Michael's musings

Tue, 14 Jul 2009

La Ronde -- montreal expo island roller coaster

I went to La Ronde last night after my http://linuxsymposium.org talk. $25 after 5pm, $20 if you buy online. (Internet at my hotel was stuffed, so I couldn't buy online) http://www.laronde.com/

Take Metro to BERI-UQAM, and then take Yellow line south one stop to the island, then take 167 bus "La Ronde" for 5 minutes. It's too far to walk, alas. I got there at 7:30pm, alas. I wish I had got there earlier. (There were plenty of buses at 9pm to deal with the people leaving when the park closes)

I managed to ride "le Monstre" which is one of the larger wooden roller-coasters in North America, apparently. It is fast. They had only one of the two tracks running, otherwise, you'd be "racing" the other track.

I also rode the Goliath, which is a metal coaster. It's not as fast overall, but it has more up-gforces.. I.e. you get weightless as you go over the rises. You are almost standing. I didn't get to ride the one where you hang, and your feet are out, and you go up-side-down.

I did see, next to the Goliath, a diving pool spectacle. It's called Y'Eau. Now I know what happens to retired Olympic divers. Very cool... I just sat down there to finish my food before I lined up for the Goliath... line ups on Monday were not bad... 25 minutes each...

I gotta go back.

I gotta go back with Liam when he is tall enough to ride! I hope he will be into roller coasters.

Wed, 15 Jul 2009

Amtrak trip to New York state field

It's 3:35pm. We've been sitting in a field in upstate New York State for 45 minutes. Finally, the northbound train just passed us, and we are now proceeding. I guess this is because we were too late to get to the next passing track.

I think we were late leave, the train bridge was under construction, so we were slow leaving, and the border crossing at "Rousse Point" was very slow. 2 hours, I think.

PLEASE, can we not work something out so that US border guards get on the train in Montreal, and work as the train moves?

I understand that there are issues with the US boarder guards being armed... well, the Canadian ones are now (unfortunately, I think) now also armed. At least, could we arrange for Canadian immigration to board at Rousse Point, and process people while the train moves?

(Finally, at 3:50pm, after going around some more of Lake Champlain, we got to Port Henry. I think we are 4 hours late now... Apparently there is no train on Thursday/Friday due to track work. I hope they can improve things)

Mon, 06 Jul 2009

Rails 2.3.x requires new test_helper

I was getting weird errors like:

.../test/test_helper.rb:11: undefined method `use_instantiated_fixtures=' for Test::Unit::TestCase:Class (NoMethodError)

When trying to run "rake test" on an application that actually had no tests defined, (my goal is to add a few) that was built with rails 2.3.2.

It turns out that in rails 2.3 (?- maybe 2.2, my other applications are at

2.1), the unit test cases are now subclassed from ActiveSupport::TestCase

instead of Test::Unit::TestCase.

This matters for both test_helper.rb and the *_test.rb files.

Open proxies vs network censorship vs security issues

http://www.renesys.com/blog/2009/06/the-proxy-fight-for-iranian-de.shtml

this is a very good read as are the previous posts about Iran.

http://www.renesys.com/blog/2009/06/strange-changes-in-iranian-int.shtml http://www.renesys.com/blog/2009/06/iran-and-the-internet-uneasy-s.shtml

The conclusion is sad, but it does remind me of various Verner Vinge books (both Deepness in the Sky and Rainbows End) about needing little mote sized routers....

People we talk to inside Iran say that almost no proxies are usable any more. Freegate, a Chinese anti-censorship application that makes use of networks of open proxies, has proven popular in Iran. But this week, it, too, has been experiencing problems. Many popular applications, like Yahoo! Messenger, have stopped working. The authorities are said to be using power interruptions as a cyberweapon, causing brief outages during rallies that cause computers to reboot, just as people are trying to upload images and video. The net result, as Arbor's excellent analysis shows, has been a drastic reduction in inbound traffic on filtered ports since the election.

If there's a lesson here for the rest of the world, perhaps it's this: Install a few proxy instances on machines you control. Learn how to lock them down properly. Swap them with your friends overseas who live in places where the Internet is fragile. Set up your tunnels and test them. And don't wait until the tanks are in the streets to figure this out, because by that point, you may have already lost the proxy war.

This is why people need to be using privacy and security tools on a regular basis. That was one of the major reasons behind the FreeS/WAN project.