davemclain.com

I finally figured out what was going wrong inside my gateway (tywin) such that when i VPN’d i could only access Tywin’s resources, not those of the rest of the network. Turns out i had the following:

iptables -A FORWARD -i ${LAN} -s ${SUBNET} -j ACCEPT
iptables -A FORWARD -i ${LAN} -d ${SUBNET} -j DROP
iptables -A FORWARD -i ppp+ -s ${SUBNET} -j ACCEPT
iptables -A FORWARD -i ppp+ -d ${SUBNET} -j DROP

When i needed the following:

iptables -A FORWARD -i ${LAN} -s ${SUBNET} -j ACCEPT
iptables -A FORWARD -i ppp+ -s ${SUBNET} -j ACCEPT
iptables -A FORWARD -i ${LAN} -d ${SUBNET} -j DROP
iptables -A FORWARD -i ppp+ -d ${SUBNET} -j DROP

oops.

My sojourn back into the wild frontier of Linux as a client machine has been mostly good, but one thing that frustrates me is the lack of support for iTunes podcasts. The phobos.apple.com/blah/blah/blah urls that everyone and their mother (including The Austin Stone Community Church, by way of me) provide aren’t supported by most clients. This is fine for many sites (like Stone’s) because they also provide the link to the raw rss feed.

The thing of it is that it’s not a terribly complicated task to actually get the rss feed from an Apple link. At first I thought they were running some tpe of weird binary format, but those first 2 bytes were that magical combination 1f8b, gzip! Ok, maybe i’m an idiot for not realizing that it was a gzip compressed stream to begin with, but whatever. One zcat later and I see that those phobos.apple links are just redirects to an edge-caching site using an “itms://” link that is supposed to only be understood by iTunes. Replace itms with http and you’ll get another gzipped stream that contains the iTunes formatted feed. But that just means it’s XML that’s already pretty darn close to what you want. I guess I ought to check out the code and see about writing a patch…

Update: The last thing you get isn’t the original rss feed, but rather some marching orders for iTunes that has all the data contained in the original feed, but luckily embedded in there is a link that has the original feed given to iTunes. So if for example Cornerstone Church in Simi Valley is lame and doesn’t post that their rss feed is at http://feeds.feedburner.com/CornerstonePodcasts and only gives you an iTunes link, you can figure that out.

I followed a facebook ad link because somebody wrote an Scourse clone. Scourse is a fast scheduling application that scrapes UT’s course schedule and lets you choose a schedule graphically. Anywho, I pulled up CS 345: Programming Languages as it interests me and I have only one semester left.

It’s waitlisted.

Not closed, not restricted, not cancelled. Waitlisted.

Apparently registration has already begun. OHCRAPOHCRAPOHCRAPOHCRAP. When’s my time? “Tue, Apr 17 11:00am - 5:00pm and 6:00pm - Midnight ” Cue a Charlie Brown style: AAARRRRRGGGGGHHHHH!!!

So now one of the classes I need to graduate (MIS375) is waitlisted and my next opportunity to get in classes that every Junior and Senior in my majors are trying to get is Saturday. At this point, my sisters have better shots at getting ideal schedules than i do, and they don’t get to register until June-ish.

Matt Carter preached on Peter’s denial of Jesus today. The story has had a large impact on me every time i read it, because it’s so very human. Peter had spent the last 3 years of his life following Jesus at any cost, and only a few hours earlier had been in the following exchange:

Jesus: Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift you as wheat. But I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned back, strengthen your brothers.
Peter: Lord, I am ready to go with you to prison and to death.
Jesus: I tell you, Peter, before the rooster crows today, you will deny three times that you know me. ~Luke 22:31-34

This is the same Peter who affirmed the deity of Christ before all the other apostles(Matthew 16:16). The same man who walked on water until his eyes wavered (Matthew 14). The very same man who witnessed the Transfiguration (Mark 9). And in the hours before dawn both on that day and in redemptive history Peter chose the estimation of a slave girl and some dudes around a fire over claiming the name of Jesus. How often is it the testimony of my life that a joke at someone else’s expens or a configuration file are worth more than the name of Jesus.

And yet as much as the story is a punch to the stomach, the ending is happy. For every denial, Jesus gives Peter an opportunity to proclaim his love for Himself. Peter answers every time with variations of “you know that I love you”, and Jesus gives him the roles of “feed my lambs”, “tend my sheep” and “feed my sheep”. Peter, after decades of spreading the good news of reconciliation with God through the blood and resurrection of Jesus, ended his days on a wooden cross in Rome under Nero; traditionally said to have been crucified upside down at his own request because he did not deem himself worthy to die in the same manner as his Lord. Jesus doesn’t owe us anything, we should be so lucky as to die upside down at the hands of our oppressors, for it is far better than to land in the hands of the holy, holy, holy God of the universe whose justice demands an outpouring of divine wrath. But that price has been paid.
The last few weeks have taught me that it takes an alarmingly small amount of persecution to cause me to drift from the loving embrace of the living God, but I am confident that he who began a good work in me will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus (Phillipians 1:6)

I have no additional knowledge regarding the continuing Song of Ice and Fire series, though i wish i did. Those who have read this series and know me very well (Austin/Alfonso) may have already deduced that my primary laptop (formarly named Arya) has bitten the bullet, and that I have installed linux on the hardware. This is as a result of my overly complex naming scheme whereby machines are given names from House Lannister if they are running Linux and names from House Stark if they are running Windows. The system is further complicated by the distinction that clients get female names and servers get male names. Hence Tywin is the Linux file server/gateway, Catelyn is the Media box running Windows MCE and Tommen is a Linksys WRT54G which calims to be something else, but is actually running Linux under the hood.

Anyway, my laptop was Arya (Sansa is a tool) but through repeated crashes and a general malaise towards XP paired with a lack of desire for Vista, I pushed back into the territory of laptop Linux with Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft. And it Just Works ™. The extent to which this shocks me is difficult to understate. I tried to run Gentoo Linux on nearly identical hardware almost two years ago and met with a near total lack of success. Wireless was a pain in the butt and buggy as hell (where the worm never dies). X would crash not infrequently. Even browsing the web was crappy because of the lack of standards and the inability to just fire up IE. Don’t even get me started about trying to get Suspend to disk to work. All those things worked out of the box. Suspending to disk for the first time, i nearly flipped out. The biggest surprise is wireless. For the past year or so i’ve been using USB wireless adapters because my internal wireless card just would not work under Linux. I popped open the Gnome networking configuration dialog, popped in the SSID, the WEP key and it Just Worked.

There are still things that are going to be problematic (Visual Studio) but they shouldn’t be insurmountable. And to think I was considering getting a MacBook. Bah!