citizen428.blog()

Lately a lot of my working time is spent on cloud technologies, most notably the Amazon Web Services. In recent month I compiled a rather comprehensive list of cloud-related links which I now decided to share with you all.

Cloud Links

It’s just a markdown file copied into a Gist, so if you want to add any links just fork away!

While browsing through my Delicious bookmarks the other day, I realized that over time I had accumulated quite a few dead links (about 5% of my collection). I then looked for a simple tool to automatically remove them, but couldn’t find one that appealed to me, so I wrote my own script called unsavory which you can find on GitHub:

http://github.com/citizen428/unsavory/tree/master

It uses HTTParty to generate a list of all your bookmarks, which then get checked individually with Net::HTTP. Every link that returns an HTTP status code of 404 will automatically be removed (no questions asked, no undo), links with a status code other than 200 (OK) won’t be changed but will display some information in case you want to fix them manually. Here’s some example output (links anonymized for this post):

  Enter Delicious username: citizen428
  Enter Delicious password: *********


  citizen428 has 664 bookmarks.
  Processing URL #0001: OK
  Processing URL #0002: OK
  Processing URL #0003: OK
  Processing URL #0004: OK
  Processing URL #0005: OK
  ...
  Processing URL #0013: 405: http://...
  ...
  Processing URL #0074: 302: http://...
  ...
  Processing URL #0086: Connection reset by peer – https://...

Not bad for under 60 lines of code. I hope this is useful to some of you, I do have some features I plan on adding to this in the future.

Today I found this excellent Flash animation on the Metalab members mailing list, which may prove to be a great help in raising your non-techy friends awareness of privacy issues. Unfortunately it’s in German only…

http://www.trashhero.ch/redirect/1881.html

Pungenday, Chaos 28, 3173 YOLD

...some random stuff I wanted to blog about for quite some time already:

• *Pearl Jam concert (September 25th@“Wiener Stadthalle”:http://www.stadthalle.com/): I have to admit that I’m not the biggest PJ fan, but since Silvia was nice enough to invite me (thanks by the way!), I went to see one of the best concerts in a long time! The band and the atmosphere was great and I was quite surprised to see the traditionally rather lame crowd in Vienna so excited! (pics@flickr)
• *Internet Explorer on Linux: As we all know, IE sucks donkey balls. But some sites who don’t care about standards – and whose developers definitely should be first against the wall when the revolution comes – only work with Microsoft’s browser. But don’t despair, help is available in form of IEs4Linux, a shellscript which downloads IE and automatically configures Wine for it. Flash 9 is also included and if you really insist on it, you can run 3 different versions of IE at the same time (5, 5.5 and 6), which is pretty handy for web developers. I have IE6 installed on my Kubuntu system for quite a while now, and in the rare cases I really need it, it works like a charm.
• *Pokerstars client on Linux: Most online Poker sites don’t seem to be interested in Linux users, since the clients they offer are mostly only available for Windows. Some of them at least offer Java clients, but with my general dislike for most things Java and my strong preference of Pokerstars over other Poker sites, I gave the client a shot under Wine and was really pleased to find out that it just works™. Of course it would be much nicer to have a native client, but for the time being I’m happy enough with this workaround.
• *UEFA cup Pasching vs. Livorno@Pasching: Went with some other Sportclub fans to see the UEFA cup match Pasching vs. Livorno in Pasching. It was a great day, and I still laugh my ass off when I think about the policemen and -women who found our little group of around 25 people rooting for the away team (as Austrian you were only able to buy tickets for the home sectors) so frightening, that they not only surrounded us for the whole match, but even put on their riot gear. And there I was, thinking every policeman in Austria already knows that we are only dangerous to ourselves.
• *man pages: Read them! You know you should! Even if you believe you know an application. E.g.: “man sshd”, section “AUTHORIZED_KEYS FILE FORMAT”. Or am I really the only person who didn’t know about all the useful options like “from”, “command”, “no-port-forwarding”, “no-pty” etc.?

