Keskusrikospoliisi, me tultiin tekemään kotietsintä

Kotona
Epätodellinen tunne on se tunne, jonka kokee aamulla herättyään ovikellonsa soittoon, kun tapaa neljä mustiin nahkatakkeihin sonnustautunutta keskusrikospoliisin työntekijää ovellansa. Unisempikin henkilö jo tässä vaiheessa alkaa toden teolla heräilemään, tai ainakin tietoisesti näin pyrkii tekemään. Moni asia ei motivoi skarppaamaan heti aamulla yhtä tehokkaasti. Jo hyvin aluillaan olevaa kognitiivista dissonanssia ei tietenkään vähennä se seikka, että ei ole aavistustakaan siitä, miksi nuo yhteiskuntamme palvelijat ovat juuri omalle ovelle tulleet. Vielä vähemmän asiat loksahtavat päässä paikalleen, kun ryhmän puhemiehenä toimiva henkilö ilmoittaa joukon tarkoituksena olla kotietsinnän suorittaminen.

Oman havaintokyvyn rajalliseksi tietävä ihminen epäilee, ettei havaitse todellisuutta ihan oikein. Puutteellisen tiedon varassa aloin käymään läpi joukkoa mahdollisia tapahtumasarjoja tarkoituksenaan tulla selvyyteen siitä, mitä oikein on tapahtumassa. Epäilin jopa psykoottisen kohtauksen mahdollisuutta vaikkei minulla koskaan sellaista olekkaan ollut. Psykoosissa oleva ihminen voisi päästää kyläilemään tulleet kaverinsa ovesta sisään, mutta luulisi näiden olevan kotietsintää suorittamaan tulleita poliiseja. Tässä kohtaa tilanteen vakavuutta tietämättä en osannut tulla johtopäätökseen, kumpi olisi huonompi vaihtoehto: mielenterveyden katoaminen vaiko pitkään vankeusrangaistukseen ja kaikkeen muuhun sellaiseen tilanteeseen liittyvään jukiseen häpeään johtavan kertomuksen alkukohtaus. Pelkoa ei helpota tieto siitä, ettei ole tehnyt mitään poliisitutkintaa edellyttävää.

Salaliittoteoriat alkavat nopeasti tuntua paljon todellisemmilta siinä vaiheessa, kun virkavalta tulee asuntoosi sisälle kutsumatta. Turun Torikokous oli ollut käynnissä jo melkein kuukauden tuona päivänä ja monenlaista vastoinkäymistä oli koettu puolustaessa perustuslaillista oikeutta jukiseen kokoontumiseen. Epäilys Torikokouksen vastustajien käyttämistä likaisista keinoista ei ollut kaukana. Kun kysyin etsinnän liittymisestä jotenkin Torikokoukseen, vastasivat etsijät etteivät tienneet mikä se on.

Aika äkkiä myös alkaa kaivata lainopillista tietoa luotettavasta lähteestä. Varhain kysyivät tietokoneen salasanoja kertoen rivien välistä olevan epäilyttävää, ellei jopa rikollista, kieltäytyä. "Vaikeutat vaan omaa tilannettas." En antanut, kun en tiennyt onko lain mukaan velvollisuus antaa. Kertoivat asiallisesti, että voin seurata etsinnän suorittamista tai sitten lähteä asemalle. Päätin jäädä seuraamaan etsintää. Asunnosta vietiin kaikki tietokoneet ja massamediaksi kelpaava laite, mukaan lukien puhelin. Poliisi ilmoitti ottavansa minut kiinni ja, että asiaan en voi vaikuttaa. Matka jatkuisi asemalle.

Turun poliisilaitos

Vasta poliisiasemalla selvisi, mistä rikoksesta minua epäilivät. Pahaksi onnekseni en kuitenkaan muistanut, missä olin ollut rikoksen tapahtumahetkellä 5.11.2011. Olin ollut kuumeessa jo yli viikon, eikä muisti tuntunut pelaavan. Kuitenkin rikoksen tunnusmerkit viittaavat tekijässä sellaisiin piirteisiin, että minua on vaikea saada kuvaan sovitettua. Sensaationhakuisuus ei ole minuun kuuluva piirre. Olen myös mielestäni kunnianhimoisempi siinä mielessä, etten kokisi tuollaisten tietojen käsiinsä saamista edes saavutukseksi. Paheksun tekoa sen vuoksi, että ihmisten yksityistietoja paljastettiin ilman mitään riittävää syytä. Riittävä syy ei ole tietojärjestelmissä olevien haavoittuvuuksien paljastaminen. Esimerkiksi Bradley Manning saa sympatiani siksi, että hänen tekonsa on ollut omiaan paljastamaan rikoksia, jotka muuten eivät olisi paljastuneet. Grillasivat minua monta tuntia, lähes itkun partaalle. Positiivista oli tosin se, että kiinni otettuna olin kuulemma valtion hoivassa ja valtion tulee pitää silloin minut ruokittuna ja juotettuna. Sain asemalla kupin kahvia.

