So here I am, my last in berlin and I had to move to my favourit hotel, hotel panorama. Do you know the beds from the 80s, with a radio clock in the middle? Thats exactly what I have here. Anyway it could have been worse so I will not complaint. The worst thing was the amount of baggage I had with me in berlin. It took me about a hour to get all my stuff in the car and the guy from the reception looked a bit strange. But after this week I will finaly have holiday, beach, sun and fine cigars.

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"The Call", thats the name of the first Pirellifilm released. Yes Pirelli ! The ones that make good tires, they know to do a lot more then just tires and this movie shows it.
This short-movie is available only on the internet, so don’t waste any time looking for it, just visit the site of PirelliFilm and watch the movie, you can also download screen-savers and wallpapers.

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so finaly I finished seting up nagios on my server to monitor themselves and in case of a problem send me an SMS.
I found a plugin to send the sms on the nagios exchange site but that didn't quite work out of the box.
First problem is that the URL creation will never work, the URL for the message is created before the session id is assigned to the variable, this can't work! The second problem is that the message is sent "as is" for example "Server xy is down" this won't work either! The text has to be url_encoded ( in php, or uri_encode in perl ) so I created a patch which you can download here.
Then the description of the usage on the site is not correct 

define command{
command_name service_notify_with_sms
command_line /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/notify_sms -a 1012345 -u myusername_for_gw -p mypassword_for_gw -m '$NOTIFICATIONTYPE$: $HOSTNAME$ is $SERVICESTATE$ ($SERVICEOUTPUT$)' -t $CONTACTPAGER$
}

It should be $OUTPUT$ and not $SERVICEOUTPUT$ but this was the rather minor problem.

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and now a test with a mobile 

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I should know it better, especially that this isn't the first time it happens. I installed once again after a long time nagios on my server so I have something that keeps an eye on the server. Anyway … I installed nagios-mysql ( as I did the last time ) but it looks like the database has to be created before installing, or … who knows, I still didn't RTFM well the result was that the 5 min. nagios was running I dumped about 2 gigs of syslog messages that where saved in the syslog, message, users AND the nagios.log … I had over 8 Gigs of logs, good performance test for syslog-ng by the way. Anyway now I finally cleaned up everything, as .gz the file isn't that big at all only 8.5 MB, OK now that logrotate is finished I should get back to my server.

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Sometimes it's nice to have a name that is also used in german but it written different then in german. Everybody writes my name with h ( Christian ) but in Romania Cristian is the correct way to write it. Well most of the time it really pisses me off when I see this, but today actually it was funny. I got a ticket for wrong parking, but the "officer" was to stupid to write the licence plate the correct way. Instead of CRIS he wrote CHRIS, and this means … no ticket for me since it's a formal error.

I wonder what the poor guy that will receive the ticket instead of me will think … "Berlin?  I haven't been in Berlin"

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I have finaly found a simple way to start my Cigar rating, for this I will use my new WordPress blog and the "rate my stuff" plugin.
So since the Cohiba Siglo ( I and II ) are my favorite cigars until now I will give them a rating of 4.5 stars! why not 5? Well there might be something better out there, so I will leave the rast of the half point open 

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Once again on Phoenix ( German TV channel ) it's time for history. "The past 100 Years", I already seen this once and from the most things told there I have already heard. But there was one thing that shocked me, I was shocked last year as I saw this and I was still shocked as I saw this today. It's about the apartheid in South Africa. I can't imagine how stupid we humans are. Racism is and will always be the worst thing on this world. I always thought that something like this is against the law everywhere but that the apartheid was still present till 1993 sounds so unbelievable to me. 1993 can you imagine this? Can you image signs that show "For members of the white race group only" ? I would be ashamed to live in such a country where somebody hasn't got the same rights that I do just because of religion or race … This blog could be continued to a very long roman I think, but for everyone that is interested in this subject I can only recommend the wikipedia article bout this .

I can only hope something like this will never never happen again, I can only hope that we humans start learning from our past and from our mistakes but as history shows us, we are to stupid for something like this and keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again. 

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Just finished a smal movie of my sister and me in Berlin. This is the first finished movie project with Final Cut on my mac
The video can be downloaded here .

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I remember as I was a kid, with 11 Years I went by train to Romania, this was in 1990/1991, I was all on my own on a train, nothing special one might think, me nither … Ok there was some funy story at the end as I kind of got lost in Arad in the Train station, but this is not what I intent to write about now. Ok now think today of sending your kid somewhere … allone. Also nothing special. So my sister ( 14 ) came to visit me in Berlin by plane. No she didn’t get lost, but I forgot to turn on my mobile, my IP phone was not plugged in to power ( needed the power for a batery charger ) my sisters phone doesn’t have roaming and my last phone had an empty battery … so 4 phones, none was switched on, and this was enough to create big panic over in Vienna ! As I switched my phone back on I received 3 messages and a message on the mailbox My parents where worried that something might have happened! Wow … they didn’t hear 24 hours from my sister and they realy wanted to call the police. Now as I was my sisters age, the only way they could reach me was, call my uncle in Timisoara, he would have to drive over 30km to my grandmother and then I could call from the postoffice to Austria. Actualy this never happened, nobody worried about anything, not that I might think they didn’t care, but it was nothing to worry about. But imagine this today, in these modern times with mobiles, email and all that nice stuff, how can it be possible not to hear something for 24 hours?
Now THIS is worrying me!

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