaling it (it is at http://home.mosha.net at the moment, but don't expect it to work in any way). I'm currently recompiling the virtual machine, hopefully it will lead to a version that actually works (the current virtual machine is too new, if you can believe it, and causes strange run time errors).