Mayo Jordanov

Caine's Arcade

2012-04-12T00:00:00Z

Awesome and inspiring story. (via Daring Fireball)

Rear Window

2012-04-12T00:00:00Z

Timelapse made from footage of Hitchcock’s Rear Window movie. (via Daring Fireball)

“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.” — Aldous Huxley

2012-02-21T00:00:00Z

Broken WAN Miniports

2011-11-13T17:24:00Z

Windows network stack uses “miniports” to handle different layers of the network. These can sometimes “break” and cause VPN and possibly other network level services to not work properly. Usually you can tell a miniport is not working when it has an exclamation sign icon next to it in the device manager. (The miniports are typically hidden too, so if they aren’t broken, they won’t show up at all.) To me, this problem manifested when I was creating a VPN, and despite choosing connection over network, the connection would try to dial the modem.

All it takes to fix them is uninstalling and re-installing the non-working miniport, but unfortunately there is no easy way to do it. Miniports can’t be deleted/uninstalled, and their drivers are hidden from the user, so even re-installing them isn’t easy.

Trying to avoid OS reinstall, I hunted around for a while and could not find a decent guide to fixing the problem. There are a lot of outdated posts that no longer work in Windows 7 (and probably Vista), and some that are just plain wrong. Having read number of forum posts, some KBs, and a bit of intuition and guessing, I’ve pieced together the following guide to uninstall and re-install the network miniports:

Uninstall the non-working miniports

To do this, DO NOT edit the registries. There are number of other registry keys that depend on the miniports being present, and it is super easy to completely break the network stack, to a point where the base network card driver won’t work. (If you did this already, let’s hope your system has restore points — you can restore to previous snapshot and try doing it the non-registry way outlined there.) When doing this, take a note of the miniports that you are removing, you’ll need to know this later when reinstalling.

So, to remove each non-working miniport, do the following:

Right click on the non-working miniport, choose “Update Driver”.
Choose “Browse my computer”.
In the next window, choose “Let me pick driver from a list”.
Uncheck “Show compatible hardware”. From the “Manufacturer” list, choose “Microsoft”, and from the “Network Adapter” list, choose “MAC Bridge Miniport”. (It can be any device the user is allowed to uninstall.)
Back in the device manager, delete the device that just turned into the “MAC Bridge Miniport” device.

Once done removing the bad miniports, reboot. Don’t skip this, it’s important. Otherwise there is a change things will go bad again.

Reinstall the miniports

This is the fun part. You’ll need to do a few extra steps, as the miniport drivers aren’t meant to be installed by users and are not visible. To avoid editing .inf files (which in lot of cases are protected and not easily editable), we’ll do it the long way…

Get ahold of current devcon.exe. 32-bit version won’t work on 64-bit systems. It runs, but won’t do what it needs to. Old (XP/2000) versions don’t work well wither. The easiest way to do this is to follow the steps outlined in “How to Obtain the Current Version of Device Console Utility (DevCon.exe)” on Microsoft’s TechNet wiki. (It involved getting an ISO image of a developer CD and extracting the devcon.exe file out of there.)
Go to command prompt, go to the directory where you extracted devcon.exe

For each miniport that you have previously uninstalled, execute the command outlined below. DO NOT run all of them or run the command twice, as that will create second version of the existing miniport, which can cause problems again.

If running the command reports “driver install” failure, don’t pay much attention to it, it usually does. The only problem is when it complains about the inf file missing, or a missing class (in which case you most likely made a typo in the last part of the command).

IKEv2	devcon.exe install c:\Windows\inf\netavpna.inf MS_AgileVpnMiniport
IP	devcon.exe install c:\Windows\inf\netrasa.inf MS_NdisWanIp
IPv6	devcon.exe install c:\Windows\inf\netrasa.inf MS_NdisWanIpv6
Network Monitor	devcon.exe install c:\Windows\inf\netrasa.inf MS_NdisWanBh
L2TP	devcon.exe install c:\Windows\inf\netrasa.inf MS_L2tpMiniport
PPPoE	devcon.exe install c:\Windows\inf\netrasa.inf MS_PppoeMiniport
PPTP	devcon.exe install c:\Windows\inf\netrasa.inf MS_PptpMiniport
SSTP	devcon.exe install c:\Windows\inf\netsstpa.inf MS_SstpMiniport

Once done, reboot. Again, this is necessary. You can go to device manager and scan for new devices and some of the miniports will show up, but some will have wrong names and won’t work properly without a reboot.

That’s it, you should have working miniports again. If you had a VPN connection created while the miniports were still bad, you will most likely need to delete it, and re-create it. Otherwise, things should be back to normal. Enjoy.

“Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” — Albert Einstein

2011-08-26T00:00:00Z

Hackers pierce network with jerry-rigged mouse

2011-06-27T00:00:00Z

Walt Disney's MultiPlane Camera

2011-06-14T00:00:00Z

Filmed in 1957. (via Daring Fireball)

ISS docked with Space Shuttle Endeavour

2011-06-09T00:00:00Z

One of a kind photo. Check out the whole set on ESA’s photostream.

