I am surely not the only one to complain about the ridiculous liquids restrictions for airplane travel. Since these new regulation are in place, I’ve challenged them, found holes, and compiled tips for those trying to blow up planes.

I wouldn’t write another story if it weren’t for an idea I’ve had at Zurich airport on my last trip to London: let’s swamp the airports with trash so that they’ll be forced to deal with Brussels and IATA to return to normal.

After checking in for my flight, I stopped by the supermarket to buy two containers of yoghurt that would make someone happy. The containers each said 150g (that’s weight, not volume) on them, and I put them into a clear, resealable one-litre bag, placed them into a tray to be x-ray-scanned separately, only to have them confiscated.

After discovering (not much to my surprise) that the security staff didn’t know the difference between weight and volume, nor understood the concept of density, I got a chance to speak to the head security officer (surrounded by five police whose attention I’d gotten), and learnt that Zurich airport has one ton of trash to discard every day, Frankfurt supposedly has to deal with four.

As I was walking onto my plane, I tried to think of non-recyclable containers that we could fill with liquids to bring along to increase that amount. My theory was that once the trash problem became too massive, the airports would have to deal with the authorities to resolve this liquid restriction, because it seems quite clear that normal people have no way to influence choices made that affect our “safety”.

Unfortunately, I see two problems:

First, we’d be dealing with trash and hence face all the environmental concerns. The airports do not recycle the millions of PET bottles they confiscate every day, so we shouldn’t make that worse. Unfortunately, I cannot think of another liquid container that wouldn’t come with similar concerns.

Second, the airports might have the burden, but they won’t carry the cost of all the trash. In fact, thanks to the security theatre related to liquids, we already pay higher airport taxes and charges. Surely it can’t be in our interest to push that further up the scale.

So in the end, swamping airports with trash doesn’t seem like a viable way forward, unfortunately.

I wish I knew what to do. I wish that the decision makers at IATA would finally admit that they overreacted and revert to normal, with sensible security measures, which focus on fending off the real threats, not fake ones. Unfortunately, nobody likes to admit that they were wrong, especially not when the decision is heavily backed up by the lobby of vending machine companies and restaurant owners, who benefit greatly from these ridiculous liquid safety measures.

NP: Pulp: We Love Life

Penny keeps me updated on New Zealand terrorism and it’s depressing to hear about it: 18 people detained and tried as terrorists for peace activism, protesting against environmental issues, and fighting for Māori rights.

I’d like to help spread the word and hope that avaaz.org picks up this issue soon! If you would, please pass this on.

NP: Stars: Set Yourself on Fire

You are so unique! No other programme I know can suck up memory at such a steep rate as you. And not only that, you also keep it safe and secure, making sure never to release it. You’re awesome! I wish there would be more like you. NOT.

Update: sorry, Firefox, you’re about to be degraded!

NP: 65daysofstatic: The Destruction of Small Ideas

When Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876, he probably didn’t expect the rise of the cellphones we’ve been seeing over the last 20 years. At first, there were C-net phone too huge to carry, but mobile still, as they communicated wireless. Then, devices became smaller, networks faster and ubiquitous, and today, the number of cellphones sold worldwide has exceeded the population.

Much like everything else, “it used to be better back then”. When phone calls were still ridiculously expensive, people were able to enjoy their peace and life progressed slow for everyone to think enough, not do or say without engaging their brains. Then, when the first cellphones stuffed people’s pockets, they did their job pretty much from the start: you could make phone calls. Some genius discovered SMS as a splendid tool to rip off customers, so phones grew pager abilities, but other than that, they just worked; I remember my first phone, which didn’t break in years.

Obviously, if you’re a phone manufacturer, you don’t like that, because once you sell a phone that works, the customer won’t come back to give more monies in ten years. Clever as you are, you devised two schemes to ensure your cash flow: make phones more brittle and crap, so that they break within a year, at most two; and drag ever younger people into the debt trap. For the truly stupid, sites and services offer ring tones and games and what not, and the lesser challenged you keep close by the continuous addition of new features that noone needs.

So these days, almost every phone can play music files, which is mighty convenient to spice up your work commute with some tunes, but our youngsters are overburdened by that, it seems.

