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Justin's Linklog Posts

DVD annoyances

Published June 13, 2005

Hardware: I’ve been needing a decent backup solution, since I’ve got 60GB of crud on my hard disk that isn’t being rsynced offsite yet. So I bought myself a nifty DVD writer from woot.com a week ago, supporting DVD+RW, DVD+R, DVD-RW, and DVD-R, and a spindle of 20 DVD+Rs from Target. Little did I realise the world of pain I was entering.

Did you know there are no less than 6 barely-compatible DVD formats? Prerecorded DVD, DVD-RAM, DVD-R, and DVD-RW, from the DVD Forum, and DVD+RW and DVD+R, from the ‘DVD+RW Alliance’. Interoperability is, needless to say, a total mess, even with the Sony 4-format drive I picked up.

I eventually managed to burn myself a DVD+R backup of bits of my home dir, making several coasters in the process (DVD+Rs apparently do not support simulated-write dry-runs, at least not with growfs). So, great!

Next thing to do was try it out on my laptop’s internal CD/DVD drive to make sure it worked. Needless to say, it didn’t.

Apparently, single-session, single-track DVD+Rs are virtually identical to DVD-ROMs, which most generic DVD-reader drives support. However, Sony drives do not support setting the ‘book type’ bits, which is the trick that turns a DVD+R ‘into’ a DVD-ROM-compatible disc. Guess why (hint: it’s Sony). Yep, that’s right, paranoia about piracy. Well, thanks a bunch, Sony — my backups are now of decidedly limited usefulness, since I don’t know if I’m ever going to be able to read them again! (more info from the OSTA.) I think I now see why Woot were flogging them cheap.

I’m not sure where to go with this — do I have a spindle of 17 shiny frisbees? I have a very nasty feeling I’m heading into dead media territory here. What a mess…

Aaaanyway. Here’s some possibly-useful bookmarks.

OTOH, I got to watch the BBC’s new documentary, The Power of Nightmares, a fantastic history of the two parallel ideological worlds of al-Qaeda and the US neo-conservatives. Mind-boggling, but highly recommended.

European swpat update letter

Published June 10, 2005

Patents: Ian Clarke copied the FSFE-IE mailing list with a good mail he sent to Mairead McGuinness MEP, detailing the current state of proposed fixes to the European software patenting directive. He discusses a comment from an Ericsson employee asking for software patentability:

It may be the case that this employee was concerned about Ericsson’s ability to compete against smaller competitors if Ericsson cannot use software patents against them. I would argue that it is not the responsibility of any EU institution to protect Ericsson against legitimate competition from other companies, indeed competition must be encouraged. Software patents will have a stifling effect on competition in Europe, and this is why some large companies like Ericsson are strong advocates for this directive.

And a brief overview of the amendments we want:

The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure, an organisation whose line we endorse, has prepared an analysis of the amendments, indicating which will help to ensure that software patents do not become patentable, and which will not. This document may be downloaded here.

In particular, we support the position and amendments of Piia Noora Kauppi MEP, who has taken a strong position against the introduction of software patents within the EPP group, and also the position of Michel Rocard MEP who is the rapporteur for this Directive.

The only other thing it misses, in my opinion, is a paragraph discussing the ‘as such’ loophole that has been heavily relied upon by most pro-swpat politicians recently — the trick of saying ‘this directive does not permit software patenting, as such‘.

Indeed, it does not permit patenting of all software techniques, but instead permits the patenting of software techniques as long as it is of ‘a technical nature’ — without defining what that means. Given that it’s clearly arguable that all software is technical, and since patent offices earn money based on the patents they accept, rather than those they reject, this is a loophole the size of a bus. Many of the desired amendments concern cleaning up this obvious omission.

Anyway, here’s the full text of Ian’s mail from the list archive.

Dot-coms and geographical insularity

Published June 8, 2005

Web: i caught sight of (8 June 2005, Interconnected), on the geographical insularity of the dot-com boom. A good read:

The huge influx of cash at the turn of the millennium led to the whole Web being built in the image of the Bay area. The website patterns that started there and – just by coincidence – happened to scale to other environments, those were the ones that survived.

Lots to think about. He’s spot on, of course — many of the web’s big commercial success stories are almost shamelessly US-oriented, and if they work outside that, it’s purely by accident.

I’d love to see more web businesses that work well for other parts of the world, but that’ll take money — and from what I saw in Dublin, the money either (a) just isn’t there, or (b) frequently goes to the companies that talk the talk, but then piddle it away on ludicrous ‘e-business architectures’ and get nothing useful out the other end.

On both counts, Silicon Valley has an ace up its sleeve. The VCs are smart and well-funded, and the developers have experience, and know which tools are right for the job.

I’d be curious to hear how other high-tech hotspots in the US (Boston, for example) find this.

IBM patents web transcoding proxies

Published June 2, 2005

Web: I link-blogged this, but it’s generated some email already, so it deserves a proper posting.

One thing you quickly learn about IBM where software patents are concerned, is that if IBM Research is making noise about a new software technique, they’ve probably patented it already. A few years ago, IBM was keen on HTTP transcoding — rewriting web content in a proxy, to be more suitable for display and access from less-capable devices, like PDAs and mobile phones.

So I probably should not have been surprised today when I came across USPTO patent 6,886,013, which is an IBM patent on a ‘HTTP caching proxy to filter and control display of data in a web browser’. It was applied for on Sep 11 1997, and finally granted on Apr 26 of this year.

The first claim covers:

  1. A method of controlling presentation on a client of a Web document formatted according to a markup language and supported on a server, the client including a browser and connectable to the server via a computer network, the method comprising the steps of:

    as the Web document is received on the client, parsing the Web document to identify formatting information;

    altering the formatting information to modify at least one display characteristic of the Web document; and

    passing the Web document to the browser for display.

Notice that there’s actually no mention of a HTTP proxy there — in other words, an in-browser rewriting element, such as Greasemonkey or Trixie may be covered by that claim. However, the claim does indicate that the document is passed from the ‘client’ to the ‘browser’, so perhaps having the ‘client’ inside the ‘browser’ evades that.

