ajft

After promising myself I'd use my camera a little more, and learn how to use it well, I took a couple of shots this morning while making breakfast. One each on automatic and then manual. Here is a subject close to my heart.

MLP

[http://www.wowwebdesigns.com/]

something to aspire to I guess.

[http://pcdb.overclockers.com.au/]

some interesting machines, some very interesting cases. Which I got to from...

[http://www.vieren.be/casemod/]

possibly the most stylish PC case I've seen.

There was an extra degree of difficulty attempting to upload the photos I took yesterday on the way home... the USB plug of my Camera to PC cable was full of dried avocado.

Spent the evening moving furniture around in the second bedroom to make room for the painter tomorrow. This was no easy task as it is crammed in there like the pieces of a puzzle. Bed disassembled and on end, desk shuffled around, boxes of magazines under the dinner table, and the wall was revealed in all its glory.

Day one of my enforced fitness regime, I don't mind cycling to work, but it seems different when I know that I have to cycle to work because I can't ride the motorbike.

Dark and gloomy as I left the building to ride home, the storm clouds grew thicker and closer as I rode along Gardiner's Creek. Too dark for sunglasses, the little midges were so thick I had to keep my eyes half shut. Around Bourke Road I new I wasn't going to get home dry and tried to guess which underpass to stop at. By Tooronga Rd the storm had hit, so I sat for fifteen minutes watching the rain hammer down, the lightening flash around and the creek rise.

A bit dark, but it was amazing watching the creek rise and all the pine chips, plastic bottles and other rubbish come shooting out of the drains.

Not a very good day. Joey was “a little ill” following a Friday of too much stress, too many drinks after work, and too little food. To top it off, it looks like I've lost the ignition key and wheel lock key for my motorbike. I had them with me when I left to drive to Evan's, I didn't have them with me when we got back in the car to come home. I think they're somewhere on the streets of Fitzroy... Unfortunately that means that the bike is stuck in the middle of the garage space and we can't move it to get the car in! Monday will be the start of the hunting around for the optimum way of removing a disc-lock, and getting a new ignition key.

Will try and get FreeSWAN running on wyvern tonight.

[http://www.lge.com.au/]

time to check out their electronics I guess...

[http://www.evhead.com/]

blogger

[http://www.tropfest.com/]

Tropfest - Aussie Indie Film

[http://www.stormwerks.com/linked/]

usr/bin/girl.

[http://www.davezilla.com/]

[http://www.alicebot.net/]

animated Eliza like thingy?

Found a reference to a book that I'm interested in looking up: Ways of the World: A History of the World's Roads and of the Vehicles that Used Them, author Max Lay (chairman of the RACV). I'll be very interested to see what the coverage of bicycles and motorcycles includes. (in POSTscript, Terry Lane's, Extra pp7 Sat. Jan 26, 2002)

QOTD: “Its all fun and games until a rampaging robot destroys half your city.”

Ouch. I'm all stiff and sore from a collision on the bike track this morning; I came up behind the usual group of pedestrians blocking the path (as expected), I started to go around the last two on the right, as soon as they saw me they jumped in front of me (as half-expected), I swerved to the left off the path and onto the grass and too late saw the rider coming the other way who'ld also swerved out onto the grass. End result, me with a bruised knee and a stiff neck, the other rider with a very sore elbow, and a group of walkman-clad students blithely continuing on their way filling up the shared path — I'll probably meet them again tomorrow.

Spent the afternoon exploring the backstreets of Cremorne. There are some fascinating little alley ways, renovated (and non...) old houses, ugly as sin industrial buildings and odd architectural creations.

The evening held a custard catastrophe in the kitchen: I turned my back for an instant, milk boiled over everywhere, evil clouds of stinking black smoke arose, Joey laughed, I swore. The resultant custard had the consistency of rubber and was a particularly lurid shade of yellow.

Yay! We finally rode a tandem.

After literally years of "getting around to it oneday", Joey and I rode down to Pegasus Cycles and took one of the hire bikes for a spin down to Blackrock. A KHS Alite, we both found it very upright compared to our existing bikes, and both missed having bar-ends and a speedo! There were a few shrieks from Jo, mostly due to my unannounced turns, or the sudden appearance of overhanging trees, intruding bushes, or the absolute no-no of tandem rides, the un-announced bump. By the time we turned around we just about had it coordinated, parting thoughts are that it was definitely fun, but more experimentation is needed.

