Category Archives: Technology

Really everything related to technology

Open Source, Technology

Snaxx v18

Me and my fellows of the Haxx tribe have been arranging the Snaxx series of gatherings for about eight years by now and on this Wednesday the 19th of March 2008 it is time for the 18th meeting. We gather up in a dark pub in Stockholm to talk tech, work, open source and similar crap with similar-minded people while going through the beers of the place.

Since several of us in Haxx are pretty much into ales, porters and stouts we tend to prefer places with a large selection of that kind of beer, both on draft and on bottle.

We tend to be somewhere around 10 to 15 friends, but I really prefer if you mail me and tell me if you intend to come so that we can arrange properly to deal with the amount of people that show up. We’re basically all friends and friends of friends.

So if you’re a friend and in Stockholm, welcome!

Electronics, Rockbox

Secrets are hard to keep

On the web, it seems more or less everything is eventually getting out and gets accessible for people to download and see. You can fight hard and make a real effort but as we keep seeing, lots of secrets get revealed in the end anyway.Data Sheet for a technical thing

The other day a friendly fellow joined the Rockbox IRC channel and pointed out a russian site full of iriver goodies such as service manuals, firmwares and perhaps most importantly: circuit diagrams for just about all (somewhat older) iriver models, including the H10, H100, H300 series and more.

I wish we had these before when the Rockbox ports for these targets were younger, but I’m sure they’ll still come handy to some people now as well.

(Now I won’t reproduce the link here just to not make the traffic too hard on that site and to avoid getting into problems for linking to content that is clearly dubious legal-wise, but you don’t have to be a genius to find the link yourself.)

Electronics

Tonium’s Pacemaker has little point

1 Comment

I happened to read an article on idg.se (in Swedish) that talks about the people behind the company Tonium and their portable music device called “Pacemaker“.the pacemaker

The description on the site says: “the world’s first pocket-size DJ-system – a superior portable music player enabling the playing of two tracks simultaneously, equipped with an extensive range of professional audio manipulation features allowing for creative mixing between two independent channels. Any mix created can be saved for legal sharing. ”

Having been involved and hacked on portable music players for a few years by now, I can’t but to wonder exactly who this is targeted for and what they are supposed to do with it? I do like the pictures on their site showing business-style persons using it, but why on earth would any ordinary human want to mix songs while on the go?

The IDG article says (translation by me) that (talking about Jonas Norberg the CEO) “it was in January 2005 when he realized that the computing power required to playback video should suffice to play back two simultaneous audio streams“. Yeah – and that was all we had to know in order to quickly see that this guy certainly is not an engineer… 🙂

Of course, there’s also this possibility than I’m just an old grumpy whiner.

IT Politics, Network

The IPv6 failure being joined by DNSSEC?

2 Comments

In case you haven’t read it before, Randy Bush‘s 55 page PDF slide show named “IPv6 Transition & Operational Reality” is a harsh (but quite accurate) description of how the IPv6 protocol was made, where some of its major problems lie and why the transition is going so slow etc.

I tried to find some official and recent figures or statements from some of the more IPv6-positive people and companies, but I failed to find much updates from after the year 2000 or so…

Speaking of network things that aren’t so successfully deployed: DNSSEC. Apparently iis.se (runs the Swedish TLD) tested 10 broadband routers (article and PDF in Swedish only) how well they support this (I believe mainly because .se tries to be a pioneer in DNSSEC), and 7 of the tested ones failed… Personally I’ve never liked the fact that DNSSEC isn’t really crafted to do it securely all the way.

Electronics

Wiimote head tracking and touch stuff

WiimoteI was shown these Johnny Lee youtube videos of his remarkably cool wiimote hacks and I feel an urge to make sure you lot don’t miss out these gems:

Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the WiiRemote

and

Low-Cost Multi-touch Whiteboard using the Wiimote

They really make me want one of these to play with. Unfortunately, all the software Johnny’s done for this that is available on his site seems to be C# for Windows! ;-(

Technology, Web

Tracking Swedish officials’ web use

1 Comment

I thought I’d just mention Patrik Wallström’s interesting project named Creeper. He basically offers a URL for an image to display on the site you run/admin, and then his server checks which IP addresses that gets the image and then cross-checks those addresses against a list of IP ranges of known swedish organizations, government agencies, political party headquarters and more.

