Shortly after I started fucking around with sockcheck.c, I got involved with one of those inevitable side projects that starts distracting from the problem at hand.
I decided I needed a decent Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for C/C++ in order to get the project done. Hacking around in jed (I hate vi) just wasn't cutting it.
Then I realized I had gone through this all before.
Twenty years ago next January I got my first "IBM compatible PC". It was a slick dual floppy 8mHz XT with EGA graphics. I bought it from a "friend" and paid about eight hundred bucks for it. The first thing I did was buy the $19.95 Power-C compiler.
Oddly enough, even though it only works on MS DOS, you can still buy it for $19.95.
Then next thing I dad was look for a decent editor. My friend had thrown in a bunch of software, including a text editor from DAK, another company that's still around for no apparent reason whatsoever.
In the 80s DAK sold mostly blank cassette tapes. By the time I got around to buying a PC in 1988 they had moved into the floppy disk business. Their "value add" at the time was including worthless software with their floppies.
And that was where I found "DAK Edit". I used it for all my C hacking until my programs got too large. It seems DAK's programmers had no idea what the "PageUp/Down" keys were for, so you had to hit the Up/Down arrows to navigate through your source code.
The search for a decent editor eventually led to Blackbeard, a decent DOS editor with all the bells and whistles. Blackbeard has passed on. You may be able to find a copy on some of those old BBS file dumps, but don't try to Google for it because some guy named Bill Blackbeard, who, as fate would have it, happens to be an editor, gets all the hits. Only oldtimers seem to remember it now.
In 1990 Borland introduced Turbo C++ 1.0, which was my first exposure to IDEs. It came on a half dozen floppies and shipped with twenty pounds of manuals. I bought it at the low, low introductory price of $99.95.
In 1992 Windows 3.1 came out and later that year Borland produced Borland C++ Professional. At $799, it was out of my price range until they offered a Turbo C++ upgrade for $99.95.
By this time I was writing shareware. Everything I did was written in BC++ and I was clam happy.
I could've hacked away forever on BC++, but '95 rolled around and MS DOS was, like the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt, history. In 1997 I gave in and bought Microsoft Visual C++, which I still have and still use.
Except recently all of my hacking has been on Linux.
If you run a Linux distribution that comes with the Synaptic Package Manager, don't waste your time searching for "IDE" or even "integrated". The only thing that shows up is eclipse.
Eclipse is fine. In fact it's damn near wonderful. But the version that Debian 4.0 supports leaves much to be desired. Go to www.eclipse.org and get the most recent version. Then go to (ugh) www.java.com and get the highest version you can find that isn't 1.6 (easier said than done). The GNU Java VM that ships with Debian doesn't play well with eclipse.
If you don't believe me, install it and try to insert a colon while you're inside eclipse. It'll crash and burn.
After I finally got the www.eclipse.org version installed & configured the sockcheck.c project started to cook. I hacked away on it for a weekend. The following Monday I decided to fire up Xvnc4 and work on it during lunch.
Crash.
Burn.
It turns out Xvnc4 & eclipse don't play well together.
In fact the only way I could get it to run remotely was to start an ssh session with X forwarding and run eclipse through Cygwin-X.
Slow, but it didn't crash.
I worked like this for a few days and then stumbled upon this page. There were IDEs I had never heard of. Sockcheck went to the back burner again while I tested alternatives.
So far anjuta seems to be the winner. It doesn't require Java (I hate Java), doesn't crash Xvnc4, and ships with Debian 4.0 (although it is impossible to find by searching using the aforementioned search terms).
Unfortunately, the latest version (2.2.1 - Debian ships with 1.4.something) will not compile. It demands versions of gnome and GTK+ that only ship with the "unstable" version of Debian.
So now my side project is installing Debian "lenny" on a VM to compile the new version.
It never ends.
Sunday, September 09, 2007
Monday, September 03, 2007
SOCKS Fucking
The updates went well. There were no issues at all. I got out of bed at around 6:15AM and no one was on either server, so I nailed it.
I spent most of the rest of the morning on my current project, fucking around with anonymous SOCKS proxy servers. Several weeks ago I ran across sockcheck.c and started hacking away at it.
Proxies have been the bane of my existence for the last ten years. It started when the company I used to consult for sent me to a class on Microsoft Proxy Server 1.0. After that, proxy servers became my problem.
1.0 was a piece of crap that was soon replaced by Proxy 2.0. Proxy 2.0 was yet another a piece of dookie until Microsoft rewrote the whole damned turd pile and decided to call it Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2000 (or ISA Server 2000, as we poor IT folk know it).
Of course that was a piece of shit as well and was replaced four years later by ISA Server 2004.
And continuing their anal expulsive tradition last year Microsoft shat out ISA Server 2006. At the moment the next version is just now beginning to poke its little turtle head out of Microsoft's ass and will be delivered, complete with a new name (which escapes me at the moment) sometime in '08.
While Microsoft was exercising its bowels over the years I spread out, transferring my mad proxy skillz to SQUID, Dante, and mod_proxy for Apache.
Except for Dante, all these products are variations on the original CERN http proxy. That is, they are basically Web servers that take http and ftp requests for other Web servers. Those requests are stored (cached) to disk and wait to be fetched by the next user, who hopefully experiences a faster retrieval time since the request is served locally.
Dante is a SOCKS server. SOCKS servers don't typically cache Web requests and can proxy much, much more than http and ftp. The catch is the client program must know how to deal with a SOCKS proxy server. This must be built in to the software itself or additional software needs to be used in order to socksify the client program.
Unfortunately, 99% of Web traffic (that isn't SPAM) is http. As a result SOCKS servers tended to fall out of style outside of their traditional Unix environments.
