Tief und Langsam, Baby!

Via Jonathan Carter’s blog, since I’m in full agreement and would like to spread the thought:

Nach längerem Googlen habe ich also endlich eine (deutschsprachige) Liste von 2- und 3-Letter Country Codes zusammen mit den deutschen Landesnamen aufgetrieben. Eine schöne, einfache, gut zu parsende .txt-Datei, die erstmal in UTF-8 konvertiert und mit UNIX Line Endings versehen wurde. Weil das Web sich ja ständig wandelt und ich ganz gut mit Kontinuität zu sein scheine, bekommt das Ganze seine eigene Seite: http://schattenschreiber.org/länderliste (mit Umlaut!) – Viel Spaß beim indizieren, lieber Googlebot.

During School we used Texas Instrument’s Voyage 200 calculator, and had lots of fun with it also. Since I strongly believe that when you buy something, it’s also yours to mess with, I was sad to read that they’ve issued DMCA takedown notices to a couple of TI calculator programmer enthusiast websites. Apparently the new versions of some calculators’ OSs are cryptographically secured from being altered and these folks cracked the codes. Dear Texas Instruments, you’re hurting your own business. And, as has been stated elsewhere, hindering the distribution of these codes has now become an exercise in futility:

Voyage 200 OS signing key:
n=8307B022CEC848E14CA5D57C0C148A4803FEB19F7EEEC4493C860D
F89594250E8F0F80B7AB18CF03C27A07C1BA41B5ED4368261F4427BBE
200A3B017EE100511p=8FAEE8D84AB6F0AE8FCED849C52A5E5E63366
D2484CE172685BADE4D908EE7Bq=E974B04EBBCA3F5AF86576CEEF63
7470F2AA78B84BE3784613861349DB70F4AE3e=11d=2689CA64972BD
93334A93ECA21ABB0334C78161FDA09FD7EF3AEF50CE0B319F0EBE0ED
4E979597BB36929C6247EAC2A35A2987B35D6C467CB2CB69A466EE87
35

Voyage 200 FlashApp signing key:
n=B53225EE518E9EAE0239DE47B9C3BB7F1D2647A3BB95AC6BA3E2B0
FB21116BE47FDA55F33F01B046A201800526DF4712E17F1AA7DF1544
7549D5A317F954077Fp=49306D3448E68EDCD746D258BBD11B5E1FF
5B3A56E99C9320A9A4E1A5A936B97q=279C8CB2099364B22B6CB740
2FDA38EAD5C6018574DEB37C775577D430D7D6059e=11d=8A8FC2A
72F4EF1D05C0E22731595AD7F5286AF40F8DBDE343207B483CDFE437
06342BC4BECAEFE365A89C2AEBD154AE789980EFB56AA8DF5400895E
905ABE241

Good night and remember,
there can never be enough civil disobediance!

Danke, Pechfunk, für diese wirklich allgemeinverständliche Erklärung. Sogar CDU-Politiker (“Browser, was war das gleich nochmal?”) sollten damit keine Verständnisschwierigkeiten mehr haben.

Okay, so there’s lots of you who are willing to set up their own SSH->Squid tunnels but don’t know how to do that. I’ll have to leave the house in a couple of minutes so I don’t have enough time to give instructions for every operating system / distro, but for Ubuntu (either virtual or not) it’s pretty simple:

• sudo aptitude install openssh-server squid
• Follow instructions on http://iran.sharearchy.com/ for how to edit Squid’s configuration file and then do “/etc/init.d/squid restart” (as those instructions also state)
• Edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config (i.e. into a terminal type “gedit /etc/ssh/sshd_config” and change the line “Port 22″ to read “Port 80″ or use some other number between 1 and 65535 that isn’t used (above 10000 you should be safe in any case). Similar to Squid, do “/etc/init.d/ssh restart”
• Using Ubuntu’s graphical tools (System->Settings->Users and Groups) create a new unpriviledged user, at best with a random password and write that down somewhere
• Send all your info (IP address of the server, username, password, port you chose and port of the Squid server, 3128 if you didn’t change it) to Austin Heap or whoever you know can pass it on. IMPORTANT: don’t communicate that information through any public channels as the Iranian security forces ARE watching!
• In the case that you’re using your home internet line for this, your router will have to be configured to forward the port you chose to the box that runs the proxy. For most routers this is easy and can be configured under something called “Virtual Servers” or “NAT”.