• *Mac stuff: Here’s some cool widgets and plugins which make the OS X experience even nicer: iTunesShut, VI Input Manager, Application Update Widget (thanks Moose!), AppleScript Shell, Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes
  

Last but not least here are some funny/interesting things I found over the past few weeks:

• Programming Language Inventor or Serial Killer (via metalab-members)
• Robot chicken: Great stop motion animation. Examples: 1, 2, 3 (thanks colo!)
• ELP Laser Turntable: bonki posted this a while back, but I never came around to post it here.
• Bruce Schreier facts: ‘cause Chuck Norris isn’t as cool as Bruce! And as we all know: Bruce Schneier tapdances in Morse Code. (via berq)
• China Makes a Sexy, Slutty Robot: What can I say… (thanks m3)

Since I was pretty busy with personal stuff during the last few days, I hadn’t noticed that two days ago German authorities started confiscating Tor middleman servers. That changed when earlier today I received an email from the owner of a confiscated system, who wants to get in touch with other Tor admins, in order to start a kind of “Knowledge Base” for people who were affected by the recent confiscations or who (still) want to set up their own Tor server. Since I’m also running such a baby (which never was an exit node though) on a virtual server in Germany, I’m of course interested in this recent development, so I want to share the informative links provided in his mail with you.

Articles/postings about the confiscations:
Anonymisierungsserver bei Razzia beschlagnahmt (German)
Staatsanwaltschaft beschlagnahmt Anonymisierungs-Server (German)
Erfolgreicher Schlag gegen die Privatsphäre (German)
Wie man die Anonymisierung kriminalisiert (German)
Re: confiscating middleman-tor-nodes [1], [2] & [3] (English)
Staatsanwaltschaft geht gegen Tor-Server vor (German)

General info on Tor/anonymity:
TOR web site (English, German and more)
Wikipedia article on Tor (English, German)
Sicher und anonym im Internet mit Proxys (German)
Onion Routing und Tor (German)
TheOnionRouter/OperationalSecurity (English)

Tor network overview:
Tor Network Status
Current Tor routers

Don’t get me wrong, child pornography is one of the worst crimes I can think of, and I wish the German authorities all the best in finding the people they are after. I do however feel that the route taken here wasn’t ideal, as it may well lead to a negative perception of Tor in the general public.

That’s why I’ve tripled the total amount of traffic Tor is allowed to serve on my system and donated some money to the project. I would advise you to do the same! Besides that I also encourage you to use Tor and promote it to other people, because anonymity is something that can’t be gained, only lost.

Pungenday, Bureaucracy 34, 3172 YOLD

While reading netzpolitik.org yesterday, I found a link to an article on the OpenNet Initiative Blog, explaining how the filtering of Google.cn works. Now let’s have a closer look at some of the blocked sites:

site:hrw.org
site:hrichina.org

Human Rights Watch and Human Rights in China. Who is surprised that they get blocked? Nobody? Guessed so…

site:rfa.org

Radio Free Asia describes itself in the following way: “RFA is a private, nonprofit corporation that broadcasts news and information in nine native Asian languages to listeners who do not have access to full and free news media. The purpose of RFA is to provide a forum for a variety of opinions and voices from within these Asian countries.“

site:tsquare.tv

A pretty informative site about the incident on Tiananmen Square in 1989. You really should try to see the documentary, it’s probably the best I’ve seen so far on this topic.

http://64memo.com/

The Tianmen Massacre Memorial Museum. I haven’t read any of the articles on this site yet, so it’s hard to tell how exactly they are dealing with the subject.

site:news.bbc.co.uk
site:voa.gov

Ok, the BBC and Voice of America may not be the most objective news sources one can find in the world, but blocking them seems a little harsh.

site:boxun.com
site:peacehall.com

Both domains will lead you to the Boxun News Network, a site writing a lot about censorship, free speech and similar topics.

site:freechina.net

After having a look at the goals of The Free China Movement, it should be pretty obvious why the Chinese government wants this site blocked.

site:geocities.com

Free web hosting == free expression? It seems so…

site:falundafa.org
site:epochtimes.com

After having been at a conference with participants from these groups I have to say that I don’t feel any sympathy for them, but that definitely isn’t an excuse for locking them up and censoring their sites.

site:savetibet.org

It should be pretty obvious why this got blocked.

site:topforum.com

A dynamic index of Chinese forums websites.

site:laogai.org

Since 1992 the Laogai Research Foundation is trying to gather information on Chinese penal camps and other “systemic human rights violations in China, including public executions, organ harvesting from executed prisoners, the coercive enforcement of China’s population control policy, and persecution of religious believers.“

I guess that sites like the China Labour Bulletin and related worker’s movements get filtered as well, but I can’t personally confirm this currently.

