Daniel Lange's blog

Every once in a while iTunes on Windows decides to start but does not show the main application window when trying to sync an iPhone (or any other iDevice).
May be it pops up after half an hour, may be not.

This behavior is caused by iTunes waiting for its Bonjour zeroconf network service. Unfortunately though iTunes is updated very frequently that bug is persistent for years now.
The work-around is easy though:

Open up CMD as Administrator and type

net stop "bonjour service"

and iTunes should pop up its window a few moments later. It will complain about Bonjour not running but that is not needed for anything but network self-discovery. Which you usually don't need anyways.

If you do, you can start Bonjour again with

net start "bonjour service"

anytime also while iTunes is running. Once it decides to show its main window, it's fine to go for the session.

The laptop systems aboard the International Space Station (ISS) have been infected by computer viruses and worms multiple times. The W32.Gammima.AG virus made it to space in July 2008. And it happily spread from laptop to laptop onboard the ISS. The virus has been written to steal credentials for some common games. It is unknown how many of these were run in orbit. The latency would kill the experience for sure.

I am sure there have been policies in place to prevent astronauts carrying personal soft- and hardware up to the ISS. Personal items must be explicitly applied for and will only be approved after severe scrutiny of each item. Even beyond the obvious security considerations, this is necessary as the launch weight needs to be calculated exactly.
NASA and Roscosmos both have very strict policies for their personnel and strict training to make sure they know and follow policy. The group of astronauts primarily affected by the policy is very well known and counts a few dozen heads.

Still at least one infected USB stick made it up to the ISS and could spread its malware. Other infections have happened and we can assume similar infection vectors.

So the policy has proven unenforceable. It is broken. It is still correct per se. There is nothing wrong with prohibiting personal soft- and hardware in a high risk environment. So the policy stays in place. NASA still needed to make sure to rely much less on its effectiveness.

Hence NASA did the only sane thing: Move from an unenforceable policy to a technically feasible solution, significantly reducing the security exposure. In May 2013 NASA announced the ISS laptops are being migrated to Debian 6. Imagine how much pressure Microsoft must have put up to prevent such a technical decision due to the adverse marketing message it provides along the way. And still the engineers at NASA saw this as the best way forward.

The take-away message here is: Security by policy does not work.

Well, shortly after I wrote about encrypting files with a keyfile / passphrase with gpg people asked about a solution with openssl.

You should prefer to use the gpg version linked above, but if you can't, below is a script offering the same functionality with openssl.

You basically call crypt_openssl <file> [<files...>] to encrypt file to file.aes using the same keyfile as used in the gpg script (~/.gnupg/mykey001 per default).

A simple crypt_openssl -d <file.aes> [<files.aes...>] will restore the original files from the encrypted AES256 version that you can safely transfer over the Internet even using insecure channels.

Please note that you should feed compressed data to crypt_openssl whenever you can. So use preferably use it on .zip or .tar.gz files.

Automatically transferring (syncing) files between multiple computers is easy these days. Dropbox, owncloud or bitpocket to name a few. You can imagine I use the latter (if you want a recommendation)¹.

In any case you want to encrypt what you send to be stored in "the cloud" even if it is just for a short time. There are many options how to encrypt the "in flight" data. Symmetric ciphers are probably the safest and most widely researched cryptography these days and easier to use than asymmetric key pairs in this context as well.

Encryption is notoriously hard to implement correctly and worthless when the implementation is flawed. So I looked at gpg, a well known reference implementation, and was amazed that it can neither use a proper keyfile for symmetric encryption (you can just supply a passphrase via --passphrase-file) nor does it handle multiple files on the command line consistently. You can use --multifile (wondering...why does a command need that at all?) with --decrypt and --encrypt (asymmetric public/private key pair encryption) but not with --symmetric (symmetric shared key encryption). Duh!

With a bit of scripting around the gpg shortcomings, you end up with crypt_gpg that can nicely encrypt or decrypt multiple files (symmetric cipher) in one go.