Freedom for Iran!

With all the crap going on in Iran at the moment, some of us around the world are setting up proxy servers to help the people in Iran communicate among each other and also get info out to the world. However, simple HTTP proxy servers don’t cut it anymore since the Iranian government seems to be quick to block them.

The best thing right now seem to be SSH tunnels, which can be challenging to set up for not-so technically inclined users. For everybody within Iran who wants to go through such an SSH tunnel, a quick step-by-step guide. You’ll usually get an IP address, 2 ports (usually 80 and 3128), username and password (one distributor of these is Austin Heap). What to do with that info depends on the operating system you’re using.

Windows:

• Use BitTorrent to download http://iran.sharearchy.com/tunnel.torrent
• Read the Howto and run the tunnel.exe file which you got in the torrent
• Enter the info (ports, IP address, username, password) into the Tunnel program
• Configure your browser (i.e., Firefox) as per the instructions in the Howto

Linux, Mac:

• Open a Terminal
• Type this into it: “ssh -oPort=PORT1 -L PORT2:localhost:PORT2 USERNAME@IPADDRESS” – so for example: “ssh -oPort=80 -L 3128:localhost:3128 iran@80.25.15.30″ and press . After that it’ll ask you for the password
• Set your browser to use “localhost:PORT2″ (so, for example, “localhost:3128″) as the HTTP proxy

Please try to get this info into Iran by whatever means available to you.

After being burned by ScheduleWorld’s policy of first luring you in for free and then beginning to try and charge money, I decided to install Funambol myself and be done with all those synchronization headaches. Turns out installing funambol isn’t quite that easy, so for everybody interested as well, here’s a little step-by-step guide. You will need some command line literacy though.

ol li { padding-top:1em; }

1. Download funambol-7.1.1.bin (if, like in my case, you have a headless server, also download funambol-admin-7.1.0.tgz for your desktop/laptop)
2. Install the bundle. I went for /usr/lib/funambol as an installation directory, the default is /opt/Funambol. It shouldn’t matter much. Installation is started by issuing sh funambol-7.1.1.bin while ssh‘d into the server. From now on, I’ll assume the Funambol bundle to be installed in /usr/lib/funambol (and not /usr/lib/funambol/Funambol!)
3. If you don’t have it installed already, sudo aptitude install sun-java6-bin sun-java6-jre. This step isn’t theoretically necessary if you’re on a 32bit OS. Next, edit /usr/lib/funambol/bin/funambol to contain export JAVA_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun" and export JRE_HOME=$JAVA_HOME at the top. Also change COMED=true to COMED=false somewhere around line 50 while you’re at it (this prevents the start/stop script from trying to start or stop the Hypersonic database, since we’re going to use MySQL). To save some space on the server, you can safely rm -rf /usr/lib/funambol/tools/jre-1.5.0. In order to keep track of things, I went into /usr/lib/funambol/tools and did ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun. Update: You might want to do ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun jre-1.6.0 instead – thanks for the hint, Rachael!
   Also see the outdated HOWTOInstallOn64bit article on the Funambol Wiki.
4. Go to /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/lib/ext and download mysql-connector-java-5.1.7.tar.gz. The tar.gz should contain a file called mysql-connector-java-5.1.7-bin.jar which you have to put into the ext directory. All other contents of the tar.gz and the tar.gz itself can be deleted again. Now back into /usr/lib/funambol and there to edit ds-server/install.properties. Line 24 will have to be changed from dbms=hypersonic to dbms=mysql. Next, comment lines 63 through 67, uncomment lines 55 through 59 and make them fit to your needs. For me, they read as follows:

   
jdbc.classpath=../tools/java-6-sun/jre/lib/ext/mysql-connector-java-5.1.7-bin.jar
jdbc.driver=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
jdbc.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost/SOME_DATABASE_NAME
jdbc.user=SOME_USER
jdbc.password=SOME_PASSWORD

   Save and close. If you haven’t already done so, create a mysql database with the same name, username and password as you specified in install.properties. That database will now be populated by calling the Funambol install script through bin/install. Just answer yes (“y”) everywhere, unless you don’t want the web demo, in which case you answer no to that question, of course. rm -rf tools/hypersonic to save yet a bit more disk space. (Again, there’s a slightly outdated page for this in the Funambol wiki – https://core.forge.funambol.org/wiki/BundleMyPSSQL)