Takaisin kotiin

Kuulustelun jälkeen sain kyydin takaisin kotiin. Minulle annettiin ilmaisukielto. Sen lisäksi, että minua ahdisti koko tapahtuma, en nyt saanut edes keskustella siitä kenenkään kanssa, jotten paljastaisi tutkinnan kannalta tärkeää tietoa. Kävin Torikokouksen teltalla. Oli mieli maassa, mutta näyttelin niinkuin mitään ei olisi tapahtunut. Taisin kannustaa jotakuta pysymään rohkeana osoittaen samaa viestiä kai hiukan itsellenikin. Sairastin kotona vielä päivän verran kuumettani. Sitten alkoi pelottaa se, että olin yksin ja siten ilman minkäänlaista alibia, mikäli taas tapahtuu jotain, mistä minua epäiltäisiin. Pelkäsin myös, että minut päästettiin pois asemalta vain siksi, että tarkkailisivat miten käyttäytyisin. Ahdisti. Pelotti. Sain jonkin verran selvitettyä myös sosiaalisista medioista, taskuun jääneistä kuiteista ja sähköpostista missä noin suunnilleen olin viettänyt aikaani rikoksen tapahtumahetkellä. Vietin kaverini luona pari päivää. Seura teki hyvää ja tuntui mukavalta tietää, että on koko ajan tarvittaessa alibi. Mielessä kävi tosin, että ajastettuna voi mitä vaan tehdä tietokoneella, joten alibikaan ei välttämättä toimi samalla lailla kuin ns. perinteisissä rikoksissa.Yritin keskittyä arkeen. 

17. päivä minua haastateltiin työpaikkaan, johon minut myös palkattiin. Minun olisi pitänyt vakuuttaa kirjallisesti, ettei minua epäillä mistään rikoksesta. Ilmaisukielto esti asiasta keskustelemisen. Soitin rikospoliisille kertoakseni probleemastani. Seuraavana päivänä sainkin puhelun, jossa he kertoivat, etteivät enää epäile minua rikoksesta. Olo helpottui huomattavasti vaikka vielä joutuikin vaikenemaan asioista ystäville.

Summa Summarum
Nyt ilmaisukieltoni on päättynyt. Ilmaisen siis itseäni. Minua epäiltiin rikoksesta sen takia, että minun tarjoamieni palveluiden kautta levitettiin http://ylilauta.fi/ sivustolle linkkiä 16000 suomalaisen henkilötiedot sisältäneeseen tiedostoon. Sivuston lokissa näkyi siis minun internetyhteyteni julkinen IP-osoite lähettäjänä. Palveluita, jotka mahdollistavat tämän on kaksi: Avoin langaton verkko ja TOR-palvelin. Tekijä on siis joko ohjannut verkkoliikenteensä TOR-verkkoon, josta se on tullut ulkomaailmaan minun päätepisteeni kautta tai ollut jossakin langattoman verkkoni kantaman sisällä. Olen pättänyt jatkaa näiden palvelujen tarjoamista keskeytyksettä.

Tyhminkin ihminen tänä päivänä ymmärtää, että internetissä ei noin vain kirjoitella ilman, että joku kirjoittajan saisi selville. Siksi on olemassa anonymisointiteknikkaa, jonka avulla voi esim tehdä kirjoituksia internetissä ilman, että lähettäjää saadaan selville. Joissain maissa vainotaan esimerkiksi toisinajattelijoita ja liikenteen anonymisointi voi olla ainoa tapa välttyä vankeudelta, kidutukselta tai jopa kuolemalta. Joissain maissa ei esimerkiksi ole ilmaisun vapautta. Langattomat verkot ovat murrettavissa auki olivat ne WEP tai WPA salattuja. WEPin saa auki muutamassa minuutissa ja esimerkiksi WPS ominaisuudella varustetun WPAn 4-10 tunnissa. Myös yleisillä nimillä asetettujen WPA tukiasemien salasanat voidaan rainbow-table tekniikan kanssa selvittää. Voidaan olettaa, että henkilö, joka onnistuu henkilötietolistan saamaan käsiinsä, osaa myös salata oman identiteettinsä tarvittaessa. Tiedostot voi lähettää vaikka kahvilan avoimesta verkosta. Muiden ihmisten langattomien verkkojen käyttämisellä oman identiteettinsä salaaminen on tänä päivänä niin helppoa, että sen voi kuka tahansa toteuttaa.

Mielestäni kotietsinnälle ei ollut järkevää perustetta. Olisin kyllä ymmärtänyt ja auttanut tarpeen mukaan, mikäli poliisi olisi ottanut yhteyttä minuun asiasta muutoin, kuin epäiltynä. Kyllä rikollisen pitää olla todella tyhmä, jos omasta verkostaan jotain lähettää ja sillä tavalla saa osakseen poliisin huomion. Niin tyhmä, että on jo lähes mahdotonta sellaisen tyypin saada mitään yksityisiä tiedostoja haltuunsa. Jo käymällä läpi tietoja minusta sosiaalisessa mediassa pitäisi toivon mukaan tulla ilmi, että jotain aivoissani tapahtuu. Tämän tapahtumasarjan kokeneena voin kuitenkin sanoa, että on kyllä mukava palata normaaliin päivärytmiin ei niin jännittävään elämääni.