But they persisted for years. In fact in the '90s anonymous SOCKS proxies were a bit of a problem, since they were used to distribute SPAM. This problem was so bad most major ISPs went on a search & destroy mission to eradicate them. And they did a fairly good job.
They still exist, but most won't proxy SMTP mail anymore. No matter, the SPAMmers have gone on to bigger and better things.
If you like anonymity and you don't like having your IP address known, SOCKS proxies are the way to go. Problem is, they are hard to find. Once found, they need to be tested.
And that's what got me interested in sockcheck.c.
I have been collecting SOCKS IP addresses and I've learned some interesting things I will be sharing with you about the state of anonymous SOCKS proxies in the 21st century.
I spent most of the rest of the morning on my current project, fucking around with anonymous SOCKS proxy servers. Several weeks ago I ran across sockcheck.c and started hacking away at it.
Proxies have been the bane of my existence for the last ten years. It started when the company I used to consult for sent me to a class on Microsoft Proxy Server 1.0. After that, proxy servers became my problem.
1.0 was a piece of crap that was soon replaced by Proxy 2.0. Proxy 2.0 was yet another a piece of dookie until Microsoft rewrote the whole damned turd pile and decided to call it Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2000 (or ISA Server 2000, as we poor IT folk know it).
Of course that was a piece of shit as well and was replaced four years later by ISA Server 2004.
And continuing their anal expulsive tradition last year Microsoft shat out ISA Server 2006. At the moment the next version is just now beginning to poke its little turtle head out of Microsoft's ass and will be delivered, complete with a new name (which escapes me at the moment) sometime in '08.
While Microsoft was exercising its bowels over the years I spread out, transferring my mad proxy skillz to SQUID, Dante, and mod_proxy for Apache.
Except for Dante, all these products are variations on the original CERN http proxy. That is, they are basically Web servers that take http and ftp requests for other Web servers. Those requests are stored (cached) to disk and wait to be fetched by the next user, who hopefully experiences a faster retrieval time since the request is served locally.
Dante is a SOCKS server. SOCKS servers don't typically cache Web requests and can proxy much, much more than http and ftp. The catch is the client program must know how to deal with a SOCKS proxy server. This must be built in to the software itself or additional software needs to be used in order to socksify the client program.
Unfortunately, 99% of Web traffic (that isn't SPAM) is http. As a result SOCKS servers tended to fall out of style outside of their traditional Unix environments.
But they persisted for years. In fact in the '90s anonymous SOCKS proxies were a bit of a problem, since they were used to distribute SPAM. This problem was so bad most major ISPs went on a search & destroy mission to eradicate them. And they did a fairly good job.
They still exist, but most won't proxy SMTP mail anymore. No matter, the SPAMmers have gone on to bigger and better things.
If you like anonymity and you don't like having your IP address known, SOCKS proxies are the way to go. Problem is, they are hard to find. Once found, they need to be tested.
And that's what got me interested in sockcheck.c.
I have been collecting SOCKS IP addresses and I've learned some interesting things I will be sharing with you about the state of anonymous SOCKS proxies in the 21st century.
Sunday, September 02, 2007
Even More Debian Updates In Store
Debian has released yet another kernel upgrade that will affect both BOT House and Experimental II. This update has also made it's way into the Ubuntu tree and it's going to take down Mrs. Hinky's computer as well.
Lady Dink has been running Ubuntu 6.06 LTS for over a year on a refurb all-in-one IBM NetVista similar in speed & capacity to the EXP II server.
It has run flawlessly all this time and updates have never beeen an issue, but since she runs the same RaLink wireless NIC as EXP II, I expect the same problems (although, thinking back on it, she has had several kernel upgrades in the past year with no NIC problems whatsoever - perhaps that particular driver is in the Ubuntu tree).
Mrs. D. was a latecomer to the 21st century. We've been married 23 years (as of September 4th), and for two decades she has stared at the back of my head while I hacked away at my various projects.
She realized last year she needed the Internet and email to survive.
Her little Ubuntu box resides in a corner of the kitchen and when she's not cranking out batches of her award winning peanut butter fudge or Norwegian Almond Nut Bars she diddles away at the computer writing emails to her various relatives or to our Worthless Kid, who is attending "college" at the Moody Bible Institute, studying Creationology and Faith-Based Logic.
Since this is a three day weekend (I never understood why the USA decided to celebrate May Day in September), I may do the maintenance early tomorrow. BOT House shouldn't be an issue, but EXP II may be down for a couple of hours.
Lady Dink has been running Ubuntu 6.06 LTS for over a year on a refurb all-in-one IBM NetVista similar in speed & capacity to the EXP II server.
It has run flawlessly all this time and updates have never beeen an issue, but since she runs the same RaLink wireless NIC as EXP II, I expect the same problems (although, thinking back on it, she has had several kernel upgrades in the past year with no NIC problems whatsoever - perhaps that particular driver is in the Ubuntu tree).
Mrs. D. was a latecomer to the 21st century. We've been married 23 years (as of September 4th), and for two decades she has stared at the back of my head while I hacked away at my various projects.
She realized last year she needed the Internet and email to survive.
Her little Ubuntu box resides in a corner of the kitchen and when she's not cranking out batches of her award winning peanut butter fudge or Norwegian Almond Nut Bars she diddles away at the computer writing emails to her various relatives or to our Worthless Kid, who is attending "college" at the Moody Bible Institute, studying Creationology and Faith-Based Logic.
Since this is a three day weekend (I never understood why the USA decided to celebrate May Day in September), I may do the maintenance early tomorrow. BOT House shouldn't be an issue, but EXP II may be down for a couple of hours.
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