I seem to have a thing for plotting things.

Plot also available in SVG format. Both should be updated vaguely daily.

The primary value of some­thing like Freenet in mostly-​​free coun­tries like Canada would be Wikileaks, I would think. Well there is some of that — for instance there’s a frees­ite devoted to the leaked Sarah Palin emails — but the fact of the mat­ter is that Wikileaks exists in the “real” cen­sor­able Inter­net and it hasn’t been cen­sored. Or at least not yet. There’s been pos­tur­ing that maybe it will be some day, we’ll see. But the fact that it hasn’t been yet takes away a niche mar­ket for Freenet.

Considering the reaction by the world’s governments to the most recent Wikileaks leak, I may have to reconsider Freenet’s role a little bit.

The highlight so far was our rushed trip last night to Regina to see the Rider game: we almost didn’t make it in time to pick up the tickets. It was Jasna’s first time seeing a live CFL game and it was definitely a good one to see, one of the best games of the year. It was a little chilly—around 0°C—but good times anyway. I captured one of the touchdowns!

Anyway today we’re doing pretty much nothing. We went for a walk around the river this morning and we’re going to take a river cruise later this afternoon, but other than that not much of anything. It’s pretty awesome.

There’s this problem of having to have a password for every website you have an account with, which is a serious problem if you have an account on a lot of sites. OpenID was supposed to solve this problem by allowing you to—securely—share one account across multiple sites, but never took off due to a chicken-and-egg problem: almost no one uses OpenID which means almost no sites feel the need to support it. Most web browsers will store passwords for you, but that doesn’t do you any good if you want to access one of your accounts from a different computer.

You can use the same password—or the same few passwords—across multiple sites, but this is actually a real security risk and is something that should be avoided if possible.

So I put together a wee bit of Javascript to help manage passwords. You have to remember one base password—which should not be from the dictionary, but otherwise has no constraints—and from that password it will automatically generate what your particular password is for any given site. Your base password is never transmitted across the network. The generated passwords should hopefully meet the criteria of any site you come across: they all contain one uppercase letter, one punctuation mark and one numeric digit. If some unscrupulous website owner gets your password to one site, it is veritably intractable for them to determine your base password or your password to any other site. And it requires you to only remember one site.

I post it in case anyone finds it useful or wants to use it for their own purposes. If you do want to use it, follow these steps:

1. Steal my HTML document and change around the style, etc., to suit your needs.
2. Find a place to host the HTML document.
3. Come up with a base password, hopefully something harder to guess than “galvatron”.
4. Determine the SHA1 hash of your base password. You can find online SHA1 calculators, but from a security standpoint it would be preferable to calculate the hash on your home computer (e.g., on a Unix-based operating system with OpenSSL installed, one can do something like echo –n “galvatron” | openssl sha1 to calculate the hash).
5. In the HTML document, modify the Javascript variable password_hash according to what you just calculated.

The script will then give you passwords that you should use for sites you sign up for in the future, which you will then never have to remember.

Jasna and I don’t have cable or an antenna for our TV, which means we download everything we watch, or borrow it from friends on rare occasions. My MacBook was starting to run near the end of its useful life as my main work computer—the trackpad was becoming unusable which meant I couldn’t depend on it when travelling—but it’s still got some life in it as a server. It was wireless networking (no cables to string around), uses very little power, is completely silent, comes with media software (Front Row) and comes with a remote control, is really small (less than 2cm tall), which makes it more or less the perfect media server.

The only downside is it was a pain to get shows onto it to watch, as you have to search for the shows manually, download them, then copy them manually over to the server. So, I decided to make a web interface.

Check here for screenshots of the new web interface for the media server. EasyNews, our Usenet provider, provides very handy services like global searches, thumbnails and AutoUnRARing. A big benefit to this is not having to wait until something has finished downloading it before watching it. So far I’ve got services for downloading from Usenet—which is where we get almost all of our TV shows to watch, downloading CFL games from TSN and just uploading individual files from your browser. At some point I need to set up scheduling so that it automatically downloads new episodes of shows when they’re released, but I guess that’s for another weekend.

I’m kind of embarrassed at how proud I am to have actually finished it in a weekend like I’d planned, especially considering I haven’t done any web development in years and years. The astute of you may have noticed I used straight-up CGI instead of technologies the cool kids are using: no love from me for PHP or RoR or Ajax or anything. Since I haven’t put any password security in yet—that’s for another weekend yet—and the box is publicly addressable via IPv6 I’ve had access to the web interface to just within our local network, but if IPv6 takes off some day it’ll be cool to be able to download movies while I’m away from home.

