First Assange, then Pirate Bay

Just saw a story about a co-founder of Pirate Bay getting arrested in Cambodia to be brought back to Sweden.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/story/2012/09/03/tech-ap-pirate-bay-arrest.html

 I'm not sure how to interpret this, especially since he's only being charge for 1 year in prison in Sweden. That does seem like a relatively light sentence, but seeing this after what they did to Assange does seem to suggest Sweden is no longer as independent from North American influence. That's a bit sad, as Sweden has always been such a progressive nation when I comes to the distribution of information online.

Reinstalling Ubuntu while keeping the home partition intact

I've been using Ubuntu on my desktop alongside Windows 7 for a little while. I started with 11.04 and since then I have been simply upgrading it using the update manager. It worked well enough up until 12.04, I have since experienced a few problems. For instance, my sound all of a sudden stopped working on my Linux, I have had a lot of issues managing my ipod with rythmbox or banshee (which I don't tend to use since it's so buggy), my Conky now looks a bit funky and I often get errors when I try to update my distro using the software manager.

Anyway, lot's of problems. So I decided to install a fresh copy of Ubuntu 12.04 from a disk, and my main problem is that I would like to keep my /home partition intact and of course keep my Windows partitions the way they are. So this is what I have done:

1. Using a GParted live CD, I formatted my \ partition (root partition) but I left the partition as it was
2. Rebooted the machine with the Ubuntu live disk and selected the install Ubuntu option
3. Chose to do "somthing else" on the installation. There I selected my original root partition to and "changed" it to be an active partition and be used as root. You have to make sure all the Linux partitions are in Ext4.
4. Chose the original /home partition and select it as active and as the "/home" partition.
5. Chose the original /swap partition and keep it as /swap, although for this I didn't seem to need to do anything about it.

This method seems to work in terms of getting my distro installed fresh, however it did not seem to fix my sound problem, probably because the configuration information is probably located on my /home. Regardless of that, at least I have a fresh install of ubuntu now. So my next course of action will be to see if I can fix the sound issue without having to install the OS again. If that doesn't work maybe I'll install Ubuntu again and create a new /home partition. From there I could just keep my old /home partition and move the files later.

Settled on Astrill as my VPN service

For a while I have been looking into different ways to gain a bit more privacy while online. I love the internet, and I do think it is the greatest invention of the 20th century, however, political parties and their archaic outlook on new technologies, slows down the natural progress of it. One of the main problems with the internet is privacy. Laws have not been evolving as quickly as the community, so a lot of them are outdated and infringe on basic freedoms already achieved in the real world. For that reason, I have decided that investing a little bit on a VPN service would be worthwhile.

I did a fair bit of research, and ended up settling on Astrill. I looked at a lot of different services, and as a package I think Astrill's service really suited my needs. One of the other contenders was "Hide my ass", which seems to be one of the most popular services out there. Indeed it was one of the ones I was most interested in. However, HMA made big news at one point when the folks from lulzSec got caught. Apparently HMA did provide authorities with logs that gave away a lot of vital information about its members. So entirely due to principles, in this case being that it makes no sense to pay a fee for privacy, if privacy is not really garanteed. It's not like LulzSec killed anyone.

The other big contender was Strong VPN, which I almost signed up with before I had done more reading. Their prices seem fair, and they do have a lot of options in terms of where their servers are, however, I really was looking for a service that included servers in different countries, freedom to switch servers frequently, the ability to connect via PPTP or OpenVPN. At Strong VPN, the ability to have all those things would cost me quite a lot, so I decided to go with Astrill. They offered pretty much all I wanted for a decent price if you do at least a 3 month contract.

The installation in Ubuntu as well as Windows 7 was easy. On Ubuntu you may need to download OpneVPN through apt-get, but after that you just click to download a small client. Windows just requires the client. I'll use it during the next few months, and I'll post if I encounter any problems.