I almost soiled myself laughing at a group of five Italians at Ezeiza Airport in Buenos Aires, who were sitting around waiting for a bus, every one of them ear plugged and grooving to the beats (you know how dorky it looks when people silently sing along rap songs?). That’s not the funny part. The funny part is that every minute, one of them would say something, which would cause the others to unplug one ear, and form their lips to bleat “what” (making sure to add just a little bit extra of the tone of general disinterest, which is “cool”). This elicited one of two responses: either the original speaker would say “oh, nothing” and everyone nodded, or he’d repeat his wisdom, causing everyone to laugh and nod… before in both cases they replugged and returned to luff themselves. I wonder how they made it to the airport themselves, and why they travel as a group.

Worse than that, however, is that cellphone manufacturers remembered that their phones had speakers (for fancy ringtones) and consequently added the ability to blast tunes through them. As a result, groups of kiddies walk around or sit in trains, with one (or more) of those cellphones blaring into the environment.

Apart from being generally inconsiderate, what I don’t understand is how they put up with the sound quality. It’s mostly hip-hop music — you know that genre that makes some homies out there install 5000 watt subwoofers into their cars so make sure the windows rattle with the base — but these phones have a frequency spectrum comparable in width to that of your grandfather’s, way further up the scale (meaning they just don’t do base). Playing hip-hop through those is like putting a flute concerto on a subwoofer, just worse, because high-pitch tones are harder to filter by those who don’t want to hear them.

And yet, I see it all over the place, kiddies “listening” to music through cellphone speakers. Is it because silence would kill them?

NP: 65daysofstatic: The Fall of Math

Tired and under the influence of beer, I tried to remove the currently broken IPv6 default route from my primary mailserver via an SSH connection and accidentally executed instead:

ip r d default
# I meant: ip -6 r d default

Unfortunately, I didn’t immediately realise what I had done, and then it was too late.

Robert Collins told me that I could have saved the session because even without a default route, packets still reach the machine. Unfortunately, due to Nagle’s algorithm, you pretty much only have one shot, so the next time this happens to me (or you), quickly type

ip r a default via <gateway>

into a separate window, then copy and paste it into the SSH session and you may get lucky.

Update: one lesson I learnt from this is to add specific routes for at least the IPv6 tunnel peer, and possibly another machine (or two) under my control out there. I now have that in place on all machines I own.

NP: The Phoenix Foundation: Pegasus

Thank you, Ted Lemon and Paul Vixie for the ISC DHCP server and client! My days would be so boring without them. I revel in your wisdom, experience, and sheer genius when I get behind some of the design decisions you made when writing those pieces of software.

My current favourite is the hook integration into dhclient-script(8). Read what the manpage has to say about it:

[…] the client script checks for the presence of an executable /etc/dhcp3/dhclient-enter-hooks script, and if present, it invokes the script inline, using the Bourne shell . command. The entire environment documented under OPERATION is available to this script, which may modify the environment if needed to change the behaviour of the script.

Hooks which can modify the environment and thus influence all other hooks that follow, as well as the script which applies the network configuration dhclient obtained to the local machine! Yay! Genius!

You are my heroes.

NP: Pluto: Pipeline under the Ocean

I put the Nokia E51, which I had previously acquired, onto Ebay last night, and it sold within minutes. Even though I made a 50€ loss on the whole affair, this made me very happy! The phone is crap in so many ways that it made me quite angry. I now consider those 50€ the investment I had to make to bring you this post:

First of all, the reason why I bought the phone was because it sports wireless LAN as well as Voice-over-IP. Since I’ve recently gotten into VoIP, I was looking for reasonable VoIP phones and even though the Siemens C450IP DECT phone works very well, it only does so at home, or where I find a switch port for it. So my theory was to get this Wifi+VoIP phone and be able to use my VoIP infrastructure from anywhere around the world. Penny has the Nokia E65 and loves it, so I went for the E51, a newer model that promised to address some of the issues she had with hers.

All of the following is based on the E51 with the 100.34.20 firmware dated 29 September 2007, which runs the (crippled) Symbian S60r3 operating system.

