In a trend that oddly mirrors the recent flap over buy.com’s new music service, my sharebuilder account was inaccessible to me this afternoon.
It seems that the powers that be at Sharebuilder think I should be using a browser newer than Microsoft or Netscape 4.0. Hmm, I thought Safari, Camino, and Mozilla Firebird were all newer than 4.0.
Lucky for me, Safari can mask itself as other user agents. A quick trip to the Debug menu and I was able to login again.
My life situation continues to be filled with fear, uncertainty, and doubt. It seems that no matter where I look these days there is unrest and uncertainty about the future.
The United States feels more out of control than ever before. Terrorism from abroad and terror tactics from within have made living here uncomfortable in a way that I have never experienced before. I used to view our national government as inept, but largely harmless. Now I wonder if it is safe to live in this country and hold the views I hold. I feel like our government has been handed over to the right-wing Christian hard-liners. I fear for the freedoms we as Americans have taken for granted for so many years.
Personally my employment situation continues to be unsettled. I am finding some opportunities, but none that we have wanted to uproot our lives for yet. We have been trying to reevaluate our personal life goals so that when (if) we move it is to a place that better takes care of us. This would be hard enough to accomplish without adding fear of our countries direction to the mix. We have started talking about going abroad for a time. Or maybe to someplace small and out of the way in this country.
Financially, choices and bad decisions I have made in the past few years are coming home to roost. Leaving here and selling the house is a way to clear away all our debts, which is good. But it leaves us starting over again, which is a bitter pill to swallow.
The only thing in my life today that doesn’t fill me with fear, uncertainty, or doubt is my relationship with my beautiful wife, Michele. Without her love, understanding, support, and friendship, I would never be able to survive this current set of rapids in the river of my life.
Many years ago when I was first developing this site I stumbled across a book called “Creating Killer Web Sites.” Despite the hyperbole in the title it sparked an interest in web design that lasts to this day.
Today I am reading a new book, “Designing with Web Standards” by Jeffery Zeldman. It is fantastic. I haven’t even finished it and already I am looking at my site and starting to make changes.
Get it. Read it. Attain Oneness with the One True Way in a Blinding Flash of Enlightenment.
I posted a picture of me taken in the door to our shipboard cabin to the Mirror Project over the weekend.
This is just too funny for words. Bomb Iraq.
Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was necessary.
George Orwell, 1984
[as seen here first: dive into mark]
Recently I have been experimenting with ssh and port forwarding. Many people today have access to the internet while they are at work. This access usually comes at the price of privacy. The data packets that comprise their activities, be they web surfing or instant message chatting, are monitored and tracked. More than a few companies aggressively pursue violations of whatever access policy is in place.
While I am not trying to escape the boundaries placed on my access at my current engagement, I am interested in keeping my business private. A friend of mine, JJ, showed me how.
ssh, or secure shell is a tool at allows you to access a remote server over an encrypted connection. Someone monitoring the connection will know it exists but in all likelihood they won’t be able to read the actual data passing over the connection as it will be encrypted. Just using ssh is not terribly hard or exciting. Command line access is useful and very powerful, but rarely sexy.
Port forwarding is a feature of ssh. Using port forwarding it is possible to map ports on your machine to those of another, remote machine. In my case, I wanted to map to the web proxy ports of a machine that sits outside the firewall (and therefore beyond control) of my client. Once the mapping was established I would be able to use the internet just as before, only now my activities would be masked by encryption, and it would appear as if I had just visited a single site, that of the remote server.
Here is what I had to do to accomplish this admittedly nerdy goal: Since my laptop isn’t running the necessary client software to login to the client’s network I first had to establish a connection to a machine that was authenticated to the network. In this case that connected machine is running Windows NT 4.0 Workstation. I downloaded and installed an open ssh server for NT, on my NT workstation. This allowed me to open port 22 to ssh connections.
Next I downloaded and installed SSH Tunnel Manager, a Mac OS X ssh and port forwarding client, much like puTTY for Windows. Configuring a connection to my NT server consisted of entering my NT domain user ID, and the IP address of my NT workstation. Once I established that connections could be made I moved onto created a tunnel, mapping the local (laptop) port 8080 to localhost:8080 on the remote (NT) machine. While this may seem counter-intuitive at first it makes sense when you look closely. Once the ssh connection is made to the remote server, the tunnel needs to access localhost. This really means 127.0.0.1 on the remote machine. As a command line this would look like this:
ssh -l userid -L8080:localhost:8080 192.168.85.76
In other words, securely connect to some remote host (192.168.85.76) as useid, and create a port forwarding from port 8080 here, to port 8080 there (-L8080:localhost:8080).