Joseph Heller's "Catch-22"

 The chaplain was apologetic. "I'm sorry, sir, but just about all the prayers I know are rather somber in tone and make at least some passing reference to God."

"Then let's get some new ones. The men are already doing enough bitching about the missions I send them on without our rubbing it in with our sermons about God or death or Paradise. Can't we take a more positive approach? Why can't we all pray for something good, like a tighter bomb pattern, for example? Couldn't we pray for a tighter bomb pattern?"

This was one of those books I had been planning to read for quite some time, and it was as good as I expected. It is an interesting read, since it is written in quite an unusual way. The story is not told in a chronological order, instead you are told events in a way that all the pieces are presented as different characters are introduced and explored. Heller keeps feeding you different parts of the story and only giving you hints to when the events occur. The hints on the timeline are given in a very clever way, by using the number of mandatory missions pilots have to have before they can be sent home, which keeps going up as the war progresses.

The story is really interesting and Heller really twists things up as you go, by starting the book in a very humorous tone, that eventually turning it into a dark humor that really paints a grim image of war. Better than the plot in my opinion, was the prose. Heller, to me, writes some of the funniest proses I've ever seen, and even when I felt that the plot was dragging a bit, I never felt compelled to quit, because there were so many hilariously absurd dialogues.

Overall, this was a great book, and a must for anyone looking to read a classic WWII satire. In the next while I would like to read Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, as I've heard it is also a good satire. For now however, I will leave Catch-22 with a 8.5/10.

PPTP, OpenVPN, IPSec and L2TP - What's the difference?

I have recently started to look into VPN services to enhance my privacy while using the interwebs. One thing that started to confuse me pretty quickly was the variety of different servers available, and honestly it took me a while to start to understand what the differences are. Well to make this process simpler for other people, here is a nice short summary from zzing123, which was posed at "perfect-privacy.com forum.

On a general level, PPTP was invented by Microsoft as a VPN that could be used with dialup, and is far older than OpenVPN, and as such is practically available from any device that supports a VPN of some description. That and the fact it's easy to use are really the only reasons it's used. In terms of security it's basically crap: at best it uses 128 bit encryption with an RC4 handshake (Handshake is the authentication/login process for setting up the VPN). At worst, 64 bit encryption and a plain-text handshake (so it wouldn't even take 2 weeks: just read the packet!). Naturally, PP uses the better sort.

OpenVPN is - in this league - very new technology. It's basically the amalgamation of several technologies, like SSH, Stunnel, OpenSSL's encryption libraries all of which provide unix with best of breed power and together form OVPN, a best of breed VPN. OVPN allows you to choose the method and algorithm for handshaking as well as for data encryption, plus uses SSL certificates, PSK's or User/Pass (or a combination of) to authenticate clients on top of that. With hardware acceleration, OVPN is easily faster than PPTP. Without acceleration, it's entirely dependent on the algorithms chosen - Blowfish is designed to be the fastest software-only algorithm, so OVPN would be a lot faster than PPTP. Encumbered with a software AES-256 implementation, and PPTP's 128 bit encryption is faster. This ultimate configurability is also OVPN's downfall: it's pretty complicated to set up.

With PP's OVPN service, ideally they should provide a client.crt and client.key unique to every customer, instead of using the auth-user-pass directive for ultimate security, but management of these keys becomes a nightmare. That said PP uses RSA 4096-bit encryption for the handshake and AES-256 for data, which are probably the two most secure algorithms you can use currently in OVPN.

There is also a third technology: L2TP / IPSec. L2TP provides the layer 2 tunnel, and IPSec the encryption, and was invented by Cisco to bridge 2 networks together. IPSec uses either RSA or a Pre-Shared Key (PSK) for the handshake, which uses Diffie-Hellman hashing over and above that. For data, it can use 3DES, DES, Blowfish, AES and CAST-128. IPSec does have pretty good support in clients and is widely regarded as being PPTP sorted out. Because Cisco developed it to sell more routers, a lot of expensive network gear has IPSec support built in, meaning that if you have very expensive network kit using IPSec, your VPN's will be so fast there's practically no latency overhead. Software implementations are as fast as PPTP.

