This event was absolutely beyond any of my expectations.

I was expecting a Mashup Camp-style event with a hundred or so people. I certainly wasn't prepared for the event. Heck, I knew very little about the event before showing up.

Entertainment and Hospitality

Beck. Beck. And more Beck. Beck put on one of the best shows I've ever seen. The crowd was about 500 strong, I'd guess. The stage effects had the help of Puppetron, who synchronized marionettes of the band with the band's movement. Very cool. A summary of what Beck did during this concert can be found in a review of another Beck concert. Bears on stage. Seriously. Awesome.

To quote Beck Puppet, "I'm about to hack a bitch." Puppetron and Beck did a sweet hack video for the event.

Other hospitality perks included many kegs of beer, tons of pizza, fifty-six dozen Krispy Kremes for breakfast, and an extremely well organized staff.

Before the event

One of the rules of the event is that you ought to invoke one or more of the available Yahoo! web API's in your code sorcerery. Prior to arriving, I wasn't sure I wanted to do a web-based hack, so I was planning on not using any of the APIs. I also showed up with no ideas. Hacking without a plan? Seemed to work out. I found out at sometime around midnight during the event that there would be prizes for the best hacks. My hacks would clearly not qualify, but whatever, I was here to hack :)

Hack Day

I started with working on my binary screen partitioning tool. I haven't found a good way to explain this application in words yet. Look at my slides (link at bottom of this post) and it'll show you a screenshot-based demo. I added a bit of more polish to it. I got bored after I ran out of code to write, so I offered coding services in exchange for not being bored to Kevin Marks.

Idea bouncing led to me playing with the del.icio.us API. The end result was something I term "jokeware" - a filesystem driver for storing real files in del.icio.us. It was built as a joke just for the sake of trying it. It worked. The more technical details can be found in my slides. If you want to look at the code, you'll have to use a decent webbrowser that supports "data:" urls. View "tastydrive.py" on http://del.icio.us/jlshackday/tastydrive. And, yes. I am actually storing raw data in del.icio.us. It's a hack, and I think it's hilarious. It's not fast enough to use to store anything meaningful.

Personally, I think my two projects are totally slick. Read about them on my slides:
My Slides for Hack Day '06

I can't remember all the hacks I liked, but those I remember are here:

• Purse Hack. Pedometer + microcontroller + camera. Takes pictures every 100 steps.
• monologr(sp?) - record an audio stream while selecting images from flickr to create slideshow with an audio story.
• YahooSpace - bridge Yahoo 360 with MySpace. Society is doomed.

There was press everywhere at this event. Yahoo's PR folks did a fantastic job of selling the existence of the event to the press. Local news, Wall Stree Journal, etc. Journalists for publications as far as Germany were here. At the end of the hack session, news coverage was shown on the projector. Atleast three news channels covered the event.

The event was a huge success. To any of you Yahoo folk reading: Thanks for an incredible event. Same time next year? ;)

The Interface elements plugin for jQuery is super slick. It has a puffer function I want to use. However, the act of 'puffing' makes the element disappear. I want to clone the element and puff the cloned version.

  function magicpuff() {
    $("img").mousedown(function() {
      pos = findPos(this)
      left = pos[0];
      top = pos[1];

      puffer = this.cloneNode(true);
      puffer.style.left = left + "px";
      puffer.style.top = top + "px";
      puffer.style.position = "absolute";
      $(document.body).append(puffer);
      $(puffer).Puff(1000, function() { $(puffer).remove() });

      return false;
    })
  }
  $(document).ready(magicpuff);

This code will duplicate the image clicked placing it directly on top of the old element. It then puffs the new element and removes it when the puff has completed. Simple enough.

What good is code without a fun little demo? View the puffer demo

I should note that it seems that the remove portion doesn't always remove the cloned object. This is especially noticable (though, not visually) when you activate puffing on more than one image at a time. You need somewhat fast hands to do this. Firefox's DOM inspector will show you the additional elements parented by the body tag.

This depends on findPos available from quirksmode, jQuery, and the forementioned Interface plugin.

I'm in the process of feeling out my options for the pimp rewrite. I've started with Pylons. Pylons gives me an actual framework and lets me choose implementations.

The database back is going to be SQLObject. I've been playing with it for 10 minutes. I haven't written a single line of SQL, and I've already got objects mapping to an sqlite database. Insertion is so cool. I simply instantiate an object and it gets inserted to the database. The potential to write database-backed systems without having to understand SQL is quite cool.

Neat. More on sqlobject as I learn it?

Now that I'm nearly settled in my new apartment, I need to start working on some new, cool projects to make it better.

pimp, version 5

Pimp v4 was my excuse to learn python. It's great, but needs serious work. Now that I know python better, I think it's time to revisit this project with a complete rewrite. Reinventing the wheel isn't always good, but it's a fun exercise and certainly a useful project.

web-based home automation

Home automation kits are extremely expensive. I'm hoping to leverage LIRC, my X10 equipment, and the web to create a one-shot portal for controlling most of the devices in my apartment. The end-goal is to be able to click a button and have the TV switch to "input 3" and tell my receiver to switch to "dvd". Perhaps some sexy light dimming or something, aswell, with my x10 stuff. Mostly with one or two button clicks.

