Category Archives: Technology

Really everything related to technology

cURL and libcurl, Technology

Recent and Current Hardware Problems

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During the last week or so, we’ve experienced major problems on some of the main servers at work, and I happen to host a bunch of services on them. Thus, I not only get problems to access my regular mail, but also the primary curl web site gets shaky!

Unfortunately, this is holiday season so most people that can fix these issues aren’t around so waiting for a reboot of the boxes can take a long time. Fortunately, we already have work in progress that is meant to replace the two main servers with two new ones on January second 2008, so things should at least settle after that operation.

cURLSo, remember that you can always find a suitable curl web mirror at curlm.haxx.se that has most of the contents you’ll need. Some stuff is only provided on the main site, but all downloads, docs and more are distributed on mirrors.

cURL and libcurl, Network, Open Source

Tunneling with libcurl

As I wrote a while ago, companies using http proxies make people feel a need to break out of their proxies.

Bryan is a friend who recently found out that his company is switching proxy to a different one and apparently both corkscrew and proxytunnel have problems with this new piece, and since libcurl offers quite a lot of functionality to accomplish almost this, a new project was born: curltunnel.libcurl

One immediate benefit of using libcurl is the support for multiple authentication methods, in fact more than any of the above mentioned tools.

However, it seems our first quick stab at making this tool (currently 278 lines of code), made it work for several common cases but… not for Bryan’s new proxy.

The current theory is that the proxy actually checks for SSL traffic and only lets that through, and thus it prevents the ssh server banner to appear when we try to tunnel through the proxy to a remote ssh server on port 443. If further testing proves this correct, we will of course have to add a SSL layer to the mix.

Electronics, Rockbox

Sansa V2 and View Roundup

There’s been eager activity in the Rockbox forums lately, and I’ve also had help from friendly guys over at anythingbutipod. But now things are much clearer on the Hardware front of many of the recent SanDisk Sansa players:

Sansa ViewSanDisk has released new or updated mp3 players this autumn, named Sansa View, Sansa e200 v2, Sansa c200 v2, Sansa m200 and Sansa Clip. I’ve summed up the situation on the pages those links take you.

All models except the View use the same main SoC chip now, the AS3525. Funnily, the new m200 isn’t called v2 or anything but it is still totally new hardware compared to the older model called… m200!

There’s no docs available for the AS3525 (yet), and the firmware format for it is still not figured out. There’s lots of work to be done, so we really can use all the help you can offer!

Technology

Better Photos From An Angle!

Stockholm from above at a 45 degrees angleWe’ve been spoiled by nice photos from above from services like Google Maps, but here in Sweden that service never really even got close to match what Hitta.se and Eniro have offered. Google’s service is and always have been too US-centric for us Swedes.

I’ve considered Hitta to be the Swedish leader in this race, with their street level photos of buildings for addresses you search for etc, but now it seems Eniro has taken this one step further up the ladder as now they no longer only provide very detailed photos taken from above, they now also offer very cool photos taken from a 45 degrees angle!

Also, it seems the new “utsikt” photos (which translates to “view” in English) are taken closer to the ground as I can view my own house and neighborhood even closer using this service. The only downside with this service is that it is painfully slow. I can see that I get very slow transfers and my computer is idling so it can’t be much else than underpowered servers in their end!

Electronics

MapShare part II – not the last episode

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Tomtom ONEContinued from Tomtom MapShare.

I bought a new shiny 2GB SD card (which btw made me realize how dirt cheap these things are nowadays) and inserted it into my Tomtom ONE only to find out that backups done with the previous version of “Tomtom HOME” (their windows-only PC-based management tool) weren’t recognized, so I had to put back the old SD card again, make a backup, swap back to the new card and restore the backup.

