Andreas Wacker

The Cisco / Linksys srw 2024 is not really a bad switch. What is really sad that the web interface will only work in IE7 or before. It will fail in any modern browser. There is nothing fancy about a web interface for a network switch. No need to use anything IE specific at all. No need to seemingly do it in a way that IE8 simply stops working. I think Cisco should either stop selling the device, update it, or at the very least put a note in the box that it requires IE7 or below to operate. If they would care that is.

Leo Laporte realized that he was communicating into /dev/null. It is not surprising that nobody noticed it.

In the pre Internet age dentists with a literary ambition not no corresponding talent could ‘publish’ the book themselves. They dropped a nice amount of cash on a couple of palette of dead trees. Now, in the digital age they just can blog, tweet, update their facebook page. The googlebot might care.

Social media always has been a Ponzi scheme. Much like you run out of fresh suckers in the money ‘making’ enterprises you run out of audience. The difference is that the internet is able to give you the illusion of an audience. It seem that things are working. Everybody in the world COULD find that tweet you just made that is so brilliant.

People and companies alike often fail to look clearly at the actual effort and time that they put into the creation of the content and put it into relation of the size of the actual audience. Luckily failed virals have the built in effect that nobody notices them. But they still exist, and so do millions of tweets that nobody cares about.

The signal to noise ratio of the overall Internet keeps collapsing. People complained about the “Summer of AOL” last century. It is a blessing that we had no idea what was coming our way …

wanting to check out a free application for the iPad I had to go through the following motion:

1) tapping in search of iTunes store makes it crash. No message whatsforever. Just vanishes.

2) wondering if that is related to the fact that there are pending updates, so doing those

3) iTunes Store still crashes tapping into search.

4) cold reboot fixes sudden store crash. Can locate the app.

5) trying to download I need to sign in. Fair enough.

6) trying to download, but something has changed with the CC. It has not, but hell if Apple thinks so.

7) trying to download, but NO I have to pick a a salutation

8) trying to download, but NO, the terms have changed and I have to agree to them.

9) trying to download a free app, and -imagine that- it does download. Less than 10 attempts! to get something simple going.

We bought some very nice pictures for our living room:

I really like the work of Siebe Warmoeskerken. It is nice these days that one can buy things directly from the artist. No need for a Gallery getting in the way.

Bill Joy wrote allot of software. Allot of what he wrote in the 70s is still in use. Of course not bit by bit. Not even much of his original source code might be left. But -whether you know it or not- BSD Unix, nfs and vi make your life better. Every day. Before his generation computer code was entered via punch cards. Access was very limited. Even on the terminals that Bill used people had to account for the time they used. But:


So the computers of the time at Michigan, you were charged like $3 an hour. It was
interactive, which was cool. It wasn’t just punch cards, but you were charged like $3 an
hour to be on, and you were charged for CPU time, disk IO’s. Every little thing the
computer did, it would keep counts and charge you. So the Anthropology Department
had an account with several thousand dollars so we could get some reasonable computer
time. And we figured out how to get free time very quickly. There was a bug in the
system where you could tell it when you logged in, you’d say you wanted time, and time
equals seven seconds, or time equals five minutes, some limit. You’d sign up for a block
of time. You’d say T equals K, which was not a number, but that would give you free
time, and then we had as much time as we wanted until they plugged that loophole, which
took several years.


from Andreas Bechtolsheim & William Joy, 1999

I am sure that they would have found a different way to get the time they needed. Sometimes
gaming the system is a good thing. But certainly not as often as people think. The spirit of Enron is still out there.

Stephen Pigeon posted an interesting blog entry about the history of knowledge in math. The Internet CAN be a nice and inspiring place.

In order to operate the ZTE K3565-Z under OS X 10.5 or 10.6 you need to set the
network preference settings yourself. The Software defaults are wrong and will not work.
Vodafone phone support refers to debitel for this product. Debitel charges $1.55 a minute for support.
The bigger problem is that they don’t support OS X. They just say that they don’t know anything about it.

In the end things got working with these settings collected from the Internet and applied with a bit of luck:

When you insert the USB stick you get a volume with

Vodafone MC Installer

I ran this. I think it is needed. Also since its distinct crappyness will give you a taste of things to come. After you installed this the volume will no longer be mounted when the stick is being inserted.

Under 10.6 I got lots of messages about extensions not being working / being compatible. Both after the install and after the reboot this POS installer felt it needed.


Vodafone Mobile Connect.


should launch after the install. It fails the first time under OS X 10.6, complaining that it can not find a the stick. Just start it again.

The Vodafone Mobile Connect junk-app is good for one thing only: it lets you enter the PIN of the stick. The “Activate” / “Aktivieren” button is actually plain evil:
it will overwrite the network preference settings for the K3565-Z with non working defaults. Don’t click it.