After installing RawTherapee, a raw photo to jpg image converter, on my Kubuntu 13.04 desktop, Mozilla Firefox started to open the Downloads directory in ... RawTherapee. Gosh. Now that's what you'd want to browse a downloads folder with.

Update-alternatives did not help as RawTherapee is not managed by the Debian alternatives system. Hm, xdg-open still works as intended and opens dolphin.

Asking Google turns up many not working solution proposals. Hm.

But, searching the collective memory is not completely useless. There is a solved bug report on the RawTherapee bug tracker that explains the issue. The .desktop file RawTherapee installs contains inode/directory as a supported mime type. Well, that's technically correct but makes no sense in the way mime associations are used. Thankfully the bug reporter was able to convince the developer of this and get this fixed for future RawTherapee releases.

So option 1: edit /usr/share/applications/rawtherapee.desktop and remove the inode/directory entry from the MimeType=-line. Then regenerate the various mimetype caches.

This still bears the question why Firefox does not use the inode/directory entry from dolphin.desktop. Also, the next update from Debian/Ubuntu will probably overwrite the fixed rawtherapee.desktop file again as the patch from the Rawtherapee developer will only be included on new releases (and these may or may not be backported to Debian/Ubuntu). So you'd need to copy that fixed rawtherapee.desktop file to ~/.local/share/applications/ or the like.

Option 2: find out what the real issue is...

Manually copying the BIND master zone configuration to slave servers is a tedious and error-prone process. There are configuration management systems available for large deployments and BIND can support database backends as well which allow synchronization virtually behind the scenes.

For my use these options are overly complex and have unwanted risks associated with it.

The better option is to automate generating the BIND slave configuration from the BIND master named.conf.local.

Since version 2.0 the behaviour of grub regarding passwords has changed quite substantially. It can be nicely used to secure the boot process so that a X display manager (gdm, kdm, lightdm, ...) or login prompt cannot be circumvented by editing the Linux kernel boot command line parameters. The documentation is concise but many old how-tos may lead you down the wrong GNU grub "legacy" (the pre-2.0 versions) path.

So this assumes you have a grub installed and working. I.e. if you press Shift during boot, you get a grub menu and can edit menu entries via the e key.

First you need to setup grub users and corresponding passwords:

Run grub-mkpasswd-pbkdf2 to encrypt every password you want to use for grub users (which are technically unrelated to Linux system users at this time).
You'll get a string like 'grub.pbkdf2.sha512.10000...'. It will replace the plain text passwords.

In '/etc/grub/40_custom' add lines like:

# These users can change the config at boot time and run any menuentry:
set superusers="root user1"
password_pbkdf2 root grub.pbkdf2.sha512.10000.aaa...
password_pbkdf2 user1 grub.pbkdf2.sha512.10000.bbb...
# This user can only run specifically designated menuentries (not a superuser):
password_pbkdf2 user2 grub.pbkdf2.sha512.10000.ccc...

Now once you did this grub v. 2.0+ will ask for a supervisor password every time you want to boot any menu item. This is a changed behavior from v. 1.9x which defaulted to allow all entries if no user restriction was specified. So you need to add '--unrestricted' to all 'menuentries' that any user shall be able to boot. You can edit '/boot/grub/grub.cfg' and add --unrestricted to (the default) menuentries. Or you can edit the 'linux_entry ()' function in '/etc/grub/10_linux' so that the 'echo "menuentry ..."' lines include --unrestricted by default:

[...]
echo "menuentry '$(echo "$title" | grub_quote)' --unrestricted ${CLASS} \$menuentry_id_option 'gnulinux-$version-$type-$boot_device_id' {" | sed "s/^/$submenu_indentation/"
else
echo "menuentry '$(echo "$os" | grub_quote)' --unrestricted ${CLASS} \$menuentry_id_option 'gnulinux-simple-$boot_device_id' {" | sed "s/^/$submenu_indentation/"
[...]