It appears this really wasn’t original research even when the patent was applied for — there’s probable prior art, even if the patent itself doesn’t cite it. For example, WWW4 in 1995 included Application-Specific Proxy Servers as HTTP Stream Transducers, which discusses ‘transduction’ of the HTTP traffic and gives an example of ‘A “rewriting” OreO (transducer element) that encapsulates each anchor inside the Netscape Blink extension, making anchors easier to spot on monochrome displays’. On top of that, Craig Hughes notes that his ‘senior project at Stanford in 1992 was an implementation of a content-modifying HTTP proxy. It re-worked HTML in http streams to add some markup to enable full navigability through touch screen or voice control, for screen-only kiosks.’

Add this to the ever-growing list of over-broad software patents.

Getting JuK to output sound via ALSA

Published June 2, 2005

Linux: Linux sound is still a mess. Due to the ever-changing ‘sound server of the week’ system used to decide how an app should output sound, it’s perfectly possible to have 3 apps on your desktop happily making noise at the same time, while another app complains about requiring exclusive access to /dev/dsp — or worse, hangs silently while it attempts to grab an exclusive lock on the device.

This page gives a reasonably good guide to getting software mixing working across (virtually) all apps, using ALSA software mixing and esd.

However, some cases are still very kludgy — in particular, JuK, the excellent KDE mp3 jukebox app, has a tendency to play poorly with others, requiring playback via no less than two sound servers — artsd and esd — to work correctly in the above setup. In addition, the support for mp3 files in artsd is buggy — it’s frequently unable to open certain mp3s, depending on how they were encoded.

Well, good news — the current release of JuK now supports direct playback from GStreamer via ALSA. Here’s how. By adding these lines: 

[GStreamerPlayer]
SinkName=alsasink

to ~/.kde/share/config/jukrc, you can skip sending JuK mp3 playback via 2 sound servers, and just play directly to the hardware from the mp3 player. An improvement! Not quite optimal, and certainly not user-friendly — but getting there…

Patents come to computer gaming

Published June 2, 2005

Patents: in a recent discussion about games and patents, it emerged that these common elements are patented:

Looks like software patenting is coming to computer games in a big way. I’m not sure how any game on a modern platform can avoid the ‘streamed loading’ patent.

Naturally, I can remember playing games on the Commodore 64 in the 1980s that included these…

Yet another non-smoking weblog

Published June 1, 2005

Life: seeing as yesterday was World No Tobacco Day, it’s worth noting that I gave up smoking last Thursday.

This is the first time I’ve taken the step of quitting with any seriousness. I’ve been smoking since I was 18 or 19, without any real attempts to quit before now. It was a gradual process, but imagining a smoker’s future, with the diseases and reduced life expectancy it involves, makes it quite sensible in the end. So far, it’s going pretty well — lots of occasional pangs, but nothing I can’t say no to… especially with the aid of Liquorice Altoids. wish me luck!

Irish Oireachtas take care of their own

Published May 27, 2005

Net: Fergus Cassidy reports that ‘bandwidth-starved TDs and Senators’ in the Oireachtas will be taking a shortcut around Ireland’s woeful consumer broadband situation, especially in terms of deployment outside of the main urban areas.

There’s a tender up to implement ‘an enhanced remote access system, which will improve access from Members’ homes or constituency Offices to data and services on servers in Leinster House’.

No similar luck for their constituents, of course. That really takes the biscuit…

Backscatter X-ray ‘naked scanners’ in the news

Published May 27, 2005

Security: the use of backscatter x-ray scanners has hit the US press now that the TSA are taking an interest.

These are interesting devices; unlike normal X-rays, they effectively render clothes invisible. That’s obviously got big privacy implications.

Quite a few of the press stories include images that have been blurred or obscured, presumably to render them printable. However, this image seems closer to the real results (not work-safe).

They were trialled in Heathrow’s Terminal 4 last year. One slashdotter’s experience:

Every Nth person in the line had to go through. They take you to a seperate are which is blocked off, make you lift up your arms and then move, facing three different directions. There was one operator and the screen was blocked off. The operator is always the gender of the person being scanned. Still I felt very offended for two reasons. First, even though it was enclosed it still made me feel exposed and my personal space violated, second, any questions I asked the operator with regards to their data storage, or if I could see the images that had been made were met with ignorance and my questions were ignored. However, turning down a scan you would probably get a strip search which would be even worse. I disliked airplane security checks before, but now it is incredibly annoying.

The Times has some passenger’s reactions to images from their scans:

‘I was quite shocked by what I saw,’ said Gary Cook, 40, a graphic designer from Shaftesbury, Dorset. ‘I felt a bit embarrassed looking at the image.’

A female passenger, who did not want to be named, said: ‘It was really horrible. It doesn’t leave much to the imagination because you’re virtually naked, but I guess it’s less intrusive than being hand searched.’

If these are installed more widely, I wonder how long it’ll take before we start seeing backscatter images of supermodels being saved to floppy by unscrupulous staff, and leaked?

Also, SpyBlog notes that images of children scanned with this device would constitute ‘making, distributing or possessing child pornography’ in the UK, presuming the machine stores them internally in electronic form. oops!

Massive US bank breaches, and Europe

Published May 25, 2005

Security: Adam Shostack has been tracking the immense volume of recent bank disclosures of compromised customer data. Bruce Schneier has also commented, and an interesting question arose in his posting’s comments — why are there seemingly no similar problems with European banks?

One responder points to a WSJ article which broadly misses the point. It discusses the additional layers of security imposed by European banks above the usual username/password combo. This is true — Eurobanks generally have higher security at the ‘front gate’; for example, I recall Bank of Ireland even issued SecurID-type tokens in its earliest online banking system. However, that misses the ‘insider’ attack, as in the most recent case of these 676,000 accounts, so I think it misses the point.

Bruce Schneier’s take:

Personal data is 1) not collected as widely, and 2) much less valuable as a tool to commit fraud. The second reason is far more important.

I think he’s partially right. Access to new and existing accounts in the US often requires little more than an SSN or similar trivial, easily-discoverable, data which is used in common across multiple institutions, and can be performed online; whereas in Europe, one requires documentary proof of address, ID, and the act must be performed in person at a bank branch. (This is often exceedingly annoying, of course. ;) In general, identity theft seems to be at a greater level in the US, and this is one reason why, I’d guess.

