Filip Norrgård’s blog @ filips.net
Filip’s blog about mobile technology, tech itself and other stuff

Let It Rain!
13 June 2007 in Root | Comments (0)

Finally, after weeks of drought, today some rain came to water the town of Vaasa. We’ve had forest fire warning for probably a month already, and even the weed (no, not that one) started turning dry and yellow.

Amazingly the rain did fall within city borders this time around. It’s been quite usual for rain to start to pour just outside city borders, leaving the town/city to dry even more in summer sunshine.

As I’m typing this, the sun is already starting to make an appearance and the little rain that came may dry away almost too soon. And here I was hoping for a cozy rainy day indoors…

Über-Cool Lightning Radars
16 May 2007 in Root | Comments (0)

The thunderstorm season started tonight with some mediocre thunder going on. (No, I’m sure that none of my neighbors were playing AC/DC’s Thunder ) The whole storm that came over Vaasa/Vasa yesterday was surprisingly powerful, I at least thought. The water poured down heavily and the wind had gusts at storm strengths that I thought belonged in the autumn, not spring.

Well, it is time to keep an eye on those lighting radars that are plentiful on the net. The good with these radars are that they are ideal for predicting when/if a thunderstorm will get near you. The bad is that they have varying data and calibrations, but that needs to be expected since they are only amateurs maintaining them. The pros (FMI, Foreca, SMHI) do not sadly allow give free access to their lightning radars, which is a bit of a shame. FMI has had their lightning radars only available for farmers and aviation needs, but last year they (thankfully) made their service available on mobile phones as well… for a smaller fee. But, in the end, the information from the free radars are not the significantly less accurate than what the meteorological institutions have to offer.

A local storm chaser group have put together a link list of Swedish and Finnish lightning radars. My two favorites are Zalama in Muurame and Stormtracker Wasa in Vaasa/Vasa. It’s worth checking out if you have concerns that lighting might destroy your home electronics or computers, or just wanna go golfing.

YLE’s Website and Finnish Websites Under Attack
15 May 2007 in Root | Comments (0)

The homepage of YLE – the Finnish Broadcasting Company –, Finnish Eniro and Suomi24 — a Finnish portal — have been under a so called website flood attack or (in geek speak) denial of service attack that started yesterday. According to Helsingin Sanomat, the attack started yesterday and continued today with the attacker, or more presumably attackers, adapting to the defenses put up by YLE.

The same article by HS quotes the Finnish Ministry of Communication as claiming this to be the largest attack on a Finnish website to date. The last big attack was on F-Secure a few years back.

The interesting part here is that no-one either mentions the reason of the attack (if they know it) or genuinely do not know why someone is attacking them. Since the severity of the attack is quite extensive, it seems like someone is commandeering a zombie network of compromised computers to attack the websites in question. There is a possibility that the attackers have tried getting money from the websites as a protection payment, and when the websites didn’t cough up the dough, the attack started.

F-Secure recently said on their weblog that this method of blackmailing hasn’t been working well for the attackers so most of them have switched to other methods of illegally gaining money.

I can’t figure why someone would try to attack YLE for other than money… not that YLE has money to spare. I’m paying them 200+ € in TV-license fees already and all of that has gone to ensure digital TV in Finland (I personally suspect ). Ok, there are two highly unlikely possibilities to why someone might want to attack YLE:

1. the digital TV mess
2. disgruntled Eurovision Song Contest fans

But I think I can safely assume that no-one of the above options have enough resources to initiate a destructive DoS attack.

Joost Is Down?
9 May 2007 in Root | Comments (0)

Hmph, trying to launch Joost today just shows a polite message about a new version being available. But, the Joost.com website seems to be down with either a server internal error or some proxy error. Sigh, and I wanted to watch some classic clay animations…

Update 10th of May: Joost seems to up and running fine right now. I only now had to download the latest version: 0.10.2 The old 0.9.2 version is outdated apparently.

Man, The WiFi and Bluetooth Space Is Getting Crowded Around Here
9 May 2007 in Root & Security | Comments (0)

Looks like the 2.4 GHz spectrum is getting crowded around my apartment these days. Way back, ’bout 2 years ago, when I moved to my current apartment, I was the only one using WiFi in the building. Well, except for someone in a neighboring house who also had WiFi, but I only saw that access point near the windows.

Today, when I tried to use my Bluetooth Plantronics stereo headphones to listen to some music in the kitchen but it turned out to be more difficult than previously. All was well for a few seconds and then…. silence… I quickly checked that the headphone and transmitter were connected and the power on — and yes, they were on and the music was still playing.

The music came back for a second, silence, some music for a bit more than a second, silence… and some music now until the track changed and more eerie silence. Aaand finally the music came back on.

This is probably what it sounds like when the headphone and transmitter try to find a less congested channel to broadcast on. I had thought there were quite few WiFi access points that could interfere with my Bluetooth headphones, but boy was I wrong! Using my Pocket PC and a program called WiFi Graph I checked out the number of APs it could find in my vicinity. The sum: 7 (including my own). So, all of my neighbors seem to have now!

Funny and scary bit was that 4 of those APs used the same WiFi channel number 6, and two of them had their manufacturer’s name, Zyxel, as the SSID. I’m afraid that those who didn’t change their SSID didn’t fix the password from the factory default either. Even more worrying is that only I and another WiFi user have enabled some sort of WiFi encryption (WPA or WEP), the others don’t seem to have any encryption in effect (unless they are using IPSEC or VPN, which I doubt they are using).

