XMLHttpRequest… and headers… (and TinyBox)

Posted on 2012-01-12 by Etu

Some call it AJAX, some call it XMLHttpRequest and others XHR, AJAX is not the common usecase of AJAX. Most people transfer JSON and not XML, or some other crap, that’s up to you as a developer.

Common practice for the two major Javascript frameworks (jQuery and Mootools) is to send this custom HTTP-Header: X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest

It does not break the HTTP Protocol nor the website, if the website doesnt care about the header, nothing happens. If the website requires the header to be sent to work and the javascript doesn’t send it, the website will break.

at work, we have this setup:

<?php
if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH']) AND strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH']) === 'xmlhttprequest') {
// Print response of request encoded as json
} else {
// Print template and push the data to the templatefile to render
}

And then we had an old setup of pages, that was using TinyBox, and got XML sent to it. And since I rebuilt the default template for that system… and implemented in the templating system to NOT RENDER the menu’s on AJAX calls… And I thought… Well, that’s it, now it will work everywhere where AJAX is used. I was wrong.

Since it’s not part of the standard XMLHttpRequest to send this header, it’s only the common practice, this header isn’t defined automagicly by the browser. Both jQuery and Mootools does this. TinyBox does not.

I thought most JavaScript developers who built libs and such things was following common practice, at least for libs people heard about. TinyBox is quite known. So I patched TinyBox:

diff -r 2216c184eed3 tinybox.js
--- a/tinybox.js	Thu Jan 12 17:09:54 2012 +0100
+++ b/tinybox.js	Thu Jan 12 17:11:24 2012 +0100
@@ -30,7 +30,9 @@
 				x.onreadystatechange=function(){
 					if(x.readyState==4&&x.status==200){TINY.box.psh(x.responseText,w,h,a)}
 				};
-				x.open('GET',c,1); x.send(null)
+				x.open('GET',c,1);
+				x.setRequestHeader('X_REQUESTED_WITH', 'XMLHttpRequest');
+				x.send(null)
 			}else{
 				this.psh(c,w,h,a)
 			}

Now my code works, and all other code on the page. So simple. Please follow common practice…

Telenor 4G, Huawei E398 med fri mjukvara

Posted on 2011-12-06 by Etu

Har förflyttat mig ner till Helsingborg, detta resulterade i att jag inte har något fast Internet hemma, så jag införskaffade mig ett 4G från Telenor.

Jag valde Telenor på grund av tre anledningar…

Modemet visade förhoppningar att köra i Linux
De har 4G täckning där jag bor med goda marginaler på yta
Telenor är den enda leverantören som säljer abonnemang till privatpersoner “utan” begränsning

Till en början så identifierar sig modemet som

12d1:1505, men med lite modeswitch på den så kommer den identifiera sig på följande vis:

Bus 002 Device 004: ID 12d1:1506 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.

Och som den Gentoo användare måste jag sätta upp min kärna för att slå de moduler och drivrutiner jag behöver för all hårdvara, så jag tänkte lista de moduler jag behöver för få igång modemet.

Dessa options använder jag i min linux 3.0.4 kärna:

Device Drivers --->
  [*] Network device support --->
    <*> PPP (point-to-point protocol) support
    <*>   PPP support for async serial ports
  [*] USB support --->
    <*> USB Serial Converter support --->
      [*] USB Serial Console device support
      [*] USB Generic Serial Driver
      <*> USB driver for GSM and CDMA modems

Efter att man modeswitchat enheten och har de kärnmoduler som krävs så skall det dyka upp en enhet som heter /dev/ttyUSB0.

Sedan så behöver du ppp, wvdial samt lite konfiguration.

Wvdial kan generera en helt okej grund till att konfigurera det som krävs för att det ska fungera.

$ sudo wvdialconf

Min konfigruation wvdial ser ut såhär: (fil: /etc/wvdial.conf)

[Dialer Defaults]
;Init = ATZ0
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Init3 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","internet.telenor.se","",0,0
Phone = *99#
Modem Type = Analog Modem
Baud = 9600
Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0
ISDN = 0
Username = 4G
Password = 4G
Stupid Mode = 1

Username och Password verkar inte spela roll, Stupid Mode gjorde så att saker började fungera.

Jag har hitils lyckats nå 2Mb/s stabilt i nerladdning, teoretiskt sett ska jag kunna nå 8Mb/s, vet inte om jag skickar rätt APN eller ej med mina AT kommandon, om det är någon som har tips så får de gärna skriva en kommentar om det. Men så långt fungerar det och det känns som en bra början.

Why Humble Bundle? Why?

