Trash Diving Revisited

Look what I found on the street yesterday: A see-through garbage bag labelled "securicleaning", filled with printouts and printed stuff. Now this poses some questions: Is this a company that promises to dispose of your sensitive office trash in a secure way? Do they boast about their security checked staff?

Either way, the word "secure" is a lie on that bag. Heck, you would not even have to rip open that bag to get at the contents. I did not look to close, but even if the bag did not contain letters the breach of cover would be bad. Let's just hope that this company has a shredder and their employees do not put anything remotely sensitive in that bag. But a seasoned Social Engineer could make use of even remotely company related material. Conclusion: The reference to "secure" must be a joke from the side of the cleaning company.

ZopeTree Using SESSION patch

Dug around with ZopeTree (also ZopeTree on Sourceforge). Managed to get something working (despite almost total lack of documentation), except I had a problem with cookie paths in different browsers messing up the Tree state. Decided to use Zope's session engine. Here is a patch for ZopeTree that seems to make it work: zopetree_session.txt

Updated: I'm not using ZopeTree any more, instead I use ExpansionTree, see "Trees for Page Templates"

Schach auf Griechisch

Am Dienstag war ich Schach spielen in einem Schachclub in Kipseli. Die Konfusion meinerseits war gross. Griechische Schachbretter sind zwar mit lateinischen Buchstaben beschriftet, aber griechische Schachspieler benutzen natuerlich die griechischen Buchstaben α, β, γ, δ, ε, ζ, η, θ um die Felder zu bezeichnen.

Seit Oktober hatte ich mich nicht mehr ernsthaft mit Schach beschäftigt und jetzt muss ich auch noch da "um die Ecke denken". Das kann ja nur gut rauskommen. Natürlich habe ich erstmal verloren, aber was solls. Es war ein interessanter Abend. Ich weiss nur noch nicht, wo ich die Zeit hernehmen soll, um regelmässig zu spielen.

Security On Monday

Monday morning first thing I will go to a one day event "Γενικές αρχές εθνικής στρατηγικής για το απόρρητο και την ασφάλεια δικτύων και πληροφοριών" phew. "General principles of national strategy for the secrecy and security of networks and information". A couple of ministers, university professors and security guys will give speeches. Let's see how it will be like. Link should be at http://www.adae.gr but at the time of writing the site is not reachable. So let's hope the best for national security.

sec congress 1

First batch of speakers heard. Was late but still heard a minister read down his bullet list. then some more interesting uni profs. They were asking for example why still so few uni programs for sec in IT exist. Also heard that Internet access might still be as low as 7% in Greece. Diomedis Spinelli gave a speech on Open Source, some good points to reach the audience of suits and ties in a country in the grip of the big M$ monopoly.

Sum Up Of Security Strategy Conference

I had thought about mobile blogging more of the conference, but it got too tiresome with the tiny mobile phone keyboard. Here are some notes and thoughts though. Overall the day was a surprisingly good experience. Don't expect too much to come out of it, politicians are going to turn it their way anyway. Read on...

Sahara Dust

This sunday Athens was hit by Sahara dust. I had seen that before, but it was more yellowish then. So at first I did not believe guesses about the Sahara origin. But Then I Saw It On TV (TM). And the powdered cars everywhere make it more believable. We went to the seaside in Kalamaki, my old neighbourhood. With a lot of wind and fresh air it was quite nice. Other niceties: Buying belgian chocolate from the branch of a belgian chocolate chain. Kalamaki is so high society compared to the center of Athens where I live now.

The picture shows the beach in Kalamaki in the "fog". The greyish white sky is due to the sand in the air, not just due to the lowly mobile phone camera.

Who Is Behind the Greek National Security Organisation?

For a long time people were worrying who is actually behind the Greek National Security organisation. I can't tell you just now, but the answer can be found on the streets of Athens. Obviously, whoever it is, their phone number starts with "522".

I noticed this abandoned van on the street behind a building of some army school (!). Since I was there at night (don't ask), I had to come back to snatch some pictures during day time. This I did in spite of the scary signs "No Photos!" around the building. Civil disobedience must prevail in the face of the military industrial complex, even if it comes (drives?) in the form of a Mitsubishi van.

vi commands

So I found this vi command reference. I had trained myself to use 'mp' to mark an arbitrary position, but here they use the character 'f' for the marker. Should switch, 'mf' is just so much cooler. Though it will be hard to retrain the finger habit.