“Make no little plans” — Daniel Burnham, Chicago architect. (1846-1912)

2011-06-08T00:00:00Z

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.

(via Daring Fireball)

“All that is not given, is lost” — Hasari Pal

2011-05-30T00:00:00Z

Astronomy picture of the day

2011-05-29T00:00:00Z

Fireworks, comet, and lightning in single exposure.

Is Your Brain Sleeping While You're Awake?

2011-05-03T00:00:00Z

“Key parts of sleep-deprived brains may go offline, hindering decision-making.”

Convert 8mm film with the Canon 5D mark II

2011-03-18T00:00:00Z

Mercurial Atoms

2011-02-15T00:00:00Z

Building blocks that matter. At least to some of us… Atoms is a paste-like service implemented on top of Mercurial as a backend. The idea was inspired and heavily influenced by GitHub‘s Gists.

For a while now I looked for Gist-like implementation that ran on Mercurial. Wanting to explore the Mercurial API a bit and hopefully learn a bit more about Mercurial’s internals, I decided it was time to dive in. It’s running on the Pylons framework with an extra WSGI handler for serving up the repositories to hg clients using Mercurial’s hgweb.

The feature set is fairly basic, mostly focusing on what was necessary for it to be usable. More features are coming, as is code cleanup after my newb hacking at Pylons I’m also interested to see where others take it. The source is at Bitbucket and it’s licensed under the MIT. Go check it out, and have fun!

Antikythera mechanism out of LEGO

2010-12-13T00:00:00Z

(via The Register)

“Everything is free, except the video that we capture of you. That we own.” — Josh Harris

2010-11-29T00:00:00Z

Josh Harris from the Quiet: We Live In Public experiment. Check out the We Live In Public movie. Facebook, Google… ring a bell?

Network card rootkit

2010-11-24T00:00:00Z

(via The Register)

Cracking SHA1

2010-11-18T00:00:00Z

Cracking two SHA1 keys every seven minutes, at $2.10 an hour. (via The Register)

From Simplenote to Jekyll

2010-11-16T00:00:00Z

Does Mr. Jekyll have a new twin? Jekyll and statically generated pages are nice, but it would be nice to create some posts while on the road without the laptop. SSHing to the server is an option, but typing up a post in vim on phone is not exactly enjoyable. I use Simplenote all the time, and I figured it would be nice to write posts in Simplenote. Using Simplenote’s API, I wrote a quick and dirty script that pulls notes with a blog tag and writes a file that Jekyll can process.

The post in Simplenote looks somewhat like your regular Jekyll post, with first line being the “filename” with date, but without separating the words with dashes, and file extension (so Jekyll uses the right formatting). Then a minimal YAML front matter, where rest of it will get filled in when generating the actual file. Following that, it’s a regular post. As an example, this post in Simplenote looks somwhat like:

2010-11-16 From Simplenote to Jekyll.markdown
---
layout: post
short: sn2jk
---
Does Mr. Jekyll have a new twin? [...]

The script on server-side can be run manually or in a cron job to automagically get the posts as they are written. I then have the script add and commit them to the site repository, triggering Mercurial hooks and regenerating the site with Jekyll.

Like I said, the script is quick and dirty and will be improved over time. I might consider spinning off the Simplenote API in a module of it’s own, if Simperium doesn’t mind and I’d like to make it more generic as well, but for now it does what it needs to.

Hello World from Simplenote

2010-11-15T00:00:00Z

Hello from Simplenote, automatically downloaded through the Simplenote API, and processed with Jekyll.

Some code and more on how it works a bit later.

Back in the new digs

2010-11-10T00:00:00Z

After fumbling around with numerous redesigns using static pages, switching to wikis, blogs, and anything else you can think of, Webby, then hopping to Tumblr, and giving up, I made it a full circle back to statically generated pages using Jekyll.

I’ve been thinking about total redesign, and prompted by other people’s recent redesigns, I went back to the beginning, found Jekyll, and started over. Some old posts are ported here, and so are some Tumblr. The old stuff is moved out of the way, but still reachable with the help of some rewrites and redirects.

I’m using Mercurial to maintain the site, and got it setup with commit hooks, so pushing changes out will generate the necessary pages. The hooks were fairly simple. Just add the following to the server-side .hg/hgrc file:

[hooks]
changegroup.regenerate = hg up && jekyll

From there, just point the webserver to the repository/_site directory.

socat, my new favourite tool

2010-11-09T00:00:00Z

socat, self described as “multipurpose relay,” is the swiss army knife of any kind of bidirectional data transfer. So much cooler than netcat and lot of other similar tools.

“Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.” — unknown

2010-09-28T00:00:00Z

Climbing to the Top of a 1,700-Foot Transmission Tower

2010-09-15T00:00:00Z

Aperture's time adjustment functionality

2010-09-13T00:00:00Z

I’ve always missed decent way of adjusting photo time in Aperture. The normal Batch Change only allows you to change time-zones, which is almost always useless if you are like me and don’t adjust your camera for daylight savings, or have camera with wrong time.