Damn, while filling up the bike this morning I managed to pour petrol all over myself. I've been sitting here smelling all day.

Second Damn! 5:30pm, I'm sitting here at work, the thunderstorm has arrived and my waterproofs are sitting at home on the floor...

[http://www.technology.pitt.edu/itplan/cds2/kerberos.html]

Kerberos and NetWare?

Oh well, the day got better once I got home. For a start it stopped raining as I rode up the street. Then there was the bottle of champagne left over from christmas to drink while watching the sun set. Dinner was at the East Timorese restaurant we've been meaning to visit for months, a tasty mix of Portuguese, Chinese and Timor foods.

I just had to include this piece of an email to all Monash staff:

  From Friday 15 February 2002 the Temporary Blue Car Park
  (formerly the Rugby Oval) will be accessible for vehicles

In princely fashion I guess that'd be “the carpark formerly known as the Rugby Oval.”

Saw The Fellowship of the Ring, together with the usual mix of three-minute-attention-span individuals in the audience. It all ended a bit weakly, but I've no idea how you end part one of a trilogy when part two isn't due for another year.

Shared resources, "Internet Scale Operating Systems", etc, all seem to be the flavour of the month:

[http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/chord/]

Chord

[http://www.mithral.com/projects/cosm/]

Cosm

[http://www.eurogrid.org/]

Eurogrid

[http://research.microsoft.com/sn/farsite/]

Farsite

[http://www.griphyn.org/]

Grid Physics Network (Griphyn)

[http://oceanstore.cs.berkeley.edu/]

OceanStore

[http://www.ppdg.net/]

Particle Physics Data Grid

[http://www.research.microsoft.com/~antr/pastry/]

Pastry

[http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~ravenben/tapestry/]

Tapestry

Almost incontrovertible proof that wyvern's problems are heat-related. After 58 days of uptime, albeit through the not-very-warm December and January, I replaced the cover on Sunday. Walked into the study this morning to find that it had shut itself off.

While on the topic of miscellaneous electrical problems, I then went downstairs to ride the motorbike to work. The battery is dying, leaving it for two days without starting it is ok, three days and I had to jump start it from the car.

Saw a piece on Slashdot on "10 years from now" and the usual puff pieces on future OS research, but picked up a few interesting references on some of Microsoft's research:

[http://research.microsoft.com/sn/Farsite/]

Farsite — [microsoft.com]

[http://research.microsoft.com/lampson/]

Butler Lampson — [microsoft.com], for papers on Byzantine reliability, mostly based on the work of...

[http://research.microsoft.com/users/lamport/pubs/pubs.html]

name removed¹ [microsoft.com]

New thought. Maybe I should start the War Against the Popup. I'm growing to detest websites designed by people who are so insecure that they can't include links without making sure that the link pops up a new window, they're terrified that if their page disappears from view you'll forget all about them.

---

1. (Censored, 2002-Jul-11) the author of that page has emailed me and insisted that I remove his name from this page.

Decided this morning that it was about time that I rode my bike to work again, I've been far too lax lately. Very disconcerting not having a speedo on the bike though, must get around to fitting the new one. Nice to have the new tyres though, no need to keep my fingers crossed that the poor old Panaracer Pasela was going to crumble into dust.

Spent far too much time during the day fiddling about with Apache rewrite rules getting pretty URLs to work. I'm not sure why, but the copy of my site that I play with under Win2k gives an interesting selection of errors, which fooled me because I thought it ought to work. Once I'd checked it in to bund I found that the rewrites worked fine there.

Why is this on this website? At some time back in 2002 I must have found it of passing interest and copied it, so to prevent URL entropy I'll keep a copy here for posterity — ajft.

11 February 2002
Authors (alphabetically):
Sister Tornado

Copyright © 2002 Sister Tornado. Reproduce with credit at will.

Abstract

SOAP ¹ is a lightweight protocol for exchange of information in a decentralized, distributed environment, using XML. This document details transporting SOAP messages over the USENET ², as modified by the ideas and techniques of BlackNet ³.