Adam Shostack has another take: these disclosures have all arrived on the heels of California’s SB 1386. It’s very unlikely that these kind of breaches never occurred before this, and suddenly began recently — it’s more likely that they’ve always gone on, but are unreported in Europe (and of course were unreported in the US, pre-SB 1386).

I’d add another point — the US has a large population of targets, with banks sharing financial systems across the entire country. Europe, by contrast, has many individual countries which each have their own set of banks and banking systems, and less interoperability and cross-state data flow. The potential return from ID theft fraud is increased by the larger pool of candidate victims in the US, compared to what an attacker could achieve in each individual European country. This means both that (a) an attack will affect a smaller number of victims in Europe than the US, and (b) widening the scale of an attack becomes significantly harder when the attacker must deal with new systems. It’s the ‘security monoculture’ issue again, applied to banking instead of operating systems.

The Nokia 770 Internet Tablet

Published May 25, 2005

Hardware: Slashdot: Nokia’s Linux Handheld. It’s to be called the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, and runs on an open source development platform called Maemo.

This looks really nifty. ARM processor, 800×480 pixel resolution, GTK+, 2.6 kernel, wifi, 3 hours of active battery life, and a clever panning system to get around the clunkiness of scrollbars on a touchscreen.

I note particularly that they seem to have planned to include an RSS reader based on Liferea.

The Maemo site looks interesting, in that it’s clearly a bunch of switched-on, open-source-comprehending developers who set it up; it’s built using Apache Forrest, they use Bugzilla for issue tracking, Mailman for lists, the terms of use for user contributions explicitly call out OSI-approved licenses as a requirement, there’s plentiful references to Debian’s apt as the preferred means of installing developer platform software, and Maemo apps are distributed as Debian packages.

There’s clearly been quite a lot of work going on behind the scenes. There’s already some third-party apps out there, such as those on INdT’s Maemo apps page, and the the SDK tutorial contains copious detail, suggesting it’s been seeing some use.

That SDK tutorial is full of tantalizing glimpses into Maemo’s operation.

It all looks very promising, and nicely hackable! I’m looking forward to a closer look at one of these. It’s especially good to see such a solid comprehension of the open source model by such a major company. (If only they could have a word with their patents department ;)

Update: They’ve ported WebCore to GTK+. Mobile Gazette has more info, too, including this worrying line:

And although Nokia hold several patents for (the Maemo development platform), they intent to open up access to their intellectual property to aid development.

(My emphasis.) That line is not encouraging, seeing as it seems to be a pretty typical cross-compilation platform as seen in embedded systems development. But hey, let’s see the patents first.

Threadless RSS

Published May 25, 2005

Clothing: I love Threadless. Unfortunately, they don’t have an RSS feed for new T-shirts. So I wrote a quick scraper:

with pictures, naturally. This is not going to help my Threadless habit. ;)

Here’s a preview of what the feed looks like:

Del.icio.us ranking systems

Published May 25, 2005

Weblogs: there’s been a few attempts to mine ‘trend’ data from del.icio.us:

However, none consider how many links a user generates. A user who links to every single page on the web would quickly gain a good ‘trendsetting’ rating, and would also skew the website trends upwards, without actually providing useful data to others.

A look at the hublog top posters does seem to indicate they’re linking prolifically to any old crap that looks likely to be popular, which is a more humanly-possible way to do that. ;)

However, populicious new links is quite cool — popular sites that are new in the last 24 hours. Especially handy to find out where one could download Daily Show torrents these days. ;)

There’s also the venerable Hot Links, which unfortunately tracks a very small population, but still gets interesting stuff.

Justice Bradley on patent law

Published May 17, 2005

Mr. Justice Bradley, discussing US patent law in 1882:

The design of the patent laws is to reward those who make some substantial discovery or invention, which adds to our knowledge and makes a step in advance in the useful arts. Such inventors are worthy of all favor. It was never the object of those laws to grant a monopoly for every trifling device, every shadow of a shade of an idea, which would naturally and spontaneously occur to any skilled mechanic or operator in the ordinary progress of manufactures.

Such an indiscriminate creation of exclusive privileges tends rather to obstruct than to stimulate invention. It creates a class of speculative schemers who make it their business to watch the advancing wave of improvement, and gather its foam in the form of patented monopolies, which enable them to lay a heavy tax upon the industry of the country, without contributing anything to the real advancement of the arts. It embarrasses the honest pursuit of business with fears and apprehensions of concealed liens and unknown liabilities to lawsuits and vexatious accountings for profits made in good faith.

Well said that man! (via)

Virtualisation is good for the environment

Published May 16, 2005

Computing: mentioned in a Slashdot thread about green server farms — a page extolling the OpenVPS virtual-server software’s environmental benefits:

OpenVPS is good for the environment: a low-end server these days consumes no less than 200W. Given that typical servers run 24/7/365 this amounts (to) 1752 KWh per year. And because every joule of energy consumed by a server is transformed to heat, you need to at least double this to consider the air conditioning costs, which brings us to 3504 KWh per year. …

At some point this becomes an ethical question: If my CPU is 99.9% idle, is it environmentally (not to mention fiscally!) responsible of me to keep this server running?

Virtualization technologies such Linux VServer used by OpenVPS offer a very viable alternative. If the server acts and feels like a dedicated server, what difference does it really make if it’s actually virtual? Yet consolidating 30 physical servers into 30 OpenVPS accounts running on one (albeit power hungry) server would save over 100000 kWh per year. That’s as much energy as is consumed on average by 10 houses!

What an excellent point! The OpenVPS dev’s slashdot commment reveals another good demo of this — 

  # cat /proc/uptime
  16000520.62 9482790.31

The first number is seconds of uptime, the second number is seconds spent in a CPU-idle state. So the server for taint.org, going by those numbers, has spent 59% of its time in a CPU-idle state — and converting fossil fuels to waste heat in the process…

UBE, not UCE

Published May 15, 2005

Spam: About this time last year, German neo-nazis launched a massive worldwide spam run with the aid of the Sober.H worm.

Well, it looks like they’re planning to make this a regular occurrence, because it’s on again, spamming nazi opinions linking to stories on reputable news sites, as well as pages on less reputable right-wing sites, Joe Wein has posted some samples. I’ve already received nearly a thousand since last night.