At this point I have a secure, encrypted connection between my laptop and my NT server, and a port forwarding tunnel through this connection that maps any request on my laptop for port 8080 to port 8080 on the remote server. My laptop can now ‘see’ a machine on the in-house network at my client.
Next I downloaded and installed puTTY, a secure shell and port forwarding utility for Windows NT, on my NT workstation. This time the connection would be from NT to a Linux server outside the firewall. That machine in turn has a connection to the internet and allows secure connections to a proxy server called squid. This time I mapped my NT machine’s port 8080 to the Linux machine’s port 3128 ~ the port exposed by the squid proxy server.
Again, the command line would look something like:
ssh -l userid -L8080:localhost:3128 www.remotehost.com
Now I have two connections.
The first is between a Powerbook running Mac OS X (10.2.6) and a Dell Optiplex running Windows NT 4.0, and a secure shell server (opensshd). This connection is made via ssh and includes a port forward from 8080 on the Powerbook to port 8080 on the NT machine.
The second connection is between the Dell, running NT 4.0 and a generic PC running Red Hat Linux 8.0. This connection is made via ssh and includes a port forward from local port 8080 to the exposed squid proxy port, 3128.
Changing my proxy information in the Network panel of System Preferences to map all HTTP and Secure Web requests to localhost:8080 I am now able to access the Internet via this daisy chain connection. All inter-machine communication is encrypted.
There are some difficulties. Imagine that! Several of my favorite daily applications, namely the chat clients, want to use a HTTPS proxy. Currently the remote Linux server that is my target doesn’t have an open HTTPS port for me to forward requests through. Any https request that can travel through the HTTP port works fine, but those that want a HTTPS connection don’t.
Was all this worth the time and effort? As a learning exercise most definitely. My understanding of proxies and secure shell is vastly increased. As a practical day-to-day thing, not really. However, I am now going to set up a Linux machine in my home, and equip it to act as my remote host. This will give me access to my home network over a secure connection, from anywhere I can plug in my laptop.
Update: I have written a new piece on ssh over here.
I started working as a programmer in 1983 after getting a degree in computer science. In the 20 years since then I have worked as a mainframe programmer, client-server application developer, SQL Database Administrator, Object Modeler, Business Reorganization Analyst, distributed application architect, OO developer, web application developer, and consultant. I have coded, designed and developed applications in COBOL, Nomad 4, Easytrieve, CICS, IMS, Powerbuilder, Forte TOOL, Java, HTML, and Jakarta Struts. I have used file systems ranging from ISAM and IMS to VSAM and then DB2 and SQL Server, and even OODBMS. I’ve used code generators and CASE tools; hand coded web pages and developed using WYSIWYG IDEs.
I have been fortunate enough to “retrain” myself at timely intervals and ride the current wave, whatever it might have been at the time. Now I am faced with entering the job market once again, and for the first time it appears there isn’t a new skill I can acquire that will make me more marketable. Whether it is the movement of technical jobs offshore, or the slowing of the economy, I am finding fewer jobs, and getting fewer responses than ever before. More jobs are now looking for master’s degrees or advanced certifications than ever before.
My twenty years of technical experience is counting for very little in today’s technology marketplace. Hard skills are no longer in vogue. Soft, or people skills are more important than ever before. I am having to reframe my resume to highlight my leadership and people skills over my technical knowledge and ability.
The golden age of technology for technology’s sake maybe ending. The importance of the human computer interface is rising, and a new era of human centric technology is about to be ushered in to our lives. I have always been excited about technology, and I am more excited than ever about discovering new ways to bring the benefits of technology to more people.
For years I described myself as a programmer regardless of my current title; today I am starting to think of myself as a technologist. I am someone who can walk the geek walk and talk the geek talk. But I am also someone who can relate to people and their needs and desires. If the technical programming jobs are moving to low cost development centers overseas then I’ll move to architecture and design functions where understanding the work place society or consumer society in addition to the reality and limitations of software is important.
It’s 1 am and I am up because I am afraid of my cat and I am mad at her.
Our new kitten is quite the bundle of energy and attitude. At night she attacks anything that moves; roll over in bed and you are going to get multiple puncture wounds from her teeth and claws. Repeatedly dropping her on the floor only causes her to stop for a little while. I know that she is only a kitten of 5 months or so but she is starting to terrorize me.