Make a backup of this file as it will be overwritten by grub updates. This way all Linux kernels detected by the script will be available to all users without identifying to grub via username / password.

Now issue update-grub to re-generate 'grub.cfg' with the amended menuentries.

If everything worked well, your system can now be booted unrestricted but the grub configuration can only be changed from the grub superusers after identifying with their username and password at the grub prompt.

Bonus point:

If you want to create menuentries that user2 (and any superuser) from the above example user list can run, add blocks like these to the end of '40_custom':

menuentry "Only user2 (or superuser) can run this Windows installation" --users user2 {
set root=(hd1,1)
chainloader +1
}

Update

16.12.2015:
Hector Marco and Ismael Ripoll have found a nearly unbelievable exploit in Grub2 that allows you to tap backspace 28 times to get a rescue shell and that way bypass a password prompt. Time to update!
Read the excellent analysis of the bug and the exploit vector in Hector Marco's blog post.

A few days ago I was re-installing a laptop of mine. Downloading the default add-ons for Firefox came to a stall as I could not find SyncPlaces, which I've been using for a few years to synchronize my bookmarks between the systems I use. As I knew the author, Andy Halford, has a homepage I surfed there and found...

"So long Mozilla and thanks for all the fish

If you are here looking for any of my extensions (SyncPlaces, SortPlaces, CheckPlaces or SearchPlaces) then I'm sad to inform you that these are no longer available.

Unfortunately I do not have the time or the motivation to continue to support these in light of the close-minded, short-sighted and increasingly inflexible organisation that Mozilla has become. Apparently spending 1000's of hours promoting their products and providing my extensions to the general public to fill the gaps in their product, and repair bookmarks destroyed by Firefox Sync, counts for little and does not deserve any flexibility or support from them. Apparently add-on developers are second-class citizens to them whatever they may say. Surprising given that these are the main USP of Firefox, and developers are providing their time and efforts for free. My decision was taken after a series of problems the last one being the final straw."
Andy Halford, 17.06.12 screenshot

I was unable to find any details what caused this rant and the serious decision to remove his excellent add-ons from the Internet. There are a few discussions on the Mozillazine forums but nothing enlightening so far. Andy's personal homepage, family homepage and the TotalValidator product he and his wife offer are all still online, he just pulled all his popular Firefox add-ons.

Andy states on his homepage

"I will not be answering any further emails on this matter, I suggest that you direct any questions to Mozilla themselves and ask them why they were happier for me to leave than to use a little common sense." [ib.]

I still tried to contact him and asked for an interview but he has not come back to me so far. I've sent a second email with the URL of this blog post.

The SyncPlaces plug-in is still prominently featured on Wikipedia's Comparison of browser synchronizers at press time.

Now this is a mess. With some ungraciously licensed closed source software, you're probably used to plan migrations once license terms run out or you have to upgrade to the much improved successor product because "extended support" for your perfectly fine current version gets ridiculously expensive.

But with open source you have more rights and e.g. the security to use the product as long as you wish. If you have kept a copy of the code (and the license file). Because in this case the Mozilla Firefox installer .xpi's are hard to come by. Mozilla has a centralized add-on repository and once the files are pulled from there, they quickly vanish off the net. Now don't get me wrong, these plug-ins are now unmaintained software, so you will have to migrate at some point in time, but not necessarily now. You have some time for planning and evaluation of alternatives.

Online community users know the XY problem:

A person has a problem X and tries to solve it with Y. He asks about help with Y online.
Often X has a straight forward solution which is not Y. But the person asking doesn't describe X.¹

The term "XY problem" was implicitly coined when the Open Source philosopher Eric S. Raymond wrote his "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way" text and added "How can I use X to do Y?" to the "Questions Not To Ask" section.

ESR himself states in "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way":

Describe the problem's symptoms, not your guesses

It's not useful to tell hackers what you think is causing your problem. (If your diagnostic theories were such hot stuff, would you be consulting others for help?) So, make sure you're telling them the raw symptoms of what goes wrong, rather than your interpretations and theories. Let them do the interpretation and diagnosis. If you feel it's important to state your guess, clearly label it as such and describe why that answer isn't working for you.