What would MacGyver do?

We won't budge

We finns are determined folk it would seem. Yesterday the police was dispatched to see that the tent would be taken down. The protesters then took shelter in a mobile performing stage that has been on the market square for years and has a roof on top. The city of Turku then sent someone to remove the stage from the square leaving the protesters with nothing against the weather but their wits, some equipment and determination.

The situation called for some MacGyverism. An improvised shelter was put up using some tarps and benches in the pouring rain and a pretty nifty one I can witness. It was completely dry despite of the rain and no stove was needed when everyone was packed tightly together in the shelter. As a matter a fact someone thought it was a bit too warm. I was about 4 deg C outside(39F) It brought back childhood memories of making such huts indoors at home with friends and declaring them as our forts.

You could find the fort by following the sound of laughter and passionate speeches about the world, environment, economy and other topics.

We are living interesting times!

The following note was "flewn in by the wind" today

Due to civil activism (tents at Wiklund corner) we ask all merchants at the market square to take care when visiting the restroom that the activists don't accidentally get the access code for the door. Also care should be taken in order not to allow strangers slip in when entering or leaving the facilities. Other kind of assistance(giving water, electricity etc) is discouraged. Notice this when going to the "washroom".


Warm water will be available as soon as we get the boiler fixed. It's known to the people who decide these things but we don't yet know about the timetable.

We are living interesting times!


In the note was included a four digit code written by hand.

Thank you very much merchants at the market square!

Lessons of life and work

In 1980 Heikki "Hessu" Salmela opened the first Hesburger fast food restaurant in Turku Finland. The chain grew fast and in 1988 he sold it for almost 200 million finnish markkas.(At that point the reason for selling was exhaustion and stress.) Only a few years later during the recession, he bought it back for 25 million. The chain has grown ever since and expanded to other countries as well. The things that have made this possible are: hard work and self sufficiency. Almost everything in the production process apart from farming is done in-house. That and little luck is a recipe for success. Marketing helps, but only if you've done everything else right.

I have always been interested about how one makes a business really successful. The stories that tell the history of great successes often are stories about personal sacrifice and hard labour. Very few people have the qualities this requires. I believe one has to learn how to fail many times before the lessons that enable one to be truly successful are learned.

The first lesson is: don't take shortcuts. The quality of your work is that much less when the product you offer is not exceptional. Only by offering truly worthwhile stuff you and your customers can believe in the work you do. With bad products/services no one has any incentive to turn to you.

The second lesson is: know when to take shortcuts if absolutely necessary. Sometimes the situation just needs for quick action. There's not very much time to think things trough in situations like these and unless you are a very seasoned expert you are going to make bad decisions.

Third lesson is: how to avoid situations when you have to take shortcuts. When you've been doing something long enough you start to develop an eye for situations that tend to escalate towards an unwanted result. Experience and hard work are the only ways to get this foreknowledge.

Anyone that has some experience in business or other serious undertakings that take time and effort should have learned these lessons at some point. It's just too easy to forget these things when you're obsessing about one specific detail about your work. I hope to remember by having this text as my personal reminder.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesburger
http://www.city.fi/artikkeli/Heikki+Salmela/468/ (finnish)
http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heikki_Salmela (finnish)

UEFI "Secure boot" feature

Read these and you're up to speed
http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/5552.html
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/22/protecting-the-pre-os-environment-with-uefi.aspx


The PR department at Microsoft is lulling people to their happy places again?

There obviously isn't any real benefit for the end user in "secure boot" so why beat around the bush. This is a feature, the purpose of which is to allow commercial entities to have greater power over what can and what cannot run on computer hardware. It's an "update" like so many we've seen that doesn't really fix any problem but only makes it more difficult for the end users to have freedom over their devices.

People can't really be so gullible that they can't see past the fact that this writing does nothing to clarify anything but only drops words and phrases like secure, enforcing, strong protection, ensure, growing threat. To me this writing gives a strong impression of trying to seed fear and then sooth with a miraculous salvation. When the threats are great we forgive the trespassess right? At least in the US as recent history has shown.

Keep updated, follow @mjg59 on Twitter.

Censorship

I'm fucking pissed off by censorship. There's no point other than to annoy people, there can't be. When I first heard censoring of swearwords as a kid I thought it was kind of funny. If someone somewhere really thinks they can protect for example children from hearing swearwords by censoring TV, they gotta be kidding. Do you know what kind of parrots kids are. Kids talk to other kids who talk to other kids who talk to someone else and so forth. As long as we have language kids will be hearing swearwords and repeating them to their friends like there's nothing else to do in this world. Especially if you forbid them or try to "protect them" from this. It's rather ridiculous when some people think it's  ok to show blood spilling and heads literally rolling, but swearwords are a big oh no.

