Software Trenches

A Shape of Things To Come?

Most of us have seen the "Ordering Pizza in the Total Surveillance Society" movie: http://www.aclu.org/pizza/ If you think it was a just a joke, take a look at this "Ultimate Solution for Law Enforcement".

Removing Unsanity's Application Enhancer (APE)

Today I was surprised to see aped mdash; Unsanity's Application Enhanced Daemon running on my iMac. I am still not sure how it got installed, most probably it was bundled with one of the applications, like Gizmo Project. I tried to find instructions on how to install APE but it wasn't an easy task and that's why I posting them here — it is always a pain to uninstall the extensions. You need to do that manually; handy utilities like AppZapper cannot do it. To remove APE:

1. Kill aped process using Activity Monitor
2. Remove /Library/Frameworks/ApplicationEnhancer.framework
3. Remove /System/Library/SystemConfiguration/ApplicationEnhancer.bundle
4. Remove com.unsanity.* plist files from ~/Library/Preferences
5. Log Out / Log In
6. Empty Trash

We currently have a similar issue with extensions in our Password Manager for OS X. Fortunately, we found a great solution and the next version of 1Passwd will make installation and removal of extensions very easy.

Hire Carl to Track Your Logs

We learned a lot of interesting things from the Getting Real book by 37signals. This book influenced how we build and promote not only our web applications but also 1Passwd — Password Manager for Mac OS X. This story is about how we learned to track our logs:

You need to know who's talking about you. Check your logs and find out where the buzz is coming from. Who's linking to you? Who's bitching about you? Which blogs listed at Technorati, Blogdex, Feedster, Del.icio.us are hot on your trail?

Find out and them make your presence felt. Leave comments at those blogs. Thank you people for posting links. Ask them if they want to be included on your special advance list so they'll be among the first to know about the future releases, updates, etc.

Google Analytics gives an overview of the website traffic and a summary of referrals — great to look at every morning to see the big picture. We felt that the overview is not enough and wanted to have something more dynamic — live tracking of the incoming referrals. Sounds like a lot of work, who is going to do it?

Back in the USSR?

In 2005, The New York Times published an article about how many "local news" broadcasted by "independent" TV and radio stations were in fact created (is "fabricated" the right word here?) by US State Department.

It seems that the spirit of propaganda did not die with the collapse of the USSR:

An important instrument of this strategy was the Office of Broadcasting Services, a State Department unit of 30 or so editors and technicians whose typical duties include distributing video from news conferences. But in early 2002, with close editorial direction from the White House, the unit began producing narrated feature reports, many of them promoting American achievements in Afghanistan and Iraq and reinforcing the administration's rationales for the invasions. These reports were then widely distributed in the United States and around the world for use by local television stations. In all, the State Department has produced 59 such segments.

I wonder if VDNKh is coming any time soon.

Found in Digg.

Security News in the Press

Here is an interesting way to present the security news. For unknown reasons the authors of the article from Guardian Unlimited decided that HSBC bank accounts are especially prone to keylogger attacks:

The flaw, which is not being detailed by the Guardian, revolves around the way HSBC customers access their web-based banking service. Criminals using so-called "keyloggers" - readily available gadgets or viruses which record every keystroke made on a target computer - can easily deduce the data needed to gain unfettered access to accounts in just a few attempts.

Other banks use a different system, which researchers say is more secure.

Found via Schneier on Security.

$5 phone number in Canada

Ever since Skype started its SkypeIn service where you can get a regular phone number and accept calls on your computer, I wanted to get a phone number in Toronto.

Unfortunately, it does not look like Skype has much interest in Canadian VoIP market -- the company does not provide SkypeIn numbers.

Today I found an easy and cheap solution. Here is how you can get a Canadian number and start accepting calls on your computer:

1. Download and install Gizmo Project.
2. After you register as a Gizmo user and login, your profile will show SIP number. It looks like this 1-747-NNN-NNNN.
3. Register an account at CallCentric.
4. You can now purchase a real phone number in USA or Canada:
   http://www.callcentric.com/did/
   Currently, they have numbers in Alberta (403, 780), British Columbia (250, 778), Manitoba (204), Ontario (519, 613, 647, 905), and Quebec (514).
5. Use Call Treatments page to forward incoming calls to your Gizmo SIP number. You will need to enter the number as 747XXXXXXX@proxy01.sipphone.com

That's it! Now all calls to your real phone number will be sent to your Gizmo SIP phone. The phone number at CallCentric costs $5.99/month (plus one-time $5.99 setup fee).

This setup takes care of incoming calls only. For outgoing calls you can use Gizmo or Skype directly.

Also, you can get even cheaper numbers at DID World Wide and then map it to your CallCentric account.

One more thing... Gizmo can also provide you with a free area 775 number (Nevada, USA).

UPDATE (Dec 3, 2006): Now there is a way to get a number in Canada forwarded to your Skype.

"If it is in newspapers, don't worry about it"

Bruce Schneier once said: "If it is in newspapers, don't worry about it". Newspapers report events that do not usually happen in everyday life and chances that the same event will happen to you or someone you know are very low.

In 2002 over 3,000,000 people US died from heart attacks and cancer (see stats) but you will not have a two thousand newspapers writing about the need to close the fast food chains or ban trans-fats.

Over 44% of accidental deaths in US (over 43,000 deaths!) in 2002 were caused by motor vehicles (see the same stats) yet it is so mundane, there is no (pardon me) "excitement" for the newspapers and people reading them. Can you imagine a few thousand newspapers reporting something like this: "British police foiled a major highway accident this morning by arresting 3 drunk drivers. The highway traffic in US and Europe has been brought to a halt. US officials posted code-Red alert and every driver now has to pass a driving test before he or she can use a motorized vehicle."

RubyConf in Second Life?

Here is an interesting idea: since RubyConf 2006 conference sold out in just a few hours, John Lam suggested to setup the parallel conference in Second Life.

There is a Google Groups discussion about the possibility of this happening.

A quote from the discussion:

> I can't believe people are paying money for virtual real estate. ;-)
Domain names? ;-)

and another one

For another look at how things happen in Second Life, check out this movie of John Hockenberry of The Infinite Mind with Suzanne Vega performing live in Second Life: http://www.blip.tv/file/57262 I spent some time walking around the offices of The Infinite Mind - they're floating 602M above ground. A Second Life resident gave me a lift up there on his jet plane / flying saucer thing.

I'm spending way too much time in here already ... :)

-John

Stop Phishing!

David Teare has created a video showing how 1Passwd Password Manager for OS X protects him from phishing attacks. Looking at his mailbox, I can tell that he gets an amazingly large number of phishing e-mails (I guess the Gmail spam filter I use does pretty good job then):

QuickTime Video: Protection From Phishing Attacks

Rolling back changes using Subversion Version Control System

It is easy to undo your changes and revert back to the previous version of the code in Subversion. The only "problem" is that this feature (counter-intuitively?) called Merge and to rollback your changes you need to merge your revisions in reverse.

For example, if your currently committed revision number is 1000 and you want to go back in time and start again with revision 900, you can do it using

svn merge -r 1000:900 svn+ssh://your.svn-server.com/path/to/project

There, now you have your own Time Machine.

Note the reverse order of revision numbers — from 1000 to 900.