Blog - 3

Yes!

The best-ever time sink is out again!

I'm a huge fan of the GT-series, have been that since the first Gran Turismo was published for PlayStation in 1997. Because the PSX doesn't support racing wheels, I played the game with a NeGcon-controller. Most of you have never heard of it, because it supported only PSX and was discontinued around the time when PS2 was released in year 2000. PS2 has USB-port, which made generic USB 1.1 wheels available to PlayStation/Gran Turismo -world too. NeGcon is one of the weirdest game controllers anybody has ever seen. Its like a normal game controller with swivel in the middle. Twisting the controller makes it possible to act as a steering wheel. It also had three analog buttons in it making throttle and break control reasonable accurate for race gaming.

Fast forward trough GTs 2-6 to GT Sport, which is the latest, best, brighest and first GT for a PS4. The controller I'm using on my PS4 Pro is a Logitech G29, but I'd definitely like to give my NeGcon a go, if the game would support it somehow. Now I'm wasting space for a Wheel Stand Pro, a NeGcon wouldn't require that!

Of course I have to put some miles to my GT Sport, so, not much happening here in my blogosphere.

Today I was helping a friend with his Twitch-stream. Apologies for non-Finnish readers, the stream and accompanying information is in Finnish.

Mr. Larpdog has a pretty cool Twitch-studio:

I've never seen an Elgato Stream Deck before. But having witnessed it being used in a live stream, it sure makes management so much easier.

So, the idea of this particular stream was to assemble a PC and donate it to a follower of the stream. The money (I think 988 €) for the PC parts was donated by other followers.

Entire stream is at https://www.twitch.tv/videos/164849338, and I make brief apperance there in the beginning.

This is what I got from an IPv6-user:

The TLS-handshake succeeds, but after that everything breaks loose. TCP-packets are out-of-order, there are retransmissions. The above packet capture starts at second 23 and there is a failing retransmission at second 53, so obviously there is not much of a service from my website.

There are perfectly working IPv6-users, I have requests from 14 separate IPv6-addresses in log, so it works perfectly for somebody. Ultimately I have no idea what's going on, or how to fix it. If you know, drop me a comment.

I got a disc failure. Luckily the server has a RAID, so no imminent data loss occurred. However, it is a RAID-5 setup, so the system performance was impacted heavily.

Now I transferred the entire system into Microsoft Azure and it seems to be running little bit better. The project was a huge one and I had to tinker with it a lot. I guess I'll have to do a full discosure about that later.

Hopefully this thing stays working this time.

There was bit of a pause in my blogging. Lot of stuff happened during that time and as an end result I moved to Stockholm, Sweden. But hey! Now I have a ton of time to do blogging.

It all started at end of year 2016. My employer at the time was about to be acquired by a big corporation and they asked us if we would relocate and continue working from their Sweden office. I chose to accept their offer and here I am now, in Stockholm.

Around the time the information about the acquisition leaked, I (with the team) spent a while at Stockholm office and rest of the time I just wrapped up my life in Finland.

Anyway, I'll be putting some of my time again to this blog and try to process all the comments I received and even reply to some of them. Thanks for your continued interest in this blog!

Those of you, who celebrate All Hallows' Eve today: have a happy one!

I whipped up my pumpkin knife and carved a very scary(?) looking one for those kids ringing my doorbell for trick or treating.

Update:

This iFixit teardown of a pumpkin isn't how I did it.

I business in Sydney, Australia and I'm sharing some pics I managed to snap with an iPhone. There wasn't too much time for doing any extensive touristing around, but I managed some.

So here goes:

There is a pic of The Bridge, view to harbor from top floor of one skyscraper on Victoria Street, Opera House and Manly Beach.

It's nice to have readers for my blog, but for some reason you're stepped over your boundaries. People who actually know me, know where to reach me, but all of you that I don't, this is addressed to you. For some unknown reason, there has been an influx of contact attempts via various media. I've gotten e-mail to all kinds of addresses, Google+ contacts and all such crap.