I’ve got a grand total of 3 pictures from the trip and I’m happy with that. It wasn’t the sort of trip to you take to take pictures of. Apparently the park is known for its fossils, but we didn’t go hunting for those, either. We went down to the beach a few times—twice for moonlight swims—and spent most of the rest of our time in our campsite sitting around and talking and enjoying one another. We got a nice campsite with fairly good privacy and shade, and none of the campsites directly around us were taken. It was pretty much the perfect couple of days, only because we were together.

Jasna bought me an e-reader! She actually bought it before we’d planned on going on the trip, but I guess this seemed a good time to give it to me, and give me an easier time reading. It’s a Kobo, which I adore. I’m actually a bit of a freak in that I’m somewhat anti-paper: I often prefer reading on screen to reading on paper; maybe it’s a side-effect of growing up with a computer. The Kobo has a really beautiful display and is easier for me to read than anything I’ve ever read from, CRT, LCD or paper. The display can’t refresh very often—maybe once a second or something like that—and it’s super low-powered which makes it unsuitable for anything but reading, which suits me fine. I have only two complaints: firstly, that the font size is typically too big, but that’s a criticism of the books that are formatted for it, not the device itself; and secondly, that it’s really difficult to skip forward or backward a lot of pages at a time. With paper it’s easy to do a binary search for the page you want, but the Kobo seems determined to make you do a linear search.

I did bring my laptop, but only so I could do just enough work to make my guilt levels fall to the point where I could genuinely relax. It turns out that’s about half an hour, ha! I’m still more or less pleased with how the thesis is progressing.

The first and most important part is to install rtmpdump, a utility which you will use to actually download the video stream. I’m using a relatively ancient version of rtmpdump and I don’t think it matters particularly which version you use.

From there all that is needed is a way to get the rtmp URLs of the game you want. To use the script below, you give it a link to a game you want to download—something of the form http://watch.tsn.ca/cfl-games-on-demand/week-1-alouettes-vs-roughriders/ (one of the best football games I’ve seen in a long time, incidentally)—as an argument. It then extracts the clip IDs for each quarter (including overtime, if needed), determines the rtmp URL for each video clip, and downloads the video files in sequence.

It’s worked well for me but there are certainly no guarantees about it. CTV could break it easily if they so wanted (if you’re reading this, CTV, please don’t be meanies. Let’s be BFFs). The only unfortunate downside to it is that CTV potentially loses out on some advertising revenue. My recommendation is to stare extra hard at the commercials to make up for it on the days you do go out to the bar to watch a game. Heading out to the stadium—at the very least whenever the Riders are in town—would also be a nice way to support the league and TSN for putting games up online.

I intended to run OpenSolaris on it because I quite like the technologies in OpenSolaris. Unfortunately OpenSolaris’s hardware support is very poor, but the laptop I bought looked like it had the highest chances of working, and it was very highly rated by Consumer Reports as well. After trying various OpenSolaris distributions and developer builds, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not going to work, at least not yet. It was probably naïve of me to think I could get my wireless card working under OpenSolaris.

No matter, though! My back-up plan was to run Linux. The last time I ran GNU/Linux as my primary operating system was in 2004. I ran Slackware with a custom built window manager and custom, well, everything, and I stayed willfully ignorant of what was happening with “mainstream” Linux. When it came time to install Linux on this laptop, I went with Ubuntu—as mainstream a Linux distribution as you can get—just because I wanted DVD burning software immediately so I could try yet another OpenSolaris install CD, and Ubuntu seemed like it would have the quickest install time.

I think I’m going to stick with Ubuntu. Setting up everything was so mind-blowingly painless it hardly even feels like Linux anymore. I’m perversely a little mournful about that. I dare say Ubuntu is easier to use (for me) and easier to set up (for me) than OS X is. Wireless, email, instant messaging, Flash, Dropbox, all my development tools, everything is cohesive and is set up in a matter of seconds; it all feels immediately comfortable. Even ZFS, my one source of geek pride, my one deviation from “mainstream” Linux, the one reason I wanted to install OpenSolaris in the first place: set up in a couple seconds and working flawlessly, and still light-years beyond OS X’s Time Machine. Maybe Ubuntu isn’t easier than OS X for the general public, but I’m not the general public so that doesn’t matter much to me.

The plan is to eventually retire the MacBook and turn it into a full-time media player (it’s currently only a part-time media player). I don’t think it’s going to be too long before Ubuntu is my full-time operating system. I never thought I’d say that.