Good things

Let’s start with the few good things up front: the E51 comes with a regular USB jack, allowing you to plug it into any computer and use it as mass storage device without the need for any Nokia-specific cables.

I also liked the remote lock functionality: in the event of a stolen phone, you could send it a pre-defined “passphrase” that would cause the phone to lock itself. Also, the phone could be configured to lock itself (like a screensaver) after a given amount of idle time.

Other than that, I could not find anything outstanding, so let’s turn to the downsides, of which there are many more:

VoIP/SIP shortcomings

I had previously dismissed the E series phones for good reasons, but both the E65 and the E51 improved their SIP clients a fair bit, and with the SIP VoIP settings utility, it was even possible to configure STUN. But unfortunately, the SIP client, while a nice toy, ended up being unusable in production. Here are some of the reasons:

I got VoIP working at home and in some other places, but definitely not everywhere. It may be that some of those networks blocked the SIP port (5060/udp), or that the phone didn’t feel well on the day, but in the majority of cases, I could not get the SIP client to connect. And there was no way to find out what was going on, as the client would just claim that “registration failed” without any additional information. It was also hard to retry, often requiring the phone to be restarted. Whenever if failed, the client would helpfully tell me that it “could not establish a connection to the connection network”.

To get the phone to log on to the SIP server automatically, I had to define a home network for the SIP profile. Changing the access point for that network required a phone reboot to get SIP working again. It was possible to define multiple SIP profiles with different access points and add them all to the one, global VoIP profile, and theoretically get auto-login to work across multiple Wifi networks; unfortunately, I cannot say that this worked, there were always some problems requiring me to change defaults and shift things around. Also, after I had defined a few of those profiles and needed to make a change to the SIP settings (move the SIP port to 53/udp), I had to modify all profiles in turn; it was not possible to share settings. On the other hand, NAT traversal settings and timeouts, which can only be configured with the aforementioned SIP VoIP settings utility, applied to a VoIP profile and thus to all SIP profiles, without exception.

I found it mildly annoying that I couldn’t use # and * as part of the number/SIP address to call, nor was it possible to dial single-digit extensions — the phone will ask you to associate a “quick dial” number with the key, even if “quick dial” has been explicitly disabled). I could also not “dial” a SIP address ad-hoc — if I wanted to call sip:someone@sip.somewhere.org, I had to define a contact and add the “Internet phone” address.

One can define “Internet calls” to be the default call type, thus routing all calls via VoIP if available. Unfortunately, once I dialed a number, the event was hardwired to the call type: I could not redial a number used previously for a VoIP call when all I had available was GSM coverage.

Gripes with the IMAP client

The IMAP client, while an interesting addition to my day, turned out to be pretty unusable. The first mistake I made was to tell it to synchronise all messages in some of my larger mailboxes, which caused the phone to take tens of seconds until it switched a folder, and a few seconds just to scroll to the next screen in any given folder. I found that once any mailbox accumulates more than 100 messages, the client turns useless (Nokia’s default is to synchronise 30 messages).

I could tell the client to synchronise every hour, but only if I locked it to an access point, the “home network”. If I roamed to a different Wifi network, I could no longer connect to the IMAP server, as this access point would not be found. The phone would not let me use a different access point unless I changed the home access point, but changing that turned off the automatic mail sycnhronisation.

If I say mail synchronisation, I mean header synchronisation. Even though there is an option for “Headers only”, it only applies to POP3; it is impossible to have the phone download message bodies automatically, only manually and then only per-message or per-folder, not for all folders at once.

The IMAP client could delete messages, but it could not move a message to a different folder, nor create or delete folders.

And even though I could turn off the message tone the phone would play when it received new email, it insisted on vibrating nevertheless.

The only other IMAP client I found for Symbian phones is ProfiMail, which looked interesting and much more powerful, but which would randomly crash on me while browsing or operating on larger mailboxes.

Connection hiccups

While the an application was running that was using the network, the Wifi connection stayed open, but I could not make it stay open between sessions. The phone would obtains an IP, do what I asked it to, and then immediately close the connection. From a power management perspective, this makes sense, but not from the usability angle.