Since we are talking crapware here the Network control panels gets populated with three devices for the ZTE stick. You can ignore / remove the ones ending in ATPort and DiagPort.
One should read “Vodafo…565-Z”. The number is *99***1#. That’s ok.

In order to make the ‘Connect’ / ‘Verbinden’ button sing for you have to change settings under ‘Advanced …’ / ‘Weitere Optionen …’.
In the Modem tab choose for the

‘vendor’ / ‘Hersteller’ the setting ‘Generic’ / ‘Allgemein’

then for the

model pick “GPRS (GSM/3) ”

for the

APN: event.vodafone.de

just like your Grandma always told you. Make sure to hit “Apply” / “Aendern” before you try to connect. If you “activate” the card with the mobile connect crapware then your settings will be overwritten.

While many in the US might think that getting a new car is mostly a matter of picking the right brand and dealership, in the end the darn things still have to be produced. Somewhere. And that part is actually quiet complex.

Nissan had to halt three of its plants since one chip was not available. Manufacturing in 2010 is a highly complex and interlocked environment.

Hugh MacLeod about self employment

Steve Jobs said at this years D8 conference:


When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks because
that’s what you needed on the farms.” Cars became more popular
s cities rose, and things like power steering and automatic
transmission became popular.

“PCs are going to be like trucks,” Jobs said.
“They are still going to be around.” However, he said,
only “one out of x people will need them.”


I agree on the part that iPad like devices will liberate
people from using computers that didn’t want them in
the first place. And there are more than we think.
I think Apple will make a killing by recognizing this with
the iPad.

I like the historical analogy. However I find this one
to be more fitting: Computers are like kitchens, and
iPads are like micro wave ovens. A microwave will
work against your hunger. You are dependent on
pre made things that you have to purchase at a price.
It is easy, but you have not much chance to control
the experience.

A kitchen is more complex to operate than a microwave.
But the food tastes better. It is healthier and cheaper.
And the varieties of experiences is endless.

I had no idea this exists: Google advanced search which I can see being very useful.

people don’t know how fast their Internet is

I hope that it takes a while before the couple of last mile vendors adopt their upgrade plans accordingly.

On a centos machine ldapsearch was not giving me much love when accessing a Microsoft Global directory server via ldaps and a given port. The error message I got was:


ldap_sasl_bind(SIMPLE): Can't contact LDAP server (-1)


When turning up debug level via -d 1 as in


ldapsearch -d 1 -v -H ldaps://servername:portnumber


I got the bit more revealing error message:


TLS certificate verification: Error, unable to get local issuer certificate
TLS trace: SSL3 alert write:fatal:unknown CA
TLS trace: SSL_connect:error in SSLv3 read server certificate B
TLS trace: SSL_connect:error in SSLv3 read server certificate B
TLS: can't connect: error:14090086:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE:certificate verify failed (unable to get local issuer certificate).


It turns out that a simple line like


TLS_REQCERT never


in ldap.conf makes things better. In my particular install a simple ‘locate ldap.conf’ was a bit misleading. The true location of your config file can be revealed via:


strace ldapsearch -v -H ldaps://servername:portnumber 2>&1 | grep ldap.conf


An Apple TV box stopped reacting to the IR when being back in the Apple interface. The light was still changing colors when a button was pressed, but nothing happened. This forum post describes perfectly shows how to get the IR working again. Since it would be a shame if these clear and wonderful instructions would fall prey to data rot here a (slightly amended) copy of them:

1) if you have not already, patchstick the ATV

2) ssh to the atv

(Steps 3 and 4 will fail if you have set the ATV to not auto update its software, since mesu.apple.com will resolve to 127.0.0.1)
3) download the IR firmware update utility: wget http://mesu.apple.com/data/IR/061-3045.20080708.Aq12D/IRReceiverUpdaterTool2

4) download the firmware image: wget http://mesu.apple.com/data/IR/694-5586.20081119.2AvT3/irrxfw-0×0312.irrxfw

(you probably will need to do chmod +x IRReceiverUpdaterTool2)
5) run the firmware patch: ./IRReceiverUpdaterTool2 irrxfw-0×0312.irrxfw

6) if the process worked you should see this message near the end of the output:

Flash Image Verification Succeeded…
SendCmdExitBootLoader
Bootload Success…

At his point the IR indicator blinks yellow. The Apple UI is reacting again. With
an ATV software Version 3.0.2 on a Geforce Go 7300 1GHz ATV the IR became
inoperable after a reboot.

Redoing the update, then unpairing the remote and pairing it again fixed this.

On a side note: I found this blog post 20 minutes after I made it when googling for ‘IRReceiverUpdaterTool2′.

Google is simply amazing.