[...]

Since the preceding point seems to be a tough one for many people to grasp, here's a phrase to remind you: "All diagnosticians are from Missouri." That US state's official motto is "Show me" (earned in 1899, when Congressman Willard D. Vandiver said "I come from a country that raises corn and cotton and cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I'm from Missouri. You've got to show me.") In diagnosticians' case, it's not a matter of skepticism, but rather a literal, functional need to see whatever is as close as possible to the same raw evidence that you see, rather than your surmises and summaries. Show us.
Source

As online communities like IRC or forums are quite aware of the XY problem now, the people involved will often quickly focus on getting behind the issue presented. They will ask questions around the "why" do you want to do Y, what is the reason for you seeking help on Y etc. trying to uncover X.

They have been trained by numerous long winded discussions of why somebody would want to solve something as awkward as Y which slowly lead to uncover the unarticulated underlying problems X.²

ICQ has a feature to show your online status on a web page. You need to enable it in the "Security and Privacy" settings as indicated on ICQ's support page. Once you include http://status.icq.com/online.gif?icq=<ICQ-ID>&img=5 in a web page you can show your online status like this: (Online) and (Offline).

Now the page that used to show all the icons available (img=<number> parameter in the URL) 404's (with a very nice 404-cow). Try at http://www.icq.com/features/web/indicator.html whether ICQ fixed their pages.

A friendly

helped to get the Online (and similarly the Offline) icons in the mean time.

Looking at them I find these icons provide a nice glimpse into web design history.
ICQ was founded 1996 and has seen a lot of changes between being sold to AOL 1998 and on to mail.ru in 2010. Aah, the '90s ... animated gifs anyone?
As you probably risk eye-cancer looking at them too long, the full glory of the available ICQ icons delegated to the full article view...

I found a very nice script to create Notes on the iPhone from the command line by hossman over at Perlmonks.

For some weird reason Perlmonks does not allow me to reply with amendments even after I created an account. I can "preview" a reply at Perlmonks but after "create" I get "Permission Denied". Duh. vroom, if you want screenshots, contact me on IRC .

As I wrote everything up for the Perlmonks reply anyways, I'll post it here instead.

Against hossman's version 32 from 2011-02-22 I changed the following:

• removed .pl from filename and documentation
• added --list to list existing notes
• added --hosteurope for Hosteurope mail account preferences and with it a sample how to add username and password into the script for unattended use
• made the "Notes" folder the default (so -f Notes becomes obsolete)
• added some UTF-8 conversions to make Umlauts work better (this is a mess in perl, see Jeremy Zawodny's writeup and Ivan Kurmanov's blog entry for some further solutions). Please try combinations of utf8::encode and ::decode, binmode utf8 for STDIN and/or STDOUT and the other hints from these linked blog entries in your local setup to get Umlauts and other non-7bit ASCII characters working. Be patient. There's more than one way to do it .

I /msg'd hossman the URL of this blog entry.

Apple has crippled the iPhone to not allow normal music files as ringtones. Business decision. Technically any sub 40 second MP4 audio file will do once you rename it to *.m4r and drag-and-drop it to the ringtones folder of your phone in iTunes. Longer ones will work, too. But you'd need a jailbroken iPhone for that as iTunes will refuse to transfer the ringtone file if it's too long. Not much of an issue imho, who keeps ringing your phone for 40 seconds or more?

There's a gazillion websites available telling you how to convert a single .mp3-file to a ringtone with or without iTunes help and there are hundreds of tools doing that for you if you can't find out how to do it with just iTunes itself. Still the ones I tried failed for me as I wanted to convert my 20 or so standard ringtones from the good old Motorola K3 to iPhone ringtones all in one go. Without having to edit each one by hand. They are already nice ringtones and have served me well for years, just too long for the iPhone and in .mp3 format.

