10 days or so ago, I got myself a PicooZ and got instantly hooked on flying RC-Helis. The Picoo is a lot of fun, but it is very difficult to get the toy-grade heli to move as intended. Everything is a bit wobbly, you only have 2 channels to control it (pitch and roll are not available), and while it's a lot of fun to cruise around the office or the living room, you soon come to a point where you'd really like to have bit more freedom in what that thing you a controlling does. A real RC-Heli comes into play ;)

I dug into the material, and several places on the web suggested to “start small” with a coaxial heli¹⁾ as those are self-stabilizing and thus a failure in control does not immediately lead to catastrophe and high repair costs. Everything pointed to getting a Blade CX2 as well, so after some pondering and reading reviews that's what I did. And I must say, I'm very happy so far with that choice.

It is indeed very stable, and a lot of fun to steer around the garden²⁾. I also got myself a copy of the ClearView RC Simulator and hooked up my Blade's remote control to the PC (via a 3.5mm audiocable in the trainer jack and SmartPropoPlus) for the more windy parts of the week. Of course, I couldn't resist the urge to give the Airwolf model in ClearView a quick try. Ended with a negative landing height *cough* Full-fledged helis are a bit tougher to control than my Blade

Still learning to hover tail-in, moving around and keeping position over ground at specific locations. Let's see were that leads me And keep your fingers crossed for some non-windy days in Darmstadt in the weeks to come, so I can properly practice on the field

I'm currently spending some quality time at my parents – which now happen to have a hammock in their garden¹⁾.

	Hammock
	foosel in hammock
	foosel fallen out of hammock2)

I feel this is the beginning of a wonderful new friendship between a geek and a hammock

Over the last couple of weeks, Michael Klier and me were frantically working on all those little (and larger) plugins making up the Dokuwiki BlogSuite. Adjusting to changes in the recent Dokuwiki release candidates, fixing old bugs, debugging new ones, and then finally releasing plugin after plugin. Today we finally were able to finish the last couple of plugins – include, blog, discussion and Michael's cool and shiny new feedmod. Thus, a new edition of the BlogSuite is finally ready for usage¹⁾

And with that comes also a new tool I hacked together to create your very own customized blog plugin bundle: the Blogsuite BundleHub. It's a website which allows you to select all the additional features you want to have included in your personal Dokuwiki blog and then bundles them together with the mandatory parts of the blogsuite – blog, include and pagelist plugin that is – into one single tarball. This then can be fetched and installed directly via the plugin manager of your wiki and used for updates as well. It's still in it's early stages of life, but feel free to try it out And don't forget to give me a shout if something doesn't work

I succumbed to peer pressure (/me waves at Andi ) and got myself Mario Kart for the Wii. You can read a review over at Andi's. I have yet to try out the online play, so if anyone is prepared to embarrass me (ask anyone, I suck at Mario Kart, but it's one of those games that are fun even if you lose continuously ), my Friendcode can be found here. Just leave me yours in the comments or somewhere else I can find it

I've had it with those evil bots trying to exploit non-existing phpMyAdmin installations on anything webserverish, therefore I wrote up a small fail2ban rule to ban those bastards after the third attempt. Maybe it's of help to you too, thus here it is.

# Fail2Ban configuration file
#
# Bans bots scanning for non-existing phpMyAdmin installations on your webhost.
#
# Author: Gina Haeussge
#
 
[Definition]
 
docroot = /var/www
badadmin = PMA|phpmyadmin|myadmin|mysql|mysqladmin|sqladmin|mypma|admin|xampp|mysqldb|mydb|db|pmadb|phpmyadmin1|phpmyadmin2
 
# Option:  failregex
# Notes.:  Regexp to match often probed and not available phpmyadmin paths.
# Values:  TEXT
#
failregex = [[]client <HOST>[]] File does not exist: %(docroot)s/(?:%(badadmin)s)
 
# Option:  ignoreregex
# Notes.:  regex to ignore. If this regex matches, the line is ignored.
# Values:  TEXT
#
ignoreregex =

The badadmin matchers will prolly be extended in the future, this was just what I found regarding trial-and-error-URLs after a quick scan through the logs of one of the servers at work.

I added this to /etc/fail2ban/jail.conf to enable the rule:

[apache-phpmyadmin]
enabled  = true
port     = http,https
filter   = apache-phpmyadmin
logpath  = /var/log/apache*/*error.log
maxretry = 3