Colin Charles Agenda

I have been reading quite a bit recently. Quite a number of them are being read online, in sporadic bits, via my O’Reilly Safari subscription, so at some stage maybe I’ll list them when I complete them. However, in a non-technical sense, here are a bunch of books I’ve read recently:

• Sperm Are from Men, Eggs Are from Women: The Real Reason Men and Women are Different by Joe Quirk – arguably, a complete waste of time, but you might just read it for humour sake. However, I’m wondering if his thoughts on sexual evolutionary biology holds weight – what he says, is actually, at many instances, quite true. Its an extremely easy read, he likes pointing out that he isn’t an expert in any field he talks about (good, I like his honesty), and if you’re a man (or woman), you’ll find out a little more about the other sex. With a surname like Quirk, this doesn’t get any quirkier.
• The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins – if I were loaded, I would buy this for every evangelical Christian with a brain, that I know. And there are a lot of them (those that don’t just listen to what the pastor says and takes it for gold). Giuseppe bought this for me as a gift in Heidelberg, and its truly a great read. Of course, there’s also a book titled the Dawkins Delusion, and at some stage I’ll find that and read it. However, if you’re of the thinking that religion is one of the major causes of problem in this world, read this book.
• The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cell Phone: The Emerging 21st Century Power by Shashi Tharoor – Amazing book. This is highly recommended, do read it, if you want to learn more about India. Shashi Tharoor himself was the youngest under-secretary general at the United Nations, and his writing quality is just amazing. He might be a bit wordy, he is originally a Keralite, but living overseas, but his perspectives are just amazing. I really enjoy the way the stories are presented, as they’re all independent from another.

Seeing that I’m in India now, I picked up all the rest of Shashi Tharoor’s books from the bookstore the other day. You might want to do that too.

The general paranoia at conferences is such that there almost always is WiFi, and there almost always is someone wanting to snoop your traffic. I guess, in a similar vein, this could also happen at Starbucks. So, on day 1, at foss.in I tried to recollect what I used to do, ages ago (when I used to run Fedora on my R51, before the disk died, and I realised I lacked a backup of /root).

iptables
Firewalls break networks? They also secure networks. I have access to some legacy POP servers, that don’t support SSL/TLS like the IMAP servers I have access to. Firing up Thunderbird, to change the settings, to point to localhost, just seems like a waste of time. So the magic of iptables comes into play.

iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp -d my.pop.server --dport 110 -j DNAT --to-destination 127.0.0.1:1235
iptables -t nat -A OUTPUT -p tcp -d my.pop.server --dport 110 -j DNAT --to-destination 127.0.0.1:1235

The above, ensures that to access my.pop.server:110, the traffic is automatically routed now to localhost:1235. Clearly, I don’t run a POP server on my laptop, so this is where SSH port forwarding comes into play.

SSH port forwarding
Provided you have access to a server via SSH, and you trust it, you can tunnel your traffic through it. Its made very easy by the:
-L localport:my.pop.server:foreignport

So using the above example, that would be -L 1235:my.pop.server:110.

Then, let’s not forget the useful -C option, to compress traffic.

And hey, web surfing isn’t secure either, so lets create a SOCKS5 proxy while we’re at it. ssh supports the -D option, which works a charm. Use it such that you have something like:
-D 8188

And now, configure your web browser, to use a SOCKS proxy, localhost:8188. You can also configure it in GNOME, under the Network Proxy, but it seems like not all applications respect it (for instance, I can get pidgin to segfault, and Liferea will not get RSS updates for some reason, etc.).

So to sum it up, your SSH command should look something like:
ssh -D 8188 -L 1235:my.pop.server:110 -C my.ssh.server

Discuss
Am I missing something? Do you have an easier iptables rule? Yes, I realise I can also use a VPN. If you have other tips, please don’t hesitate to comment. Thanks.

Technorati Tags: ssh, iptables, travel, tips, wifi, open access points, socks5

foss.in is officiated. Atul is on stage, speaking and the room is filled up. The lighting ceremony happened, a while ago. “Only an Indian can give a keynote, at foss.in” – here comes the Anjuta keynote, by Naba Kumar. History of Anjuta? The name, was the name of his girlfriend, and now, its his wife (they have a cute daughter, whom we got to see at Opus last night).