The basic processing sequence needed is

1. Cut the .mp3 down to 39s
2. Convert the .mp3 -> .wav (with mplayer, normalize output gain while we're at it)
3. Convert the .wav -> .mp4 (with facc)
4. Clean up, GOTO 1 for next file

So below is the free shell script to create multiple ringtones in one go on any Linux system. You need to install cutmp3, mplayer and faac for it, so apt-get install cutmp3 mplayer faac on Debian or Ubuntu. cutmp3 is currently not in the portage tree for Gentoo, but you can download an ebuild from Polynomial-C's overlay (mirror). Or you just download the cutmp3 binary from Jochen Puchalla's homepage. There's no error checking in the script, so know your way around the shell before running it.

Without further ado:

Update

23.12.14 Apparently the faac package in Debian and Ubuntu has had the MP4 writing capability removed in v1.28-5 and later due to a minor license incompatibility. See the Debian Changelogs. Duh.

faac (1.28-5) unstable; urgency=low
  [ Andres Mejia ]
  * Disable mp4v2 support.
    This only disables mp4v2 for the faac utility program. The faac
    utility is GPL-2 but the mp4v2 library is MPL-1.1. The two licenses
    are incompatible with each other.

So ... unfortunately you have to built faac from source yourself or pin the v1.28-4 version which is identical except for the castration anyways.

Random distro dev: "Why oh why doesn't my distro ever head mainstream...?"
Hint: Because of stuff like this.

We've recently relocated to Beijing, China. A fellow expatriate invited me to Internations which is basically Xing with a focus on people living (or having lived) abroad. As I've used the Xing Greasemonkey script to enlarge user images on mouse over for years now, I missed that function on Internations immediately.

So I created a derivative of the Xing script which you can download here (2kB), v1.1.

You need to install the Greasemonkey Firefox Addon and then click on the above download link to get the script which will automatically be active on Internations.

If you care, my shiny new Internations profile can be found here.

Updates:

07.10.11 Updated to v1.1 to support Internations new NetDNA Content Distribution Network (in-cdn.net) URLs. Thanks to Marc for the prod via the comment below.

20.11.11 I've seen a new URL scheme in this image. URL ending in _e__x.jpg. If that's not an error but a new scheme, I'll update the script to support it.

06.07.18 I've deleted my Internations account as the site does not seem to have gained enough traction to still warrant keeping an account around. The (understandable) need by the team to increase monetization ("Albatros membership") doesn't work well with having not much more to offer than local meetups organized by volunteers.

The key on my girlfriend's MINI had to be replaced as the remote control parts of it decided to cease functioning.

The key is an interesting piece of engineering as it communicates with the car wirelessly, charges via electromagnetic induction and has a standard key quite elegantly hidden inside.

When the replacement key arrived it was already bruised on the chrome ring. So I went "duh, another two weeks wait on the next key" but the dealer just smiled, removed the chrome ring and replaced it with a new one.

Playing around with the key it had not occurred to me that the (quite easily scratched and bruised) chrome ring can simply be replaced.

So I figured, I'd document it: Using (strong enough) fingernails or a plastic or wooden spatula you can carefully remove the chrome ring from you MINI key and replace / refurbish / re-paint it. Work from one side. Push up as the chrome ring is open only on one side. There are four 8mm wide notches at 55° measured from the longitudinal axes of the key below the chrome ring. If you get your spatula locked in there you can easily leverage the chrome ring off the black plastic body of the key. Before you break things ask somebody with more manual skill to help you or pay a visit to your car dealer's spare parts desk.

The chrome ring as a spare part should be somewhat affordable as well. But I think being able to grind the ring and paint it matching the color of your MINI is a much cooler option. Please leave a comment / send a picture if you do this.

The engineer in me demanded to take the broken key apart. The inner shell is quite sturdy and the halves are tightly molded into each other, so removing the electronics will quite likely break the thing. Don't do it. But my girlfriend's was broken already, so this is what it looks inside.