Apple published a “Thoughts on Flash”. The piece is amazingly well crafted and written. The real reason for Apples bold move attempting to keep flash out of the mobile space only shines through. If Flash would become the engine for mobile, then applications could run on Apple and other devices. A mobile software eco system would grow outside of the Apple space.

Apple realizes the potential of preventing this. Out of the box the iPad can NOT do any of the following:

= perform as a calculator
= perform as an alarm clock
= read PDFs

Yes, I am sure, ‘there is an app for that’. Which is the model of the device. And in order to create software for this you have to adhere to Apples programming standards (objective C) and use their distribution channels. They are in control. Letting flash grow in this space would not allow them to control this.

For Apple this makes perfect sense. And it is amazing that they had vision that they would be able to dethrone a system that always could claim greater than ninety percent proliferation.

It would be tricky to sell this image as a comp.
It would also have been tricky to suggest a couple of weeks ago that Europe could experience a flight outage of 9/11 dimensions.

Some rocks fall down on the north pole of Mars, and we have a picture of it.

Nature happens even if nobody watches. Doing it for the first time is sometimes all it takes to make me re-realize that.

Are we in trouble when the Onion has a point?

If a machine sports edac then


find /sys/devices/system/edac/ \( -name mem_type -o -name size_mb -o -name mc_name \) -exec cat {} \;


will display quickly what kind of memory modules are visible to the kernel, and in which state they are in.

Death is a certainty with daily varying degrees of probability. I wonder if people that twitter think about what their final tweet would be. What google search results they should be remembered for.

Oh, and if you hunt for business ideas, I am sure there is one here. When people believed firmly in the progress of technology, they paid good money to have their bodies frozen. Hoping that tech would catch up. And that future scientists would have nothing better to do then to get them out of the freezer and frankenstein them back to live. Maybe one should offer a ‘digital legacy’ service. Keeping peoples musings, and if Moore’s Law keeps progressing, run some sanitizing filters over them. Of course the next step would be to figure out what you would have tweeted were your thumbs not worm feed. That would be as charming as Polar Express I guess.

Ars Technica has a more realistic and helpful article about the state of death and social media.

With digital technology it is feasible for the first time to keep a vast amount of data around that is related to dead people. How much information do you have about your ancestors? 2, 3, 5 generations back? It thins down pretty quickly. There is no more reason for this. Again: There is a business model here. Probably one that Facebook will pick up. Chances are that Mr Zuckerberg will live longer than many of us.

This page compares the user experience of a legit DVD with that of a pirated movie. I would add to this to get the packaging open: There are often the shrink wrap + 3 ugly white stickers on each open side saying “Security Device enclosed”.

I remember that early DVDs would start into the movie right away. and then, when done would go to the menu. When you insert a DVD you do it, since you want to see the movie. Not because you want to watch all the other crud, like a menu opening that contains key elements of the movie to come, often oddly animated.

The problem with this is, that probably not enough people care. They don’t care about spam, viruses on their computer, their diet either. In turn the quality of the offerings for ‘the general public’ get worse. To the point that they are plain junk in some cases. I read that ‘30 rock’ would be a good show. When I watched some of the first season the other day I was a bit shocked how little I was able to enjoy it. Probably a unique aversion since I don’t watch TV. So my tolerance for mental junk might be a bit different compared to people who spend hours in front of the TV screen.

Naturally my son wanted his own computer. He is 11 so isn’t it a birth right to have one? I only pointed to a stack of parts, being left overs from some upgrades and told that he could have one if we can put it together himself. He looked and me with this “Dad, I love you, but wtf is wrong with you + and what on earth have I done to deserve to be treated like this” look. He actually said “But I am eleven years old”. My reply was “yes, you are eleven years old”.

After a couple of days he realized that that I was serious about what I had said. Funny, since the previous 11 years might have given him a hint about that one. So he got the parts out. Had a good look at them, connected them in a way that made sense, connected them wrong, cursed, cried (of course not), asked questions and he ended up with:

I gave him a hand to put things in a case and everybody was happy.

But wait, there is the Internet, there is an eleven year old boy. An awesome one. But still!
I have not seen any software that would be able to protect my child from all the rotten stuff that is a couple clicks away on the internet.
The solution that we came up with works better I think. I explained my worries to him. He understood. I asked him if it would be
OK if I would look at where he goes at the net. He had no issues with that. Since Firefox stores visited URLs in sqlite and he
naturally runs an ubuntu machine this was easy to do. Each day that he used his computer I get an email from it that shows me
what he has been up to. He is totally aware of that and does not mind at all. And I never had anything to worry about.

Today was the first time that I saw in the end of such an email:

Which helps me quiet a great deal in what I have to do. Nice to see gmail getting better. With Buzz and Wave being what they are it became en vogue to bash google. It is nice to see that they continue to add nice features as well.

Readwrite web wrote about Facebook login

Which happened to bring them high in the google search results for “facebook login”.

