SOCKS and friends

So you're sitting at some random cafe, having a cold beer - whilst surfing your favorite porn, using some semi-public WiFi access-point, in the vicinity of your local beer pusher. How to login to a non-https site, without all the other suckers around you sniffing up your password ?

Quite simple actually, you'll use ssh(1) and it's local "dynamic" application-level port forward - ssh will simply act as a SOCKS server.

On your laptop (running some sort of Unix - obviously), do the following:

ssh -v -D 8989 -N user@host

-v: Verbose mode - in order to see what the is going on
-N: Tells ssh, not to execute a remote command (optional)
user@host: should obviously be replaced by credentials and a box, you have access to.

Next, open your browser (Firefox, obviously) and go into "Preferences" and open the "Connection Settings" dialog box. Click "Manual Proxy Configuration" and enter "localhost" and "8989" under SOCKS.

Voila, you are surfing through the box you port-forwarding to - and traffic between your laptop and your remote box is tunneled through ssh.
Obviously, the traffic from the remote box, to the site your are sending your HTTP request to is not secure, but that's another story.


You can most likely do the same with a windows box, but I'd be fucked if I know how - go ahead, and google it.

Monsoon - Paris Style

I must say we had a greatly entertaining day yesterday.

The day started off with a bit of golf at 12 (I wasn't really awake before then anyways). The weather was FAN-Tastic (35° C, not a cloud), and we were enjoying every bit of this delectable moment.

Then all hell broke loose.

At around 3:45, Clouds started coming in from the SW, big clouds. Within 40 minutes, we had gone from full sunny daylight, to almost pitch black darkness. You know when day becomes night that shit is about to hit the fan, and it hit that fan real hard.

At around 4:30, this is what paris looked like:

The clouds opened up, and we got hail and heavy rain for around an hour....


It goes without saying that Météo France didn't know about this'light drizzle' before it was in sight (literally), and therefore didn't really warn anyone.

We lost power for about a minute, so did our local McDonald's, and all the traffic lights in the area went out of service, reaking havoc everywhere.

Overall I tend to love chaos, so I was loving it from the start. I would have loved to have seen a cow go flying by like in Twister, or see some cars (with their occupants) being thrown around, but i guess just seeing people panicked and scared is pretty cool too..

Guess what? 'They' say that we should have a storm today too.. sweeet!

In the sign of golf

This week, has really been in the sign of golf - and I've got a feeling that so will the weekend.


Dim and I, are now zooming out to the driving-range in our lunch break. We've discovered, that have exactly enough time to shoot 1,5 bucket, and make it back to the office in time.

On Wednesday night, be went out and practiced bunker shots, and putting as well. It's good fun, and gives us an opportunity to profit the great weather.


Btw, it's nice to see that Blogger has added an image hosting service, so you can upload pictures directly to your blog.

Fete de la Musique - Paris, France. June 21st 2005

Well here you have it, another successful "Fete de la Musique". We walked around the Latin Quarter of paris from 8 to 2am, listened to A LOT of loud music, drank A LOT of beer, had A LOT of fun, but didn't have enough merguez sandwiches for my taste. In any case, it was a blast!

Fete de la Musique

Well, well well... it's that time of year again. The annual Fete de la Musique bash is tonight - for the love of god is blows my mind, why this event is not scheduled on a weekend - cause, you *know* that everyone will get shit-canned tonight.

I'm not a huge fan (like everyone else), primarily because of the whole transportation issue. It is impossible to bring your car, and the metro/bus system will be flowing with vomit and fucked up folks. Getting a taxi is less than likely..

I checked out the program for tonight. Not too much that peaked my curiosity, unless you're in to new-wave-tree-huggin' fusion music. Oh well, there's always cold brew and plenty of merguez around - so I guess it won't be a lost cause.

Firefox extensions

Over the next couple of months, I'm going to blog about my absolute favorite Firefox extensions. It might be useful for some people ;)

GreaseMonkey
One of my most recent extensions (and already one of the most useful). GreaseMonkey enables you to "load" any given piece of DHTML while loading a page, hence enabling you to change the behavior of the page. Fx. a small script is Linkify (if you have GreaseMonkey installed, you can right click on the link and press "Install User Script"). Linkify well crawl through all the contents of the loading page, and change all URLs that do have an <a href=... tag - so that you can click on them.

There are hundreds of ready-made and ready to run scripts available here:
GreaseMonkeyUserScripts

The Dim-needs-a-golf-license-but-is-too-broke Fundraiser!

Hello Dear Friends,

I am writing you about a very serious subject. It takes up a vast part of my life and is of utmost importance to me. Of course I am talking about golf. I love it, everything about it. I love hitting the living crap out of that stupid little ball, I love breaking tees, I love hitting 'warning shots' to the group ahead and see their pissed off faces when my ball lands 20 yards in front of them, I love caddies, I love the childish way us men buy our clubs like boys with new toys, I love the cold beer after finishing up a round. I'm sure you've understood, I love golf.

Here is the problem. I can't play golf. I mean I can play golf, but I can't actually go out on a course and play a round, because I do not have a Federation Française de Golf license. I am confined to the premises of our local driving range in Rueil-Malmaison, hitting basket after basket of wasted balls, balls that go up and land, but have no meaning, no "raison d'être*" I do not have a license because I do not have the money to buy one, not because I am cheap, but simply because I am broke.