Status

This is a draft.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
1.1 Notational Conventions
2. Use Of USENET Message body
2.1 Encoding
3. Identifying USENET transports in WSDL
4. Request / Response semantics
5. Examples
6. Security Considerations
7. References

1. Introduction

BlackNet provides a model for two-way anonymous communication over USENET. This document describes an adaptation of the technique for computer-to-computer communication. It is hoped that this technique will allow very high risk Web Services to operate with a reduced risk of exposure to coercive forces.

Like the BlackNet model, this SOAP transport hides the identities of both client and server from each other, at the expense of latency. Clients and servers post anonymously to USENET through a chain of anonymous remailers.

1.1 Notational Conventions

The keywords "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC-2119 ⁴.

2. Use of USENET Standard

2.1 Use of USENET Message Headers

As USENET SOAP, except servers MAY decrypt every message in the newsgroups it monitors, ignoring Subject headers and Message-IDs.

2.2

Messages should always be ENCRYPTED to the recipient's public key. The server's key is published in WSDL, publicly or by arrangement. The client's key is published publicly or via API call.

Encrypted messages should be ARMORED.

3. Identifying BLACK USENET transports in WSDL

The URI http://schemas.xmlsoap.com/soap/usenet/black/ SHOULD be used to identify USENET transports compliant with this specification in the transport attribute of the soap:binding element of a WSDL ⁵ document (see section 3.3 of the WSDL spec.)

The address of the SOAP service in the soap:address element of a WSDL document SHOULD be the name or handle of the intended recipient and a comma-delimitedlist of newsgroups where a request may be posted. For example:

<soap:address
location="DarkNet@example.alt.soap.messages.trendy,example.alt.soap.messages.fake">

4. Request / Response semantics

As in USENET SOAP, but Message-Id header and Subject correlations are not required.

5. Example.

As in USENET SOAP transport.

6. Security Considerations

It's not clear whether an automated service can reliably choose anonymous remailers in an intelligent and anonymous manner. Can an automated service survive an extended period of message passing in this manner and remain anonymous? How does this affect Traffic Analysis?

7. References

---

[0] Tornado, S. "USENET Transport Binding for SOAP 1.1", February 2002

1. Box, D., Ehnebuske, D., Kakivaya, G., Layman, A., Mendelsohn, N., Nielsen, H. F., Thatte, S. and D. Winer, "Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) 1.1", May 2000.

2. Horton M., Adams R., "Standard for Interchange of USENET Messages" RFC1036, December 1987

3. May T., "True Nyms and Crypto Anarchy", 2001

4. Bradner S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels", RFC 2119, Harvard University, March 1997

5. Christensen E., Curbera F., Meredith G., Weerawarana S. "Web Services Description Language (WSDL) 1.1", March 2001.

The weather is conspiring against Joey and I. Every time we plan to go and ride a tandem, something happens. Today it was going to be after lunch, as a result, at lunch time it started to rain and continued all afternoon.

Oh well, some good came of it all. I spent the afternoon rummaging around in the second bedroom and actually performed some cleaning up. As part of this, I decided it was about time to put the case back on wyvern, which has been running flawlessly for the last two months. I'm pretty sure it'll crash soon, but just want to verify this.

Why is this on this website? At some time back in 2002 I must have found it of passing interest and copied it, so to prevent URL entropy I'll keep a copy here for posterity — ajft.

10 February 2002
Authors (alphabetically):
Sister Tornado

Copyright© 2002 Sister Tornado. Reproduce with credit at will.

Abstract

SOAP ² is a lightweight protocol for exchange of information in a decentralized, distributed environment, using XML. This document details transporting SOAP messages over the USENET. ³

Status

This is a draft.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
1.1 Notational Conventions
2. Use Of USENET Message body
2.1 Encoding
3. Identifying USENET transports in WSDL
4. Request / Response semantics
5. Examples
6. Security Considerations
7. References

1. Introduction

By binding SOAP to USENET, we can take advantage of USENET's store and forward messaging to provide an asynchronous, broadcast, one way transport for SOAP. Two one way messages can be correlated to provide request / response semantics (this closely follows the SOAP model). This allows SOAP to be used in a number of scenarios where HTTP is not suitable (partially connected nodes, one way notifications etc.)