So in summary:
- Choose PPTP: If you want an albeit crusty VPN technology available everywhere
- Choose OVPN: If you want the most powerful, secure and modern VPN
- Choose IPSec/L2TP: If you want high performance between two sites

Theism and Existentialism

Probably one of the first attributes most people associate with existentialism is atheism. That makes sense when so many influential existentialists (Nietzsche and Sartre) were atheists. But the fact that a lot of people ignore, is that the father of existential thinking, Soren Kierkegaard, was an extremely devout protestant.

Kierkegaard's perspective on Christianity is very appealing to me, he uses compelling logic to expand on his frustrations with the church of his day, and common paradoxes of religions. For instance, he really disliked when people tried to prove "miracles" in the bible using facts and science. Just the attempt of explaining a miracle, to him is an attempt to make something extraordinary into something that could have happened naturally. I personally don't see why it matters whether or not a certain miracle actually occurred. The bible is a book that provides spiritual guidance, not historically accurate depiction of events. It isn't a history book. His main point is that faith is faith, and science is science, and attempting to combine the natural with the supernatural is just one way to weaken one's faith.

The main reason Kierkegaard is regarded as the father of existentialism however, has everything to do with how he practiced Christianity. The way he viewed Christians, and most importantly, how to be a Christian was the main reason he is considered an existentialist. Kierkegaard talked a lot about existence, not in the sense that things exist physically, but how the individual exists in a world that is inherently absurd.

To Kierkegaard, existence has everything to do with responsibility, making decisions and making commitments. To him existence has to involve taking a hold of one's life, making decisions and being passionate about life. He went as far as making a distinction between this existentialist way of living life and the herd mentality of the mobs. These are the people that don't make "decisions", that just go along with the flow of the crowd. He uses an analogy of a man that tries to mount an untamed stallion and tries to ride it despite the stallion's resistance. He compares this scenario with a scenario where a man just falls asleep in a wagon, and is taken places by the horse pulling the wagon. To him. this contrasts the active mode of existing to what most people do, which is to follow the crowd, and just go where life takes you. People that just always take the path of least resistance. To Kierkegaard, finding his truth was much like finding that stallion.

In more general existentialist terms, Kierkegaard's truth is what other philosophers would substitute for meaning. Sartre's atheism often negates religion, as he believes it to be something that consumes the human passion to an absurd cause. But much like kierkegaard, existentialism to me is a lot more general and subjective. I think my passions and my truths are all part of who I am as an individual. And if what I am includes a person with faith in a God, then I don't see how this minimizes my own personal journey to self discovery. Personally, it is actually a bit of a challenge, since as a scientist I often find myself following logic and evidence to reach conclusions, which is most certainly not the ideal mentality most religious people to develop their faith in a higher and sometimes paradoxical power.

Stephen King's "The Gunslinger"

“The greatest mystery the universe offers is not life but size. Size encompasses life, and the Tower encompasses size. The child, who is most at home with wonder, says: Daddy, what is above the sky? And the father says: The darkness of space. The child: What is beyond space? The father: The galaxy. The child: Beyond the galaxy? The father: Another galaxy. The child: Beyond the other galaxies? The father: No one knows. - 

Just finished the first book in the Dark Tower series by Stephen King. It's a bit of a unique book as I find it hard to give it a genre, maybe a fantasy/western? Overall, not a bad book, it was my first S. King novel and since the books I've read lately have been so big it was nice that this novel was a bit more compact. The chapters were short and the book had a pretty good tempo. I'd recommend this book to anyone looking for a relatively quick read, it's not a heavy book but you do have to keep track of a bit to follow the story. I've also read that this is being made into an HBO series, so that could be very good. I guess George R R Martin's series was such a success for them that they want to find some other book series to milk. This is probably a good pick for that, although I would have preferred something like Dune. I know there are several attempts at Dune out there, but none were well done.