I could not make the phone connect to a Wifi network that advertised both, WPA and WPA2 and had to disable WPA at home to let it connect.

At times, it was not possible to reuse an existing connection. I haven’t been able to figure out the details, but it seemed to me that whenever an application like the IMAP client was locked to an access point, it would be unable to make a connection to the IMAP server, even if e.g. the VoIP client was connected to the server by way of exactly the same access point. The phone would just say that “a connection was already active” and that I should “close it and try again”.

I had a really hard time working with SSL-enabled websites and IMAP servers, because even though the phone presented me with the server certificate and offered the choice of accepting it permanently, it didn’t and would ask the question again and again (which made the phone pretty unusable if the IMAP client was running in the background). Only after I had found out how to import the CACert root certificates, did this problem become irrelevant.

Other pet-peeves

The phone came with a lot of smaller issues that made me ask the question of whether its designed ever had to use it too often.

Possibly the most annoying aspect of the phone was its speed. It’s a lot faster than the E61, but it still takes on the order of seconds to update screens or display simple text messages.

Speaking of text messages, I am a little spoiled by the Sony Ericsson K610i (to which I now return), which would offer the contacts with whom I’d recently interacted instead of presenting me with the full list, like the E51 does. I could filter the full list, but only by typing the start of the name — substring matching was not implemented.

It was impossible to receive text files via bluetooth and have them put onto the filesystem. On receipt, the phone just said “text file saved”, and it took me a while to figure out that it had stored them into the notepad, from where it could not be exported. To get my SSH identity onto the filesystem for PuTTY to use required me to access the phone via USB.

The phone could receive vCards with new contacts, but it only offered to import the first contact, even though the standard allows for an arbitrary number of contacts per file. What’s even worse though is that the phone silently failed to import contacts with non-ASCII characters in their name, such as Ä or Å — they just didn’t show up even though the phone gave every indication of a successful import; creating such contacts on the phone worked, on the other hand.

Each time I started the phone, the Nokia greeting screen would show up, accompanied with the Nokia tune, which could not be disabled. Enough said.

The last problem I feel worth mentioning is hardly a Nokia or Symbian problem: battery life. With Wifi turned on, the phone would last about 24 hours on standby, which makes it pretty unusable for roaming Wifi or even VoIP usage.

Summing up

I am happy to have sold the phone and look forward to returning to my Sony Ericsson K610i. After checking out the E61/E71 a bit, playing with the E65, and trying the E51 out for several weeks, I can conclude that Nokia has a long way to go before they can offer a usable smartphone with Wifi/VoIP capability.

It would be a good step forward if they would open-source the Symbian operating system, but until that’s done, I am going to look at the OpenMoko FreeRunner next. The E51 once again made it perfectly clear for me that proprietary software is no alternative for my use case.

NP: Fat Freddy’s Drop: Live at the Matterhorn

When I got home last night, I couldn’t sleep and instead popped a DVD into the drive and sat back to watch an episode of the famous Tatort series (German only).

Tatort (“crime site”) episodes tell the tale of police investigations, but without stuntmen and special effects, without sci-fi elements or threadbare settings and stories, without technology and gadgets. In fact, it just feels plain as if it could happen next door tomorrow. The characters are normal as you and I, but played beautifully, with witty and enjoyable dialogues, which seem familiar and natural to me as a German, rather than trying to be funny or cool. Yet, the two main investigators, Batic and Leitmayr, are awesome and it’s good fun to watch them inch towards solving the mysteries.

I watched the episode “Norbert”, and I really enjoyed it. The plot is full of surprises, and the viewer is (purposely) mislead on various occasions. It was suspenseful until the end. I’ve seen maybe 20 of the thousands of episodes (it airs every Sunday night since 1970), and this one was so far my favourite.

Quality television! It’s a shame the (Dutch) DVDs I have do not have English subtitles.

NP: Dimmer: I Believe You Are a Star

As some of you may know, the Euro 2008 football championships are on in Austria and Switzerland at the moment. I am not a football fan at all, although I won’t mind watching a game between two skilled and fairplaying teams (which is becoming a rarity, I heard). But I don’t care much about it, unless it negatively affects those who don’t care (which includes myself).