Censoring draws unnecessary attention towards the fact that someone just swore. It also makes it very difficult to understand what was being said when it is not obvious what the word was. When it is obvious what the person is saying you're just making people say the word themselves in their minds, you chickenshits... Swearwords convey mood and meaning. It's a fact that people swear.(I'm not quoting a source, go find out for yourself) You can relate to things when swearwords are used in proper context. That means you have to balance the amount of swearing so that whatever story is being told is believable. It just sounds stupid when swearwords are out of context or there's nothing else than them. You start thinking tourettes or lack of things to say.

After a while the censoring itself starts to deliver the same effect that the swearword did. Eventually what is being said will become devoid of meaning. I'ts like telling all the painters in the world to suddenly start painting only happy pictures.

Censorship is control over people in all it's forms. Censorship is evil. Censorship is burning books. Censorship is suppression of speech. Censorship is unnatural.

Censorship is being done only when someone is feeling of loss of control and then instead of reflecting on the real matter they do something fun like turn off your country's communication networks.

ps. This is so fraking lame no matter how big a fan of BSG you are
pps. I swear too much, but it's ok, I'm aware of it.

The day the christians left earth

Sometimes out of the blue happens something so hilarious it's just insane. I thought it was the last episode of Futurama's sixth season (Reincarnation) But then this happened today when I was on Twitter.

I didn't confirm this by going out and checking out by myself, but I'm preeetty sure the religious nuts called christians are sadly all still here.


Have You Been Left Behind? from Rem Lezar on Vimeo.

Lucky Luke - Faster than his own shadow

Ever since I saw this as a kid, I have been fascinated by this image. I think it warrants some explanation.

So this guy is pretty fast with he's gun, that much is obvious. Let's say for the sake of argument that Lucky Luke is instead of being a two dimensional character on paper, a multidimensional being and can appear to move faster than light. The amount of time it takes for the light to travel from Lucky Luke to the viewer is slightly less than the amount of time it takes for the light to travel from the wall to the viewer. This means that if we would imagine someone taking a picture of this the exposure time should be equal to or less than the time difference. In other words this is an image that can never be captured with a modern camera because it wouldn't be able to capture enough photons in the allotted time. It is an illustration of the phenomenon how we can today see a star that went supernova over 21 million years ago.

So lets speculate that it's bullets he's shooting. The bullet should travel the distance instantly in order to be able to pierce the wall before the light travels from the wall to the viewer. How do you pierce something instantly? That must not be a normal gun then either. Maybe that's the reason there's a trajectory drawn in the image? It's a virtual trajectory. The gun passes the bullet through a wormhole but it doesn't travel the whole distance there. That doesn't sound very plausible. Another possibility is that the bullet is propelled by an alcubierre drive. This is still not making much sense. Or maybe he's shooting tachyons? A ray gun of sorts. That would make sense. At least it would if tachyons could affect objects. Maybe there was a hole in the wall to begin with?

As for the smoke, the guy must have exhaled and the smoke conveniently moved in front of the gun to make this image more challenging to figure out. At this point I can admit this guy can do pretty awesome things so it doesn't seem too odd that he has a levitating hat. Even I could do that.

Please leave a comment below if you have any ideas of you own. I'd love to hear any idea no matter how silly.

Next generation of website traffic analysis

Times change and open source software diversifies even more. It wasn't that long ago when Awstats was the only thing I could imagine using in order to monitor the vital signs of websites. At the present day some content management systems have internal traffic monitoring and some have options in their backends where one can connect to monitoring services like Google Analytics.

Awstats' main view

I liked Awstats in that sense that it didn't require any extra code embedded in the documents it was intended to monitor unless you wanted to gather information like screen resolutions used. It also felt quite futuristic to be able to know geographically the source of traffic with plugins like geoip. Version 1.0 of Awstats  was released in 2000. I started using it around 2002 and to this day it has served it's purpose well. There is however one thing I don't like about it. It's the fact that it always gets hits from accesslog with usually a cron-based data retrieval(yes you can refresh it on the page too, but I don't like that). This might have been okay back in the day when there wasn't anything more sophisticated available, but I like my statistics live, thank you very much.

Piwik visitors overview

Awstats has been around for over ten years now and the amount of code produced by the open source community is surely substantial enough to offer us some decent alternatives by now. As it happens there's one neat application called Piwik. Application like Piwik could not have been possible at the time Awstats was released. Browsers were buggier and things like jQuery(released in 2006) were a distant dream. It must be aknowlidged that there are certain limiting factors in any application that is developed and one great factor is the technology available at the time.

Installing Piwik is breeze. It's like installing any other application that uses Mysql and resides on your server. A hated setting up multiuser environments with Awstats (lots of htaccess-hassle). Piwik has a stylish user interface with a login system that supports multiple users. With Awstats you couldn't really navigate your way through site stats. You had to type in the config parameter in the address bar for other than the default host. At one time I had access logs sent to my imap-box and a custom made script to get them processed by awstats and deleted from my mailbox after success. It wasn't very pleasant. Piwik uses a code snipplet to monitor traffic like Google Analytics does and the results are immediately viewable. For importing logs there is a tool called Apache2Piwik that works well.

Piwik has an API that can be used in various web applications like Joomla, Codeigniter, etc. To understate, the list of software and cms you can integrate with is impressive. I don't think Piwik has mail-monitoring capabilities yet, but I hope it will in the future. Awstats already knows how to go through your mail.log.