The good news — here’s a SpamAssassin ruleset that catches these nicely. thanks Raymond!

Using sound as a dead man’s switch

Published May 13, 2005

Software: a nifty trick in this Slashdot comment:

… This reminds me of an old trick we developed to use on the Amiga on a public-access cable channel. The software was under development and crashed occasionally, so rather than having a flashing guru meditation up on a local TV channel until it was rebooted the next day, we came up with a plan, that would probably work on a Windows machine as well (or just about any other system)

The idea was that while the software application was running, it drove a continuous 1khz tone out the audio port that kept a relay energized (that kept the signal on-air). When the system crashed, the audio output stopped, which meant the relay was no longer energized = video signal switched back to a stock SMPTE bars signal from a test generator.

Nowadays, I’d probably pay the money for a hardware watchdog timer. But this is a good, cheap way to implement a dead man’s switch. Very clever!

The Stag’s new owner: Louis Fitzgerald

Published May 12, 2005

Dublin: Sorry to the non-Dublin readership, I’m sure you all are getting quite bored of this by now. But anyway…

According to jd on the discussion page, the new owner of the Stag’s Head is Louis Fitzgerald, who picked it up for EUR 5.8 million.

Reportedly, he’s ‘the biggest publican in Dublin’ (sic), and owns The Quays in Temple Bar, The Palmerstown House in Palmerstown, The Big Tree on Dorset Street and The Poitin Stil in Rathcoole — and Kehoe’s on South Anne Street. Quite an empire.

I’ll have to leave the speculation on Fitzgerald’s pros and cons to more recent residents of Dublin, but I agree with jd’s comment: ‘hope he does half a good as job as the Shaffrys, and the bicycles are left outside rather than on the ceiling,’ Amen to that.

The Bayh-Dole Act and publicly-funded research

Published May 11, 2005

Science: in passing — this came up elsewhere, and it’s worth copying here, too (for reference).

The question was: how much should publicly-funded researchers be required to disclose – should they be allowed to generate ‘closed-source’ solutions at the taxpayers’ expense?

In the US and world-wide, there used to be a tradition that government-funded research should be made open to all, since if it was funded from public taxation, the fruits of that taxation should go back to the public. However, 25 years ago, the US enacted the Bayh-Dole Act, in which:

  • Universities were encouraged to collaborate commercial concerns to promote the utilization of inventions arising from federal funding.
  • It was clearly stated that universities may elect to retain title to inventions developed through government funding.
  • Universities must file patents on inventions they elect to own.

So in other words, the government has dictated since 1980 that government-funded research should not produce open-source or public-domain solutions, necessarily, as the results of research are to be considered private-sector profit-generating centers for the host universities. Naturally, cash-strapped universities have imposed internal regulations to maximise revenue from their research staff.

The implications for whatever ‘the next BSD TCP/IP stack’ may be are obvious.

Stag’s on the block today

Published May 11, 2005

Dublin: Lean forwards on this story from today’s Irish Times. Sadly, it’s behind their subscription firewall, so I’ll just snip out a few choice quotes from Philip Shaffry, the current owner:

‘(The Stag’s Head) has been part of my life for three decades and I’ve been running it for 10 years,’ he says. ‘I’ve two small children and I’m living 10 miles out of town, so I’m hoping to find a pub a bit out of the city centre. But of course I’ll miss this place. I have got really attached to the clientele and the crowd that comes in.’

Looking around at the Victorian bar, opulently decorated with mahogany panelling and a red Connemara marble bar counter, Shaffry is confident there will be no changes to the building.

‘They won’t be able to touch it. This is the crème de la crème, the jewel in the crown, of Dublin pubs. It has been here since 1760, although it was completely refurbished in 1895. This is a grade-one listed building.’

But the bad news?

There are no State laws regulating some aspects of the pub, namely his family’s refusal to allow music – live or otherwise – or television in the bar. Any new owner could change this tradition, says Shaffry, which is a source of concern for some regulars. (….)

A spokesman for CBRE Gunne, which will auction the pub this afternoon, says there had been ‘enormous interest’ in the premises from Irish and international buyers.

Eeek! The guide price is 5 million Euros, if you fancy a shot.

Thanks for Philip for his excellent stewardship — here’s hoping any new buyer will keep his approach. That approach made the Stag’s what it is today — the best pub in Dublin. (In my opinion, at least ;)

PVR Build Log

Published May 10, 2005

TV: I’ve taken a little time to throw up my PVR build log.

If you’re hacking on one yourself, or curious about what it takes, or just like reading cut-and-pasted UNIX command lines — go take a look!

Tip: secure SSH tunneling for cron jobs

Published May 10, 2005

UNIX: a quick recap of a good tip combo picked up from ILUG recently. To paraphrase Conor Wynne’s original question:

What’s the best way to set up a secure connection between two hosts, possibly over the internet, using SSH, suitable for use from cron so that it can run via crontab without entering authentication manually?

Barry O’Donovan replied:

I suggested ssh keys without passphrases … in
http://www.barryodonovan.com/publications/lg/104/ and it includes instructions. … You can invoke rsync over ssh and specify a specific key with:

rsync -a -e ‘ssh -i /home/username/.ssh/id_rsa-serverbackup’

Colm MacCárthaigh followed up with:

You can restrict what commands an ssh account can run in the ssh public key. This is how some of our more important projects (like Debian, FreshRPMS, and a few more) push us updates. The key looks like (jm: all on one line, no space between ‘no-pty,’ and ‘command’):

no-port-forwarding,no-X11-forwarding,no-agent-forwarding,no-pty, command=”/home/ximian/rsync-ximian-nolog &”
ssh-dss keydata username@blah

So, create a passwordless public key like so, and just change the command to whatver rsync runs.

Combined, that’s a useful tip — I knew about the ssh command restriction technique, but being able to use a specific single-purpose key from the ssh client is very useful.

(updated: mbp mailed to note some missing quotes in Barry’s command above; they’d been eaten by WebMake. drat.)

Tip: expand a bash commandline as you type it

Published May 3, 2005

UNIX: another useful tip. Bash supports a wide variety of command line editing tricks; you have the usual GUIish editing (backspace, insert new characters, delete, blah blah) through the GNU Readline library, and in addition to that you have the traditional csh-style history expansion (like ‘!!’ to refer to the previous command typed).