The author wishes to acknowledge that the shameless cribbing of much of the text from “SMTP Transport Binding for SOAP 1.1” ¹.

1.1 Notational Conventions

The keywords "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC-2119 ⁴.

2. Use of USENET Standard

2.1 Use of USENET Message Headers

The USENET Message standard requires the use of a Subject field. This field SHOULD be used to identify the service being called.

For example:

Subject: SoapRobot

2.2 Use of USENET Message body

SOAP payloads in USENET MUST be packaged into the body of the USENET message.

2.3 Encoding

A content transfer encoding of base64 is RECOMMENDED. A content transfer encoding of Quoted-Printable MAY be used if the SOAP payload meets the requirements of RFC-1036 ³.

3. Identifying USENET transports in WSDL

The URI http://schemas.xmlsoap.com/soap/usenet/ SHOULD be used to identify USENET transports compliant with this specification in the transport attribute of the soap:binding element of a WSDL ⁵ document (see section 3.3 of the WSDL spec.)

The address of the SOAP service in the soap:address element of a WSDL document SHOULD be the name or handle of the intended recipient and a comma-delimitedlist of newsgroups where a request may be posted. For example:

<soap:address
location="DarkNet@example.alt.soap.messages.trendy,example.alt.soap.messages.fake">

4. Request / Response semantics

SOAP applications requiring request / response semantics will need to perform some sort of message correlation. This SHOULD be achieved via the standard Message-Id and Followup-To USENET headers ³. The request will include a Message-Id header, and the associated response should include a Followup-To header that contains the Message-Id of the request, and a new Message-Id header.

The responder SHOULD also reflect the incoming subject header into the response, prefixing it with "Re: ".

5. Example

A request destined for SoapRobot@example.soap.messages

Path:
server.example/unknown.site2.example@site2.example/relay.site.example/
site.example/injector.site.example%jsmith
Message-ID: <1F75D4D515C3EC3F34FEAB51237675B5@example.com>
From: soap@client.example.com
Date: Mon, 11 February 2002 23:27:00 -0700
Subject: SoapRobot
Newsgroups: example.alt.comp.rec.foo

<?xml version=3D"1.0" encoding=3D"UTF-8"?>
<SOAP-ENV:Envelope
SOAP-ENV:encodingStyle=3D"http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/"
xmlns:SOAP-ENC=3D"http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/"
xmlns:SOAP-ENV=3D"http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"
xmlns:xsd=3D"http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
xmlns:xsi=3D"http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
<SOAP-ENV:Body>
<m:echoString xmlns:m=3D"http://soapinterop.org/">
<inputString>A human being should be able to change a diaper,
plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write
a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the
dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve
equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer,
cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is
for insects. --Robert A.  Heinlein</inputString>
</m:echoString>
</SOAP-ENV:Body>
</SOAP-ENV:Envelope>

The resulting response from SoapRobot

Path:
server.example/unknown.site2.example@site2.example/relay.site.example/
site.example/injector.site.example%jsmith
Message-Id: <FF75D4D515C3EC3F34FEAB51237675B5@soap.example.org>
From: SoapRobot@server.example.com
Date: Mon, 11 February 2002 23:51:00 -0700
Subject: Re: SoapRobot
Newsgroups: example.alt.comp.rec.foo
References: <1F75D4D515C3EC3F34FEAB51237675B5@client.com>

<?xml version=3D"1.0" encoding=3D"UTF-8"?>
<SOAP-ENV:Envelope
SOAP-ENV:encodingStyle=3D"http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/"
xmlns:SOAP-ENC=3D"http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/"
xmlns:SOAP-ENV=3D"http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"
xmlns:xsd=3D"http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
xmlns:xsi=3D"http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
<SOAP-ENV:Body>
<m:echoStringResponse xmlns:m=3D"http://soapinterop.org/">
<return>A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an
invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a
sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying,
take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations,
analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty
meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for
insects. --Robert A.  Heinlein</return>
</m:echoStringResponse>
</SOAP-ENV:Body>
</SOAP-ENV:Envelope>

6. Security Considerations

Clients may wish to authenticate the sender's response in some API-specific way, as there is no direct connection between client and server and the server's response is trivially spoofed.