Piwik also provides stylish statistics widgets that you can embed like you can do with YouTube videos. I strongly recommend it for anyone who wants to monitor their traffic.

Insecure

Sometimes I'm quite puzzled when it comes to security. Not because it's hard to implement but because of the unimaginable things people do regarding various security implementations. I mean things like leaving the default password on a company wireless network or having plaintext medical data travel trough a WEP-encrypted(takes maybe a minute or little more crack) network in a hospital. Things like patient history or banking keys should never be allowed to be transmitted without a strong encryption. There are policies forbidding passwords over 8 characters long in a system that holds patient data.

Every time I have questioned the safety of such systems the response has been somewhat the same: "I'ts secure" as if just saying those magic words makes it so. Apparently people just have this tendency to blindly trust people who have made these systems and forward the message of everything being secure down the chain until it reaches the end-user who is so convinced at that point that he/she could believe the sky was falling before there was anything wrong with the security of their systems.

I believe that when people have been using proprietary systems that they have never seen into or do not understand they don't really have a chance to know whether anything wrong. They just "have to trust". What open source has taught me is that I can see the lines of code of the entire program and see for myself if it is secure or not. And so do everyone else. I once belonged to that group of people who "had no choice" because I had no skills to check these things. With much wisdom comes much sorrow, that is the case if you don't change how you do things. And you don't actually have to be an expert in everything in order to be skeptical. There's nothing wrong in questioning things other people take for granted. It is however a sign of a mental condition to blindly believe anything without having at least some process of source criticism.

I know it might sound scary to your life by automatically not trusting anything before verification, but you learn to live with it.

I think it's not politically incorrect to ask does anyone know any skeptic organization in a country with Islam as its main religion?

Unwanted email, also known as spam

Does this look like I'm interested in getting mail?

I use email a lot and I check my inbox a couple of times a day. I've been trying to keep my incoming mail to a minimum. For example opting out from mailing lists and going trough email notification settings in various services that send mail(facebook, linkedin, netposti, twitter, xda-developers, fedoraforum etc.) I also manage the mail server that my box is on so I have a pretty good control over what mail I and other mail users on the same server do receive. Greylisting, blacklisting, whitelisting, honeypotting and a spam learning imap folder have kept spam to a minimum(I have not received actual spam other than from a misconfigured backup MX that is no longer in use).

Basically only mail I should receive is mail that is directed to me personally and requires some sort of direct action from me. Keeping that in mind I'm pretty pissed off now after getting yet another spam from LinkedIn. If I fail to find whatever hidden setting there is that allows me to opt out of unsolicited mail I think I'm just going to remove my account and see if that works.

I can't really understand what's the point in all that unnecessary mail sending anyway. What it does is repel people who might otherwise enjoy being a user of some service X. Is there truly a person who really reads all those "weekly updates"? And what about Facebook notifications? With default settings I'd probably have 4 times the amount of mail in my box for stuff that I already read while on Facebook. And that's Facebook alone.

I like Google's policy of letting the user opt in to get mail notifications. I actually had mail notifications for events I've marked in my Google Calendar come in one day in advance +SMS reminders 2 hours before. This was before current happy relationship with my HTC Hero(which does the reminding nowdays)

Now playing: Jippu - Kii

Cravings for Pelmeni, a recipe

I had to have some pelmeni today. Luckily I remember learning how to make them when I was younger. Pelmeni is a delightful culinary item from Russia. They are usually made in big batches and frozen in winter times. What you need for pelmenis is a kind of pasta dough and a filling. The filling can be basically any kind of meat, fish etc. I prepare mine with minced pork meat.

Sebastian's Pelmeni recipe

Dough:

• 200ml water
• 1 egg
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 300g flour

Filling:

• 400g minced meat
• 1 onion
• spices and salt according to taste

Make sure you chop the onion finely. Finer the onion is chopped the better it will mix with the minced meat. Mix the ingredients of the filling well. I seasoned the filling with some thyme, cumin(geerah), hint of paprika, some cayenne pepper, white pepper, black pepper and salt. You can check the taste of the filling raw or you can fry a tiny bit of it on a pan to get a more accurate tasting.

Prepare the dough as you would make pasta. You don't need to let the dough rest. It's ready as soon as you're done punishing it. Knead the dough into submission. It will have better consistence that way and won't puncture easily.

You can use a rolling pin to flatten and roll the dough over and over again.

Flatten the dough as much as you can and make circles out of it. Turning it over from time to time and flattening it with a rolling pin allows you to get it thinner faster. Find something round you can use to cut the circles. I used the lid of my coffee maker. If the circles are too small you can use the rolling pin to make them larger. Stretching by hand(like you stretch pizza) works for me.

Take some of the seasoned meat and put it on the center of the circle that you have placed sticky side up.

Fold and pinch to close and make a half circle with filling inside. Bend and pinch the opposite ends of the half circle together.

You can boil the leftover dough as thin strips to get a homemade pasta. I like to thwow it into the freezer and use it later.

