So I wrote a Quine in Python. It’s not exactly short or impressive, but it works. I am pretty happy with myself, because I found out how to do it by myself, which was a very enlightening moment, makes you realize a bunch of things about compilers.

So here it is: (pretty vim-desert syntax colored version here: http://alex.underwares.org/quine.py.html)

#!/usr/bin/env python
# Holy fucking shit I wrote a quine!
# You wouldn't believe how baked I am.
 
code ="#!/usr/bin/env python\n# Holy fucking shit I wrote a quine!\n# You wouldn't believe how baked I am.\n\ncode =\"__code__\"\n\ndef regurgitate(text):\n    \"\"\"Hi, I regurgitate stuff, but escaped.\"\"\"\n text = text.replace(\"\\\\\",\"\\\\\\\\\")\n    text = text.replace('\"', \"\\\\\\\"\")\n   text = text.replace('\\n',\"\\\\n\")\n  return text\n\ndef main():\n    \"\"\"I seem to be the entry point, sir.\"\"\"\n    print code.replace(\"__code__\", regurgitate(code), 1)\n\nif __name__ == \"__main__\":\n    main()\n\n"
 
def regurgitate(text):
    """Hi, I regurgitate stuff, but escaped."""
    text = text.replace("\\","\\\\")
    text = text.replace('"', "\\\"")
    text = text.replace('\n',"\\n")
    return text
 
def main():
    """I seem to be the entry point, sir."""
    print code.replace("__code__", regurgitate(code), 1)
 
if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

http://www.flax.co.uk/xapian_windows.shtml

This renders my binaries redundant, so I will update the relevant pages with this link. I hadn’t built recent python bindings in a while because my the Windows Server 2003 VM I used for windows builds was lost in a hard drive crash, and I never got around to rebuilding it. Well, this is great news!

But alas, no. I plug it in this morning, and bang:

Again, for those not speaking french, it means “battery not charging”.

This is the third battery that dies with this laptop. If the laptop broke down, I’d understand. It has a bit over three years of age, which is pretty much the average life span of a laptop-you-carry-around-every-day. But the battery is still young. Bleh.

ADDENDUM (24 mar 2009): I just noticed I sound like an elitist douche hipster in that post. I mean, Art Salon + Apple hardware + French… Should have included more codetalk or wires as not to lose my geek street cred, yo.

THEY ARE ALL WEARING THE SAME GOD DAMN HELMET!

Thank you.

So, Mark Hoekstra of Geek Technique has died of a heart attack earlier this week, while riding his bike.

Shit.

Mark was a really huge inspiration to me, I absolutely loved the guy and his work. I really related to his love of SGI gear and various obsolete chunks of hardware. I read geek technique with almost religous, cheerful glee every update.

I can’t believe he’s gone, I truely am sad now. This really is sad day.

Turns out local administrators cannot elevate their privileges over the network, with UAC enabled.

Note that this doesn’t affect users in the Domain Admins group!

Now, you could do the dumb “neowin poweruser” thing and turn UAC off, or you could change this particular behavior in the registry. Navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

And add a new DWORD named LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy with a value of 1, and then reboot. It all should work.

Again, users with Domain Admin privileges are unaffected.

I used to use tethering with my previous Motorola phones via bluetooth, my Treo, and the many blackberries I have owned, and found it was fairly practical to be almost guaranteed internet access from my laptop no matter where I actually am. This enabled me to support clients no matter when, even while in transit between two cities, on a bus.

So, all that NetShare software did was set-up an HTTP proxy on the iPhone. This immediately sprung a lightbulb over my head, as there’s another way to accomplish just that, without the application, provided your iPhone is jailbroken.

The idea is to use SSH, and just tunnel stuff through it. Simple and effective.

First, jailbreak your iPhone and install OpenSSH on it. If you’re a Unix hacker and haven’t done that yet, please turn in your geek gard. Right now.

Second, set-up an ad-hoc wireless network on your laptop. On a mac, it would look like this:

I named the ad-hoc network the same as my laptop, and password protected it.

Next, join the newly created wireless network with your iPhone, and establish an SSH tunnel to it. You don’t actually have to set-up ip addresses and all, thanks to the magic of Bonjour/Avahi/Zeroconf. Just use youriphonename.local as the hostname to connect to. My iPhone is named Glitch. (My iPod Touch is named Copland. You win a cookie if you catch the reference). This means my iPhone would be found at “glitch.local”. If it was named Cookie, it would be “cookie.local”, and so on.

If you have iTunes installed on Windows, this will also work since it comes bundled with Bonjour. If not, you can download bonjour for windows here.

Establishing the tunnel would then go something like this:

ssh -D 7070 -N root@glitch.local

You can of course use PuTTY on Windows, or use plink.exe and the exact same line above.

Of course, replace “glitch.local” with whatever applies to you. Then, just point your browser to the newly created SOCKS proxy running on port 7070 of your local machine:

(Firefox)

(Safari/OS X)

Important note regarding Firefrox: Firefox is actually quite stubborn and likes to do it’s own name resolving. Since you’ll most likely have no working DNS servers available to you, you’ll need to have Firefox let the SOCKS proxy endpoint do the DNS resolution. This can be done by changing the value network.proxy.socks_remote_dns to True in about:config.

Then, restart Firefox. Once all of that is done, bang, you’re surfing the interwebs using your iPhone’s connection.

Now, I understand it is not a true tethering solution, but NetShare isn’t that either. I could probably tunnel a PPP link inside SSH, too, but that sounded a bit overcomplicated to me.

For applications that don’t support SOCKS proxying, just use tsocks.

So there you have it.