It is somewhat unfortunate that Bluetooth has to share frequencies with WiFi on the 2.4 GHz band, but what can you do when there is nothing left really for them to use? Plus, me being a sort of “bitten by the Bluetooth”-fanatic it probably doesn’t help that I have a good number of Bluetooth devices in good daily use: my computer, phone, Pocket PC, keyboard and mouse. (Sure, I have a bit more Bluetooth devices here also, but they are not always on. )

I wonder how long before the 2.4 GHz band will be over-crowded in apartment buildings by all of the super-converged-devices. Five years, perhaps?

What’s Up, UMTS?
27 April 2007 in Phones & Root | Comments (0)

After reading about problems with Sonera’s 3G (=UMTS) network in the Helsinki area, I’ve started getting problems with Saunalahti’s (aka. Elisa) UMTS network in Vaasa as of recently.
 It is quite strange this time around, though. People can’t really call me - all right, they can try to call me but they get all kinds of strange error messages or I ”never answer” to their call.
Well, I can’t answer if the phone ain’t ringing, can I?

The problem seems to be in the network and not the phone. It is the only reasonable conclusion I can make for when I today went into a store, where they apparently have a GSM repeater, the phone made the switch to GSM as UMTS probably doesn’t have great reception without a repeater there.
Quite soon after the phone went GSM, a phone call came in. Apparently, the caller had tried calling me several times but without any success until now.

I’ve seen this behavior before, but the other way around, I couldn’t call nor send SMS to anyone when I was connected to the UMTS network. Switching to GSM made it all work again. That was the result of a malfunctioning UTMS antenna on the network operator’s behalf, or so they told me.

So, I think I’ll be running on the GSM network for the moment and leave the trials and misbehaviours of the UMTS network alone for a few weeks time… (Yes, I’ve sent a report to Saunalahti, but they can take some time to answer to their emails. Large organization and all that makes email answering take some time, I think.)

Certificate for University of Vaasa’s E-Mail Server
11 April 2007 in How-To & Phones & Root & Security | Comments (0)

If you, like me, have a Nokia phone (or any other phone or mail program for that matter) and want to use the automatic pull mail feature for getting the e-mail from your University of Vaasa account, then here is the certificate that you will need. Unless you have this certificate installed, you will recieve a certificate error message on the server mail.uwasa.fi everytime you connect to the server because the UoV’s computer center have used their own self-signed certificate on that server.

Download: mail.uwasa.fi Server Certificate

Extract the file withing the zip-file and transfer the .der-file to your phone. Open the file there and allow the import of the certificate into the phone’s certificate list. If the phone asks for which usage areas the cerficate should be used for, select ”Internet”.

How can you do this yourself? Follow the instructions by Kevin Henrikson in “Gmail POP SSL certs for Symbian / Nokia phones“. I have used Opera to easily export the certificate, but the OpenSSL method used by Kevin also works fine. (Plus there seems to be some bug with the export function in the latest version – 9.10 – of Opera, or at least on Windows Vista. Can’t say which one is the faulty one for sure.) The settings for connecting to the UoV mail server can be found here.

CSS = Certainly Something Strange?
22 February 2007 in Root | Comments (0)

There’s something funky going on with my site design ever since I installed Wordpress 2.1 and I do not have a single idea of what Wordpress has done to my theme’s CSS right now… maybe something to do with the new RTF editor called TinyMCE? :?

Diagnose ‘N’ Repair This! … And Vista Healed Itself
22 February 2007 in Root | Comments (0)

I’ve had a problem with the university sites and pages not loading properly for about a week now. The problem was that the text did get though, but images as small as 20 kilobytes would take over 4 minutes to load. Initially, I thought that the problem was due to a factor in my connection (gives the ISP a nasty look, for no good reason), but trying the same via the Palosaari campus wide WiFi, I noticed that I was wrong.

Was there any difference in browsers? Opera works fine in Windows Vista (unlike Firefox for the moment) and I reluctlantly tested IE7. No dice there either, a bit faster on the university sites than Opera but only marginally. Pictures didn’t load fast in either browser.

So, back to the drawing board I thought, and fired up Fiddler HTTP debugger and looked at the download times. Pages: just a few milliseconds – Images: several minutes per image. Ok, so, now what? Is it IPv6 that’s the culprit?  I managed to find that Opera has some bug with IPv6 websites, but the university page has got no IPv6 address yet. They are still good ol’ IPv4 DNS-ing. A quick disable/enable of the IPv6 stack later and the result was a short and bitter answer: no. Dang! :x

I recalled that the last time I had connectivity issues was when I installed Virtual PC 2004 on Windows XP Pro on the same computer that’s now Vista-ing. The source of the problem was hard to find, but after some Google Groups searching I discovered that VPC2004 had problems with Broadcom’s and Intel’s network drivers. However, with Vista VPC 2007 is the only option and so far I have had zero problems with 2007’s networking.

Just as it happens, I stumbeled upon the solution today: it’s called Network Diagnose and Repair. I clicked on my network connection’s “Diagnose and Repair” expecting nothing, but it found a problem with a TCP setting that wasn’t compatible with my router. After Vista “fixed” itself, the problem was and is gone!

What did it fix? I don’t know for sure, but it seems like it fixed TCP window scaling which some router (maybe mine) was having problems with. In conclusion, I hope that the problem will remain out of sight from now on.

Windows Vista Update Can’t Count
31 January 2007 in Root | Comments (0)

Since I enabled Windows Update to be using Microsoft Update (a-ha! spot the difference! :P) the Windows Update has lost the ability to tell the total number of updates pending…

Now, ok, this is a small bug, but I wonder why it even should be so hard to get the count of updates pending, even when it is just one waiting in the queue.

(Oh, boy, here comes the Microsoft jokes?)