The latter are great, but they won’t actually be expanded until you hit Enter and run the command line. That can be inconvenient, resulting in the user being forced to reach for the rodent for some cut’n’paste instead.

Here’s a handy trick — add this line to ~/.inputrc (creating the file if necessary):

Control-x: shell-expand-line

Start a new bash shell. Now, if you type CTRL-X during command line entry, any shell metacharacters will be expanded on the current command line. For example: 

% echo Hello world
Hello world

% echo Hi !$       (press CTRL-X)
           (current command line expands to:)
% echo Hi world

There’s a few more commands supported, but none of them are really quite as useful as shell-expand-line.

Update: ‘Smylers’ wrote to point me at this UKUUG talk from 2003 which discusses .inputrc expansions, and provides some insanely useful tips.

In particular, Magic Space clearly knocks this tip into a cocked hat, by performing the expansion on the fly as you type the command, with no additional keypresses — amazing! Bonus: it works if you use Emacs-mode line editing as well as Vi-mode.

I strongly recommend reading that paper — lots of other good tips there.

Sony coins new name for vapour

Published May 2, 2005

Patents: New Scientist: Sony patent takes first step towards real-life Matrix:

IMAGINE movies and computer games in which you get to smell, taste and perhaps even feel things. That’s the tantalising prospect raised by a patent on a device for transmitting sensory data directly into the human brain – granted to none other than the entertainment giant Sony.

It’s a very lame ‘first step’ though — Sony has done no research and development on this invention whatsoever, it’s just a patent form of the old ‘in the future, we’ll wear tinfoil suits! And here’s how they’ll probably work!’ speculation. Sony’s comment:

Elizabeth Boukis, spokeswoman for Sony Electronics, says the work is speculative. ‘There were not any experiments done,’ she says. ‘This particular patent was a prophetic invention. It was based on an inspiration that this may someday be the direction that technology will take us.’

That’s nice; I’m sure they have some in the pipeline for flying cars, too.

It’s good to know that if an inventor does eventually come up with an ultrasound-based human-computer brain interface, they’ll have to pay license fees to Sony so they can use their ‘prophecy’ in their invention. The USPTO’s high standards are being maintained, as usual…

Forfás Intellectual Property Lecture Series

Published April 26, 2005

Ireland: Worth watching for european software-patent watchers, Forfás, Ireland’s ‘national policy advisory board on enterprise, trade, science, technology and innovation’ are running a series of monthly seminars on ‘Intellectual Property’ in association with Licensing Executives Society Britain and Ireland.

This one looks quite interesting — 10 June: ‘Patenting Software – The Current State of Play’, Author Barry Moore, of Hanna Moore & Curley, patent attorneys.

Interested parties can attend with pre-registration, or wait to download the mp3 at Forfás’ website, apparently, along with the rest of the lecture series. (No sign what the license is on those files, though ;)

the ISA has a new chair

Published April 21, 2005

Patents: It seems the Irish Software Association has a new chairperson, namely Bernadette Cullinane. Whether this has anything to do with Cathal Friel’s ‘out of line’ statements, who knows…

John McCormac passed on some interesting quotes from an Irish Times interview, which were also syndicated here:

‘The incoming chairwoman of the Irish Software Association (ISA), Bernie Cullinane, has pledged to support the introduction of a proposed European Union directive on software patents.

She also warned members of the European parliament against blocking the controversial new directive or weakening it by proposing a host of amendments. …

Ms. Cullinane, a former chief operating officer of the Irish company Performix said European firms needed to protect their intellectual property in a similar manner to the way US firms can.

‘We don’t want any further dilution of the current situation on patents,’ she said in an interview with The Irish Times following her ratification as chairwoman of the ISA last night.’

My emphasis — given that the current situation is that they are unenforceable in Europe, that’s good, because we on the other side don’t want a dilution either!

‘We do need to look at how the US is developing its software industry and a removal of the patent (sic) could weaken venture capitalists’ appetites for investing in new innovative companies.’

The whole ‘venture capital requires patents’ line is easily debunked. I’m sure the VC companies are telling Ms. Cullinane that they want patents, of course; it’s just that they’re wrong. ;) Laura Creighton, a European investor, gave a fantastic speech in Brussels in 2003 about investment and patents:

Software Patents (in the US in the 1990s) encouraged venture capitalists to make foolish investments, because they believed the patents were worth something. Venture capitalists often do not mind if the companies where they have invested go bankrupt — as long as they hold title to the patents. They can start over again with a different team.

Sadly, when the bubble burst, the venture capitalists discovered that their patents were only good for a trip to court — or at least some legal wrangling with a bunch of lawyers. A software patent is not like a hardware patent, where typically one, or at most a few covers the whole invention. Dozens, sometimes hundreds of patents, are relevant to any piece of software. So an investor, who now owns the assets of a defunct company — cannot take its patents and hand them to a new development team and say ‘build this’. It is impossible to develop software today without infringing somebody’s American patent.

The venture capitalists, having lost fortunes backing companies which had no real product, are now uninterested in investing in any software companies whatsoever. Right now the American economy could benefit from more investment — but the capital is not going into software companies. Again, part of the problem is software patents. The venture capitalists have learned that all software is in violation of somebody’s patent. So they do not want to touch the stuff. Thus on the up side, and the down side, the existence of software patents have contributed to creating the stock bubble, and making the recovery slower and harder than it needed to be. So #4 is right out — the existence of software patents are inhibiting investment right now, and for very good reason.

In other words, the presence of software patents has ‘weakened venture capitalists’ appetites for investing in new innovative companies’, as Ms. Cullinane put it.

Anyway — to keep the VCs happy, small companies can still obtain software patents in the US, and spend the tens of thousands of dollars required to register and enforce them in court, if they so desire. They can bring the US software industry to a legal standstill if they like, as they seem to have done, as long as European software developers can quietly carry on developing software for use outside the US ;)

But at least things aren’t as bad as the situation with my neighbours — I live a few miles from the offices of Acacia Research, the notorious patent trolls, who’ve just initiated a new lawsuit against Intel and TI.