Boomtime, Chaos 27, 3172 YOLD

I just noticed that I haven’t blogged much lately, so the least I can do is put together one of my random link dumps for you:

Tech Stuff:

• FLPR:
  Sure, LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) has proven itself to be a pretty neat platform for web development. However, there are people who disagree with one or more of the choices implied by the acronym, and yours truly is one of them. If you want to learn a little more about alternative technologies head over to FLPR to read up on web development with FreeBSD, lighttpd, PostgreSQL and Ruby on Rails.
• Speaking the Lingo:
  A nice presentation on creating domain specific languages with Ruby
• Why Good Programmer’s Are Lazy and Dumb:
  Ok, almost everybody already knows that good programmers exactly know when to be lazy and dumb, but the article is still a good read for poor folks like me who are lazy and dumb without being overly good programmers…

Fun:

• Semapedia:
  Hyperlinking Wikipedia articles in meatspace is what this cool project is doing. Interesting stuff, as soon as time permits I’ll have to play around with this a little more!
• What’s My Pirate Name?:
  Everyone should have his own pirate name…
• ColdPizza:
  A nice parody of Coldplay’s recent DRM-EULA.
  

Boomtime, Chaos 22, 3172 YOLD

I haven’t blogged for quite some time now, so I decided I could at least entertain you with one of my semi-regular link dumps until I’m motivated enough to write a proper entry again…

Ruby

RadRails: From a rather recent mail on ruby-talk I learned about RadRails, an IDE for (who would’ve guessd) Ruby on Rails which was built using the Eclipse RCP. Unfortunately I didn’t have too much time to play with it yet, but so far it seems to be quite nice and if you’re into Rails you maybe should have a look at this project.

eigenclass: Recently RedHanded kept talking about Mauricio Fernandez’ new blog called “eigenclass”, which talks about a lot of really interesting and advanced Ruby stuff. Definitely an interesting read for every serious Ruby programmer and everyone who wants to become one.

try ruby!: As I found out on poignant-stiffs why is at it again, which means there’s something cool coming up. Despite not involving cartoon foxes or chunky bacon, try ruby is still a really neat project, giving you the opportunity to interactively test Ruby from within your web browser. There’s also a little tutorial, so this site may very well become the first stop to send Nubies to…

Disobey

The Hacktivist: Instead of summing up what the Hacktivist is all about, I’ll just give you the self-description of the project: “The Hacktivist is dedicated to examining the theory and practice of hacktivism and electronic civil disobedience while contributing to the evolution of hacktivism by promoting constructive debate, effective direct action, and creative solutions to complex problems in order to facilitate positive change.“ – Involve yourself!

The World’s Most Populated Countries: Sometimes a new look on things helps changing your perspective in a positive way. That’s why it’s important to take a minute or two to think about this map of the Earth, where all the countries got resized in relation to their population.

Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster: This comes from an open letter to the Kansas school board: “ I am writing you with much concern after having read of your hearing to decide whether the alternative theory of Intelligent Design should be taught along with the theory of Evolution. [...] Let us remember that there are multiple theories of Intelligent Design. I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel. We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him“. Ramen!

Relax

Unintentionally sexual comic book covers: Part 1: If you know The Best Page In The Universe you either love or hate Maddox. No matter to which group you belong, check out this collection of unintentionally sexual comic book covers and have a good laugh! (via hoodwink.d onslaught)

The Website Development Process: Learn everything important there is to know about the process of developing a professional website from platic figurines. (via BoingBoing)

Squidoo: The developers of Squidoo thought that “Everyone’s an expert on something”, so they decided to give all of us the opportunity to share our knowledge in the form of “lenses”. For all of you who are to lazy to look at the FAQ to find out what a lense is, here’s the answer: “ A lens is one person’s (lensmaster’s) view on a topic he cares about. More specifically, a lens is a single web page filled with information and links that point to other web pages, to continually updated RSS feeds, or to relevant advertising. It’s a place to start, not finish. “. Interesting concept, and there are some pretty cool lenses already. (via teemow).

Setting Orange, The Aftermath 53, 3171 YOLD

Once again I try to avoid doing the things I’m actually supposed to do, so here’s another issue of “citizen428’s random tidbits”.

