LookIt

Apple's naming of the their OS is confusing

Apple has two naming schemes for their operating system: numbers (10.4, 10.5, and so on), and types of animals (Tiger, Leopard, and so on). They use these inconsistently in their marketing. I know the number I am using (10.5), but I always forget which animal this is represented by. And they don't tell me when I ask:

I hope the next version of the OS will at least let me find out what animal I am dealing with. Given that they are planning to call it "Snow Leopard", the confusion will be huge, so making this easy to find will be important.

Tunnel VNC in SSH

For security, I always want to run VNC under SSH. There are a few articles on how to do this on various parts of the net, but most are either too wordy or to general or both. This shows how to do just one thing: run a VNC client locally that connects to a remote VNC server through SSH. This article assumes you already know something about running VNC and SSH, just not one on top of the other.

In brief, the way this works is that you log into the host machine over SSH as you normally do, but you tell that system that you are also going to tunnel the VNC port through your SSH session. On the client system, you then send VNC messages through the SSH tunnel you have already set up. For this example, I use "example.com" as the host machine, I assume that VNC is launched with "vncserver :1" there, and that port 15901 on your client machine is not in use.

There are three steps:

• On the host machine, add "-localhost" to the configuration file (which is normally ~/.vnc/config).
• On the client machine, use the command "ssh -l remoteusername -L 15901:localhost:5901 example.com" to log into the remote server and start the tunnel.
• Point your VNC client to localhost:15901 (that is, port 15901 on your client machine).

If you are like most people, you trust the security of your SSH setup on the server more than you do your VNC setup. For example, you might require RSA certificates for client authentication for SSH on that server, and you want to require that as well before you even get to the normal VNC authentication. Using "-localhost" in the server configuration, you lock down your VNC server by having it only accept local connections.

The above works fine for people running MacOS, Linux, or Windows as long as they have Cygwin installed. Other Windows users need to do something more. If you don't want to install Cygwin, you can get the wonderful PuTTY terminal program for Windows; putty comes with SSH. To set up PuTTY as above, first enter the basic information on the main page:

Then in the Connection → SSH → Tunnels panel, enter 15901 for the source port, localhost:5901 for the destination, and click Add.

Be sure to save your settings; PuTTY doesn't do so automatically. Also, check out some of PuTTY's other SSH options, like compression, automatically giving your user name, and using your public key to log in.

Hat tip to John Levine for the idea of using localhost.

How to make simple clouds in Intaglio

Network diagrams often need a picture of a cloud to indicate the Internet. I'm now using Intaglio for drawing, and I don't have a cloud image laying around. Here's a quick recipe.

1. Create a couple of circles and a couple of ovals.

2. Lay them over each other; the order doesn't matter.

3. Select them all. Give the Object → Paths → Combine command, then the Object → Paths → Unite command. Voila.

Hat tip to this article on how to do this (and more) for Inkscape; I found the article by searching for "cloud" on Google Images.

Saving little notes on the hard drive

Here's another reason to give John Gruber money to write. This article (I hesitate to call it a "blog entry" because of its importance) completely nails two separate issues that I have dealt with for the past 30 years.

1. I still have close friends who type into an "new document" window for over an hour and then lose everything due to an application crash, a computer crash, or just to not really thinking what the warning means when they answer "yes" to closing the unsaved window.

2. I have gravitated to a notes-handling application for the very reason John did: no remembering where the notes go on the disk. I considered Yojimbo, the one he chose, but instead picked Evernote. The main reasons I chose it were that it is multi-platform (I often use Windows in the VPNC lab), that there is a Web version of it, and that it synchronizes notes among all the platforms. But the basic reason was "lots of disparate notes without thinking about file storage".

Male vs. female, singer-songwriter edition

Same topic (getting a bit wild with romance), very different songs. From the masculine side, Dave Alvin in San Diego in November 2008 doing Out of Control. On the very feminine side both vocally and content-wise, the Burns Sisters in June 2000 doing Runaway Train.

Whee! Blogging while flying

Virgin America has wifi on some of its flights. I'm on one now. The first thing I did after forking over $13 (which is nearly 10% of the trans-continental fare...) was to IM some people to tell them that I am flying. I think that's the meme that will get old in a year or two. Both my friends Patrik and Pete had IM'd me while flying, so I thought I should do it too. Then I read email.

Then I checked my connectivity speed with Google. I have a faster connection in both directions here than I have with my DSL at home. Now that's weird.

Gavin Newsom is a spammer who wants to be governor of California

It still amazes me that young politicians from tech-heavy areas like California can be so clueless.

Update: I got a second piece of spam from him, this time with an endorsement from local county supervisor Neal Coonerty. That doesn't speak well of Neal, but he can't really control the campaigning practices of the people he endorses. Regardless, Newsom again shows how clueless he is about tech by repeatedly spamming from purchased lists. It's probably legal, but it sure shows poor ethics.

Update 2009-04-21: And yet more spam. "I became a candidate for governor because California needs a new direction." Of course, that was followed by a request for money. Since when is being an unrepentant spammer "a new direction"?