Irmen's blog

Hoe surf ik vanaf 1 februari naar ThePiratebay.org als Xs4all (of Ziggo) klant?

Morgen gooit Xs4all (en Ziggo) op last van de rechter de toegang tot ThePiratebay.org dicht. In elk geval tot het hoger beroep een andere uitspraak zal krijgen (maar misschien ook wel niet), is het zonder omwegen zometeen niet meer mogelijk om ThePiratebay.org te benaderen.

Gelukkig zijn er omwegen.

En zijn ze eigenlijk nog erg kort ook.

Hier een greep uit de mogelijkheden:

• http://tpb.piratenpartij.nl - de proxy van de PiratenPartij
• http://tpb.makinit.nl/ - nog een proxy
• http://all4xs.net/repress/thepiratebay.se/ - proxy gebruikt door de wordpress plugin
• http://thepiratebay.org.nyud.net - Coral web proxy lijkt niet te werken, wegens static content die blijft hangen?
• http://www.depiratebay.nl - nog een willekeurige proxy
• http://goo.gl/eaAH1 één van de meer creative proxies: Google Translate lijkt niet te werken, wegens static content die blijft hangen?
• Gebruik 1 van de honderden andere gratis proxy servers, zoals bijvoorbeeld http://proxy.uselikes.com/use/UL/thepiratebay.se/

Meer alternatieven ook te vinden op http://www.ikwilthepiratebay.nl

Andere wat meer ingrijpende manieren om de blokkade te omzeilen:

• Stel andere DNS servers in b.v. die van OpenDNS of Google DNS
• Surf redelijk anoniem via TOR
• Surf via een VPN (kost meestal wel geld)

Subscribing SWTOR.....

"You have 29 days of play time remaining. You must sign up for a recurring subscription plan or redeem a Game Time Code before you can play. If you sign up for a recurring subscription, you will be billed automatically at the end of your current remaining play time."

Dus: ik heb SWTOR al gekocht en betaald, er zitten 29 dagen speeltijd bij, en toch moet ik een payment subscription afsluiten voordat ik kan spelen?

Misschien heb ik het mis maar ik kan me niet herinneren dat dat bij World of Warcraft ook zo was. Nou ja. Oh en die 3-5 security questions... Echt....

General chat

Wie zei er ook alweer dat general chat in een MMO verschrikkelijk is?

Internet, we maken je dood!

Waarom op zwart? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative/Learn_more (Niet alleen Wikipedia trouwens).

Somebody That I Used to Know - Walk off the Earth (Gotye - Cover)

Somebody That I Used to Know - Walk off the Earth (Gotye - Cover)

Walk off the Earth and Sarah Blackwood perform a cover of Gotye's "Somebody that I used to know" using five people on one guitar.

Wow

Merry 2278

Ran into this happy xmas tree in Fallout 3 ....

IT metrics fallacies

Interessante post van iemand op slashdot:

The major fallacy many big companies fall into is that some of these systems have been running flawlessly for years, because they hired a competent IT staff. They look at the price of those paychecks and shiver. Why are we paying so many high priced engineers when we've never had a problem, they think.

So they reduce staff and start to rely on support contracts instead of on-site gurus. The gurus are still there to solve any oh-shit moments. But that back investment in good engineers has produced a stable infrastructure that runs with few problems for years. So they reduce staff more, pay for more support contracts, and eventually the system critical mass is greater than the engineers who can support it. It's no problem until it's a problem.

Eventually something minor goes wrong, but nobody notices or if they do it's not really their field of expertise so they don't understand it's minor now but could escalate. When it does, something else goes wrong, and a cascade effect takes out more and more systems. With a full staff, you have enough guys that when the critical mass is reached, they can start defensive measures and get things back in working order in no time. With support staff only, things are going wrong faster than they can deal with it.

"Call on our support contracts," shout the bosses! So now your on-site staff are all on hold instead of troubleshooting. When they get through to someone, they have to spend the first hour or two describing their infrastructure to the technician on the other end, who starts making random suggestions that maybe help, but probably don't.

Het praktijkvoorbeeld dat hij vervolgens noemt is best wel erg te noemen...

Passwords, they suck

FUCK PASSWORDS

I'm so tired of passwords. So, so, so tired. Most people don't understand this. Most people use the same password everywhere. Most people can just mechanically type out password3 in every password box, smirking to themselves at how clever they are, because who would ever guess 3 instead of 1?

Compiling Python from source on Ubuntu 11.x multiarch

Ubuntu 11.x has changed the location for 64/32 bits libraries ("multiarch") and this can cause some hiccups when trying to build Python from source. Make sure to sudo apt-get install dpkg-dev to get the dpkg-architecture tool installed. Otherwise you'll get compile errors because some system libs can't be found (zlib, ssl, etc).

See also http://bugs.python.org/issue11715

And, ofcourse, you'll need to install various -dev packages such as zlib1g-dev to satisfy Python's library dependencies. You can see which ones you're missing by taking a look at the compile output where it complains about failed modules.

pickle efficiency when dealing with binary data

For my Pyro project I recently wrote in some detail about the pickle efficiency of various types when dealing with binary data. I've added it to the Pyro documentation but it is also useful when dealing with pickle in general.

So, here is a short overview of the pickle wire protocol overhead for the possible types you can use when transferring binary data:

• str
  Python 2.x: efficient; directly encoded as a byte sequence, because that’s what it is. Python 3.x: inefficient; encoded in UTF-8 on the wire, because it is a unicode string.
• bytes
  Python 2.x: same as str. Python 3.x: efficient; directly encoded as a byte sequence.
• bytearray
  Inefficient; encoded as UTF-8 on the wire (pickle does this in both Python 2.x and 3.x)
• array("B") (array of unsigned ints of size 1)
  Python 2.x: very inefficient; every element is encoded as a separate token+value. Python 3.x: efficient; uses machine type encoding on the wire (a byte sequence).

Your best bet seems to be to use the bytes type (and possibly the array("B") type if you’re using Python 3.x) and stay clear from the rest. It’s strange that the bytearray type is encoded so inefficiently by pickle.

A bytearray is pickled (using max protocol) as follows:

>>> pickletools.dis(pickle.dumps(bytearray([255]*10),2))
    0: \x80 PROTO      2
    2: c    GLOBAL     '__builtin__ bytearray'
   25: q    BINPUT     0
   27: X    BINUNICODE u'\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff'
   52: q    BINPUT     1
   54: U    SHORT_BINSTRING 'latin-1'
   63: q    BINPUT     2
   65: \x86 TUPLE2
   66: q    BINPUT     3
   68: R    REDUCE
   69: q    BINPUT     4
   71: .    STOP

>>> bytearray("\xff"*10).__reduce__()
(<type 'bytearray'>, (u'\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff', 'latin-1'), None)

Most notably, the actual *bytes* in the bytearray are represented by an UTF-8 string. This needs to be transformed into a unicode string and then encoded back into bytes, when unpickled. The thing being a bytearray, I would expect it to be pickled as such: a sequence of bytes. And then possibly converted back to bytearray using the constructor that takes the bytes directly (BINSTRING/BINBYTES pickle opcodes).

The above occurs both on Python 2.x and 3.x.

I have no idea yet why this is. Maybe I'll write a patch to improve it, doesn't seem that hard to do.