Then I could buy a version 7 Scandinavian map from Tomtom (4o Euros) and yes, the MapShare options are now available and I also enabled the “correction” button for the main screen to allow me to tap it to make corrections as I go. Now I’ll just need to find places to go to where corrections are needed. A bit dissapointing fact is that I’ve selected options to get other people’s corrections even those that aren’t Tomtom-verified (as long as “multiple persons” did the correction), but the tool just says there are no corrections available for me!

Are there really no corrections done? I find that hard to believe, but I’ll give this the benefit of a doubt for a while. Anyone reading this who made a correction on the Tomtom-provided Scandinavian v7 map? I’m curious if the corrections are based on maps or just on positions, since I would guess that their “Western Europe” map will have the same flaws and mistakes as the “Scandinavia” map does…

Open Source, Technology

Data Sheet Leakage

Irony is part of life.

Data Sheet for a technical thingOne of the “secret” kind of manufacturers out there which refuses to provide docs to their chips unless you sign an NDA and God-knows-what, requires a user name and a password on their web site before they hand out docs. It turned out they only protect themselves using javascript so you can just read the HTML pages and the embedded javascript in them to figure out the exact URLs to use and wham, the data sheets are downloadable…

No, I won’t tell you the exact company nor site (or even exactly when this was discovered or tested) since then they might discover this and fix. I’ve tried this myself and it works fine, but I was not the one who figured it out.

Yeah, this is a moral dilemma: should we tell the manufacturer about their problem and thus close the doors for users to get this docs? Or would that risk backfiring on the guy(s) that tell them? What would you do?

Electronics, Linux

More Phone Hacking Fun

With Google’s just announced Open Handset Alliance, I figure the chances of getting a phone that’s possible to hack and improve just suddenly increased a lot!Open Handset Alliance

Android is a project by the alliance, claimed to be an open source, Linux-based, platform for core and applications for mobile phones – “a complete mobile phone software stack”. They promise an “early look” of the SDK on November 12, so I figure that can be interesting. The SDK is supposed to be a free download and will contain all the docs. It could potentially mean some fun coming up soon!

It is cool to see both Samsung and Motorola from the handset world joining the band wagon, and also interesting and not the least surprising to see that Sony Ericsson and Nokia aren’t there…

Electronics

WQUXGA really

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LCD monitorI know this is a dear subject for many people but I feel I just have to spell it out after having read this engadget notice about Toshiba’s new 3840 x 2400 22″ LCD screen. They call this a WQUSGA resolution!

Man, can they please stop the silly WQZUXZQGA names for the screen resolutions? I’m a hardcore tech geek myself but I lost track of those weird resolution names a long time ago and I want pure resolution numbers in good old width x height style!

My 1600 x 1200 20″ screen does seem a bit old fashioned in comparison! (and no, I don’t know the name of this resolution either!)

Mail

gmail hiccups

gmail is fancy and offers lots of space

gmail is often praised these days by people all over, and yeah it is a neat web app and the amount of disk space they offer for this free service is daunting!gmail logo

I do however have several arguments against using gmail that make me not using it myself for anything that is critical.

gmail blocks zip files

The main and major complaint can be phrased like this:

(reason: 552 5.7.0 Illegal Attachment p9si2809195fkb)

That’s the exact message gmail includes in the reject mail when I try to mail my own account with a zip file attached. The zip file itself is perfectly harmless (and contains source code).

I actually get completely legitimate zip files from people every now and then, perhaps even once per week or so and having it reject these mails without even properly explaining why to the user is quite a show-stopper!

gmail spam filter is inferior

The other issue I have with gmail is its annoying spam filter. This too is often claimed to be one of the better things with gmail, and given that they have millions of users and can do pretty detailed statistics on received mails they do have the opportunity to make a decent filter.

But, given that the spam filter is one huge you-have-no-choice-but-our-way there’s no way for me to alter configs, tweak it for my specific spams or make it better deal with the false positives that it picks. And I’ve had it catch far more false positives than my regular spamassassin filter on my main mail account and then I get probably a thousand times more mail and spam on that account.