• Principia Discordia: “How I Found Goddess And What I Did To Her When I Found Her. Wherein is Explained Absolutely Everything Worth Knowing About Absolutely Anything“. I’m maybe the last person to find this decent online edition of the Principia, but stuff like this happens when you get abducted by time-travelling dolphins before being right in the middle of a government conspiracy. Or was it just the anual meeting of the Rodeo Clown Society? Fnord!
• 1000 Blank White Cards: “1000 Blank White Cards is a card game, the purpose of which is to create the cards you’re playing with.“. Personally I find this really cool: you start out with white cards, and everybody has to draw his or her own cards. I want to try out this game as soon as possible, and I’ll make sure to tell you about it afterwards…
• Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy: This guide on writing decent SciFi and Fantasy stories is for free, but the author requested that if you like it, you should tell another aspiring writer about it, and buy two of his books. As I currently don’t have the money for the latter, I thought I can at least use my blog to reach some more aspiring writers. (via BoingBoing)
• MouseHole: “MouseHole is a personal web proxy written in Ruby designed to be simple to script. Scripts can rewrite the web as you view it, altering content and behavior as you browse. Basically, it’s an alternative to Greasemonkey, which does similar things from inside the Firefox web browser“. I’ve been playing around with this for around a week now, and I have to say that I really like it. Don’t be afraid, why is involved, so there’s chunky bacon for all!
• The Kawasaki Method and The Takahashi Method: Uncle Lecture needs you! And he surely doesn’t want your average PowerPoint food soldier, but instead he’s looking for highly trained and deadly presentation ninjas. (via I-can’t-remember-but-if-in-doubt-blame-BoingBoing)

• Random geeky stuff: moo.fx – “ a superlightweight, ultratiny, megasmall javascript effects library, written with prototype.js“; meebo – Web 2.0 Instant Messaging. Buzzwordy, but looking nice; Selenium – a test tool for web applications. Selenium tests run directly in a browsers, just as real users do
• Update on cool stuff™: The third episode of NCY2123 has been released and part two of When Sysadmins Ruled the World is up on Cory’s web site. Both rock as usual.

Well, that’s it for today, don’t kill any puppets while I’m away.

...but as I really don’t want to, I thought I might as well entertain my readers with some nice links. Ready, steady, go!

• HAIR’ IS THE HAT: Nothing special to see here, just your regular Jamaican barber who is styling his hair to look like a hat for more than 20 years already. “A di policeman have to tell him seh is mi hair. Him congratulate mi an’ tell mi seh mi have talent”. Word! (blame BoingBoing)
• Yuh did a expect flood ar yuh tek yuh measurement inna wata?: Ever wondered what mister barber from the article linked above is trying to tell you? Then you definitely should try to learn some Patois!
• Tango Desktop Project: Wouldn’t you just love a consistent user experience for free software GUIs? The guys from the Tango Project sure would, so they’re putting a lot of effort into style guidelines, a basic icon library and an icon naming spec. Mi likey! (via Footnotes)
• “BoingBoing – resistance is futile”: They just have too many cool links: Super Mario in 64 costumes, the 1966 Batmobile paper craft or how to build your own Dr. Octopus costume.
• Stefan Landsberger’s Chinese Propaganda Poster Pages: I admit it, I just love communist propaganda posters. Have a look at this really nice collection, and if you happen to have some related links, please send them my way, thanks!
• TiddlyWiki: Not too long ago I found this interesting project, which defines itself as “a reusable non-linear personal web notebook” and “an experimental MicroContent WikiWikiWeb built by Jeremy Ruston. It’s written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript to run on any modern browser without needing any ServerSide logic”. Nifty, eh? Funny enough just a little earlier today someone posted to the Tomboy mailing list, asking if anyone’s working on a way to transfer data to and from TiddlyWiki, which I personally think is a rather cool idea.
• HC Hinterseer: Ok, this is only funny for my Austrian readers, but given that today there are elections taking place in Vienna, you should have a look at the great photoshop tutorial raketa.at has to offer…
• Bibi Blocksberg and Benjamin Bluemchen are Anarchists!: You don’t believe me? Than have a look at this interview (in German) that news magazine “Der Spiegel” featured some days ago.
• Anarchism: Now that I’ve started talking about this topic, I might as well give you some other links from my collection… Anarchist Black Cross, Anarchist FAQ. Wikipedia on Anarchism, Social Anarchism and an interview with Noam Chomsky on Anarchism, Marxism & Hope for the Future. Please note that I’m not trying to encourage anyone to change his political mindset. As long as you’re open-minded and use your brain, I can live with most world-views…
• Taking the Bible literally: Talking about being open-minded: “The radio talk show host Dr. Laura Schlessinger is well known in the USA. She said that her opposition to homosexuality is firmly grounded in biblical law, namely Leviticus 18:22“. I think this humorous open letter is quite a good way to deal with religious fundamentalists like Dr. Schlessinger. Thank god I’m not religious… ;)(German translation). Edit: Hmpf, only minutes after I post this, I find a forums discussion which suggests that the whole letter may be a hoax. Sorry if that’s really the case, but I still find the content kind of amusing.
• So you wanna…: Today I was googling for some information on the top ten most widely spoken languages in the world and ended up on SoYouWanna, a site I instantly fell in love with. Why? Because according to the site’s self definition, it’s all about “teach[ing] you how to do all the things nobody taught you in school“. Given that I consider the greater part of my formal education a complete waste of time (and university is only slightly better), I immediately started reading up on lots of topics, and soon found out that the various articles aren’t only well written, they are pretty funny too! Now go and learn everything you ever wanted to know about faking an appreciation for art, speaking with an Irish accent, curing a hangover or enjoying sushi.