Overall, it's a decent read. I'll definitely pick up the other books of the series at some point. It gets a 7.5

Joe Abercrombie's "Best Served Cold"

"Sometimes you must take one life to spare more, and when those times come, sentiment helps nobody." - Shenkt

Joe Abercrombie's Best Served Cold - I just finished reading Best Served Cold, after hearing so many good things about this young fantasy author, Abercrombie. I thought the book was pretty decent, it is a fun and gritty fantasy novel. The plot is essentially a "Kill Bill" set in a medieval Italy like setting. Quite interesting and a bit different from other fantasies I've read. I was expecting a violent and graphic novel and it was. It has lots of fights, bad ass characters and even weird sex. It may sound like too much, but it is written almost in a comical way, so even though the scenes aren't often funny, Abercrombie manages to make it sound funny in a very dark and twisted way (at least for me), which was good, even if it eventually got old. The book is fairly long and the "humor" didn't work the whole way through, but that might have just been me.

One criticism I have with the book though is the fact that I didn't necessarily care about any of the characters. Not to say that there weren't interesting characters in the book, but no one was good enough that I cared whether I would see him at the end or not. So much so that my favorite character didn't survive the story and I didn't necessarily care too much.

I'm definitely considering Abercrombie's First Law trilogy at some point. I've heard good things about it, and it takes place in the same world as this novel, so that could be fun.

Overall, it's worth a read if you want to read something fun and violent. I'll give it a 7.0

Firefox slowness on Ubuntu 10.04 and 10.10

I've been experiencing a very annoying slow browsing experience on my Firefox but I've found a fix for it. Type about:config in the address bar and hit enter.

from there you should see a list of configuration lines. Look for the following:

- network.dns.disableIPV6 

- network.http.pipelining

- network.http.proxy.pipelining

on all of these click with the right button and toggle them from false to true. Lastly look for

-network.http.proxy.pipelining.maxrequests

change this one from whatever is there (2 in my case) to 8

I hope this helps.

Stranger danger - a look into protectionism

Protectionism is often a point where I tend to disagree with a lot of people. I think the rise of developing nations into more significant roles in the world economy makes this topic come up more often. The BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) have been growing and developing a new role in our globalized economy. This makes a lot of sense, when you consider the fact that globalization helps spread wealth around. Wealth that decades ago would have stayed in one region for much longer, all of a sudden can go between continents in the matter of seconds. Outsourcing manufacturing jobs is not new at all, however, we see more and more outsourcing of other services to different nations and the spread of money and knowledge just allows innovation to occur more often in new places. When you put all this into context, it makes sense. If you consider that there is a finite amount of wealth in the world (which isn't necessarily true but the analogy helps my point) and all of a sudden a lot of the wealth that use to be generated and spent in North America and Europe is being diverted to emerging economies.

Well, isn't that a good thing? Don't we want to spread the wealth? More often than not, I feel that the answer is yes but no. Yes, it's good to give the opportunity for other nations to develop, and more innovation to occur. That's good. We want struggling nations to be able to lift people from poverty and maybe even develop a middle class. These are all great things, I agree. However, I also feel that we need to look at what the side effects of these things are. For instance, think about why this money started to flow to developing areas. This happened mainly because companies realized that in order to stay competitive; they needed to lower costs, and one way to achieve that, is to outsource work to places with cheaper labor, cheaper land and maybe cheaper taxes. The bottom line is that jobs that use to be done within developed countries, moved abroad. Considering people can keep having cheap products, people that are employed in NA and Europe are happy.

