Urban Terror mapping on Archlinux

Yesterday and today I’ve been trying to get a version of gtkradiant working with Archlinux in order to make own Urban Terror maps. The result is that I expanded the UrT wiki page and created two AUR packages. Everything seems to work now, I just need to get skilled in that editor

Finally a new desktop

Yesterday night I decided that it was time to give my desktop a new design. In my case, usually everything begins with a new wallpaper, but this time I decided to also use a new icon set. So I asked yaourt what the AUR had to offer and stumbled upon some very nice themes called gnome-colors. They are beautiful, I am using GNOME-Carbonite, which is included in that package right now. The next step was to find a fitting background… in the end, I chose Kurt Russell who plays Stuntman Mike in Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof (which is part of Grindhouse). Needless to say that I like the movie and recommend it, if you like QT’s other movies. Last but not least, one needs to set some matching gnome colors (I pick them with GIMP right off the wallpaper) and re-configure conky. I’m glad I did that, because my old desktop setup got kind of boring (as with all of them after a while).

desktop, stuffed

desktop, clean

Jetzt auch bei Twitter!

Das zweiter Update für den languages Abschnitt der Navigation auf der rechten Seite ist nun fertig; ein Twitter Icon. Das erste Update war übrigens das Symbol mit dem Briefumschlag, über den es dank feedmyinbox möglich ist die neuen Artikel via E-Mail (es soll tatsächlich Leute geben, denen das lieber ist als einen Feed-Reader zu nutzen…)  zu lesen. Aber im Gegensatz zu dieser eher simplen Änderung, die ja wirklich nur aus einem Link und einem Bild besteht, forderte die jüngste doch mehr Aufwand. Zwei Twitter Accounts sowie einen Account bei RSS2Twitter.com als Kleber zwischen den Protokollen sorgen dafür, dass die Sache läuft.

Now also at Twitter!

The second update for the languages section in the navigation on the right side is now complete; a Twitter icon! By the way, the first update was about the symbol with the envelope. Thanks to feedmyinbox, it allows you to read all the new articles via E-Mail (some say that there are actually people who prefer that over using a feed-reader…). But compared to that rather simple change, which was actually only a linked picture, the newest one needed a bit more work. Two Twitter accounts as well as one account at RSS2Twitter.com as glue between the two protocols do the job.

Wie man nicht Informatik unterrichten sollte

Bis vor kurzem hätte ich zwecks mangelnder Erfahrung nicht gedacht, dass IT besonders langweilig sein kann. Doch ich lag falsch, wie es sich zeigen sollte.

Als erstes gab es zwei Vorbereitungsstunden, die in einem Raum stattfanden, welcher nicht mit Computern ausgerüstet war. Es wird wohl erst mal lange Zeit um das Thema Tabellenkalkulationsprogramm nutzen gehen, weshalb der Lehrer erklärt hat, wie denn die Tabellen aufgebaut sind, wie man Formeln in die Zellen schreibt und was absolute und relative Adressierungen sind (das mit $A$1 bzw. A1). Es ist tatsächlich möglich damit neunzig Minuten zu füllen, wobei jeder, der zumindest einen Computer von Weitem schon einmal gesehen hat, selbige Informationen durch eine Demonstration an einem solchen Gerät in sagen wir mal maximal 20 Minuten aufnehmen kann. Denn dann braucht man sich nicht alles selbst vorstellen, sondern sieht direkt wie es funktioniert. Stichwort: praxisnah.

Aber genug davon, war halt vom Stundenplan her nicht anders zu organisieren, dachte ich mir und so freute ich mich schon auf die nächste Doppelstunde. Es fing auch ganz gut an – wir bekamen ein Arbeitsblatt mit einem mathematischen Problem, dass sich leicht in Excel, das Tabellenkalkulationsprogramm, welches in diesem Raum installiert ist,  lösen ließe. So weit so gut. PC anmachen, ein bisschen herumprobieren und innerhalb von ein paar Minuten dann das Problem gelöst haben, den Anderen ein bisschen helfen, nächste Aufgabe? Pustekuchen.

Viel mehr begann der Lehrer dann damit eine Tabelle an die Tafel zu zeichnen und uns nach Formeln zu befragen, wie man nun jenes Problem lösen könnte. Das ging so weit, bis detailgenau jeder einzelne Mausklick besprochen wurde und alle benötigten (es waren eh nur zwei oder drei) Formeln in Excel Syntax an der Tafel standen. Das beste ist, dass unangekündigte Tests auch so ablaufen werden – ohne Computer, einfach alles schriftlich auf ein Blatt schreiben. Und wehe es ist etwas falsch! Dann gibts keine Punkte, also besser Rechenweg auch noch dazuschreiben. Was? Haben wir jetzt doch Mathe oder Physik?

Fünfzehn Minuten vor Schluss durften wir dann die Rechner booten und den Kram in Excel eintragen. In dem relativ langsamen Schulnetzwerk dauert das Hochfahren einer solchen Maschine schon an die fünf Minuten, das macht dann praktisch zehn Minuten stupides von-der-Tafel-in-den-PC-eingeben. Toller IT Unterricht.

Angenommen es würde um irgendetwas kompliziertes gehen, wie das lernen von C++ oder so, dann würde ich ja verstehen, dass man alles vorerst an der Tafel macht. Aber doch nicht bei Excel! Das funktioniert intuitiv, da ist man wirklich schneller, wenn man es einfach ausprobiert, bis es passt. Das läuft in der Praxis doch auch so ab, da wird nicht erst >60 Minuten Brainstorming durchgeführt!