Reportedly however, they’re planning to open a European office this quarter…

The Stag’s Head days may be numbered

Published April 21, 2005

Dublin: This is it — it could be the end of an era. CB Richard Ellis auctioneers have a page up noting a new property to be auctioned on Wednesday 11th May 2005 — The Stag’s Head, 1 Dame Court, Dublin 2:

The Stag’s Head is one of Dublin’s most famous and finest landmark licensed premises, with many outstanding Victorian features.

The bar is lavishly appointed with many fine Victorian features from the beautiful mahogany panelling through to the red Connemara marble counter and the ornate stained glass windows.

Accommodation briefly comprises ground floor traditional style bar with feature mahogany and marble topped bar counter and terrazzo flooring with a snug area to the rear with ornate stained glass skylight. On the first floor there is a further lounge bar area with feature bay window. On the second floor there is a large catering kitchen, dry goods store and office. In the basement there is a further lounge bar area, cold room and toilets.

Many nights were spent in the Stag’s Head partaking of their excellent Guinness. It used to be my local, at one stage, and I still drop back in for a night when I get the chance. Save the Stag’s!

As my mate Ben put it —

The new owners will doubtless get rid of the (moth-eaten, stuffed) fox, put in recorded music and big-screen televisions, hire bouncers, open on Sundays, extinguish the distinctive odour of damp, replace the marble with formica, and dig up the Dame St mosaic and trade it to the Russian Mafia for heroin and trafficked women. Evil bastards.

Anonymous blogging made simple

Published April 20, 2005

Privacy: after reading Adam Shostack’s weblog posting about private/anonymous blogging, I’ve been driven to think about that, and would up writing up a case study of Cogair, which was an influential anonymously-published proto-weblog in Ireland in the ’90s.

Now, quinn at ambiguous.org quotes a review of EFF’s recent ‘anonymous blogging’ guidelines, which largely comes up with one conclusion: it’s a usability nightmare. The problem is, the EFF report recommends using invisiblog.com, which in turns uses the Mixmaster remailers. Those things are awful, and I doubt anyone but their authors could possibly know how to use them ;)

Here’s an easier way to blog anonymously. I haven’t tried it (honest ;) but from keeping up on this stuff, it should work…

Firefox

  • First off, install Firefox. No point giving your identity away through an MSIE security hole. Clear out all cookies in Preferences:Privacy:Cookies (or better still — start a new Firefox profile from scratch).
  • Visit IPID and note down the IP address noted (this is your own, traceable, IP address).

Tor

  • Next, install Tor, EFF’s ‘Onion routing’ anonymizer system. This also means installing privoxy as directed in the Tor install guide.
  • Set up Tor on your machine, so that Firefox will browse via that software.
  • Using Tor, visit IPID and make sure it doesn’t give you the same traceable IP address. This is to make sure you’re browsing securely.

Hushmail

  • visit Hushmail and create a new free email account. Obviously, don’t use usernames and passwords that map in any way to your existing ones, and avoid words that may show up under your interests (especially if they’re googleable)…

Blogger

  • Using that Hushmail account as the email address, go to Blogger.com and create yourself a blog, then get publishing.
  • Hey presto — anonymous blogging the easy way!
  • For safety, don’t use the Firefox anonymous-blogging profile for any sites other than Hushmail and Blogger.com‘s publishing end. (A future Firefox vulnerability could expose personal info directly from Firefox itself.)

This is essentially the ‘TOR to blog server’ method described at the privateblogging wiki.

Now, note that along that chain we have 3 levels of identity — the IP address (hidden by Tor), the email address (traceable to Hushmail, who could conceivably give up the Tor router’s IP), and the Blogger.com weblog site (traceable to Blogger, who could give up the Hushmail address and the Tor router’s IP).

As long as you don’t give it away in your writings on that weblog — and as long as Tor remains safe — your own identity in turn is safe, too; and Tor has proved safe, so far.

There are still problems:

  • The weblog site itself could still get taken down, e.g. via a DMCA takedown notice. This could be an issue, depending on what’s being published.
  • Tor traffic is identifiable as such as it traverses the internet. For bloggers in countries with a pervasive internet surveillance regime at the local ISP end, the watchers will be able to tell that Tor is in use, and tell who is the person using Tor. (They won’t be able to tell what it’s being used for, just that it’s being used.)

PS, for the future: the guys behind Tor are working on a replacement for Mixmaster anonymous remailer software, called Mixminion. There’s also a wiki for discussion of ‘private blogging’ here.

MythTV and KnoppMyth progress

Published April 19, 2005

TV: here’s a quick update on my PVR box progress. I have a very extensive /etc/LOG which I should probably just publish as-is, really, rather than trying to make it legible ;)

Anyway, the hardware arrived last month, but the main VIA EPIA ME6000 board was non-functional — it could never get as far as powering up the CRT for the BIOS self-test. So it was RMA’d back to http://www.mini-box.com, and they sent out a replacement, which arrived a couple of weeks ago.

I finally got to checking this out the weekend before last, and hey presto, it powered up nicely. There followed a whole week of busy nights doing a load of cautious hardware hooking-up, not-so-cautious KnoppMyth installation, and thoroughly non-cautious hacking crazily at the desired enclosure with a hacksaw (because I was too cheap to buy a Dremel).

Things got a little hairy with respect to CPU temperatures, but some looking at specs (the VIA Eden CPU can deal with up to 90 degrees C!), and repurposing of a bin-bound case fan together with some soldering and snipping, has that under control.

Eventually, we’re now at the stage where it can:

  • watch live TV in perfect realtime, pause, rewind, timeshift, ffwd, etc. (the PVR-350 output is good)
  • record our desired shows (bloody Antiques Roadshow! argh), according to the TV schedule
  • play mp3s
  • be ssh’able and sftp’able via a wifi USB dongle
  • expose its schedule and allow recording via MythWeb
  • expose its full desktop UI via x11vnc

and it looks good doing it, too. Credit goes to the MythTV guys for a fantastic job on their project, especially with its well-polished UI.

In addition, I have to plug KnoppMyth heavily. They’re dealing with an awful situation with hardware compatibility where bleeding edge features like MPEG2 decoding and TV out are concerned, and doing a great job — there’s been several occasions where I’ve been staring down the barrel of a daunting patch/rebuild/test cycle, and then find out that KnoppMyth includes that component built-in for free.