It still doesn't look that bad, after all, they just eliminated unskilled work pretty much. People will just have to get more educated to do other types of jobs. On the other hand a big effect this has in the economy is that companies are making a lot more money, and that money isn't really trickling down to the bottom as politicians like to claim. Richer companies, can afford to be even more competitive, which smothers the little companies (ie. Walmart). This destroys reasonably paying jobs, destroy small companies and innovation from the little guys. A company that doesn't have to work hard to monopolize a market, has less incentive to innovate. On the other hand the developing nation which is now seeing a lot more wealth running around, isn't really used to this, and labor policies don’t always benefit the little guys either. Workers on average are making more there, but the wealth distribution is just becoming more segregating. So the nations that use to provide everyone with a great share of the wealth, now are doing less of that. While nations that always had larger wealth disparities, are just raising the lower class from the dirt while they fill up their pockets with money. 

The reason why North America in the middle of the 20th century was so prosperous was the fact that the economy worked for the people. There were always class differences, and I think there should always be such. But the bottom line was that the financial agenda was to keep the country running smoothly and efficiently, providing a piece of the pie for everyone. Capitalism was controlled and worked well. When Capitalism takes over everything else, and making money is the sole goal of a society, human greed affects how the system works. It begins to alienate the elite from reality, instead giving them the sense that capitalism wants them to make money no matter what. Once this infectious mentality spreads to governments, the real problem emerges. That's when democratic nations become plutocracies, and values go from being about the welfare of the people, to the welfare of this constructed concept of the economy.

That's why I think protectionism isn't all that bad. It's a bit like capitalism, in that it is an idealistic concept, but I think it is important. Going back to the idea that there is a certain amount of wealth available, I think a nation needs to ensure enough of this wealth stays within the borders, and even more importantly, is distributed well. Of course that means people can't have as much "stuff" that's made elsewhere, but ensures a healthy job market and a healthy economy, that is sustainable and fair. Individual governments only have power over their own policies, so they can't ensure that China or India treat their people fairly, however they have the power to try and make their own country as good as it can be. By making sure business practices are done responsibly, and with the people's welfare as a priority.

(I also wrote a little on free trade in the past if you are curious to see that)

FTP client in Ubuntu

Just started to work on my website using my Linux distro. First I needed an HTML editor which I believe I already posted about. Anyway, I'm using Komposer for that purpose, and then I needed an FTP client, since unfortunately Nautilus doesn't work with FTP the same way Windows Explorer does. That was a disappointment, as I do love how on Windows I can just type in my ftp adress and boom, I'm pretty much there.

Well there are a few options I found, such as Gftp, Kasablanca, Fireftp, KFTPgrabber, and others. I ended up chosing Filezilla, since I had already heard about it before and figured that should be a good one to start with.

The app is pretty good, I have just used it a couple of times and it seemed stable enough and powerful enough for my needs. To get the bastard, you can go through the software center or the good old command line

$sudo apt-get install filezilla

easy enough

Editing PDF files and looking at the stars

Just today I had to send out a PDF document that I've received a few days ago, however in this document I had about 12 pages of irrelevant information I didn't want to share. Well there I went to look for a nice app to just remove pages off of a PDF file, and that's when I came by this neat little app on the Ubuntu Software Center called PDF Shuffler. It is a very simple and very small app that just did exactly what I needed, it literally took me less than 5 minutes to search a program like this on UBC, check a couple of reviews, download and install it. It works very well.

As I was in the Software Center, I decided to download this other program called Stellarium, which is an Astronomy app. It is great if you are interested in finding out what star you are looking at night. It's neat that you can also look at the sky anywhere in the world, and it will give you names of stars, planets and constellations. I recommend.

KompoZer, free HTML editor for Linux.

I've been using Dreamweaver as my HTML editor for as long as I can remember. I am pretty sure that before that I used notepad, but that was easily over 13 years ago. Well today I decided to look for a new editor that doesn't crash on me as much and that works on my Ubuntu distro. After doing some reading I decided to go with KompoZer, which is a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) type editor, which to me just saves me a ton of time; and it seems quite popular in the community.

To get this beast you can either go the synaptic route or the console route, which will require you to type:

$ sudo apt-get install kompozer

I'll update this post once I have used the program a few times to let you guys know how I like it.