7. References

---

1. Cunnings R., Fell S., Kulchenko P., "SMTP Transport Binding for SOAP 1.1", 2001

2. Box, D., Ehnebuske, D., Kakivaya, G., Layman, A., Mendelsohn, N., Nielsen, H. F., Thatte, S. and D. Winer, "Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) 1.1", May 2000.

3. Horton M., Adams R., "Standard for Interchange of USENET Messages" RFC1036, December 1987

4. Bradner S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels", RFC 2119, Harvard University, March 1997

5. Christensen E., Curbera F., Meredith G., Weerawarana S. "Web Services Description Language (WSDL) 1.1", March 2001.

Today we bought:

• Three new tyres for the mountain bikes — much needed. Two 1.25" Tioga Cityslickers and a 1.5" IRC Metro. The 1.5" Cityslicker comes off the rear-wheel-from-hell on my bike and goes on the front of Joey's. The IRC Metro goes on the rear of Joey's, then the two Tiogas go onto my bike... simple! It would have been much simpler if we'd had the track pump that's on the shopping list...
• A bike computer for Norky bike — late Christmas present from Joey to me. Here's hoping that a new Sigma 800 will end my run of bad luck with bike computers! Their website is presented solely in Macromedia flash, so don't bother attempting to view it from any browser that hasn't got a Flash plugin.
• an assortment of vegetables — because Saturday is market day.
• clothes for Joey
• a new pair of comfy shoes for me
• oh, and a three-seater couch and two armchairs!

There was a very tempting looking tandem in Christies' 10% off since it's last year's model. Matt black Cannondale MT800, looking like something a Swat team would ride. Can we really afford to buy such a shiny new toy?

To mangle a few metaphors — I've taken the bit between the horns and bull between my teeth and published the photos I've taken since December with the new camera. It's not quite all there yet, but with the assistance of someone's python script and ImageMagick I've generated a semi-decent bunch of thumbnails and “web-sized” images. For the moment the full sized ones only live on my laptop, so 404's will abound.

[http://www.imagemagick.org/]

Tools for generating thumbnail images.

[http://www.tomy.net/thudson]

Thomas Hudson, the someone who's python script I'm using.

Too much stuff in my head this morning, it woke me up around 4:30am and I couldn't get back to sleep. Ended up getting up around 05:15 and writing a whole bunch of notes down regarding Sophos anti-virus an what we might try next...

Mmmmm, motorbike related stuff. I've been meaning to write these down a few times:

VIN: RC17 201630
Eng: RC17E2016460

Jay Knight & Co. in Hardware lane in the city has been recommended by a couple of people as the place to go for car and motorbike keys.

You'ld never have known that it was summer by the weather today. Grey and miserable for most of the day, it might just have got up to 20 degrees! After spending a very lazy morning sitting around inside reading the papers, Joey and I went for a walk up the Erskine river. Someone had made an interesting sculpture of rocks in the water, I've got a photo of it, and when I get around to working out how to include photos from my camera in here automatically, I'll add it.

I guess I worked out how to do it. See photo above for proof.

Six o'clock in the morning and I've been awake since four. After two hours of tossing and turning, head full of things I must remember for work today, I gave in and got up. Now I can sit here and watch the hot-air balloons drift over Richmond.

Note to self: Must get around to going on hot-air balloon ride one day.

Bicycle NSW have accepted our family membership, no word on whether the entry for the ride in April was successful or not though. They also managed to ignore the address on the entry forms and use my old one, so all the correspondence would go to the next-door neighbour if the postman hadn't put it in the correct mailbox.

Seven o'clock in the evening and Joey and I drove through an amazing thunderstorm of almost tropical intensity. Great mushy hail-stones were splatting against the car as we crawled off the Westgate bridge and headed towards Geelong. I cringed while watching a guy on a motorbike pass us, no gloves, as the rain and hail pelted against his knuckles. Later as we passed under a bridge there were a dozen cars stopped, including two more bikes, one of the riders wearing only shorts and a tee-shirt!