Reza’s Rants

For some reason, I was no longer able to connect to southwest’s website from my Vista machine, though I could reach it without a problem from my other linux boxes.  Now, I’m somewhat technical savvy, but it was quite a challenge to find the problem and come up with a solution.

First, the problem: I could no longer browse http://www.southwest.com/ from my vista machine.  It worked from my unix boxes.  I investigated a number of roblems ranging from viruses on my box to a corrupted hosts table.  Nothing worked.  Odder still, southwest.com is DNS round robin’ed to two different IP – and I experienced the same thing on both IPs.

The solution:  After trying a lot of things over multiple days, I managed to install tcpdump on my linksys router (running DD-WRT).  I noticed a small diference in the packets going from my vista machine and from my linux box. 

01:14:39.667122 IP 76-191-215-90.dsl.dynamic.sonic.net.49913 > www.southwest.com.www: SWE 212965372:212965372(0) win 8192
01:14:42.665436 IP 76-191-215-90.dsl.dynamic.sonic.net.49913 > www.southwest.com.www: SWE 212965372:212965372(0) win 8192


01:14:50.994221 IP 76-191-215-90.dsl.dynamic.sonic.net.40063 > www.southwest.com.www: S 3059118406:3059118406(0) win 5840
01:14:51.047515 IP www.southwest.com.www > 76-191-215-90.dsl.dynamic.sonic.net.40063: S 2964067491:2964067491(0) ack 3059118407 win 5792

The blue is the vista box and the red is the linux box.  If you notice, the vista box has flags ‘SWE’ set and the unix box only has the ‘S’ flag set.  I forwarded this to two of my smart friends, and one replied…

wtf? Those are some fucked up flags..

S = SYN ( that’s fine )
W = ECN CWR (Explicit Congestion Notification – Congestion Window Reduced)
E = ECN-Echo (telling the sender it received a CE packet)

wtf is Vista trying to do??

The ECN shit is all from RFC 3268… read up on it if you want… I don’t
know too much about it, sorry.

Fucking Microsoft needs to die in a fire, regardless.

So I googled Vista and ECN, and found a command to turn of ECN…

C:\Users\reza.slut>netsh interface tcp set global ecncapability=disabled

And sure enough, that command turned it off, and now I can go to http://southwest.com/ from my vista box.  My only question is — how is a layman supposed to be able to figure that out?  God, there are many people at microsoft that deserve to be shot.

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So given the $200 price drop, and verizon’s stupid “dial *228” to fix all your woes attitude, convinced me to go get an iPhone, and all I have to say is, why did I wait so long? Even at the $600 price (what my old phone retailed for), it’s amazing. I was also impressed with the level of service I had at the tiny Apple store I went into. I told the greeter what I wanted as he let me in, next thing I know there’s another guy that comes to me with a pda (looked like it was running windows mobile), swipes my card, scans the box, and prints a receipt. All the while, there’s a big line in the back of the store at the registers. I was way impressed with the efficiency of the process – though I was forced to spend $0.01 for 4 hours (1/week) of one on one training by some apple geek which I found insulting.

Ok, enough of the backstory. You might have seen this all over the place, but it took me some time to figure out how to get 3rd party applications onto the iPhone — which turned out to be amazingly cleaner process than I had expected.

Installing 3rd Party Applications
First off, go to http://iphone.nullriver.com/beta/ , and download their installer.app. Turn off the autosynching in iTunes. Run the program and wait a long while (follow instructions). It took what seemed like 10 minutes for it to do what it needed to. Afterwards, the phone reboots, and you’re presented with an new icon, which is the installer application. Click on it, and start installing stuff. It handles downloading/installing, upgrading, and removing – and also supports multiple application archives.
Developing your own 3rd Party Applications
This part is going to be a bit incomplete, but I’ll post what I’ve figured out, not having any background in coding on the Apple OS. It turns out that they use objective C to code for it. It has something to do with Cocoa, and you need to code using the UIKit lib/class/whatever they call it for the user interface section.

I’m going to have a go at porting my HealthMonitor phone application over to the iPhone, as things just look nicer on the iPhone.

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I’ve released the code that updates the photos on the right side of my website.  You can find more information about it here.

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I think I picked up a bug from my Cousin’s live-in girlfriend when I went down to San Diego for a visit. And no, I didn’t get “close” — I’ve got a lame ass immune system and it sucks. As my brain has refused to work, I spend the day catching up on a lot of TV that I hadn’t watched, though I don’t see the point as there really aren’t many good shows on TV now-a-days. Because I was sick of using the keyboard to control my MythTV (IR receiver stopped working) I set to solve it.

Read more…

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I’ve been using my own template driven website for a long time now, and I’ve finally decided to do a paradigm shift and migrate to a full blown content management system (CMSms).  To those ends, I’ve been migrating the web-pages and doing a bit-o-cleanup.  I’m sure that there will be some problems, and if any are found, please let me know.

As for what I’ve been up to as of late — I’ve been in San Diego having some fun with my surf-bum-cousin.  I thought I was going to die as we got some serious air off the coast on his new favorite toy (1200CC WaveRunner) — and I’ve been enjoying people watching in my old hood (Pacific Beach).   Tomorrow I’m going to (most likely) take the train up to LA for my cousin’s engagement party (though I really don’t see the point as they might break up before they are wed)..  Who knows..

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Really.  I was convincing them that capitalism was great, and how communism wouldn’t work (at a booth at a festival), and next thing you know, my phone is gone.  They picked up once when I called and this girl (I think the one with spikes attached to her chin) said “This is my phone” and hung up.  Fucking communists.  COMMUNISM DOESN’T WORK.

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A number of hours later and I think I’m close to finishing the first version of the healthmonitor firmware. However, the FAT implementation I’m using (dosfs) seems to have a problem seeking to the end of a file across a cluster. Oh bother…

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I don’t know what’s prompting me, but I felt obliged to follow up on the photos with migrating over my site to a new theme, and integrating the blog into the home page.  Let me know what you think!

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After well over a year, I finally spent the 30 minutes required to fix a few paths and get my photos back up.  Alas, the site runs slow now that I no longer have mod_perl running, but at least the burden of gigs of photos is removed from Taner’s box.

I think I’m going to dig up the template I purchased and modified like  a year and half ago and actually retheme my website.  Time to make it look nice.

Reza

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I bailed on a camping trip today and decided to try to get some work done. Ended up going to distilery 209 for some “make your own bitters” industry event. They had a couple dozen herbs and whatnow, blenders, grinders, and 1/2 gallon jars to fill with your ingredients and 190 proof liquer. There was some interesting ingredients being used, but as I only found out about it way last minute, wasn’t prepared, and thought I could actually be more productive routing RG6 to my office. Off to get BBQ @ Bills now..

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