An ingenious way to get some degree of knowledge about who looks at what and when. At least if a large enough amount of people display the Creeper icon: Creeper icon

IT Politics, Technology, Web

HTML is all downhill from here

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Ok, so we’re now officially over the hill. HTML4 was as good as we could make HTML, and the proof of this is the mighty insane and crazy mess W3C shows in their HTML 5 draft from January 22nd 2008.W3C logo

I mean, you can possibly (I mean if you hold on to your chair hard and really really try to extend your mind and be open) show sympathy and understanding for far-fetched stuff like “ping” and “prefetch” (or for that matter “author” and “contact”), but when they come to editing, drag-and-drop and how to deal with undo they certainly lost me. My favorite chapter in the draft is however this:

Broadcasting over Bluetooth

It takes a while just to suck up the concept of a HTML draft discussing broadcasting data. Over bluetooth. Man, these guys must have the best meetings!

Mail, Open Source

My Antispam Measures

2 Comments

I get a fair share of spam. I have something like 10 working private email addresses, I’m listed as recipient in numerous email aliases and they all end up in the same physical mailbox where I read them. I’ve also had my existing emails for many years and I’ve shown and used them publicly on the internet all the time. I’m a major spam email target now. A good day I get just 2000 spams, but bad days I’ve been well over 13000 spam emails.A can with spam

My biggest friends in this combat are: spamassassin and procmail.

I’ll describe how I have things setup, not as much as to inspire others but more to be able to get feedback from you on how I can or perhaps should improve my setup to get an even better email life.

  • I consider all mails with spam points >= 3 to be spam. I’ve also tweaked my spamassassin user_prefs to be harsher on (pure) HTML mail and a few other rules, and I’ve added a couple of my own rules to catch spams that previously did slip through a little too easy.
  • First, I filter out mail from trusted mailing lists that have their own antispam measures.
  • I catch what appears to be bounces (I have a huge regex) and if it looks like a bounce to an address I don’t send email from I nuke it immediately (and those could be a true bounce are saved in a dedicated mbox)
  • I have a white-list system that marks all incoming mails from previously marked friends as coming from a friend.
  • Mails from non-friends are passed through spamassassin. Those with spam points higher than N are put in the ‘hispam’ folder – of course with the intention that these are very very very unlikely to every have any false positives and can almost surely be deleted without check. N is currently 10 but I ponder on lowering it somewhat. Spams with less points than N are put in the ‘spam’ folder, and I need to check that before I kill it because it happens that I get occasional false positives that end up there.
  • So, mails that aren’t from friends (or from a trusted mailing list) and aren’t marked as spam are then stored in the ‘suspicious’ mailbox
  • Mails from friends or from trusted lists go directly into my mailbox, or into a dedicated mailbox (for lists with somewhat high traffic volumes).
  • Oh, a little additional detail: I “mark” my own outgoing mails with an additional custom header with no point whatsoever but to be able to detect when someone/something sends me mail using my own address…

My weakest point in all this right now is the fact that I don’t spam-check white-listed mails at all, so spams that are sent to me using my friends’ email addresses go through and annoy me.

BTW, I did use bogofilter in the past and for a while I actually ran both in parallel (both trained with rougly the same spam/ham boxes for the Bayes stuff) but quite heavily testing I performed at that time (a few years ago) showed that spamassissin caught a lot more spams than bogofilter, while bogofilter only caught a few extra so I dropped it then.

Mail, Open Source

Shootout cancelled for now

Yeah, I wasn’t thinking clearly when I started this test at this time, as I then had mail servers taken down and replaced and what not, and all that extra bouncing-around of mails no doubt will affect what ends up or not in my (spamassassin) end so I’ll just stop the test right now and once everything is settled again I may restart it. If the mood and energy for it returns!

Mail, Open Source

The spamassassin gmail shootout

I’ve seen and heard so many people saying good things about gmail’s spam filter, and yet the few times I’ve redirected some of my (fairly large) mail feed through gmail I’ve not been that impressed. So, Igmail logo decided I’d fire off a test. I forward a good deal of my mail through both my local spamassassin-protected mailbox and to my gmail account and I do some detailed notes about what happens. It’ll be fun.