Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

Limewire Behind the Firewall

Despite my Uni being pretty lib­eral (read “utterly relaxed”) about per­mit­ted ports and pro­grams, the fire­wall for the res­id­en­tial net­work here blocks most of the com­mon ports used for P2P file­shar­ing pro­grams, restrict­ing usage to internal shar­ing, unless cun­ning tricks are employed. SSH to the res­cue how­ever (and this is another great bene­fit of keep­ing a server or two at home) — Limewire works just fine through an SSH tunnel.

All that’s neces­sary is to use the “Dynamic” (SOCKS proxy) tun­nel set­ting of an SSH cli­ent like PuTTY on a port of your choice, say 1234, then instruct Limewire to use a proxy server at 127.0.0.1, port 1234. Provided your SSH server allows tun­nel­ing, you should have no prob­lem using Limewire, but the download/upload speeds you’ll get will of course be lim­ited by the con­nec­tion your SSH server is on.

I tried doing a sim­ilar thing with Azureus, my BitTorrent cli­ent of choice, but that didn’t work out. However, I would ima­gine that other P2P cli­ents such as Kazaa (*puke*), eDon­key etc. would work fine.

Disclaimer: Downloading and/or shar­ing copy­righted files remains illegal in most coun­tries, so don’t even think about doing it. Not ever.

And no, I won’t give you a shell account on my box :-).

New Pants, Please

Yesterday star­ted badly, inas­much as I woke up at 9.30, sat down at my PC, and found that it had rebooted dur­ing the night. That alone isn’t so abnor­mal — once before Windows Update decided that an update it was apply­ing needed a restart *right* *now*, and so rebooted the machine, but I’d dis­abled that option since. So I log in, and I find that I have no sound. Programs that use sound record­ing (like Skype) are giv­ing errors. There do not appear to be any sound devices present on the machine.

Shit.

I reboot; noth­ing. I rein­stall sound drivers; still nothing.

Shit.

I then hap­pen to glance through the win­dow in my case, and note that the chip­set cool­ing fan and heat­sink is rest­ing peace­fully on the case floor, thor­oughly detached from the chip it is sup­posed to be chilling.

Fuck.

Cue the fast­est shut­down oper­a­tion in recent his­tory.
I pop open the case and gingerly feel around. I touch the chip in ques­tion, and it’s cool. This is the first good sign, but it goes unnoticed in the gen­eral panic. I curse the bas­tard who designed the cooler (an Akasa AK-210 with a pretty blue LED); for think­ing that a fan and heat­sink could be secured on to a ver­tical chip with only a sticker. I try stick­ing the cooler back on. It stays, until I hit the power but­ton, when the infin­ites­im­ally small jolt of the fan spring­ing into life causes it to detach from the chip once again. I start try­ing to think of ways to attach it. Eventually I decide to try to loc­ate some thermal paste, curs­ing the fact that all my hard­ware bits and bobs are at home. I walk over to Lazer Lizard — what passes for a com­puter shop on cam­pus. I ask the cash­ier, “this may be a long shot, but do you have any thermal paste?” I receive a strange look. “It’s a sort of goo,” I offer, but no, she responds, they don’t.

Walking back, I real­ise that lay­ing the PC on its side will prob­ably work, as the cooler will just sit on the chip, unen­cumbered by grav­ity. Once home, I do this, and it’s work­ing fine so far. Plus all my cool LEDs are pro­jec­ted sky­wards, which looks sweeter than before. After boot­ing up, the sound was work­ing again (it was that chip), so I can only assume that the main­board shuts the chip off if it gets too hot on boot. No last­ing dam­age, thank fuck.

A Good Start

Yesterday was dead­line day for CS118 Coursework 1 (Java). I got mine fin­ished on Sunday night, and sub­mit­ted with the nifty online system.

The course­work centred around the Warwick Maze envir­on­ment, which provides a graph­ical maze and the hooks needed to inter­act with it. Our part was to cre­ate a series of increas­ingly com­plex con­trol­ler mod­ules for the robot.

The mark­ing method was refresh­ingly per­sonal — once I showed up at my allot­ted slot, I sat down with one of the post­grad tutors, and we went through each exer­cise in the course­work. He looked through my code; I told him why I’d done cer­tain things the way I had, and how the com­plic­ated bits worked. Then he ticked off vari­ous cri­teria on his mark­ing sheet. It took about 5 minutes in total, and I ended up with 135/135 :-D. This after get­ting soaked in the rain, and hav­ing major PC trouble (which will be covered in another post :-)), it was an upshot to a day that star­ted poorly.

