Nothing is more important than coining a sexy term like AJAX. People criticize it as being old technology and not something innovative for us to be so excited on. Although I can’t disagree more, I got a déjà vu when I stumbled upon this page again called Remote Scripting with IFRAME which I read few months ago and at the time I just didn’t have any feeling. Implementation is different, but the idea is the same, that is to achieve no-page-reload-web-application. “Remote Scripting” sounds old, AJAX sounds cool. Is it how the IT industry flourishes?
Category Archives: Technology
Tor, another way to get around the Great Firewall of China
Living in China is a pain in the a** since many internet sites have been blocked by the 5th greatest invention by Chinese, namely the Great Firewall of China. Having been using SSH tunnelling to establish a private channel to my own server hosted somewhere else, browsing websites becomes possible again. But this method doesn’t help those who don’t have the technical know-how to set it up or are not as fortunate as us to own a server overseas, Tor comes to rescue. On my Debian system, it requires near-zero effort to install and configure. I just apt-get (or aptitude) install tor privoxy, adds forward-socks4a / localhost:9050 . (don’t forget the dot at the end of the line) to /etc/privoxy/config, and then restart privoxy by /etc/init.d/privoxy restart. Then I set the HTTP and HTTPS proxy of my Firefox to 127.0.0.1 and port 8118, and poof! I can now go to any websites that have been filtered, such as www.mingpaonews.com, www.appledaily.com and even the Google cache!
Actually using Tor alone without Privoxy can already let you visit most of the blocked sites. But due to the “DNS hijack” done by the authority, you will get incorrect IP addresses for some sites, such as www.rthk.org.hk and www.881903.com, the two radio stations in Hong Kong. The DNS will return random IP addresses to you when you’re querying for these site’s IP. As a result, you’ll be brought to a website that’s not what you want. Privoxy resolves this problem since your web browser is now passing the hostname to Tor instead of the incorrect IP resolved by the “viral DNS”.
We will wait and see when the government start to implement technologies to prevent people from using Tor, like blocking the directory servers or filtering traffic that looks like the Tor protocol in the Great Firewall. But until then, I hope Tor can help those who are still under the fascist rule of their government but are eager to explore the outside world.
Notebook hard disk failed, no 40GB 1.8″ disk in Beijing
The hard disk in my new IBM X40 started misbehaving around 2am last night. Some time earlier it was making rather loud noises. And then two commands (ps and smartctl) locked up the machine and I have to used sysrq magic keys to reboot it. It’s too soon for the harddisk to fail because the notebook was bought in October last year, so it’s about 5 months only. My original plan was to buy a new harddisk, transfer data from the failing one to the new one as much as possible, and then take the failed one to an IBM repair center for a replacement. But the sad news is I could not find a 40GB 1.8″ harddisk (which the IBM X40 can only use, it can’t use the 2.5″ ones) in Beijing’s Zhongguancun（中关村）! Zhongguancun to Beijing is what the Golden computer center to Hong Kong, you go there for any kind of computer hardware and parts. For all the shops I asked which sold 1.8″ harddisk, they only had 20GB. Once again, it proves that if you want to play with the newest electronic toys, your best bet is to try your luck in Hong Kong :|
So bear with me if I’m a bit slow in replying your emails or such, I think I’ll not be back to full force until I can work on my notebook again.
Newton never dies
While my coworkers and I were talking about Palm, Be and Apple tonight, Fatcat said that the demise of BeOS is a pity, and I replied that the demise of Newton is even a tragedy. Thanks him for telling me that there was a Newton conference in September, which was held in Paris. It’s cool to see that after a product has been discontinued for 6 years, there is still a strong user base following it. To me, Newton has a position that can never be replaced. Same as other Apple products, Newton was (and still is) innovative. Not only that Newton (MessagePad 130) was the first real PDA that I used and developed upon (I wrote a navigation system with GPS in my Final Year Project), its UI design, the NewtonScript programming language, the object storage (soup), the handwriting recognition, all of them are just amazing and elegant, they are pieces of art rather than just technology. Its UI is simple yet effective and user-friendly, with consideration of accessibities and different form factors. NewtonScript is simply the best computer language besides Smalltalk, this template-based object-oriented language with the excellent IDE (don’t get me wrong, I’m a vi guy, but this IDE follows the KISS paradigm, which is like the Smalltalk browser) makes programming for Newton a breeze.
In the conference, the most interesting things are the possibility of a Newton emulator by Paul Guyot and the implementation of a NewtonScript interpreter. Wish them every success. Perhaps someday NewtonScript will be re-implemented and appears on the Linux desktop.
Long live the Newton.
Notebook LCD broken, using VNC4
The LCD of my IBM X21 has become worse for quite a few days now, it doesn’t display the correct colors – black as red and white as cyan, etc, that’s horribe to the eyes. Until a new one arrive (the IBM X40, yay) tonight, I am using VNC4 on another desktop computer to use the X desktop. Strangely I can’t make the VGA output work after around the time that I upgraded to the 2.6 series kernel. I’m happy with VNC4 so far, the only problem is when I press Ctrl-space to switch to input Chinese, the keystrokes are captured by the host computer instead of the desktop being connected.