But — on the other hand — no credit to the hardware vendors. As I link-blogged yesterday, VIA is doing the classic ‘throw it over the wall’ trick with respect to their linux support — video drivers are written and deposited on their website, with scant documentation and virtually no support.

That’s bad enough, but even worse is the situation with Hauppauge’s PVR-250 and PVR-350 TV encoder/decoder cards. I realised soon into the setup process that other options for these should have been considered — Hauppauge have done a great job at confusing the issue for driver developers, as far as I can see. Here’s an example. When you buy a ‘WinTV PVR-350’ card, you may get the same box with the same manuals etc., but including these bonuses under the covers:

  • one of seemingly about 5 different tuner chips, which you’ll need to edit /etc/modules.conf for;
  • one of about 3 different remote controls with differing output codes;
  • a good chance you’ll have to enter two mysterious ioctls to fix the colour registers, because recent PVR-350 models have changed these somehow and everything shows up as purple-on-green through its TV-Out.

It’s absurd. The results are threads like this and a truly daunting setup procedure, which (of course) everyone blames on the software (and Linux itself).

Anyway — how am I doing vs. Brendan‘s progress? ;)

  • pro: my X display sizes are good
  • pro: no need to switch audio outputs
  • pro: I’m not using a separate cable box, so no need to hack up something IR to switch channels for me
  • con: I can’t yet watch AVIs or other video files, which I think he has working.

More on the latter when I eventually solve it. (it’s tricky. I suspect I’ll need to run two X servers with two TV-Outs to do this acceptably, and that’s uncharted waters.)

More ways malware damages internet infrastructure: DNS servers

Published April 15, 2005

Malware: spotted on NANOG — Six PCs caused BigPond problems:

Disconnecting six compromised personal computers on Tuesday evening eased the difficulties caused by bogus requests which clogged BigPond’s domain name servers (DNS), slowing customer e-mail and Web site access, Telstra said.

A Telstra spokesperson said the carrier had narrowed the list of malware that could have infected the computers to three, adding the problem could have been caused by a combination of those viruses or Trojans. He declined to name the suspects.

He said the PCs generated 95 percent of the bogus requests which caused the problems that evening.

The ‘problems’ in question are described here :

One forum participant (on Aussie forum Whirlpool), who claimed to be a BigPond customer, said on Monday: ‘I’m in Canberra and it’s been almost unusable all afternoon. I’m snowed under at the moment and it is really driving me crazy. Three out of four links fail to load first time and sometimes take eight or nine tries before it does.’

Another said: ‘I am having problems loading Web pages, I get the 404 error. I have to retry five to 10 times to get some places.’

Petri Helenius, in a post to NANOG, notes:

Consumer ISP’s who don’t proactively take care of security/abuse usually end up with harvesting-bots which consume significant amount of DNS resources, typically doing anything from a few dozen to a thousand queries a second. A few hundred of these will seriously hamper an usually provisioned recursive server.

Interesting. It’s been a long time since I’ve relied on an ISP’s recursive DNS servers; in my recent experience (Comcast, Cox.net) they’ve always been overloaded, and take aaaages to give me answers. Maybe this is why.

It makes sense; most Windows machines will indeed use the ISP’s NSes, because that’s what DHCP tells you to do; and setting up a BIND or djbdns instance locally to query the roots directly is still a UNIX-only trick, as far as I know.

The upshot?

  • 1. Yet another good reason why ISPs should proactively disconnect infected customers, as they deny service to other users of the ISP.
  • 2. A good demonstration of yet another way the techie community’s experience of web surfing and internet use differs from that of the unwashed masses in the hinternet — that ‘shanty-town of pop-ups and porn adware’, as Danny O’Brien puts it.
  • 3. Sometime soon, if it hasn’t happened already, someone’s going to bundle up an ‘Internet Accelerator’ lump of shareware that sets up a local recursive NS on Windows which queries the roots, and it’ll become the latest popular Windows download. Then the load on the root servers will really start rising.

(PS: top tip — ever wanted a publically-queriable recursive nameserver, or a good IP address for pinging, that’s easy to remember? 4.2.2.1 is what you’re after.)

pick a ‘flu, any ‘flu — well, maybe not that one

Published April 13, 2005

Health: Meridian Bioscience Inc. of Cincinnati, Ohio mails lethal pandemic strain of ‘flu to nearly 5000 labs in 18 countries:

The firm was told to pick an influenza A sample and chose from its stockpile the deadly 1957 H2N2 strain.

Check out how it was spotted:

On March 26, National Microbial Laboratory Canada detected the 1957 pandemic strain in a sample not connected with the test kit. After informing WHO and the CDC of the strange finding, the lab investigated. It informed the U.N. health agency on Friday that it had traced the virus to the test kit.

My emphasis. omgwtfbbq!

(WHO’s influenza chief) Klaus Stohr said the test kits are not the only supplies of the 1957 pandemic strain sitting in laboratories around the world. ‘The world really has to think what routine labs should be doing with these samples they have kept in the back of their fridges,’ Stohr said.

True: the lovely C has a story from her TCD days of a vial of smallpox
found buried deep in the ice in the back of a long-forgotten freezer, apparently rediscovered by someone during a routine spring cleaning. This was in the early ’90s, when smallpox was supposedly down to samples in just two high-security labs, in Russia and America.

Interesting fall-out from the Irish Times Microsoft supplement

Published April 12, 2005

Open Source: on the 18th March the Irish Times published a commercial supplement for Microsoft. Naturally, given that it was paid advertising, there were lots of MS plugs — but in the mix there was also a couple of more worrying articles: one by Tom Kitt, government ‘Minister for the Information Society’, noting

Microsoft has been one of the most innovative companies in the world and has a long track record over several decades of creating new product markets. The EU has to be open to allowing such innovation in Europe. Ireland will continue to argue at EU level, based on the solid evidence of our successful economy, that the Community must look at its rules on innovation and intellectual property rights to ensure they encourage risk taking in Europe and growth in the IT industry in the EU and around the globe.

And another with Cathal Friel, credited as ‘chairman of the Irish Software Association‘. Quoting the article text:

(Friel) also noted that Open Source software – which is developed by large communities of programmers and distributed for free or at low cost – is also going to have an effect on the software market. While Friel believes Open Source itself has a limited business model – ‘at the end of the day, there’s nothing but services to sell’ – it is nonetheless becoming more pervasive and is ‘a fact of life’ for more traditional software companies. He believes the Open Source movement is actually stifling innovation, because fewer programmers will develop software without the financial incentive of success.

