Fazal Majid's low-intensity blog

Sporadic pontification

Fazal Fazal

Feedburner down again

2009-04-30 Web

I just tried unsuccessfully to subscribe to a feed hosted by the annoying bozos at FeedBurner. From my Temboz feed error counters, it seems FB feeds have been failing with 503 errors for at least the last 5 hours or so, par for the course.

Just another reason why outsourcing vital services to the cloud is not always a good strategy.

gondwana ~>GET -eUS http://feeds.feedburner.com/Fooducate
GET http://feeds.feedburner.com/Fooducate
User-Agent: lwp-request/1.39

GET http://feeds.feedburner.com/Fooducate --> 503 Service Unavailable
Connection: close
Server: NS_6.1
Content-Length: 62
Client-Date: Thu, 30 Apr 2009 01:31:18 GMT
Client-Peer: 66.150.96.119:80

<HTML>
<HEAD><TITLE>An Error Occurred</TITLE></HEAD>
<BODY>
<H1>An Error Occurred</h1>
503 Service Unavailable
</BODY>
</HTML>

Update (2009-04-30):

It is possible the problem lies with my ISP (although I could replicate it at work as well). I can ping FB from my Joyent accelerator but not from home where my Temboz instance runs.

A work-around is to use the newer Google server feeds2.feedburner.com instead. For Temboz, all you need to do is run sqlite3 rss.db and the command:

update fm_feeds
set feed_xml=replace(feed_xml, 'feeds.feedburner.com', 'feeds2.feedburner.com')
where feed_xml like 'http://feeds.feedburner%';

Anthony’s Cookies grand opening

2009-04-26 Food San Francisco Mylos Reviews

Anthony

Another gourmet treats shop joined the burgeoning scene in the Mission. Anthony’s Cookies opened today to a line that stretched around the corner.

Opening

As one of the officials present said, it takes courage to start a business in this economic climate. Specially in as business-hostile a city as San Francisco, if I may add.

Anthony

Inside the store was a buzzing hive of activity, with the eponymous proprietor busy preparing batches of free cookies for the awaiting hordes. At $5 for a half dozen, these cookies are a steal. I tried the double chocolate chip, it came fresh from the oven and had a strong chocolate aroma and the right texture. All in all, a great addition to a neighborhood that already has more than its share of good places to indulge a sweet tooth. I added him to my Google map of recommended bakeries, ice cream parlors and sweet shops in San Francisco.

Podcasts, the new remaindered bin?

2009-04-16 Soapbox

After eight years of a automobile-free life in San Francisco, I bought a car in December 2007. Acxiom had relocated us from our lovely downtown San Francisco office (a 15 minute walk from home) to the outer boondocks of Foster City (viable transit options: none). Before I started commuting, I simply could not fathom the point of podcasts. Now, I understand where they can be useful, but they are still not my cup of tea.

The main reason why is that podcasts are like the remaindered bin at a bookstore (remember them?). Sure, it is fun to rummage through them in search of a bargain, but usually you don’t find the books you really want there, and if you value your time as you should, it is not a productive investment thereof. Audiovisual media like podcasts force you to take them in at their speed, unlike the written word that can be scanned efficiently for triage. The so-called rich media are actually low in information value, “rich” should really be construed as in “rich foods”, i.e. pejoratively.

Audible, the downloadable audiobook company, has a promotion where they are giving away a free copy of Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I was thinking of salvaging the daily 60 to 90 minutes of my life I lose to commuting by listening to books that I actually want, perhaps even learn a new language, and Dr. Covey’s often frighteningly earnest self-help book seemed to fit the bill for a test run. I soon found my attention would wander back to the road and I found it impossible to concentrate on the book, a good thing, I guess.

Back to classical music it is…

SOCKS and SSH, two great flavors that go together

2009-04-11 Network

I am currently in New Orleans for a friend’s wedding, and staying at the InterContinental. The hotel has wired Internet access, but like all expensive hotels, wants to charge an extortionate fee ($7/hour) for it. This is annoying as the same hotel chains’ budget-priced hotels usually offer it as a complimentary service.

I noticed my email was going through, however. On further inspection, it turns out they only intercept port 80 HTTP traffic, but not on other ports. Security through (very thin) obscurity, in other words.

I tried using Firefox from my home machine over X and SSH port forwarding, but it was painfully slow.

At this point, I was considering setting up a HTTP proxy on my home machine and using it over SSH port forwarding, but I remembered reading something about SSH and SOCKS. I had never used a SOCKS proxy before, but it turns out this is incredibly easy: just add the -D option to ssh with a local port number, e.g. 9999, and set up your browser to use localhost:9999 as the SOCKS proxy. It worked flawlessly with my Mac OS X SSH client and Solaris 10 stock server.

This has applications beyond routing around hotel paywalls. Many public WiFi access points are unsecured. Even if they are legit (many are peer-to-peer vs. infrastructure, and presumably used by thieves to harvest passwords), they can be snooped for passwords trivially easily. Using SSH and SOCKS provides you with security when using an untrusted Internet access point, even for non-SSL sites. My email uses IMAPS and SMTP TLS so I don’t need to reconfigure it to use SOCKS, but that would also be an important protocol to secure.

All in all, a very worthwhile addition to my toolset. I can’t believe I waited so long to try it.

Update (2009-04-12):

To its credit, New Orleans’ Louis Armstrong international airport has free WiFi throughout the terminal. Chic!