If you've got lirc experience, let me know. I'm looking to build both a receiver and transmitter. Receiver for recording IR signals from my other remotes and the transmitter for obviously replaying those signals.

Other hacks will probably include low-tech ones to hide wire mess, etc.

I use firefox as my primary web browser. I have for a number of years. Lots of things about it irritate me. Today's irritation is it's startup sequence.

You kids can play at home too! Do this:

tcpdump -np 'port 53'

Now, start firefox fresh. Watch it do a dns lookup. Now do something to disable dns, such as pointing dns at an invalid server, or adding a search suffix to your dns client such that your hostname.suffix does not exist. Start firefox again. Watch it do a dns lookup on yourhostname.suffix and FAIL MISERABLY. What do we do in case of dns failure? Let's wait on DNS!!! WOOT. Except, dns never comes back. So, let's never start.

God damnit this is annoying.

I have a machine that runs X but doesn't listen to inet connections (via -nolisten-tcp). What if I want to use x2x to this machine? Simple.

 ssh -tY thatmachine 'x2x -from $DISPLAY -to :0 -west' 

This will ssh to 'thatmachine' and forward X. This set's $DISPLAY on the remote machine, which you can then invoke x2x with specifying 'from' as $DISPLAY. This has the same effect as invoking:

 x2x -to thatmachine:0 -west 

Except you don't need to allow tcp X connections. :)

So, I have a pptp vpn server running in my apartment. I desire this setup:

I VPN to my apartment. *All* traffic will go through this vpn

PPP has features to negotiate IP-level information such as DNS and "Here's your IP" using IPCP. However, it doesn't seem to be able to share routes. However, my local ppp.conf can say add default HISADDR and suddenly all my traffic wants to go through the vpn. However, once I do this, I lose all connectivity to the vpn because it is off-subnet - my machine forgets how to route data to the vpn, oops!

Is there a way to have ppp add an additional route that I want? Specifically, I want to take the existing known gateway (say, my wifi gateway) and do: add [vpnhostname] [currentroute] and then add a default route for the tunnel. This will allow all traffic to want to go through the tunnel, but still allow the OS to know how to *get* to that tunnel.

A hacky solution involves some pre-vpn discovery. I need to figure out what my default route is. Once I know that, I can simply add a single line in my ppp.conf and I have all traffic routing through my apartment.

 add myvpnhostname mycurrentdefaultroute
 add default HISADDR

These two lines create 2 routes. The first keeps the system aware of how to reach the vpn server. The second ensure a default route to the vpn gateway.

While this is suboptimal, it is easy to automate. My vpn script can simply generate a new ppp.conf and grab the default route with:

nightfall# netstat -rn -finet | awk '/^default/ { print $2 }'
192.168.55.254

If you get this error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/bin/scapy", line 10647, in ?
    class Conf(ConfClass):
  File "/usr/local/bin/scapy", line 10670, in Conf
    iface = get_working_if()
  File "/usr/local/bin/scapy", line 2067, in get_working_if
    except pcap.pcapc.EXCEPTION:
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'pcapc'

This is becuase you aren't running scapy as root. Run it as root.

If you still get this error message, it's likely due to pcap failing to find usable network interfaces. This means you have no interfaces in the UP state. It doesn't count lo0 as a real interface, I guess?

This October will bring a 48-hour hackathon organized by the League of Technical Voters. If you can find your way to Austin, Texas in mid October, then you should sign up and be there.

If you know PHP, then you can probably help code. If you don't know PHP, but know how to code, and still want to help, you can probably still help code! If you don't program, but still want to help out, you can do that too!

The goal of the hackathon seems to be development of Drupal modules to aid the league site in becoming a meaningful and useful portal for political discussion.

If you're interested in attending, learn more on the league event wiki

Selenium cannot be used to test remote sites becuase browsers have cross-site scripting protection which prevents you from modifying the content from other domains. What happens when we fool the browser into believing content comes from a given domain? An extremely simple squid configuration can do just this.

I wrote one test. This test visits technorati's homepage, searches for 'barcamp' and verifies that a text string exists on the search results.

Steps:

1. Tell Firefox to use my squid proxy as an HTTP proxy
2. Visit http://www.technorati.com/_selenium/
3. Run the tests

Simple, right?

The squid proxy intercepts any requests for '/_selenium' and redirects them internally to my selenium web server. This has been tested in IE, Firefox, and Safari with 100% success over vanilla http. HTTPS probably doesn't work for obvious "Duh, it's encrypted" reasons. Squid can fix this aswell with ssl reverse proxying.

If I run my single test, the result is something that looks like the following (Firefox and IE, respectively):