botWerks

the scraper in the scion gave up the ghost the other day. as a minnesotan, i’m more than a little picky about my scrapers. they’re critical tools. period.

most folks don’t appreciate the utility of the teeth on the back side of a well made scraper. they’re used to score deep ice or buildup and make use of the larger scraper blade more efficient. the alternative is to use the primary blade of the scraper to wedge through the build-up. a tedious endeavor.

the designers of this scraper clearly didn’t have an appreciation for the utility of these teeth, but they’d seen other scrapers on the market with these teeth. they structured the base of the scraper in such a manner as to render these teeth useless. fail.

nothing revelatory here, but some interesting background pointers.

i’ve been catching up on a massive reading backlog as of late. one of the topics egregiously in the backlog has been digesting the information associated with internationalized domain names (IDNs) and poking at some of the attendant follow-on considerations. given that there’s a huge hunk of the world that doesn’t use latin character sets, this is an increasingly interesting and relevant topic. particularly for network infrastructure dweebs.

for those looking for a good place to start on the topic of internationalization i highly recommend geoff huston’s writeup on the topic, Internationalizing the Internet. he provides a reasonable primer on interesting topics such as digraphs, glyphs, etc.

fortunately, localization of content presentation is an area which has received a considerable amount of attention within the computer industry. further, it benefits from the fact that there’s been a bit of give and take socially and from a development perspective to accommodate various localization requirements. e.g.: japanese writing and layout has undergone a bit of accommodation to “modern” publishing capabilities and computer interfaces.

internationalization of the Internet is another matter. of considerably greater difficulty is enabling the infrastructure to support the variety of localizations that are out there. the first among these is the DNS infrastructure. this leads you down a windy path of different encoding mechanisms and a whole host of additional security implications. of notea number of interesting variants on homograph
attacks.

looking at this from the perspective of network engineering, we’re really moving into a world where there will be new stresses and strains placed upon the DNS infrastructure.  what was previously a relatively low bandwidth infrastructure service will rapidly explode in terms of bandwidth utilization and processing requirements going forward.  considerable attention will need to be given to application design and verification mechanisms in the background to alert users to a host of new attacks.  it’s unclear what the implications will be on service / application developers over the near term given that most of the infrastructure elements associated with web services are ascii oriented.

misc. background reading:

• punycode – a means of encoding unicode into the ASCII character space.
• Phishing defense against IDN address spoofing attacks – abstract: Address spoofing is a common trick used in phishing scams to confuse unsuspecting users about a Web site’s real origin. With the introduction of Unicode characters into domain names, also known as Internationalized Domain Names (IDN), the risk has significantly increased even for the most cautious users. The author explores the various types of address spoofing attacks focusing on IDN, and presents a novel client-side Web browser plug-in Quero which implements several techniques—including highlighting—to protect the user against visually undistinguishable address manipulations.
• RFC 4690 – abstract: This note describes issues raised by the deployment and use of
  Internationalized Domain Names.  It describes problems both at the time of registration and for use of those names in the DNS.  It recommends that IETF should update the RFCs relating to IDNs and a framework to be followed in doing so, as well as summarizing and identifying some work that is required outside the IETF.

i’m behind on organizing pictures and notes from our recent trip to peru.  but when i was running through some video, i ran across this little nugget of annoyance.

imagine, if you will, that you’ve spent the better part of the last 3 days hiking 30 miles in the andes and you haven’t had a shower.  you’ve traipsed around machu picchu and you’re dog tired.  more than anything, you’re really looking forward to getting some sleep and chilling on a train on your way back home.

as a slight aside, i should point out that some folks who’ve hiked the inca trail and arrive at machu picchu to be confronted by, “we took a bus here” tourists get their teeth set on edge. when confronted by these tourists complaining about having to walk up and down stairs at a wonder of the world the last thing you want to do is have to put up with them on a train.

however, the company that runs the trains from aguas calientes is (justifiably) loathe to miss a marketing opportunity and after they’ve given you some light snacks and tea proceed to bust out the sales cart and the pulsating techno.  when you want to sleep and politely ignore the couple sitting 18 inches across the aisle from  you this is not helping things.

a note of advice – if you’ve going to do the inca trail and you’re making a decision as to which train you’re going to take back to cusco, or wherever it is you’re going back to, stick with your peeps.  you want to be with worn out fellow hikers and folks who aren’t going to be drunkenly whipping out their visa/amex/mc to purchase alpaca wool sweaters and shawls.  more importantly, you don’t want to be dealing with some rancid marketing techno while you smell like ass.