Boil in salted water. Raw pelmeni will sink to the bottom. They're about done when they float. Bigger pelmenis might need a bit more time to boil even after they've started floating.

Serve with smetana and freshly chopped chives or parsley.

Prijatnovo appetita!!

Reballing an XBOX 360 with RROD

So you got the infamous red ring of death. Instead of murdering your home entertainment device with a heat gun you might want to check out this video series of howto fix the problem by reballing the GPU. This requires a reflow oven or a skillet.

Eggdrop commands

I'm always having trouble trying to remember the same eggdrop commands. All I want to do from time to time is to manage some hostmasks so that eggdrop will automagically op those users. The command reference has way too many commands to go through every time so here's a little reminder of the two commands I always end up searching:

+host <nickname> <hostmask>

Adds a hostmask to a user's record on the bot. The hostmasks are where the bot will identify that user from. Usually you will not need to use this command since a user can add hostmasks to their own record via the /msg ident command, but it's here if you need it.

channel [channel-name]

Lists channel info and user settings including their hosts

egghelp.org: eggdrop command reference

Howto reroute your network traffic

Howto reroute traffic through a client inside a private network in case of an emergency? I was just in such a situation where I had to ask that question and come to an answer also. In other words, my broadband went down.

Ingredients:

• 1 USB dongle

Time to cook: 5 minutes

I have a computer in my network called kiwi that has the ip 192.168.1.120 and normally connects with interface eth2 to the LAN and to internet through tomato-router(192.168.1.1) on said LAN

I don't know how to do these things in fancy GUIs so here's some command line magic

sudo su
ip route
192.168.1.0/24 dev eth2 proto kernel scope link src 192.168.1.120 metric 1
10.64.64.64 dev ppp0 proto kernel scope link src 85.78.143.39
default via 192.168.1.1 dev eth2 proto static

ip route del default
ip route add default via 10.64.64.64 dev ppp0  proto static
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
iptables -A FORWARD -o ppp0 -i eth2 -s 192.168.1.0/24 -m conntrack --ctstate NEW -j ACCEPT
iptables -A FORWARD -m conntrack --ctstate ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
iptables -A POSTROUTING -t nat -j MASQUERADE

Finally I needed to add a static route to my tomato-router
Destination 0.0.0.0, Gateway: 192.168.1.120, Subnet Mask: 0.0.0.0, Metric: 0
Now my entire network was able to connect to the internet almost as well(dongle prone to overheating when transferring data) as it had before my broadband went down

My ISP, not connecting people

There was yet another interruption in my broadband services today due to "hardware malfunction". According to Jari Kauhanen commenting on TurunKaapelitelevisio facebook page, this malfunction appeared while updating some systems. I have no confirmation whether or not this actually was the case. If they were updating systems I wonder why not set up IPv6 networking once and for all. As far as I know TDC is already capable of providing native IPv6 connectivity for them.

Turun Kaapelitelevisio was acquired by Sonera a while ago. I feared I would notice a decline in the quality of service. I really do hope that this is just a glitch the will fix asap. Traceroute shows that they still use TDC as their ISP, so no changes in that part.

a reverse traceroute to my host

traceroute to 92.242.171.98 (92.242.171.98), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 194.79.19.1 (194.79.19.1) 0.163 ms 0.245 ms 0.207 ms
2 * * *
3 tdc.ficix1.ficix.fi (193.110.226.36) 0.486 ms 0.581 ms 0.559 ms
4 62.237.135.64 (62.237.135.64) 38.375 ms 38.577 ms 38.671 ms
5 62.237.135.65 (62.237.135.65) 2.680 ms 2.764 ms 2.929 ms
6 98-171.turkunet.fi (92.242.171.98) 9.228 ms 13.319 ms 13.299 ms

I can tell you it's no fun rerouting your entire network through an overheat usb-dongle(HUAWEI E367) prone to overheating, 4G or not.

Image1: Performance of my 100M/5M broadband 18. August 2011
Computer attached directly to cable modem and downloading a dvd from multiple sources.

Update 20.8.2010

Performance is back to normal. As you may see from the pictures I'm using a different computer for measuring the speed. The other computer maxed out at 88M and was fluctuating too much.

Image2: Performance of my 100M/5M broadband 20. August 2011
Computer attached directly to cable modem and downloading a dvd from multiple sources.

I suspect the interruptions in downloading are due to aria2-downloader. It took 4m 44s to download a 2840MB dvd. Transfer speed was 9,99 MB/s or 80,00Mb/s

Original branding

I stumbled upon this:


It made me think of this:

and this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vicks_Logo.JPG

Then I found this: http://www.marmai.fi/uutiset/article625201.ece and this: http://www.landor.com/?do=aboutus.bio&bio=676 and this http://hh.kz/employer/60607

Oh how very creative... C'mon now?

Nom

Hampurilaiset on hyvei ja kännykälläki voi blogata.

YouTube Fullscreen - dualheadache

As some of you might know from my previous blog about having problems with fullscreen playback in youtube, I'm not very pleased how the player has been working. This might be changing in the future. I've just stumbled upon a discovery. Videos on freddiew2's channel and some on corridor digital's channel seem to be working just fine on my dual head setup just put of the box. It comes to mind that maybe google is trying out a new version of their flash video player on some channels. Who knows?

