Geek Drivel

The title says it all.

There certainly may be something to this. My initials spell a very positive go-get-’em word, and I’ve always felt that I can do anything if I put my mind to it. I’ve managed some things that many people certainly thought weren’t possible, though I suspect they were due to my sheer stubbornness dogged persistence more than anything else.

Or maybe this is just another piece of evidence that we’re all just simulations in a big computer run by the descendants of the people we’re modeled after, and this is a kind of programmer’s shortcut.

(I originally wrote this several days ago, planning to post it while I was on the road if I was too busy to write anything new. Since then, Scott Adams has picked it up too.)

As described yesterday, I talked someone at the office through the process of punching a hole in our firewall for the secure HTTP port this morning, then changed the SSH server to use that port instead. It didn’t solve the problem; apparently Cox already thought of that, and they’re only allowing legitimate HTTPS packets on port 443. (Joshua suggested that might be the case yesterday, but I scoffed at it… sorry Josh, you were right.)

There’s apparently a way to work around this too, involving putting an actual mini-HTTPS server program on the office machine, which redirects information coming into it to the SSH port. We’re going to be at this hotel for several more days, so I’ve got plenty of time to work on that.

Everyone has been waiting for Vista SP1 to come out, thinking that surely it will fix all of the problems that Vista has (like running many programs at half the speed on the same hardware). Well, it doesn’t seem to make a lick of difference:

Bottom Line: If you’ve been disappointed with the performance of Windows Vista to date, get used to it. SP1 is simply not the panacea that many predicted. In the end, it’s Vista’s architecture - not a lack of tuning or bug fixes - that makes it perform so poorly on systems that were “barn-burners” under Windows XP.

Oh, Mr. Jobs… there’s an opportunity here, if you’re not too busy concentrating on the iPhone and iPod… hint, hint…

I’m in a different hotel today, one that is served by Cox Internet, and I immediately discovered that the SSH redirection which worked flawlessly yesterday completely fails here. I can start the secure shell, and it works for a couple minutes or a certain number of bytes, then I get a “connection reset by peer” error and it dies.

I suspect this is due to the War On Peer-To-Peer Protocols that Comcast is in such hot water over. Either Cox or the hotel chain is probably doing the same thing, to every port except port 80 and a handful of others. I can’t confirm this though, because I can’t remotely administer the hardware firewall in the office to punch a hole through it for a different port. I could do it easily if I were in the office, and I could do it easily from here if the SSH tunneling were working, but neither is the case.

I have a plan, though. I can use the SSH connection to copy over a new configuration file (it stays running long enough for that), and I think I can talk someone in the office through making the change to the router tomorrow morning. If so, I’ll try setting the office SSH server to use the HTTPS port (443) instead of it’s normal one (22). Presumably Cox won’t be able to mess with that port, since they won’t know what’s actually secure HTTP traffic and what isn’t. We’ll see how it goes.

I’m on the road today, writing this from a hotel’s unsecured wireless Internet connection.

Call me paranoid if you wish, but I know how easy it would be for someone to snoop on any Internet traffic over such an unprotected wireless connection. Most of my e-mail accounts already use SSL encryption, but there’s one that doesn’t have that option; if I check it over this connection, any snooper could read not only my e-mail, but my account name and password too. The theoretical snoop could also see any websites I view, and any data I send to them, unless they use secure HTTP (which most sites don’t). A malicious one could even could even redirect my DNS queries and pretend to be any site that I want to view, potentially scarfing up my login credentials for any web account that I access. Secure HTTP would defeat such a man-in-the-middle attack, but again, most sites don’t use it.

So the first thing I did when I got online this evening was to research this problem. Lo and behold, there’s a very simple solution, and I was even all set up for it already!
(more…)

I just don’t get it.

Some people put on a perfectly-working watch and it suddenly starts losing time. Technology seems to hate them. This guy is a case in point (and his article prompted this entry), but I’ve known other people who had the same problem, including some of my relatives.

On the other hand, most technology seems to really like me. When I walk up to a machine that isn’t working, the chances are good that it will suddenly start working properly, even without me doing anything more than looking at it (which makes me popular around relatives’ machines). I very rarely have technological devices fail on me too.

Modern science has no explanation for either phenomenon, other than some vague mumblings about statistics that explain nothing, or bull-headed insistence that it’s all in our heads (which doesn’t seem to cut it either). I have no answer, and my speculations are no more rational than thinking that simple machines can like or dislike people, so I leave it as an exercise for the reader.

I was at the store yesterday, picking up a pack of recordable DVDs for backup purposes, when I saw that the MyBook external drives had dropped in price. I’d been drooling over them for a long time, and that proved to be the final straw… I walked out with a one-terabyte dual-drive network-accessible version.

As soon as I got back to the office, and before I even opened the packaging, I got on the ‘net to make sure that it would work okay with Linux as well as Windows. To my surprise and delight, I discovered that it isn’t just a plain old external drive like I’m used to, but an actual headless (no monitor/keyboard/mouse) Linux machine itself! It didn’t take long to find this page, which offers a lot of information on it, including a way to get a secure SSH server running on it, which I immediately did.

After playing with it for a while, I set it to reformat itself as a RAID-1 system (where the second drive is a mirror image of the first, protecting against hardware failure of one of the drives). The formatting didn’t take long, but it took several hours to “synchronize” the second drive to the first, even though both were all but empty. Once that was done, it was ready to go.

It’s fast. It’s fairly quiet. It’s network accessible, and can even be made Internet accessible (though I don’t have that set up at present). All in all, it’s pretty darned spiffy.

Joshua Lee pointed out an interesting item on the Terminally Incoherent blog a few days ago, on video game “addiction.” I have an obsessive personality, as well as problems with depression, so I have a good idea why people might think they’re “addicted” to a game. I also know why they aren’t, though I couldn’t have put it into words before reading that.

The One Laptop Per Child project is now offering one of their rugged machines for you and one for a child in a developing nation, for a total price of $399 (only 13 days left on that offer, and only if you live in North America). And Wal-Mart has apparently already sold out of the first run of their highly-touted $199 PC at their online store. It kind of makes you wonder just how much an OEM copy of Windows really adds to the cost of a computer — and that’s before adding Microsoft Office to the mix.