Posted on 2011-11-26 by Etu

Last year, early May, I found the Humble Bundle idea project thingy, they collected some multi-platform DRM free games and sell them as a bundle for a custom price, depending on what the user wants to pay.

The first bundle was a great success, when I bought the bundle it contained World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Penumbra: Overture, Lugaru. And I payed something above the average when I bought it. I don’t remember exactly. Some time later I got a surprise, I got one extra game, Samorost 2. And well, that was nice.

In my opinion the Humble Bundle #1 was worth it, I haven’t even played all games in it. But some of the games was awesome, and all of the games except one in the Humble Bundle #1 actually released the code after a while during the time it was active.

In December last year they announced the second Humble Bundle, and I was quick buying it for myself, and even as Christmaspresent as nice thing, with money to charity and some fun games. During the second Bundle, I emailed the maintainers of the project and suggested to have some kind of generator of Christmascards with the URL on, to be easy to give away as present in a nice way. I got “no, we have too much to do”-email back. And they suggested me to do it, but well… Set it up as a third party feels wrong when people should enter their codes to access their bought software, so I didn’t do anything.

I also liked the second Bundle, it was good, some good games… and… well… it was worth it only to get the music from Osmos… and Osmos itself… mmm Osmos… I was stuck in that for a while.

Then, here is where it started to go wrong, the Humble Frozenbyte Bundle… Just games from the same developers, and well… Worse quality than before… And way to close to the second bundle in timing.

The Humble Bundle #3 was an upgrade from the Frozenbyte one, really… I liked VVVVVV… Was stuck in that for a while yeah…

After the Humble Bundle #3… I think they shot themselves in the foot, more than once… They have announced three different Bundles in three months, this is way to often, and they reuse games from old bundles in the original announcements of the Bundle.

WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS?

The Bundles was better when it was a bit more rare occasions, bigger mix of games from different small game-studios, and not reuse of games used in bundles before. And I would prefer if most of the games came with source code available.

I haven’t even looked at the latest Bundle for real, and I probably won’t do it… and If I would… Humble Bundle would get zero of my donations, everything to EFF.

So, dear Humble Bundle, go back to real good bundles again?

Thoughts about Power Of Adhocracy, #adhocracy

Posted on 2011-10-29 by Etu

Date: 2011-10-25
Time: 17:00-22:00

This was my weeks first conference(I’m usually not at conferences every week, but this week was special). I was away from work to be able to work on my talk for the evening, and to be able to rest before the talk. Very good choice indeed.

During the day did I manage to meet Lina, a girl from Skåne which a mutual friend introduced me too, and wanted me too meet. And I told her to come to the Power Of Adhocracy Conference in the evening, even thought we knew it was full she joined me on the route there. And when we got close to it we heard that it wasn’t full anymore, there was plenty of more places, thanks to a Perl meet-up that didn’t happen. So Lina joined in and spoke with people during the mingling and watched the talks, I think she had a great time, a bit random :)

I presented my talk that evening with the title “What Is Telecomix?” (you can find links to stuff at the bottom of the post).

Others told me that my talk was good, I don’t know for myself, I was a bit stressed, I didn’t have a clue about the time while talking, and the talk was not very well planned with the details… So I guess It want pretty good after all :)

One good speaker of the evening was Jacob Appelbaum, he spoke about surveillance and how our devices such as smartphones can be used for tracking our every move, and secure communication and so on… It was a good talk, quite depressing, but good. The world needs people like him to refresh our minds that the world is more evil than we want to most of the time. I think most of the participants already knew, but… mind refreshing is good. And he is a good speaker.

And there was another interesting talk about a free Internet non profit organization in Sweden, called DFRI.

I also meet two journalists, and they wanted to ask me lots of questions and take a picture of me in my “home environment where I work with activism”, so well, they ordered a cab from the conference to my home after the conference was ended. It was quite nice to not take the bus home… :) So now I probably show up in some article from “Norskt Näringsliv” in a while.

This was a very good evening, thanks to our organizer Anders, .SE and thanks to everyone who was there, you all made it just perfect! <3

Links:

Power Of Adhocracy: http://powerofadhocracy.org/
Talks archive: http://powerofadhocracy.org/archive.html

Moved the blog

Posted on 2011-09-23 by Etu

Some weeks ago I decided to move this blog from elis.nu to blog.elis.nu, becouse I wanted to use the domainname elis.nu for other things… Without breaking compatibility… :)

There is three things you have to do when you do this:

Change domainname in the adminpanel
Have the new name pointed
Update the settings in the webserver

The order of one and two doesn’t matter that much. But it’s important to do one before three, else it will break the adminlogin and other stuff that depends on the URL configured.