Then facebook did a re design. I didn’t notice much difference. But some people got confused and looked for the “facebook login” on google. And as we all know
clicking on the first result is what one should do (not). Enough people were so convinced that what they actually saw was facebook they got very mad and left comments in this direction.

Two things become apparent:

Everybody has computers now. And I mean everybody.
And many people delegate everything (including their thinking) to google.

No wonder adsense scams are so profitable.

A boarding pass design

I really like this. Also because it gets to show that we take too much junk in the -after all- man made environment around us for granted.

Boarding passes right now have a format that looks like a computer punch card, which came into being in that size since dollar bills in the days of Mr. Hollerith where that big.
So your boarding pass does not fit anywhere because people used to pay with paper money of that size more than 120 years ago …

While we are at it: The airlines could get an image from me, since I am frequent flier. Then they could super impose it over a QR Code and add a check sum.

An optical scan would reveal instantly if that boarding pass would actually BE for me. Quick: Go and patent that. It might be worth your time. I am busy with other
stuff and would just be happy to see better boarding passes. Among a couple of other things.

via Eric Alba, who referenced passfail where Davin Yoon’s design can be found in the bottom of the page.

Eric Alba shows some shelfs

And -as so often- he has a point.

Adding more machines for INTERDUBS. They get tested, triaged and configured for a ridiculous long time. That way once they are production machines they do only one thing: Run.

We experimented with benchmarking the performance effects of SELinux. As we expected it is not worth disabling. But now we know. We also know something we should have known: Enabling SELinux again on a bigger file system will make the next reboot take forever. Hours. Of course it makes sense, since all files will have to be relabeled.

A very nice project

A small vertical slice of (Socal) life. Marvelously documented while it is fading out of existence.

As we are running slowly out of IP addresses addresses are being used that were deemed to be reserved. This wouldn’t be the internet if this would go smooth. See pollutions in 1/8 for the details (thanks David for the hint).

Turns that out that 1.1.1.1 and 1.2.3.4 and not so awesome choices for an IP. Others thought so before.

And they keep doing them:
Very nice visualization by the times

Often I work with a couple of shells simultaneously in the same directory. One may be the editor with a program in it, and the other one running it.
When I add the following lines to .bashrc


alias sd='pwd > /tmp/ddd'
alias d='cd `cat /tmp/ddd`; pwd'


I just need to type ’sd’ (for Set Directory) in a shell that is already in the right directory. When I then log in with the other shell a simple ‘d’ gets me where the other shell already is. Extra benefit: When I want to continue where I was last I just type ‘d’ again. Just a little thing. But the world is made out of little things. Lots and lots of them.

When using via the wrtg54 ssh connections timed out after a while.
Which is was mildly annoying. The problem that with mildly annoying things is they are mildly annoying.
So one does not go and fix them soon enough. In this case it was terribly easy to cure errors like:


Read from remote host 1.2.3.4: Connection reset by peer
Connection to 1.2.3.4 closed.


All that it needed was to create a file called .ssh/config in the home directory and add something like these lines:

ServerAliveInterval 60
ServerAliveCountMax 5000


Nice that it didn’t require any changes on the other end.

Over the last years I accumulated quiet a bit of mail in Gmail. It works, and I find it very inspiring to see its features grow while I keep all my data. But I also grew worried: What would happen if my mail should go away? I have paid google exactly zero for keeping all my email. There would be nothing I could do.

Turns out that it is possible to make a copy. Googles own Matt Cutts described it well

I found that these getmail parameters worked well for me:


[retriever]
type = SimpleIMAPSSLRetriever
server = imap.gmail.com
username = EMAIL@gmail.com
password = PASSWORD
mailboxes = ("[Gmail]/All Mail",)

[options]
read_all = false
verbose = 2
received = true
delivered_to = true
message_log = /root/.getmail/gmail.log


It took a while. Actually days. It seems that you only get mail out at a slow data rate. Then there is a bandwidth limit. getmail failed after a while with:


getmailOperationError error (IMAP error ([ALERT] Account exceeded bandwidth limits. (Failure)))


Just waiting a couple of hours took care of this. Having had the mail not backed up for 5 years it was quiet alright to wait 5 hours.

Another error occured with 5 mails. Getmail for instance would end with:


getmailOperationError error (IMAP error (command FETCH ('3049', '(RFC822)') returned NO))


And it would do so repeatedly with the same number. I assumed that something had gone awry with those mails. After pretending that the mail already had been retrieved via the oldmail-imap file getmail soldiered on.

Tragically at some point my connection went away. I had downloaded around 120,000 mails during that session.
Getmail updates the oldmail-imap file only when done (or cancelled via ctrl-C). So the next time it started I went to download the same mails again.

Even with that glitch things worked out. And I feel pretty good about having a copy of my mail now.

Having a secure copy of your data is never a bad idea.