For instance, last night, after Germany beat Turkey in the semi-finals, a group of hooligans roamed about in Dresden and vandalised Turkish food shops and hurt the people working there (German only). I can kind of understand fans getting overly excited and driving their cars madly through the city, honking the horns at frequencies directly proportional to their cumulative personality disorders (or inversely proportional to their penis size), but violence in reaction to winning? Fuck you, you low pieces of shit.

!

Update: there seems to be no information on whether the attackers were German. A foreigner living in Berlin has written in to complain that my blog post casts a negative light onto Germany in terms of hostility towards foreigners, which he disputes. Germany has had to fight that image for decades, and my blog post puts fresh petrol on the fire.

I do not intend that. I leave it up to each individual to make up their own mind, and to me, a group of hooligans is in no way representative of an entire nation. End update

Quite clearly, there are people on the street who should be locked up. I won’t go there though, at least not in this post.

Instead, let’s talk more about football and its effects, because encouraging this sort of violence is only one of many consequences, which we are forced to tolerate in the interest of the public. Everyone wants football, right? What follows are somewhat related, but otherwise incoherent rants. Enjoy, or stop reading. I’m not a misanthrope, I think.

There are many other aspects of this football event which make me want to throw up. One of them is the (sight of the) average organism who participates in the craze. Look at them! Monkeys are more intelligent than that! Has evolution taken a 180 degree turn?

Of course, you can’t blame the individuals, as their brains have been flooded and effectively shut off, so they don’t make any trouble when they trott along the path to dumbification. It’s the big companies and the media industry, blinded by short sight, do everything in their power to speed up this decline, fueling the consumerism of the stupified morons making up our the populace, just for the paycheck at the end of the day.

The UEFA is primarily a huge money-making machine, and if you want more information on that I suggest that you look a bit into the distribution of media rights for the event. Another instance, which has a little more relevance to the normal person on the street is their ticket distribution: people have to pay hundreds of Euros to UEFA a year before the event for a “chance” to be given a ticket for any random day. The ticket is made out in their name and cannot be transferred. If you can’t make the game, you can return the ticket to get you money back… after the event. If you don’t get a ticket, you’ll also get your money back… a year later. Interest-free loans, anyone?

But hey, I actually don’t care about most of that. Let those who want to consume consume, let those who can’t entertain themselves watch television, let the UEFA and media people get rich by making people stupid, and let me go about my daily business.

We held a small barbeque party some days ago, and I went out to buy a few kegs of beer from a local brewery. That was my first confrontation with the football circus, as the brewery happens to be about half a kilometre from the stadium where a match was on that night. It took me at least 40 minutes until I had argued successfully with five police officers and could pick up the kegs. Swap brewery for any of the other shops in the area, who did not receive any compensation whatsoever, and you’ll note how the football circus takes priority over everyone’s everyday life, even if you don’t give a single flying food for the sport.

I love Zurich, and just like most people, taking a stroll along the lakeside, between Bellevue and the Chinese Garden on a sunny afternoon is one of the more delightful ways to spend time in the city and enjoy its beauty… unless they are putting up massive “public viewing areas” everywhere (and make shitloads of noise in doing so), and even dump elevated “VIP platforms” into the lake to add noise in the view to the noise in the ear.

The official entities of Switzerland surely pushed for the event, as it drives tourism and brings money into the country. But were the people actually considered? Could we have done anything against this craze? I bet noone ever asked.

I find it very sad how much garbage these fan monkeys produce. Switzerland is well-organised, and there are plenty of garbage cans around, many of which have been put in place specifically for the event, but it’s already too much to ask of these low organisms to put the shit left from their consumption into those bins.

And I won’t even go near the question of how much energy this entire event wastes. Yay entertainment! Yay stupification of the populace! If you have football to celebrate, you don’t have to consider the environment, or poverty, or other such annoying issues.

Sunday night, the circus will come to an end, and what’ll be left is a few days of cleaning and tearing down all the structures. Then this place will finally retun back to normal, and there’ll be a little less idiots on the street, at least in the places I frequent.

NP: Dimmer: There My Dear