Then we come to the forth step I took, to not break any inlinks or RSS-Readers that follows the blog… That’s much more interesting.

One choice I did when I created this blog was wise, I have the linkstructure “/index.php/YYYY/MM/postname/”, this makes it easier in my case… No need for a rewrite on the new page… So I just wrote a URI parser in PHP, just a few lines and a 301 redirect for all urls that requests anything longer than just “/index.php”.

Now I just hope that all RSS-Readers follows this redirect… I know that webbrowsers do…

Code used for redirect:

<?php
if(strlen($_SERVER['PATH_INFO']) > 1) {
  $location = 'http://blog.elis.nu/index.php'.$_SERVER['PATH_INFO'];
  header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
  header('Location: '.$location);
  die('<html>
  <head>
    <title>Moved</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Moved</h1>
    <p>This page has moved to <a href="'.$location.'">'.$location.'</a>.</p>
  </body>
</html>');
} else {
?>
<!-- Put new website here -->
<?php
}

Very simple, does the job. And please check elis.nu out, leave comments here :)

Some brief thougts about Telecomix, and the reboot

Posted on 2011-08-16 by Etu

This is some brief thoughts about Telecomix from a agent, some questions might be answered for some.

Question about price

There have been some claims that the Telecomix services is free of charge, as in free beer. This is not true, and never been true. There is a reason behind this, a very simple one.

Telecomix isn’t a serviceprovider.

We have our services, that is true. But Telecomix isn’t a serviceprovider. If we would take money to use our services, we would be a serviceprovider, and have the responsibility to keep the services online. A price of 0 SEK is also a price. There is no price, and never been a price. We are a group of people that keeps services running, but there is no guarantees that they will keep running. And no one can enforce that we have too. We do it because we think it’s fun, and if others can be helped, that is only a bonus. If a services goes down, well then it is down. And we will probably set it up again, because we use our own services. But there is no price, not even a price of zero.

Free as in freedom, not as in free beer.

You have no right to use our services, it is a privileged use without guarantees. And if the admins think you miss use your chance to stay nice, that is your loss. I promise you, that all admins of Telecomix wants to think the best about people. But that isn’t possible in all cases.

Question about leaders

There have been some discussions that Telecomix does have leaders… Well…

There is no leaders(except from Cameron), but there is serveradmins. All servers needs admins to keep things running. If a server goes down, there is a admin needed to set it up again to keep it running. And he does that, because he wants the service. Usualy the serveradmins of Telecomix have to pay for the serverspace. Infrastructure does cost money. And Telecomix keeps out of the cloud. We do have our own boxes, in our own co-locations that serveradmins pays for from their own pocket.

All serveradmins do have adminpowers in some ways, duh. So if a serveradmin want a change, there will be a change in that direction (maybe!). We have serveradmins that talks to each other and discuss changes before bigger changes is enforced.

And… IRC isn’t a truly decentraliced protocol, you have to have for instance a centernode/tree structure to follow the IRC RFC, which is the case with our network.

Sources to trust

Trust on the internet is a hard question, for everyone. Who can you trust? What info can you trust? Why should you trust?

To work together in a group… you have to trust people in the group. Else the work would fail. If you work alone, and do everything on your own. You don’t need to trust anyone, maybe.

But as a cluster, that do things together, you have to trust at least someone. My protip is to not use services you don’t trust. And that trust isn’t only on protocol level, or encryption, it also includes who the admin is and so on.

I think the best website/feed to trust about what Telecomix is, and what Telecomix do, is telecomix.org website and the telecomix status.net instance and twitterfeed. Just becose a website looks like wikipedia, it does not mean that it’s trustworthy. Comon, everyone can edit, rollback changes, and do edits again. Everyone can create a page with disinfo and link it as source from somewhere else.

Totaly public wikis might contain disinfo.

About the current status of Telecomix

This is my, highly personal thougts. Do not use this as facts.

When I first joined Telecomix, I did it close to the beginning. It was only a few people there and almost only politics, so I left rather quickly. This was rather close to when Telecomix was first launched, and it was much like ‘get more people in!’. I didn’t want to build community back then. I just wanted to sit back and write code. So I left.

Almost a year later, a friend of mine asked me the question… “Why arent you in Telecomix? You would like it there.”, so I joined again. And I had almost forgot about Telecomix, and my experience of it, but when I got there I was met by tons of friendly people. Back then there was never people with op in the channel. Approx 50% of the text in the channel was in Swedish. And everyone was nice to each other. Back then we did politics by sending emails and calling people that works in EU and our own government, to make changes, push changes.