New Peacefire Web Proxy

A mes­sage went out on the Peacefire mail­ing list this morn­ing, announ­cing a new pub­lic “Circumventor” site at stupidcensorship.com. The site is run­ning CGIProxy, which I’ve found to be a decent bit of kit, so all the down­trod­den stu­dents in need of uncensored web access should give this a go.

The Course So Far

So, ten days in and I’ve found the time and inclin­a­tion to write.

Some obser­va­tions from the past week:

• Course timetables are com­plic­ated. Take ten weeks, eight mod­ules, ten daily slots, three dif­fer­ent types of appoint­ment, and appoint­ments that aren’t con­sist­ent through the whole term, and con­dense them on to an A4 grid and what do you get? A mess. It was for this reason that I got up at 8am on Monday for a prac­tical I didn’t have, and sat through a 2-hour Foundations for Accounting and Finance lec­ture on Friday after­noon that I didn’t need to be in, due to not tak­ing the mod­ule. Despite the con­fu­sion, I have Wednesdays free, and Fridays free after 10am.
• Energetic and amus­ing lec­tur­ers are a rar­ity. So far I’ve had lec­tures for CS118 Programming for Computer Scientists, CS133 Professional Skills, and IB107 Computing and Information Systems. The CS118 guy is solid gold. His course notes read like a com­edy, his lec­tures are enga­ging and funny. With him we’re learn­ing Java, and while the lec­tures aren’t par­tic­u­larly fast-paced, his course guide is pretty thor­ough, so I’m going through that — no major issues so far. The same can’t be said for the other two mod­ules though — espe­cially Professional Skills. This mod­ule is half UNIX and Linux use, and half learn­ing skills like how to make a present­a­tion, sum­mar­ise a doc­u­ment, etc. Yesterday’s lec­ture was an intro­duc­tion to UNIX and Linux, and it was pain­ful. I’ve only been using Linux 18 months or so, but I could have taught someone the entire lec­ture in about 3 minutes. The stuff was basic, like what a shell and ker­nel are; their rela­tion­ship; how there are many dif­fer­ent dis­tri­bu­tions of Linux etc, but it was pain­fully, *pain­fully* slow. The guy seemed to get a little pre­oc­cu­pied with the wrong parts — per­haps a fea­ture of IT-centric teach­ing :-P. Anyway. IB107 this morn­ing wasn’t exactly excit­ing, but at least it didn’t make me want to stab myself in the eyes.

• Uni is cool. Everyone I’ve met so far has been pretty cool. Cool people on my course, cool people in my flat, cool people in my build­ing. Me and Josh have found the per­fect com­bin­a­tion of free food, drink and DVD view­ings to snare their interest.
• Having a big TFT and elite speak­ers is cool. Just about every night since last Sunday there’s been a crowd of at least 2 in here, watch­ing a pleth­ora of films, and 24 Series 3 :-D. We’re about 7 hours in to the lat­ter, going to do a mara­thon ses­sion tonight, as none of us have any­thing on tomorrow.
• Cooking is good. Junk food con­sump­tion has been fairly min­imal so far. Most nights we mix it up and end up with a bunch of dif­fer­ent things — piz­zas being fairly pop­u­lar :-). I’ve made pizza twice, and a load of pasta stuff; last night was Sin Chicken with rice (chicken breasts, hoi sin, soy, ginger, gar­lic, stock, magic) which went down a treat. It’s still fun and it’s still sat­is­fy­ing, even clear­ing up after­wards :-P.
• Residential net­works are unre­li­able. The speeds I can get here vary a lot — prob­ably due to the fact that all the halls appear to be on hubs for some unknown reason — I’ve had 1MB/sec from Sun’s FTP, and 2KB/sec from other places. Internal speeds are good though — *cough* FTP trans­fers hit­ting 10MB/sec and up. No port-blocking hor­ror stor­ies — I can SSH freely, access any­thing I choose to at home — only thing that I haven’t been able to get here so far is BitTorrent — can con­nect to the tracker but no peers. That’s to be expec­ted I guess; haven’t tried any P2P apps yet. Tor works fine on my laptop, so if I came to it I could ham­mer some­thing through that. My wire­less AP is here but not on most of the time, as I found a reg­u­la­tion in the IT Services hand­book declar­ing that “extend­ing the net­work using wire­less equip­ment” is a ser­i­ous offence. Hasn’t been an incon­veni­ence so far — there are hot­spots all over the main campus.

All in all, an excel­lent few days :-D. Tonight’s plan is to get fuck­faced and hit the intro­duc­tion party for our halls block in the SU. Should be a blast!