Yeah, time for another random link dump. I’d bet you’ve been waiting for that, haven’t you?

• blog.red667.org: My friend Red started blogging, so I thought I’ll put some pressure on him by giving his site some exposure. Now he just has to write more…
• bonki’s blog: bonki started blogging too, and he definitely should post more often. Entertain me you punk!
• The Ministry of Silly Walks: And now for something completely different…
• An interview with the makers of NYC2123: Not too long ago I’ve blogged about this new cool, free online cyberpunk comic called NYC2123. Here’s an interesting interview with its creators, which at least is something too read until the next episode comes out. (via NYC2123 blog)
• Sewing, a Flickr photoset on sewing: Yes, sewing. Geek sewing! How about a Space Invaders quilt? Or would you prefer Tetris? (via BoingBoing)
• Red Cell: I’ve already blogged about Pardus before, but during the last few month I got pretty addicted to that game, so I ended up doing a website for the alliance I’m in. And yes, I would have other things to do, thanks for asking…

Trusted computing: A great animated short film by Benjamin Stephan and Lutz Vogel. It talks about why TC is a bad idea in a way even your non-nerdy friends and family members will understand, which is really great (via Chaos Update).

Against TCPA: Old but still good. Learn more about TCPA and why you should be opposed to it if you value your personal freedom.

The Cluetrain Manifesto: teemow was blogging about this, so I found that interesting looking book. Amazon reviews tend to agree that the book is a bit repetitive but well worth a read. Now let’s put this on the huge pile of books which has a sign in front of it that reads “Things to read later”.

The C Book: I found a free C book on the web which seems to be pretty good. Not that I’m into C again, but I discovered this while I was looking for something else and thought someone might find it useful…

NYC2123: Interested in well-written and drawn cyberpunk comic under a CC license which can be read on the web for free? Honestly, who wouldn’t be? (via BoingBoing)

Yeah, it’s time for a little update again, so let’s sum up the last week and a half, shall we?

On Friday the 16th I went to Neusiedl with some friends. We arrived at the camping site in the afternoon and had some drinks before going to watch the football match between the Wiener Sportklub and Neusiedl SC. We won that game 2-1 and I can’t remember when was the last time we celebrated a goal as much as we did celebrate the winning goal in this game. Later on we went to see a concert of Austrian Ska band No Head on my Shoulders in the surprisingly nice Bergwerk Neusiedl. The gig was great, and to my surprise the guy playing the guitar is an old friend of mine whom I haven’t seen for years. It’s also worth to note that our friends from Tyrol joined us for the weekend, which maybe explains why the partying continued into the wee hours and my memories are a little vague… And it’s probably also the reason why we spent the greater part of Saturday hanging around and doing nothing, except for a little shopping trip to the outlet center in Parndorf. In the evening we then proceeded to watch the game of Wacker Innsbruck (yes, that’s the way the team should be called) against Mattersburg in terrible rain. I’ve seen many football games under bad weather conditions, but this match definitely is among the worst, especially given that it ended 0-0.

Today is the perfect example of a nice and lazy afternoon, and I just love it! After having a great brunch at HighTea where we had toasties, antipasti, bagles and lots of other really good stuff, I’m just hanging around in front of my PC reading, doing some Gentoo work and generally having a good time. Live can be so easy…

Now let’s see if I have anything interesting to tell you:

DomeBlog:
Blogging after Katrina.

Winston’s Lego Computer:
Lego rocks! (via parasew)

Banshee:
Music management and playback for GNOME.

Griffith:
A movie collection manager.

(THE OTHER) TOP 10 MOST RIDICULOUS BLACK METAL PICS OF ALL TIME

Stockstock Film Festival:
Stockstock is a film festival consisting of short films made entirely from stock footage. We select a limited amount of stock footage and give it to you, your job is to make it into some kind of short video presentation.

h a l f b a k e r y:
A communal database of original, fictitious inventions, edited by its users.