If you've had problems getting videos playing on the entirety of your screen go try the channels out. Leave a comment below about your success or lack of it.

VBlogger gets caught stealing

A fun prank on Katersoneseven

I was on my computer reading tweets when I saw Cory Williams tweet the following:

LET'S PRANK KATE!!! Tell her that you just saw her on the news for stealing honey from hotels! Say it was an undercover video! DO IT NOW!

I thought I could do a little better than just tweet. I blogged that she stole honey from hotel and was caught on tape by hotel security. A fake Wired.com article was created to back up the blog article

I was a bit afraid the joke would be taken seriously(she tweeted that she had to text her father that this was not true) so I took the blog-article and fake site down pretty soon. For those that missed the shock and the horror I present the "evidence".

ps. I hope her family got news of the prank from her before seeing this on the internets.

See Kates vlog about the prank VLOGGER CAUGHT STEALING!

youtube-rip

how to convert youtube videos into mp3's
dependencies: ffmpeg, lame, youtube-dl, nautilus
works great in gnome or in console tweak it for your own purposes

#!/bin/bash
ICON=/usr/share/icons/YouTube_icon.png
function notify {
  notify-send -i $ICON "Youtube ripping" "$1";
  echo -e "\033[1m$1\033[0m";
}
function fail {
  notify-send -i $ICON "Error while ripping" "$1";
  echo -e "\033[1m$1\033[0m";
  exit 1;
}
FOLDER=~/Music/YouTube

if ! which lame &>/dev/null; then
fail "lame not installed";
fi
if ! which ffmpeg &>/dev/null; then
fail "ffmpeg not installed";
fi
if ! which youtube-dl &>/dev/null; then
fail "youtube-dl not installed";
fi

if [ ! -d $FOLDER ]; then
  mkdir -p $FOLDER;
fi;

if [ $# -lt 1 ]; then
  nautilus --browser $FOLDER &
  exit 0;
fi
if [ $# -gt 1 ];then
  FOLDER=$2
fi
TMP=`mktemp`
TITLE=`youtube-dl -e $1`
notify "Getting $TITLE"
if [ $? -ne 0 ];then fail $1; fi;
#notify "Found $TITLE"
#notify "Saving video temporarily in $TMP"
youtube-dl -o $TMP $1
if [ $? -ne 0 ];then rm -f $TMP;fail "Error while getting ($TITLE)"; fi;

TMPWAV=`mktemp`
ffmpeg -y -i "$TMP" -v 0 -vn -f wav $TMPWAV 2>/dev/null
if [ $? -ne 0 ];then rm -f $TMP $TMPWAV;fail "Extracting audio from ($TITLE) failed"; fi;
lame -h --vbr-new -V 4 $TMPWAV "$FOLDER/$TITLE.mp3"
if [ $? -ne 0 ];then 
  rm -f $TMP $TMPWAV;
  fail "Encoding of ($TITLE) failed";
else 
  notify "Ripped $TITLE for your pleasure at $FOLDER/$TITLE.mp3" 
fi;
rm -f $TMP $TMPWAV

#A2ilta

Pikkulintu kertoi televisiosta tulleen keskustelua sosiaalisesta mediasta(#A2ilta). En omista televisiota ja katsonkin yleensä keskustelua herättäneet ohjelmat YLE Areenasta. Keskustelussa oli mukana kirjava joukko vaihtelevin määrin sosiaaliseen mediaan tutustuneita ja sen omaksuneita. Viimeksi valtapuolueiden miehittämiä vaalipaneeleita seuranneena huomasinkin, että asiassa pysyttiin huomattavasti paremmin. Kuitenkin ehkä liian laaja keskustelijoiden kirjo johti siihen, ettei aiheita päästy ihan kunnolla käsittelemään.

Mitä tulee nopeatempoisen informaatiovirran osaan ihmisten tyhmistymiselle, pidän argumenttia hieman samana, kuin mitä ollaan sanottu televisiosta. Väittämä, että sosiaalinen media taikka internet tyhmistäisi meitä on kuitenkin yksinkertaisuudessaan virheellinen.

Tiedostan, että osa ihmisistä kuuluu siihen ryhmään, jolle ei ole kehittynyt tarpeeksi kykyä todelliseen kriittiseen ajattelemiseen. Tämä joukko ei ole myöskään saanut tarpeellista mediakasvatusta. He kuluttavat materiaalia, jonka pääpainona ei ole sisällön merkitys vaan pelkästään sen viihdearvo. Heille trendi on itse arvo.

Mitä arkipäiväisemmäksi asiaksi uudet sosiaalisen vuorovaikuttamisen välineet ja internet käyvät, sitä kriittisemmin niihin myös suhtaudutaan ja niiden ilmiöistä muodostetaan myös omia asiantuntijamielipiteitä. Nykytilanne on sellainen, että päästäkseen ryhmään, joka osaa taitavasti käyttää tämän päivän digitaalisia työkaluja tulee itse olla motivoitunut oppimaan niiden käyttöä ja tulee olla kykyä tietää, mikä on oleellista. Ilman kykyä hallita internetissä tarjottavien palveluiden käyttöä on vaarana, että tietämättömyyttään ja harkitsemattomuuttaan yksittäinen ihminen kokee omien tekojensa haittavaikutuksia kuten ajan menetys tai pahemmassa tapauksessa oman julkisen kuvan arvon lasku.