Ich bin tatsächlich ganz froh, dass ich nur zwei Stunden von dieser Sorte von Informatik in der Woche habe.

How to use Ultrasurf with Firefox

This is a little tutorial that should help you to set up Firefox for using Ultrasurf as Proxy. It should work on Windows as well as on Linux with either Ultrasurf running simply in Wine or as a daemon with ghostship. I will assume that you have already installed Ultrasurf (for detailed instructions on how to do that with wine, look here).

tl;dr: Server: 127.0.0.1, Port: 9666

1. Start Ultrasurf (or ghostship) for the first time. If you use ghostship, read on at step 6 (or if you require that Ultrasurf uses a proxy itself, run ghostship --viewer and follow the next steps).

2. The main interface appears now. Click Option (which should actually be named Options, but that does not matter – the software works anyway ).

3. Again, you will get another dialog right in your face. This time, check Do not use IE because we are talking about Firefox and not Internet Explorer and Hide Golden Lock because the image of a golden lock at the bottom right is not useful anymore (it should tell whether Ultrasurf has set the IE to use it or not).

4. Optionally, you can make Ultrasurf itself use a proxy by clicking Proxy Settings. This is only required if you can’t access the Internet without using a proxy in your local network or if you want to chain multiple proxy applications in a row.

5. Close the Options GUI (picture above) by clicking OK and the main window by clicking Exit. Then start Ultrasurf again, just as in step 1.

6. Start up Firefox, navigate to checkip.dyndns.org and write down your current IP somewhere.

7. Now you should think about whether you would like to always use Ultrasurf (easier, continue with step 12) or depending on a white- or blacklist with specific sites (read on) and/or with a icon in Firefox that allows easy switching on the fly.

8. Install the Firefox Add-On FoxyProxy by opening this website and clicking Add to Firefox as well as in the popping up dialog on Install Now.

9. Restart Firefox.

10. After that, you will be greeted with a dialog that asks whether you would like to set up FoxyProxy for usage with TOR. In this tutorial, you don’t need to do this as the onion router is  a completely different proxy application and should therefore click on No, but you might want to do it anyway if you have TOR installed.

11. Foxyproxy is a very powerful application that allows – as mentioned before – the usage of proxys depending on lists just to name one big feature. Keep in mind that Ultrasurf will listen on your loopback IP, which is always 127.0.0.1 (that information might also be called server), on the port 9666. You can now either do a very simple setup that allows you to switch proxys on the fly by following this tutorial, or dive right into the official FoxyProxy documentation and learn how to use the more advanced features. Continue when you have Ultrasurf set up.

12. Open up Firefox’ preferences by clicking Edit/Preferences (Windows users will find it in the Tools menu).

13. Navigate to Advanced, Network and set up a pretty high cache, like in the screenshot below (1024 MB). This will make sure that Firefox downloads only new data and keeps the old on the harddrive, thus speeding up the surfing experience and keeping away unnecessary traffic from Ultrasurf.

14. If you use FoxyProxy, click Close and continue with step 16 now. otherwise click Settings.

15. In the new GUI, click Manual proxy configuration, Use this proxy server for all protocols and fill in the following data:

HTTP Proxy: 127.0.0.1

Port: 9666

After that, click OK.

16. So you set everything up? You better check that by calling checkip.dyndns.org again and comparing the current displayed IP with the one from step 6. If it is different, everything works

ghostship: first release (0.4)

Ghostship runs surprisingly stable (which may also have something to do with the recent upstream update of Ultrasurf from 9.5 to 9.6), so I decided to release an official source package.  It still does run Ultrasurf like an Unix daemon, I have written pretty much about that by now, so if you don’t know the project yet, check out its homepage.

Why do I start with version 0.4? Well, I just counted my first two attempts plus the major rewrite I did lately as single versions.

About packaging: I have already made two PKGBUILDs for the AUR, so Archlinux is all fine. Yoschi on the other hand will build Debian/Ubuntu packages as soon as I get the code ported properly (I am not quite sure, but I think that there are still some parts in the code that work only on Arch). If you would like to see ghostship on another distribution, please try to build a distribution specific package from the release and give some feedback.

PS: I guess I will add a little tutorial how to use Ultrasurf with Firefox on the ghostship homepage soon. The wordpress.com control panel tells me, that there are actually people looking for such information.

RabbitVCS: Manage Your SVN Repository With Nautilus

I discovered this fine piece of software the day I pushed ghostship to sourceforge. SF.net allows you to choose between several version control systems, GIT and SVN among them. I usually choose GIT and to make life easier, I decided to look for a GIT integration in Nautilus. But I got pointed to RabbitVCS which does the exact thing for SVN. Actually they plan to implement GIT support in the next version, but as it isn’t there yet SVN got the cake.

Just take a look at the screenshots on their website – the integration is fantastic!

ghostship-svn in the Archlinux User Repository

Ghostship itself runs okay now in my experience, but I’ll keep on testing a bit longer, before I make a stable release. Archlinux is bleeding edge, so if you use that distribution, you may just build the most recent SVN revision from the AUR with the PKGBUILD I submitted.

Any feedback is welcome.

ghostship 0.4: some major rewrites

A few days ago I noticed that my ghostship software had much more bugs than I thought – in fact some bugs that prevented even bigger bugs (that happens sometimes…). Today I had enough time, so I read through all the code again, gave it better comments, simplified it where possible and rewrote some parts. The ship does still need a lot of testing and fixing, since some parts (shutdown, viewer and the init scripts) do not work anymore.

As said before, I will release an officiall tarball (gotta love that word) as soon as I think it is stable. But feel free to literary check out the svn and tell me what you think about it if you want to.