I’ve just noticed there is Metadata > Adjust Time. It can change time to arbitrary values, it can change the time on master image, and it works on multiple photos (select multiple photos, change time on current pick, and it will change all selected photos).

How nice, I wonder why this isn’t exposed in the Batch Change window.

Bio Lab

2010-09-13T00:00:00Z

Addicitive shoot ‘em up in HTML5 + JavaScript

“I know you think you understand what you thought I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant” — Alan Greenspan

2010-09-13T00:00:00Z

Panopticlick — your browser's fingerprint

2010-09-13T00:00:00Z

I know it’s been around for a while, but it came up in some conversations recently and I couldn’t find the link. So here it is. Scary stuff

The Wilderness Downtown

2010-09-01T00:00:00Z

An interactive film by Chris Milk built in HTML 5.

La Guillotine Camera, A.K.A The Adidas Camera

2010-08-31T00:00:00Z

Lego Printer

2010-06-03T00:00:00Z

Lego Stop Motion

2010-06-03T00:00:00Z

Google Maps: "Kayak across the Pacific Ocean ... 6243km"

2010-05-25T00:00:00Z

Trying to figure out the flight distance between Shenzhen, China and Vancouver, BC, I plugged the two cities into Google Maps (not realizing there are no flight paths there, at the time). I did not get what I wanted, but the outcome was interesting: They give me driving directions to a port, and from tell I’m supposed to “Kayak across the Pacific Ocean”, about 6243km to Hawaii, and then kayak another 4463km to Seattle, and drive up to Vancouver. Ok then, I’m right on it, see you in couple of years.

I wonder though, is the kayaking part something they are working on or part of the biking maps?

Project 365: Picture a day

2010-05-24T00:00:00Z

For a while I’ve been thinking how to force myself to shoot more day to day stuff. Get out of the comfort zone and shooting on trips, and instead force myself to come up with a some shots. I’ve seen number of people do the “Project 365” or “picture a day” projects, and it sounds like a good way to achieve what I want — so here I go, starting today…

Windows VPN from FreeBSD

2008-01-31T00:00:00Z

While developing an application, I had the need to access Active Directory (AD) that was running on a remote machine with no access to AD from outside world. The only option to talk to the AD was via Window’s VPN.

I found number of solutions that would let me connect my FreeBSD development machine to the Windows VPN (PPTP setup), and I initially chose Multilink PPP Daemon (mpd) version 5 as the tool to use. It seemed full featured and it had capability to open the VPN tunnel on demand and keep it connected and/or reconnect if it was disconnected for some reason.

No matter what I did, I could not get mpd to work. I’ve tried multiple configs I could find around, as well as using the supplied examples and writing a few of my own, unfortunately to no avail. It has always failed in initial stages when trying to negotiate authentication mechanisms with:

[L1] LCP: state change Ack-Rcvd --> Opened
[L1] LCP: auth: peer wants EAP, I want CHAP
[L1] CHAP: sending CHALLENGE #1 len: 30
[L1] LCP: LayerUp
[L1] EAP: rec'd REQUEST #171 len: 5, type: Identity
[L1] EAP: sending RESPONSE #171 len: 14, type: Identity
[L1] LCP: rec'd Terminate Request #3 (Opened)

I’ve tried allowing basic CHAP (which should fail and not be used) as well as MS-CHAP v1, v2 and EAP with MD5, etc. All failed, while on the server side MS-CHAP v2 was selected as the protocol to use. I’ve also verified this with a Windows client hard-set to PPTP VPN with MS-CHAP v2 as the authentication method. On the server side, the mpd failures were reported as You do not have permission to connect using the selected authentication protocol. and The user attempted to use an authentication method that is not enabled on the matching remote access policy. at the same time. This is while the remote access policy specifically specifies MS-CHAP v2 as the only authentication method.

I then gave up on mpd and went on to search for other solutions and I found a Creating a VPN using PPTP post on FreeBSD Diary. This setup uses pptpclient and a very simple config in the system’s ppp.conf. The config ended up being:

vpn:
  set authname <username>
  set authkey <password>
  set timeout 0
  set ifaddr 0 0
  add <remote iprange>/24 HISADDR
  alias enable yes
  disable dns

and it worked at the first go. Nice and simple. The only problem I have now is that the VPN connection sometime gets dropped I have to reconnect manually. Since this is a development server, it’s not such a big issue, and in the worst case could be solved with a simple script of occasional ping and restart of pptpclient if necessary.

I’m not done with mpd and I would very much like to get it going, but don’t have the time to figure out the configs. If somebody can provide me with hints for mpd version 5 config that works with Windows VPN, please do let me know. (mpd v5 specifically, as I’ve found tons of configs that are very outdated and don’t work with mpd v5 and converting them to v5 config will result in the same errors as above.)