Bjørn Stabell 白熊

In his article Jacky explained how to easily drill holes through to ports on machines behind a firewall. What I normally want is to have ssh access to machines behind firewalls, allowing me to do scp, and easily ssh in without a stupid stop-over on the firewall machine.

I came across this solution that does exactly that. After the super-simple set-up I’m able to do:

All that’s required is to tweak your .ssh/config. Mine looks like this on my laptop:

Warning: This is a rant.

With wifi came the promise of being online (almost) anywhere, but due to incompetent or misdirected implementation and management, it’s pretty much a patchwork of extremely unreliable networks. My experience is that there’s a 30-40% chance of actually being able to get online at an access point.

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This post shows how name components, which one is sorted on, and which one is normally used, vary around the world. The Chinese section is a bit weak as it doesn’t mention common titles such as 老毛 and 小毛, and the common use of nicknames, often by doubling given name characters like 东东, but the author gets his point across. Maybe it’s time to just use a full name field, and perhaps a field for an alias or preferred shorter name?

The most interesting and eye-opening talks at EuroPython 2007 were probably Arlo Belshee’s talks on agile methodologies and his team’s experiments and results in that regard. The following blog posts summarizes what I learned from listening to his talks, doing his XP workshop, discussions with him, and digging up related information on the web (such as a paper and a podcast). I strongly believe this could be the next phase in how we develop software, and I hope I’ll be able to whet your aptetite for change as well

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I have good luck with this trick on several Sony Ericssons (including W800i and now K800/K800i):

• edit ABDeviceCommandSets.plist in the /Applications/Address\ Book.app/Contents/Resources/Telephony.bundle/Contents/Resources/ directory with the editor of your choice
• find K700 and create an identical line underneath it, replacing K700 on the new line with your (hopefully compatible) model number; in my case I added two lines, one for K800 and one for K800i, just to be sure

Restart the AddressBook, and SMS away.

In early May 2007 something amazing happened. Hollywood’s most guarded secret, the key to decrypt HD-DVDs, was found and released on the Internet, via the site digg.com. At first Kevin Rose, the Digg founder, felt pressured by Hollywood lawyers to take down the key, but this made Digg users go completely ballistic, and in the end Kevin posted the code himself saying something to the sort of “this may be the end for us, but at least we went down fighting” (see original post). The key in hex, in case you wonder, is:

09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0

Even the iphone didn’t generate this much attention, the blogsphere was flooded with reactions from the two factions: “digg surrenders to mob” and “the truth will not be silenced”. I’m afraid I, with most techies and new media people, belong with the last group that thinks DRM is the Next Big Evil.

People went out of their way to spread the code, to the point of creating songs. The first song wasn’t really that good, but then Geoff Smith created a song called “Digg the Code” that Cali Lewis of the GeekBrief.tv podcast put video on…. What can I say, it’s awesome:

There are currently more occurences of this “secret code” on the net than there are HD-DVD players in the world.

I’m a slow reader, but I’ve found a way to catch-up: podcasts.

Of the podcasts I’ve listened to recently, these two were really interesting. Both were from the excellent IT Conversations and they talk about how these very successful startups came about. The John Newton one also talks a lot about open source business models in an industry that’s quite dear to me: content management.

• Caterina Fake: The History of Flickr
• John Newton - Technometria: Enterprise Content Management Systems

I never really got into web browsing on the phone, especially not without a qwerty keyboard; it’s just too painful to type in those long URLs.

But, the other day I was just idling waiting for someone for dinner, and I thought I’d try Google Reader, which is Google’s web based RSS/Atom reader; I use it as my RSS reader when I’m on the Mac, and I’m quite happy with it.

Turns out (no surprise, I guess) that Google Reader has a mobile version. Unlike their Google Mail for mobile, this is not a Java app, it’s just a different set of templates that fit better for a smaller screen. It worked… really well! Time passed quickly. Try it out!

“Let’s head out for a coffee”, my girlfriend Ivana said, thereby setting in motion an incredibly journey on this, the first day of 2007.

As usual, we caught a cab outside of our apartment building, Heqiao, heading first to Pacific Coffee at Fortune Plaza. They were, as many other places on January 1st, not working today. We continued in the same taxi to our second most favorite coffee shop, Sculpting in Time out by Lidu.

Finally inside SiT, Ivana made a face of terror, “where’s my phone?!”. That would be her Sony Ericsson 810c which her company had finally, after 3 months of waiting, awarded her for coming up with the winning names for their conference rooms. She’d just gotten the phone two weeks ago and was deeply in love with it.

We had neither a fapiao, the driver’s number, nor the license plate number. About the only thing we remembered was that the cab was from a taxi company called 海-something, which means sea-something, and that it was white and green… or… wait, maybe it was green and yellow?

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As a software/data guy I always dream of abolishing physical boundaries so everything can be in software, virtualized. Besides a computer and a place to sit, what do you need to work?

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