Kriittinen median kuluttaja on nirso sen suhteen, mitä kuluttaa. Esimerkiksi tietoisesti vältää aineistoa, joka on selvästi esitetty houkuttelevaan sävyyn käyttäen vetoavia avainsanoja, jotka useimmiten liittyvät johonkin tunteita herättäviin asioihin. Taitavasti sosiaalisia medioita käyttäessään kriittinen kuluttaja osaa seurata oleellisen tiedon polkuja ja hakea tietoa, jota hän reaalimaailmassa tarvitsee. Kriittinen kuluttaja näkee markkinoitsijoiden temppujen läpi ja kiertää ne. Jos tieto ei ole tarpeeksi suoraan tarjottu, nettinatiivi ymmärtää kyseessä olevan jotakin hämärää ja osaa hakea tarvitsemansa muualta.

Mitä tulee tietotekniikan opetukseen ja mediankasvatukseen kouluissa, mikä li se on oppisuunnitelman mukaista se on eittämättä aina vuosia perässä. Toivoisinkin, että vastuuta oppituntien sisällöistä koskien näitä nopeasti kehittyviä kenttiä annettaisiin enemmän tuntiopettajille. Liian usein on kuullut selityksen opetuksen puutteisiin siitä, että "tämä on ja tätä ei ole oppisuunnitelmassa, näistä on isommat tahot päättänyt".

Nykyiset raskaat hierarkiat, kuten valtion kokoiset koneistot kärsivät niihin sisään rakennetusta inertiasta. Niiden hitaus aiheuttaa sen, että päätökset, jotka tulevat voimaan nyt ovat nykyiseen maailmanmenoon sovellettuina vanhentuneita. Opettajilla voisi vaikka olla, jokin foorumi missä keskitetysti voisivat pysyä perillä ajankohtaisista asioista ja päivittää tietonsa.

The end is near! Repent!

NOK took a -14,11% hit today and I sure would have wanted to be buying some warrants. (Where's a flux capacitor when you need one?) Instead of going forward with Meego an announcement was made that Nokia will be focusing on Windows Mobile 7 from here on. Hearsay says Nokia will be offering only one Meego powered phone this year.

This sounds a bit insane. After putting all those resources to develop and acquire technologies that enable Nokia to offer Meego they are just not using them. Who builds a house and just when it's about to be finished goes and burns it down? No wonder there has been some changes in the list of employed.

I've tried Meego on a laptop and as a current Fedora user I was just blown off my feet. If the mobile version of Meego has any resemblance to that they're throwing away gold.

YouTube true fullscreen video in linux

I got tired to buggy playback with flash player and the inability to play fullsize fullscreen video. Here is a little script designed to improve the quality of life.

What it does is first get the url of the video and then start downloading it. Once it fills the predefined buffer set in the script or the download finishes, it will start playing the video.

If the youtube-dl script from a repository doesn't work try getting it straight from here: http://rg3.github.com/youtube-dl/

For pure lazyness I also made a desktop icon where I can drag an url and it will automagically start playing the video.

Try it. It's good. :)

---

Setting up the script in Fedora

sudo su
yum -y install youtube-dl 
wget -O /usr/local/bin/youtube-play http://sebastianmaki.fi/files/youtube-play
chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/youtube-play

/usr/local/bin/youtube-play

#!/bin/bash
#youtube-player by Sebastian Mäki

if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
 echo "Usage: $(basename $0) \$URL"
exit 0;
fi


PLAYER_NAMES="gnome-mplayer gmplayer mplayer"

for PLAYER_CANDIDATE in $PLAYER_NAMES; do 
 if which $PLAYER_CANDIDATE > /dev/null; then 
  PLAYER=$PLAYER_CANDIDATE; 
  break; 
 fi;
done;

BUFFER=$((1024*1024*2)) #initial buffer size 2MB


TMP=`mktemp`
COOKIES=`mktemp`
rm $COOKIES

URL=$(youtube-dl --cookies=$COOKIES --get-url $1)

wget -q --load-cookies=$COOKIES -O $TMP $URL &
PID=$!

SIZE=0;
while [ $SIZE -lt $BUFFER ]; do
 if ps -lp $PID > /dev/null; then 
  SIZE=$(stat -c%s $TMP)
 else
  SIZE=$(($BUFFER+1))
 fi
 sleep 1;
done;
$PLAYER $TMP
kill -9 $PID
rm -f $TMP $COOKIES

Youtube-Player.desktop <-- put this shortcut file to your desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Terminal=true
Name=Youtube Player
Name[fi_FI]=Youtube Soitin
Name[sv_SE]=Youtube Spelare
Exec=youtube-play %U

Icon=/usr/share/icons/YouTube_icon.png