Today’s Yesterday
Rants, raves and other verbal diarrhea from Andrew Martin

Recently I’ve switched to a new ISP who apparently does not relay email unless the email is meant for one of it’s accounts.  Of course this does not work for me, given that I have a number of email address which I use daily.  How can one get around this?  SSH tunnels.  That is the how, here is the howto.

Using your favorite terminal application (I’m using OS X’ default Terminal application), type in: ssh -L <local port num>:email server address:<remote port, normally 110 for pop, 25 for smtp> user@remotehost

Example:

ssh  -L 2025:my.outgoing.email.server.com:25 -L 2110:my.incomming.email.server.com:110 fender177@my.favorite.server

This will open ports 2025 and 2110 on your local machine, localhost, for forwarding traffic on ports 25 and 110 to ‘my.outgoing.email.server.com’ and ‘my.incomming.email.server.com’.  Of course, it doesn’t have to stop with one server.  You can open multiple connections to multiple servers by simply providing the -L flag as many times as you’d like.  Important Note: if you are specifying more than one tunnel, make sure to change the local port number.  If you want both incomming and outgoing connections to go through your SSH tunnel, you’ll need to specify both servers using the -L flag.

The magic isn’t quite finished.  Now you must setup your favorite (or least favorite, doesn’t matter) email client.  Simply open your email client and go into your server configurations.  Where you currently have your pop and smtp servers setup, change the server to read either localhost, or 127.0.0.1 (they are the same thing).  You’ll also need to change the port on which your email client is attempting to communicate.

Once done, you’ll just need to connect your SSH session, and fire up your email.  The nice thing about connecting this way is it enables you to check your email in less-than-secure settings (i.e. while using an unencrypted wireless network in an airport, or on a network from 1999 still using hub’s and not switches).

Best of luck!

Chinese Officials: Deadly Virus Sweeping China Is Just Olympic Fever

I’ve had a couple of minutes here and there to play around with my media linux box, running ubuntu hardy (8.04), and one thing led to another which led to another which led to a broken desktop effects (compiz-fusion) setup.  Everytime I would try to enable the desktop effects, I would get a blank white screen.

Troubleshooting:

To troubleshoot this problem, I opened a terminal and typed compiz –replace.  Once I received the whitescreen, I simply pressed ctrl-c to stop compiz.  When I scrolled up, I noticed it said Nvidia not found.  More reading led to me running the command glxinfo |grep vendor.  Three lines should come back, all of which should have NVIDIA in it.  In my case, one of the lines was SGI.  glxinfo |grep Direct also produced a big fat no.

The Fix:

Turns out xserver-xgl does not support direct rendering.  I therefore removed xserver-xgl via synaptic, killed the xserver by entering sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop.  Reinstalled my NVIDIA drivers just to be on the safe side - sudo sh NVIDIA<vernum>.  Restarted my box — compiz –replace now works just fine!

Any questions, or comments, feel free to post below.

It’s been a while since my last post, believe me, I know.  Things have been a tad on the busy side even though it is summer.  I’m currently taking a new math course in calculus, which is sort of like Calculus for retards, however, I like it because it teaches you the essential ideas behind calculus and that is it.  It doesn’t focus on all of the different trig identities, or focus on whether one can add 1/3 + 12/sqrt(17^9) in their head.  Personally, I agree with a former professor of mine; calculators have made us all lazy.  But, I also agree with industry and real life in that, we are all allowed to use calculators anytime we want.  There isn’t some calculator police force that disallows one from using their calculator.

At anyrate, I thought I would just say that things are going well.  The fall semester begins shortly -  I’ll be learning about parallel computing, which essentially means I’ll be buying a book on Linear Algebra shortly.

Anyway, thought I’d leave this one with an interesting observation.

2/3 = .6666, and 1/3 = .3333.  Now, 2/3 + 1/3 = 3/3 = 1, correct?  Well, why don’t the decimal equivlents of the two fractions add up to 1?

Keith Olbermann, you are my new hero.  For real, shut the hell up, Mr. Bush.  I can not tell you how glad I am that one main stream reporter finally had the testicular fortitude to finally say what most of us have already been saying.  Mr. Bush decided to show the world his lighter, more compassionate side the other day, by stating that he actually gave up golfing because of the war.  Oh gee, such a large loss!  WHAT THE FUCK?!  You are the president of the United States of America you fucking cowardly douche bag!  Boo fucking hiss.  Anyway, I don’t think that I need to rant, Keith Olbermann of MSNBC does quite a fine job.  I just hope that his rant does not fall on deaf ears, and that the asshole that is President George W. Bush actually hears it.  I hope he can put down his crayons, used to circle targets for bombing, for just a minute and watch and actually listen to what we all think about him.  Fuck you, Bush.