I just delete those. Got it?

If somebody sends me a hand written letter tied to a flying pigeon, for that person I will answer. Everybody else: you're just doing it wrong. I'm not a normal person like you. I'm not least bit of curious what you might have to say or offer. I just delete all your incoming attempts in a split second. It is just infeasible for me to even suggest you, that I've received your ill-formed connection attempt.

If you want to contact me, do this:

Write a comment this blog.
Preferably to the blog post, which is most appropriate for your reason to contact me. If none are, just pick one, I don't care that much.

The comments are moderated. They always have been and always will be. There has been a fair amount of spam in the comments, which you have never seen. That's because I don't approve them to be publicly visible. Instead, if you write me a comment with your own e-mail address in it and say: "Hi! I was trying to reach you privately, please don't publish this comment." I have no reason to make that public. Most likely given your polite approach, I will even write you an e-mail to your given address. Yes, it's that simple.

Please consider the fact, that I have other things in my life to do/be/see than stare my inboxes for possibly incoming mail. If you'll be considerate, I'll be too. Thank you!

Some of my avid readers have been dropping me comments on some of my posts asking what's going on. Actually couple of persons contacted me outside this blog and asked the same.

On August I wrote:

It's just that new house with lawn, fence, and all other sorts of construction kept me really busy during summer. Not to mention that my motorcycle had problem with carburetor and when I got that fixed, the alternator broke. Darn!

Wait for the bad weather to kick in, I'll be back with computing-projects after that.

To put it briefly, I just had too much to do and as writing here is something I love to do, but only if it doesn't prevent me doing something more important.

Lately I've had more time to concentrate on the computing for more than my work requires. There are some comments, that require my attention to write new code and to fix my old things. So, I'll get back to them.

Thanks for reading!

I had business in San Francisco and stayed out of my other things to do. Here are some pics:

That's Coit Tower in distance. On the other pic the Alcatraz Island is clearly visible in front of Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco Bay.

In the business center, the Market Street looks like this from 6th floor:

And while having drinks in the 39th floor of San Francisco Marriott Marquis, the night view is something like this:

For those planning to travel to US, my recommendation is to get local SIM-card. The EU-limit of 62,- € will be reached pretty much immediately. The data roaming prices are insane. 1,- € / 50 KiB or similar. The SIMs sold at the airport cost three times more than the going price at the street is. I just went to a local T-Mobile store and got a pay-as-you-go card. Fee for the SIM was $15 and 1 GiB of  LTE transfer was $10, making the total $25. You can charge more gigabytes to the account if you run out.

Last weekend I went for Serendipity software version 2. This caused lot of downtime as the upgrade didn't go smoothly. I also made the entire server almost choke to a crash as my .htaccess / mod_rewrite -trickery caused looping. My Apache tried to loop itself into an exhaustion.

After I got everything back into shape, I got new toys. Especially the back office -side is vastly improved. On the public-side it seems pretty much the same.

While working on the blog I chose to go HTTPS. That seems to be the industry trend, see HTTPS as a ranking signal. While at it I verified my SHA-256 -signed certificate with Qualsys SSL Labs analysis tool. A certificate signed with less bits is considered as "insecure" nowadays as Google Chrome chooses to dislike your SHA-1 or MD5 -signed certs.

Not much has happened here on the blog as I have been busy doing some training and planning abroad.

As the saying goes, "pics or it didn't happen!". Here are the pics:

My hotel is in Nob Hill, but for work I go to SoMa. I didn't have a chance to go to Alcatraz, as the queue is something in the region of 3 months, but I managed to take a nice picture of it from Russian Hill. I don't have the classic Golden Gate picture yet, as it would require renting a car. On the other hand, the Bay Bridge is easily visible throughout the city, including Washington Street where I took the picture of Cable Car Museum. The Also, we had a nice evening get-together and went to see Giants vs. Reds baseball game at AT&T Park. Giants lost 1-3.

