It is a bill that was signed by the president on August 14, 2008 that, among many other things, would “recommend” that public universities to implement a piracy prevention program. Universities that did not implement a program could be punished by losing funds. I can assure you that this section was added by the lobbyist for the MPAA and RIAA. This is another example of private corporations influencing law that only benefits them. They want the government to withhold funds from itself (public universities), for making it easy for students to pirate movies and music, thus causing lost profits.
I have another proposal for them, this one is for the insurance companies. They should pass a law that would withhold road construction funds from states that don’t implement a program to reduce accidents. Every accident costs the insurance companies money, which is unacceptable. The state should be punished for providing public roads that anyone can cause an accident on.
PS3 had a recent update that allows Google searching directly from the XMB. There is a different UI on this search and I thought it was pretty cool looking. So I decided to create a Firefox 3 Search Plugin for it. I found a developer article explaining how to create OpenSearch plugins for Firefox 3. An example of a search for tree. It works just like the existing Google search with auto suggestions.
Click the down arrow on the Firefox search bar and click Add “PS3 Style Google”.
Download the xml file and save it to %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\searchplugins
In software development there are many factors to consider when making changes to the code. One factor that I get pounded into my head is passivity. At my employer, we define passivity as making changes to a system in a way that does not alter the experience for the consumer. This can apply to behavior of API’s or GUI. We work very hard to make all changes to our code passive, so as to control the ripple effect. Non-passive changes are looked down upon and require approval from all parties involved. The larger your user base and organization the harder this change will be to get approved.
This week Microsoft released Service Pack 3 for Windows XP. It was announced that SP3 will install Internet Explorer 7 and that the user will not be able to use IE6, without uninstalling the SP. I think that Microsoft is trying to force higher adoption rates for IE7. With Vista and IE7 both being released within the last year or so, adoption rates have been extremely low. Enterprises are refusing to replace a product that they don’t feel needs to replacing. It isn’t just the cost of buying a new OS that is halting adoption. Companies need to certify that Vista will work with all the applications that run the company, this takes more time and money. Vista is littered with changes that held up certification at my work for almost a year. We partnered with Microsoft to be an enterprise testing partner for Vista, so we had access to the OS before the general public. Even with that head start, it has been almost a year and less than half of our employees have Vista. The reason for the slow rollout is because not everything we need to run the company works with Vista. It is improbable that we are the only people with this issue. I feel that Microsoft’s non-passive changes to their two latest releases is causing a bitter taste for their users.
How would you feel if you brought your car to the dealership for routine maintenance and when returned, it wasn’t in the same condition as you left it? Instead they had cut a hole in the roof and installed a sunroof with poor sealing that caused leaks. Then they replaced your wheels with shiny new bling spinners, sure they might look nice, but they still do the same thing they did before. Installed power locks, I’ve always wanted that! And lastly, they reprogrammed all your radio stations. The stations are still there, just in a different place, mostly an inconvenience. I don’t imagine you’d be very happy with the dealership and you’d demand that it be fixed properly. Why should you expect any less from the provider of your OS?
Tonight I wanted to setup a proxy for Firefox so I can slack off even more at work. I already have an Ubuntu server running SSH. Now I just needed to configure my laptop with the proxy.
Create a Putty profile
To do this I setup a new profile in Putty to manage the proxy connection. There are several options that I setup since this profile would only be used for the proxy.
Connection
Seconds between keepalive: 360
SSH
Don’t allocate a pseudo-terminal
Don’t start a shell or command at all
Enable compression
Tunnels
Forwarded Ports: 9999, Dynamic, Auto
Automate the proxy connection
Now that the profile is setup, we need to automate the proxy connection. I didn’t want any additional items on the task bar or system tray. To do this use Plink, it is a command line alternative to Putty. Unfortunately, Plink would leave the command window open after connecting. I found another person who had this same problem and a solution. Now create a shortcut for the connection with Plink.
plinkw.exe proxy -l user -pw password
The first parameter is the profile created in Putty, then force the user and pass. Since the password will be stored plain text, it would be smart to create a new user on the SSH server that will only be used for the proxy. If you want to terminate the plink connection, you will have to do so from the task manager.
Configure Firefox
On Firefox 2, this is done at Tools > Options > Advanced > Network > Settings. Create a manual proxy configuration on the SOCKS Host with an address of 127.0.0.1 on port 9999. I decided to use the QuickProxy Firefox extension to manage switching the proxy. There are many more extensions available, find one that suits all your needs. QuickProxy uses the existing proxy configurations from Firefox and switches between them via an icon on the status bar. There is one additional Firefox preference from about:config that needs to be changed, Network.proxy.socks_remote_dns to true. This forces the DNS queries to be executed on the proxy host instead of your internal domain.
Testing the Connection
Connect to your private network and go to www.whatismyip.com to verify that you have your private network’s IP address. Execute the plink shortcut, then enable the proxy from the status bar. Reload the tab and viola your SSH server’s IP should show up.