In truth I know that a 4 pound kitten can’t really hurt me. Her bites and scratches are annoying to be sure, but they aren’t really serious. It’s more the startle factor and the suddenness of her attacks that is disturbing. One second you are sound asleep and the next your foot or hand is being mauled.
I also know that I am over reacting to her high spirits because she is an easy place to put my increasing sense of helplessness and anxiety. Knowing that, unless a miracle happens in the next few days, we will have to sell this house and move, is really starting to wear me down. I knew when we moved back to Illinois that it was a temporary thing. I just thought we’d get to stay here longer.
I think we have been making it worse on ourselves by trying the wait this situation out hoping for a way to stay. Waiting puts me at the mercy of the state and its whims. It is reactive rather than proactive. This afternoon Michele and I talked seriously about putting the house up for sale as soon as possible. On the one hand this action feels good as we are doing something, on the other hand it is very hard to take because it means we are leaving.
Once again we are faced with uprooting our lives and moving. Oh how I hate the word “moving.” We’ve moved three times since getting married 6 years ago. Illinois to Washington state, Washington state to South Carolina, and finally South Carolina back to Illinois. We set a new longevity record here this time. It’ll be three years this October since our lives were inside a moving van.
In the time that we’ve been here I’ve faced my family and grown as a result. I no longer try to take care of them at my expense. The new relationship with them is just starting to gel and feel normal to me. Now I am going to radically change it. My parents are in their late seventies, and my brothers children are growing up fast. Leaving now means losing precious time with them.
It already feels like I’ve lost so much time with my family. The emotional separation that has existed since Amy’s death has been in place for years. Now for the first time I can see a future without this gulf between us. And I am faced with moving away.
I want to be able to stay here, close to my family. I don’t want to be thousands of miles away. But I can’t stay here with no employment prospects. And we aren’t attracted to other cities in the mid-west. I don’t want to move only to be unhappy with a new city.
So, you see, there is a lot of stuff going on inside my head and heart these days. Big decisions to make that will have tremendous impacts on the rest of my life. No right or wrong answers, just degrees of comfort and pain. At times, like 1 am, I get overwhelmed and don’t know how to take my next breath.
This is why it is easy to blame our sweet little kitten for being too aggressive and too full of attitude. It is easy to make her the culprit because she can’t fight back and she loves me anyway. I guess my inner child, little-Mark, is afraid of losing the love of my family if I move away from them again. For reasons outside of our distance from here, the last year in South Carolina put tremendous strain on my relationship with my parents and brother. What if moving away strains those ties again? What if those ties are broken?
1 am is an awful time.
Yesterday was awful. I was feeling down most of the day and everything I tried to accomplish failed to work. I was frustrated by a simple connection problem at work and ended up spending most of the day moving in circles to no avail.
At lunch I treated myself with a trip to the bookstore and the local Best Buy. While at Best Buy I found a data cable for my Motorola v60t cell phone. Thinking it would allow me to synchronize my phone and Powerbook I bought it. Of course it failed to work. It was only $17 so I guess you get what you pay for. I ended up taking it back after work.
When I got home I was sullen and feeling pretty miserable. Michele to her great credit didn’t let me sulk very long before asking what was the matter. Thanks to the wonderfully safe place she created for me I was able to express a lot of pent up anger and fear. As I released my emotions I could feel my self getting lighter.
She helped me to see that I am coping with the impending end of my contract much better than I would have in the past. Yesterday my mood was so black that I felt like I’d been handling this situation very poorly. Once I had cleared out some of the more negative emotions I could see that I was doing okay. It’s funny how your current emotional state can cloud your perception of past events and feelings.
Later on in the evening I got an e-mail in reference to a job that is exactly what I am looking for; all my skills AND in a location we would love to live. It’ll be a while before I know if this lead will pan out, so I’m not going to say much about it here. I will say that I have been putting out into the universe and idea of what I wanted to do and where for some time now. This new lead seems to be an answer to that request.
So in less than 24 hours I have gone from a morose, sullen, angry man, to someone who is feeling balanced and free, and who has something exciting on the horizon. The key was trusting my partner, friend, lover and wife, Michele. Knowing that I can lean on her when the going gets rough means the world to me. Knowing that I can trust her to tell me the truth, painful or not, is very important. She doesn’t tell me what I think I want to hear, she tells me the truth as she see it. It isn’t about judging or criticizing. It is about sharing her perspective so that I can see my position better.