5. Funambol itself should now run, which you can check by calling bin/funambol start. Check with ps ax | grep funambol and a visit to http://YOUR_SERVER:8080. If it doesn’t work for some reason and you need help, I can recommend #funambol on freenode.net with a tip o’ the hat to Reed there. The easiest way to make Funambol start automagically would be to ln -s /usr/lib/funambol/bin/funambol /etc/rc2.d/S99funambol.
6. In keeping the headline’s promise, as a last step LigHTTPd has to be configured now. I decided I wanted Funambol running in a subdomain, so I put this piece of configuration into /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/funambol.conf:

   
$HTTP["host"] =~ "^(funambol.).*$" {
proxy.balance = "fair"
proxy.server = ( "/" => (
("host" => "127.0.0.1", "port" => 8080, "fix-redirects" => 1)
))
}

   After symlinking it into conf-enabled and restarting lighttpd, you should be rid of the :8080 in the URL. Now would be a good time to install the Funambol Admin in your desktop and read funambol-installation-and-configuration-guide-v7.1.pdf to find out how to change the default admin password.

Happy configuring and drop me a comment or an email (anything @ this domain) if you feel like it :-)

Updates:

• Disable automatic user creation: Open the Funambol Administration Tool, login to your server, go to Server settings and change the Officer entry to com/funambol/server/security/DBOfficer.xml
• A note on MEM_OPTS: when running Funambol in a vserver (as I do), you may very well run into memory problems. The way it works for me now is to set MEM_OPTS="-Xmx32M" in ctp-server, inbox-listener and pim-listener, but set it to 192M in funambol-server.
• HTTP status code 417 when using SyncEvolution: That seems to be a known bug with SyncEvolution, but the corresponding SourceForge bug tracker entry is disabled for some reason. I’ve opened a thread on the Funambol forum to maybe get some help with this. In the meantime, port 8080 will do.

Wollte man -zu welchem Zwecke auch immer- eine unendlich große Menge Licht ansammeln, so bräuchte man sich nur um eine unendlich große Menge Raum, sowie eine unendlich große Menge Zeit kümmern. Da aber nun Raum als auch Zeit (zumindest in diesem Universum) eindeutig endlich sind, folgt daraus, dass Licht immer gegen Schatten, Leben gegen Tod, Gut gegen Böse wird anzutreten haben. Dies ist eine Wahrheit unserer Existenz, mit der wir uns entweder abfinden, oder an der wir zugrunde gehen können.

Kam so über mich…

Blue skies, smilin’ at me
Nothin’ but blues skies do I see

[...]

Those blue days, all of them gone
Nothin’ but blue skies from now on

[...]

—Louis Armstrong

Today you could say I flew for the first time. That’s not counting the being-allowed-to-participate in the flight my grandmother got for her sixty-somethingth birthday, or all the airline flights that have become part of “normal” life nowadays. Instead, I flew in a Cessna 172 in a bid to find my vocation. (I’ll also do a one-week course in Egyptian Arabic at the end of April and visit the HGB Leipzig school of photography on my next return from Dresden.) But this flying thing … really struck a nerve. Don’t get me wrong — it was actually far from what I had expected. For example, you’d think an airplane as small as that Cessna might be frightening a bit, but far from it! Instead you feel so safe it is almost unreal, as if some mighty, docile giant was all around you, caring for your well-being. Indeed I would recommend anyone, especially people afraid of great heights I guess, to book a flight in such a small airplane at least once in their lives. It is fascinating in many a way, mostly because you feel so alive, because you feel that the air doesn’t ask who you are, it just accepts you as another traveller and carries you toward your destination. And at the same time it is a very humbling experience because you realize how much one has to learn to be able to operate such an aircraft, but also because you realize in awe the value of life itself and the world below you… that really makes you be left awestruck afterwards. I only wonder how the heck can anyone ever learn to be comfortable with all the instruments, having to steer the airplane and, most of all, having to navigate at the same time. Like all things, it is probably just practice.

Live long and prosper, Brian! (RIP March 17, 2009; via Universe Today)