Last night quite a number of us went to the Opus, for a Mozilla party. It was truly, a hip event. Lots of beer, lots of chatter, and there was even some local Indian scotch towards the tail-end of the night. We were having so much fun, we didn’t even realise dinner wasn’t around yet ;) Aizat and I wolfed down some amazing pasta in under 5 minutes around 11pm.

Kudos to Shreyas and Shilpa for ensuring we were all safe and sound (and Kishore who sent me home, since I missed the bus :P). It was great to speak with Tejas, Allen, Gopal and the rest of the crew.

Yesterday, spent some time in Juergen Schmidt’s talks in the OpenOffice.org Project Day. I tailed into another talk about translations in Kerala, who seemed to represent the government of Kerala to some extent. Translations alone don’t interest me, but finding out more about FOSS use in Kerala clearly does. I am after all, a Mallu ? I hope I got that right :)

Jumped to see Tom Callaway speak about Fedora Secondary Architectures, though there are some things there that I feel are a little incorrect with the idea behind it. Build machines, not hosted by the Fedora Project? Wrong. Packages and the distribution itself, save for the torrents, not hosted by the Fedora Project? Wrong. Allowing a build of software to fail on a secondary architecture? Wrong. Allowing the secondary arch maintainer to fix broken packages? Smart. Though honestly, I think this might end up having to becoming a team.

Rahul Sundaram’s talk about spins was great. Considering I was building LiveCDs before there were tools, to do so, I’m glad that there are so many ways to do so now (easily, even). And of course chit chatting with him over beer at the Opus later, was fun.

Anyways, time to pay attention to the Anjuta talk. Not a big fan of IDEs myself, but I’m seeing the need for it (for folk that aren’t comfortable with vim).

Technorati Tags: foss.in, foss.in 2007, opus, party, fedora, openoffice.org, secondary architectures, livecd

Yesterday, my agenda was around the Mozilla Day – spent most of the morning, listening to Mozilla-related extension talks. I ran away the moment they talked about accessibility and localisation, and spent some time in the Hack Centre, which was just tables, chairs, WiFi and good hacking :) Then hopped into the GNOME project day, to listen to Ritesh Khadgaray tell us about how to hunt bugs. I continued spending the rest of my day there, for what its worth.

Dinner, at MG Road. Wonder if there are other locations to eat? I mean, I’ve extensively walked around the MG Road area, around Brigade Road, Church St, and so on.

Today, I’m going to jump between the OpenOffice.org and Fedora project days, both of which are projects close to my heart.

Of the 2,700+ registered jokers, the project days certainly seem a lot smaller than I’d have expected… Under-1000 attendees maybe? I guess this will pick up certainly during the main conference.

Photo by aizat

WiFi works wonderfully well at the conference. I’m actually shocked! Has to be one of the few conferences that have got Internet access working. Maybe I should knock wood in case this disappears soon…

Technorati Tags: foss.in, foss.in 2007, project days

Ever since getting the Sandisk Sansa e280 (yes, so much better than the iPod Nano, if you must know), I’ve been interested in the Voice recording feature. I fiddled with it today, to give it a bit of a test, as I plan on conducting audio interviews.

Once recorded, it outputs WAV files. This is easily accessible in Linux, in the RECORD folder. So I played around with converting the original WAV file into an OGG and MP3. Quick findings:

• WAV:  RIFF (little-endian) data, WAVE audio, Microsoft PCM, 16 bit, mono 16000 Hz size at 1020K
• OGG: Ogg data, Vorbis audio, mono, 16000 Hz, ~48000 bps, created by: Xiph.Org libVorbis I, sized at 148K, converted via oggenc 071203_01.wav -o 071203_01.ogg
• MP3: MPEG ADTS, layer III, v2,  24 kBits, 16 kHz, Monaural, sized at 104K, converted via lame 071203_01.wav

This was on a clip that was 32 seconds in length. The MP3 is smaller than the OGG, and there’s no noticeable sound difference between all the 3 formats. Is there something to make the OGGs generated by oggenc smaller? I’m happy if they just match the MP3 file sizes, to be honest.

Time to start podcasting? :)

Technorati Tags: ogg, wav, mp3, size, sansa e280, sandisk, oggenc, lame