i’ve come to the conclusion that chromium for the mac is close enough to start poking at consistently.  now, i need to find a way to make this honor the default cocoa keybindings and support for ctrl-a/f/n/p + w would go a really long ways towards making me happy.

the speed is quite frankly mind-boggling.  javascript apps scream, rendering is honored appropriately, java support is dicey (keep safari handy) and the interface is really snappy.

this week gives me enough breathing room to poke at the latest firefox 3.6 build as well.  this is the default workhorse browser for 99%+ of what i do.  frankly, i don’t know what i’d do without the “it’s all text” add-on.  given the amount of wiki editing and integration with online systems that i have to handle on a daily basis.  if i could get this for chrome, i might be sorely tempted to jump ship.  firefox 3.6 carries with it the attendant hassle of a new release in terms of add-on support.  but fortunately i’ve been able to hack or cajole all the major ones for me into submission.  there’s some decided improvement in rendering speed.  but beyond that, it looks pretty much the same to me.  which is more than ok, it’s a solid performer in the workflow.

30-november, 2009 – 4th day of inca trail

3:30a comes way too fast and i’m deeply asleep.  the porters wak us and as a group we do surprisingly well getting ourselves going.  we really only were running about 10-15 minutes behind the blistering pace that alex (our guide) had laid out for us the night before.

a comment about breakfast – cake.  seriously, it was cake, with frosting.  the porters and the cook are quite pleased with themselves, but i think everyone had the same reaction when they were introduced to the cake at 3:45a.  muted surprise and not as well muted disappointment.  still it’s a nice touch and kudos to the crew for doing it.

breakfast is short.  we collected our stuff and prepped for the trail.  in all of the hustle and bustle; elise falls from the tent terrace to the cooking / dining tent terrace.  this was about an 8-12 foot drop.  fortunately, she’s unhurt and what could have been a very bad situation is mercifully a minor bump.  she and her husband (josh) were understandably peeved by the relative ambivalence expressed by the guide and the porters to what was potentially a nasty situation.  still, kathy and i were impressed at the level of calm josh and elise seemed to have about the whole situation.

as a group we have to hustle to make it to the sun gate (intipunku) check point.  the check point opens at 5:30a and we’re almost the first ones in line.  all the groups queue up here.  the early morning rise was worth it.

it’s at this point that i develop a particularly strong appreciation for our group.  as i overhear the banality of our neighbors.  the whining brand-oriented 20-somethings w/very little daypacks.  daddy hired them porters for their makeup.

we get through the checkpoint and we haul ass.  i mean we seriously haul ass to the sun gate.  our group was passing the group ahead of us and it was a very brisk pace uphill to the sun gate.  from here, you have an amazing view of machu picchu.  more importantly, from this point, it’s a relatively short (and surprisingly modestly sloped) descent to machu picchu.  when we got down to machu picchu and looked back it was apparent that we seriously motored through that distance.  the distance between the sun gate and the funeral rock is a respectable amount and it took us no time to cover that distance.

finally, we’d made it to machu picchu.

29-november, 2009 – 3rd day of inca trail

this was our short day on the trail.  for other groups, this would be their longest.  we basically had one small pass (trivial after the day before) and we descended for a number of hours.  kathy wasn’t feeling particularly well, so we opted to bypass a small ruin and take the porters trail directly to the camp.  this enabled us to change clothes and take a nap for a couple of hours.

refreshed from our nap we had a quick snack and took an afternoon tour on winaywayna.  this was a pretty neat and relatively recent discovery.  with still working water falls and expansive terraces for agriculture it made for a very nice diversion.

happy hour was where we discussed the porter tipping situation.  tipping does tend to bring out some interesting cultural perspectives.  europeans aren’t accustomed to the bribery that we engage in as americans with tipping.  the U.S. contingent in the group was a bunch of democrats who just assumed that you tipped generously and carried with us a little bit of 1st world guilt.  france – was simply and diplomatically silent on the topic.  the english contingent seemed to feel that we were being held up by llama path.  in the end we settled on everyone contributing what they were comfortable with and took up a collection of ~720 soles.  which amounted to about 36 soles / porter and 72 soles for the cook.  this was well short of the recommended tip by llama path but better than i was expecting based on the tenor of the conversation that had taken place.

after dinner everyone was crashing early.  we had a 3:30a wakeup for the entry and trail into machu picchu.

at this point in the trail, the bathrooms are disgusting.  folks aren’t feeling at their gastro-intestinal finest and the squat toilets do next to nothing to make you feel any better.  brushing ones teeth is an exercise in gag reflex control.

crash hard, sleep hard and make sure you have your crap packed up for the early wakeup.