MS observers will note that both Kitt and Friel’s statements mirror the MS ‘party line’ — either the lads were well-briefed, or they just put their names to a story written by MS PR.

Well, there’s been an interesting follow-up. Éibhear Ó hAnluain put pen to paper about Cathal Friel’s statements, and received an interesting reply:

I received a ‘phone call from Kathryn Raleigh, Director of the ISA, in reponse to my letter. As I was unable to take notes at the time, what follows is a memory of the conversation. She told me that the ISA would like to apologise to me for any offense that I took from the comments. She said that the first the ISA heard of the comments was after the piece was published and the Mr. Friel was not speaking with the ISA’s authority. She told me that the ISA had indeed conducted some sort of analysis of the market regarding licensing and the ‘proprietary’ versus Free Software competition, and that the ISA’s position on the matter is not to have a position. She gave me the impression that Mr. Friel has been told that he was out of line. She asked me to convey the ISA’s regrets to my colleagues.

Well now, that’s interesting!

I find it very encouraging to see that the ISA don’t take the position noted in Friel’s article, anyway. In my opinion, this is wise — alienating free software and open-source-using companies doesn’t seem likely to be a good idea, given that many of today’s SMEs use open source extensively ‘behind the scenes’ in production, if not directly in the products they sell.

There’s also the matter of Google’s recent major entry into the Irish software industry, with its new offices in Barrow St. in Dublin. MS are no longer the only major multinational player on the Irish scene to whom open source’s success, or failure, is a key factor in their business plans. Google use free software extremely extensively internally, are members of several major free software bodies including the FSF, and have released quite a few interesting pieces of open source software themselves.

Spam and Broken Windows, and wecanstopspam.org

Published April 11, 2005

Spam: Spam Chongqing: Spamming Experiment:

Kasia at unix-girl.com decided to run a spamming experiment on her blog. She posted a couple spams to her own blog and waited to see what would happen. In less than 24 hours she received 356 more spams.

The chongqing guys confirm this, and I’ve noticed this as well (although just in passing, I’ve never tried testing it).

Interestingly, I’m pretty sure the same thing can happen with mailing lists, if the mailing list archives are allowed to contain the mailing list’s posting address, and the list allows open posting. It works like this:

  • spammer A posts a spam to the list
  • spam is archived
  • google finds archived spam
  • list-builders B, C, D google for search terms, find archive page for that mail message
  • B, C, D scrape the addresses from that page and pick up the list posting address
  • they then either sell on to spammers E, F, and G, who spam that address, or they spam the address themselves
  • and redo loop from the start.

One key factor is the search terms B, C, and D use. My theory is that they are intending to generate ‘targeted’ lists, and in spamming, most targeted lists are simply lists of addresses scraped from pages that show up in a google search for a specific keyword — ‘meds’, ‘viagra’, ‘degree’, etc.

Joe at chonqing surmises that it may be through the Broken Windows Theory — that spam appearing in a weblog’s comments, or in a wiki page, indicates that the administrator is asleep at the wheel and more spam can be posted with impunity. in my opinion, that’s probably more likely for google-spam and wiki-spam than for email spam, but undoubtedly is a factor.

PS: href=”http://chongq.blogspot.com/2005/04/another-spammer-owned-antispam-site.html”> wecanstopspam.org has been allowed to lapse and has been stolen by a spammer. Oh dear.

Nose Leeches

Published April 11, 2005

Health: On a lighter note, I’ve been getting through my last two weeks mail and RSS data, and came across this beauty.

It’s a truly venerable internet urban legend — the Nepalese Nose Leech story. Even given that I assumed it was more than likely a UL, I still took care not to drink from streams when I visited leech-infested areas, especially in Nepal!

Well, it appears it may not be a UL after all —

Doctors have removed a leech from the nose of a 55-year-old Hong Kong woman after she swam and washed her face in a stream, a medical journal reported.

The woman went to her doctor complaining of nose bleeds and an occasional sensation that something was blocking her left nostril, the Hong Kong Medical Journal said in its April issue. Her family doctor noticed a brownish mass in her nostril but couldn’t remove it because of heavy bleeding, the journal said.

The patient was taken to the emergency room, where doctors identified the problem as a bloodsucking leech. They had trouble pulling it out because the 2 inch invertebrate retracted into the nostril and disappeared, the journal said.

Part of the slimy leech was in a passage of her nasal cavity and a larger segment was in her sinus cavity, the article said.

Doctors used a nasal spray to anesthetize the dark brown leech that had a sucker on the front part of its body. After two minutes, the leech moved slowly out of the antrum (sinus) and was retrieved with forceps, the journal said.

The woman said that one month before her symptoms developed, she swam and washed her face in a stream while hiking. Doctors checked other members of her hiking group and found another leech in the nose of a man who washed his face in the stream, the journal said.

Link via jwz, AP wire story, abstract at Hong Kong Medical Journal site, MEDLINE abstract, including a line noting ‘this form of leech infestation has not been previously reported’ — except on teh internets!

Where I’d gotten to

Published April 11, 2005

Meta: You might have noticed things being a bit quite around here recently. Unfortunately, it wasn’t for good reasons.

A close family member in Ireland died suddenly on Good Friday. Once we found out, being in Death Valley (of all places) that weekend, we made a mad dash back home for the removal, funeral, and so on. The past two weeks have been not so much fun, all in all.

I’m torn between eulogising here, and keeping it offline. All in all, I think it’d be better to not use this weblog for that; I don’t think it’d be appropriate. But he’ll be greatly missed.

Reorganisation, and ancient history

Published March 23, 2005

Life: Alec Muffett quotes an Economist opening line:

We tend to meet any new situation in life by reorganising, Petronius Arbiter, a 1st-century Roman satirist, is supposed to have remarked. And what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation.

As apt today as it was then.

(I was recently talking to a mate who’s a post-grad in the classics. She noted that classicists aren’t the fastest-moving academicians around, speculating that maybe it was because, in studying the classics, you realise the same problems and the same solutions have been around for over two thousand years regardless of change in other aspects of life.)