Hence my request to you, my dear friends and virtual companions. I need to gather 43 € (yes, ONLY 43€!) in order to buy myself a license, and an additional 30€ to play my first round. Any help from my beloved entourage** is welcome. Please contact me if you can help me in any way, or go to the FFG website and buy my license for me. You can also click on the google banners on the blog, hence making us some money. This is my goal in life right now.

You can make my dream come true.

Thank you


Dimitri
(golf-ball-wacker-guy)


*"Reason of being", in Swahili.
** "entourage" means: "the fuckers that hang around with me, or have the luck of knowing me.

Store Wars

For once that vegetables are good for something...

A buddy of ours sent this link to us yesterday- it's too good to not be posted. I admire the ingenuity of the people who made this little film - absolutely amazing, and hilarious. I'm still not going to give up meat and cheap industrially produced vegetables though.. screw that!

AdSense

Yeah, I've put a google text-ad on the sidebar. I invite you all to go click on it, so I can buy more alcohol.

In the hope that I can soon retire, and live (like a king) on my banner earnings alone.

New clubs

Yesterday, Dim and I had the exquisite opportunity to try out our newly acquired clubs. It was good fun, and one of those moments where the "ordeal" is well worth the while...

Dim picked up a Big Bertha 4 iron, with a regular flex graphite shaft. Quite interesting, as we normally play with steel shafts. Here's the clubface:

I picked up a Big Bertha Warbird 3 Wood - also with a regular flex graphite shaft. Very nice indeed:

Both excellent clubs, that gives you a joy - whilst hitting the living crap out of the ball.

The Concorde Lafayette Panoramic bar

Well that's a view in a half! Yesterday, after a long night of Serbians, a keg of beer and various other beverages, mich, myself and our ladies went to the top of the Concorde Lafayette building at Porte Maillot for some coffee.. I must say that although a Grand Crème is 6 euros, it's well worth it considering the view. I recommend the Panoramic bar on the 34th floor - well worth the dosh.

Hello Piratebay!!!

Haha, you devils you!! Piratebay is back online, bigger and better than ever. They even have different languages and everything now. You tricksters you. Well, back to downloading stuff....

Bittorrent replacement

The government (and their friends the lobbyists) are finally catching up with the popular BitTorrent p2p filesharing application. BitTorrent depends heavily on "tracker" sites that will show you the availability of torrents. As many (read: all) those sites are being shut down by the authorities, it is becoming increasingly difficult for filesharers to find the torrents.

Enter Rodi.

From slashdot:

Rodi is a small-client P2P application, written in Java, that improves on BitTorrent by allowing both content searches and full anonymity. It's released under the General Public License (GNU). Even your IP address can be hidden using Rodi through a process called "bouncing." That is, if A wants a file from B, they get C to agree to stand-in on the exchange. B gets C's IP address, not A's. Through IP Spoofing A can even hide their identity from C. Rodi can also be used from behind corporate firewalls and LANs using Network Address Translation (NATs), something most home gateways have.'

Bye Bye PirateBay

Well it finally happened. The PirateBay website was finally brought down by the Swedish anti-piracy authorities.. I guess they made fun of the legal letters one to many times....

The French NON

Well, well, well - so the (majority) of the French voters, opted for NON to the constitution. Is that because 55% of the voters were extreme right-wing or extreme left-wing (as the media apparently will have you believe) ? Not really, it's a desperate scream for change in the French administration. It is a shame, that a the referendum had to be sacrificed - but I do not see it as a big problem.
At worst, the EU constitution will be slightly delayed. On the positive side, it might force the politicians to amend the current "draft" to something even better ?

Oh well, what the hell do I care - and could not cast my vote anyway.. (why is that by the way ? Since, I am an European - that works, lives and pay tax in France - why should I not be able to cast my vote ? )

Another wedding

Last weekend we went to the wedding of Sabrina and Stephane. It was a beautiful ceremony held at an old manoir in the north of France (Manoir de Bloisonville, between Honfleur and Deauville).
We had booked a room in a small hotel in Barneville (5-6 km from Honfleur), called "L'Auberge de la Source". It was very nice, especially as it was located well out on the countryside close to a forest.

I'll see if I can grab some photos from somewhere to put up one of the following days, as I (as usual) forget my camera...

Star Wars - Revenge of the Sith

I finally got my shit together, and went to see the "masterpiece" ! It was great, the CGI was awesome - and a lot of loose ends were explained/tied up.
I think, I'll watch episode 4-5-6 in the upcoming days, perhaps it'll be interesting watching them with a different background..

A few things, about it - I loved that we actually saw the homeworld of Chewbacca, also we saw that Obi-wan Kenobi is a hardcore motherfu**ker - and last but not least, it's great to see Yoda in some one-to-one combat.
The only thing, that bugged me a bit - was how easily Anakin was turned to the dark side, I know we are suppose to believe that he was "blinded" by his love for Padme - but hey, as a Jedi - he is trained to resist the temptation.

If you haven't seen it yet, then you should definitely go and see it - it's one of those movies that really needs to be seen on a big screen.