We did replies to some things where the Swedish government asked for opinions from different Organizations. WeRebuild was listed as organization they was interested in to reply. So we got into a pad and wrote a document in LaTeX, compiled, printed and went with the paper to the government.

At this time, I had a great experience every day talking to people in our main-channel, doing some work from time to time.

This has changed, for the last half year(well, more) it have been harder and harder to keep things running. Operators have been attacked, ddosing, tons of more people in the channels that talks(which not have to be bad!). Everyone that hangs around now does not understand how important it is to stay nice to each other. And stay cute together to be able to keep work on what we think is fun.

All systems needs reboots some time, I think, most of the admins wants to go back to this state. Recreate the state where people can hang out together, and have fun together. And have a productive environment. Before there even was thoughts about a price for the Telecomix services. How can anyone even think in that way? How? I don’t get it! I look at it a bit with the same eyes as I look at Free Software with.

The current status of Telecomix is that some parts is closed, we want to calm everyone down. We announced this at the CCCongress in a talk, with a message from Cameron. Systems are going down for reboot. Things are going to change. Not everything is decided yet.

Söker nytt arbete!

Posted on 2011-07-18 by Etu

Elis Axelsson, drifttekniker/webutvecklare, söker nytt jobb inom dessa områden. Bor för närvarande i Stockholmsområdet, men är sugen på att söka mig vidare ner mot Göteborg.

Jag arbetar gärna på flexibla arbetstider, men med regelbundna uppföljningar. Jag har jobbat senaste året med utveckling av webb och vill söka mig vidare, gärna inom områden som innefattar serverdrift, nätverksunderhåll, backuprutiner och liknande.

Du kan läsa mitt CV för mer information, det går att hitta här: Elis_Axelsson.pdf

Har du ett jobb till mig? Eller tips på något? Skrik till i kommentarsfältet alt ring/maila mig!

Telecomix I Godmorgon Världen del2

Posted on 2011-06-05 by Etu

Inslaget i Godmorgon Världen är över, det var ett bra inslag och nu har vi fått ner ljudströmmen för de som missade när det sändes på radio. Vi fick ungefär 10:30 i radiotid idag.

Godmorgon Världen är väl lite av Sveriges Radios finrum av viktiga och spännande saker av vad som händer. Och jag gillar skarpt att Cameron fick vara med i sändningen.

Här hittar ni ljudströmmen: http://img.failar.nu/etu/gmv_p1_telecomix_-_sthlm_politiska_hackare_2011-06-05.m4a

Ladda ner/sprid vidare den!

Telecomix i Godmorgon Världen

Posted on 2011-06-05 by Etu

Om 17 minuter så börjar andra timmen av godmorgon världen, någongång under denna timme så kommer Telecomix att finnas med och berätta om sitt arbete under Egypten, Lybien osv. Allt det där.

Jag kommer att fixa ner en mp3a för nerladdning senare. Men ni som har möjlighet att lyssna direkt får gärna göra det.

Standarder… Dammit…

Posted on 2011-05-01 by Etu

Standarder… Standarder är A och O för att det ska gå att hantera något som Internet. Utan en massa standarder så hade du inte kunnat läsa detta inlägg. Det vore mer eller mindre omöjligt.

Det är ingen hemlighet att jag har en N900 och har haft det ett tag, men har aldrig riktigt tänkt tanken att synkronisera kalender och kontakter, men det påtalades igårkväll så jag började titta på det. Slog upp på internet hur man gör. Gjorde exakt likadant, och det fungerade, tills jag började slå samman kontakter från SIM-Kortet och mina Gmail kontakter.

Det verkar till stor del vara problem med Googles Exchange servrar, men om man vänder på det så tycker vissa att det är N900ans fel. Men det senare känns som ett ickeargument. Man har standarder för att slippa göra specialhack för varje server.

Google doesn’t use a standard Exchange protocol, so isn’t supported with MfE on the N900. It may work for you though – there’s been very mixed reports on this.

– Rob1n 2008-03-06

Det har även kommenterats på hemsidan där jag läste om hur man satte upp det:

When I start using the “merge contacts” feature (which makes this device look pretty awesome) then MfE won’t sync contacts anymore.
I currently only use MfE for my calendar :(

– jrkalf 2009-12-31

Jag har läst lite här och där att det är en bugg i implementationen av hanteringen av Nicknames på Googles sida… Jag vet inte riktigt men jag ska prova runt lite och se om jag lyckats mergea alla mina kontakter.

Jag bryr mig ärligt inte helt om VAR felet ligger, jag är mest bitter över att det uppstår när det faktiskt finns standarder för det.