Once I get back to home, I'll continue hacking the B593. 

Update 2nd July:
I got back home and here are some more pics:

There are the classic Golden Gate pics you'd expect from anybody who visited San Francisco.

During the last day I had time to do a little pilgrimage:

University of California, Berkeley is the place where BSD Unix was initially written from AT&T's Unix. Nowadays that code runs among other OS X and iOS and most TCP/IP implementations, like the one in your Windows. So, it is a mighty important place. Second pic is a composite from Apple HQ's Apple Store. Every programmer will get the "infinite loop" joke. Since Infinite Loop is a looping street, you can actually take as many loops you want (until security throws you out). Third one is a composite from Google's HQ. There are number of Google bikes for employees to use (not that there wasn't security present when I drove one, typically there are). The last one is from YouTube HQ. It was surprising that it still has an own place and is not embedded into Google Campus.

Btw. In general the pics are of somewhat poor quality. I took them with my iPhone 4S. I didn't want to take my DSLR to a business trip.

Ok. The thing with trackbacks is, that they're used only for spam! Hate it.

Seven years ago it was said that 53% of all pings is spam. Today I'd say 100% of all pings is spam or sping. There is no point in allowing pings or trackbacks.

My blog software is Serendipity. It has following instructions for removing trackback links. Unfortunately the platform is well known and simply removing the links from HTML doesn't do the trick. The "official" word from Serendipity authors is to start using a plugin for managing spam trackbacks. Ok, since all of it is spam why bother!

This is what I put into my .htaccess:

# Deny trackbacks
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} =POST
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} =/comment.php
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} type=trackback
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]

It has three rules in it to deny a POST request into comment.php having parameters type=trackback. A trackback will look like this on my Apache log:

POST /comment.php?type=trackback&entry_id=83 HTTP/1.0

Now the spammers should be gone and stay gone!

It seems that out-of-the-box Serendipity does not support X-Forwarded-For -header. It means that any proxy in between loses original client information.

Here is my suggested patch to fix the issue:

--- serendipity/include/functions_comments.inc.php.orig 2013-01-25 14:10:03.058973150 +0200
+++ serendipity/include/functions_comments.inc.php      2013-05-14 11:34:35.302389894 +0300
@@ -782,7 +782,13 @@

     $title         = serendipity_db_escape_string(isset($commentInfo['title']) ? $commentInfo['title'] : '');
     $comments      = $commentInfo['comment'];
-    $ip            = serendipity_db_escape_string(isset($commentInfo['ip']) ? $commentInfo['ip'] : $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);
+    $ip            = serendipity_db_escape_string(isset($commentInfo['ip']) ?
+                        $commentInfo['ip'] :
+                        (
+                            isset($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR']) ?
+                            $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR'] :
+                            $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']
+                        ));
     $commentsFixed = serendipity_db_escape_string($commentInfo['comment']);
     $name          = serendipity_db_escape_string($commentInfo['name']);
     $url           = serendipity_db_escape_string($commentInfo['url']);

This works on 1.6.2 and 1.7.0.

Looks like running a blog has surpassed e-mail as the means of conveying spam. I wrote earlier about lot of automated comments, but the freemason idiots seemed to stop as they realized that their valuable information is not getting posted.

It does not mean, that I was left alone. Couple of other idiots started the same thing and I had to do something to stop their stupidity. So, I created a personal account at Akismet, there are plenty of information about them and most of the comments are about how using their service stops the spam flood completely. Luckily Serendipity supports Akismet's service out-of-the box and the setup was very simple.

Looks like, they're doing the same thing for blogs as SpamCop is doing for e-mail. And that is, essentially grinding spamming to halt. SpamCop have proven their value, it remains to be seen how effective Akismet actually is.