Search in Greek Works Now

Zope splitters are: a.) used to split text into words to make them indexable and b.) seemingly deep magic because documentation is nonexistant (or I couldn't find any). What I ended up with was the sourcecode to CJKSplitter. So I hacked CJKSplitter into doing Greek. It was not especially difficult, mostly a "delete" job (chinese is way more complex). Also I replaced the range of chinese unicode characters with the range for Greek. Might add iso-8859-1 character ranges too, especially for this blog.

Once I clean up the code, have a look at the license and ask on the mailing list if this is really the proper way to go, I will put this online. It might be a good solution for Greek in Zope with ZCTextIndex.

But in short: The result so far is that searching in Greek should now work in the search form on this weblog.

Some Links for Searching and Greek

Although this is not a "link blog", here are some references I found while fooling around with splitters for ZCTextIndex.

This is somehow the same problem I'm trying to solve, someone who wants to search using ZCTextIndex and Unicode characters:

http://mail.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2003-June/137115.html

Here are some greeks who want to search in iso-8859-7, an old entry into the Zope Collector:

http://www.zope.org/Collectors/Zope/842

(I'd suggest switching to UTF-8 and using something like the splitter I made with ZCTextIndex.)

The chapter about searching and indexes in Zope:

http://www.plope.com/Books/2_7Edition/SearchingZCatalog.stx

Unicode character table:

http://jrgraphix.net/research/unicode_blocks.php?block=7

Had to do this on my source file to stop a warning (because python wants to know about unicode characters in source files):

http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0263.html

This should really resolve all these issues and provide for better search functionality:

http://zopyx.com/OpenSource/TextIndexNG/

(I could not find any documentation about e.g. the supported languages on the TextIndexNG site, and I would have to change COREBlog, so I gave up on this for the moment.)

The Living Sea

This weekend I visited a digital planetarium / IMAX cinema. The film shown was "living sea". Was the first time for me, it was quite impressive. Since the projection covers a lot of your field of view, in some scenes it gets quite "real". Like when the camera was in the front part of this rescue boat that was going in a full storm. When it goes through the wave and the water splashes all over, you grab the handle of your seat.

What worked best for the "real" effect were the scenes where they managed to involve the camera in motion between objects. Like when they had it on a speedboat between some small islands. Some of the steadier shots were nice too, like some of the ocean scenes. But when you have to turn your head to see it all, the effect gets kind of lost.

Outside in the hall was an old projector for the old school kind of planetarium. I would have liked to see that kind of show too. Maybe another time. The planetarium is in Syggrou street, near the hospital "Onassio" (Website is in Greek only.).

Erfahrungen

Als ich Ende letzten Jahres wieder einen Job suchte, erwartete ich nicht, dass ich wieder etwas mit Zope machen könnte. Zope-Jobs sind nicht wirklich weit verbreitet. Aber mein Glück, das Schicksal oder Wasimmer wollte es wohl so, seit einiger Zeit bin ich wieder mit Zope am werkeln und sammle weitere Erfahrungen.

Re: iPod hard reset

From Tor's weblog: His sons iPod had the problem that it would not be recognized by the Mac. Tor mentions the hard reset procedure that brought the connection back again. So here are my own experiences.

They were lucky that this worked. As one can see on the Apple Discussion boards, some people had iPod problems since the upgrade to 10.3.7, and a lot of them could not resolve those problems with any remedy. Apple had no feedback or acknowledgement whatsoever. My own iPod would not connect to the G4 at work any more (except for charging) after I had foolishly left the iPod connected while running the update to 10.3.7. At home everything was fine, so I was not too worried. But none of the procedures mentioned brought the connection to the G4 back, and the G4 would also not see any other devices connected to the Firewire. Quite simple conclusion: The Firewire was hosed on the G4.

A few days ago I started to update to 10.3.9, but after noticing that the download took ages and with me having more important things to do than to wait for OTEnet to get their shit together I cancelled out the update. I can't say that this was the cure, but I was lucky because to my great surprise the next morning when I hooked up my iPod it connected just fine. Maybe the updater had already made some setups? Whatever I just "had a fat ass" as the Greeks say for someone who is extremely lucky.