Bloghorn

A few years back, I wrote a quick little PHP program that displays the relative activity of a phpBB forum both numerically and graphically. It’s quite simple, but so effective that it’s used by the administrators of multiple forums to see what’s going on.

After working with Chris this afternoon to update the code, I just wanted to post it here so that anyone who wants it can find it. Thanks to Sell and Dobbs for the troubleshooting help they gave me with this.

RepubliStats v. 1.1.2

[EDIT] Here’s a link to a working version: http://nafticon.org/antistats/

The HOPE organizers sent me an email this afternoon finalizing my talk and giving me the date, time, and place it will be scheduled for, provided that it clears the legal department. Here’s the info:

Title: The New York City Taxi System: Privacy vs. Utility

Day/Time: Friday 2000

Location: Turing (18th floor)

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I have the prime time slot on Friday night. Which means I have to get my butt into gear to clear the presentation with the legal department.

Speaking of HOPE, one thing I’m working on doing is setting up a VPN connection from my laptop, which is running Fedora 9, to Omnivore back here at home. Somehow, sending plaintext traffic over a wireless network populated by the same people giving presentations on wireless exploits doesn’t sound like a good idea. The problem is that Fedora is being very picky with its VPN settings.

I’ve tried OpenVPN, MS VPN (PPTP), and even re-flashed my WRT54G with DD-WRT to try the VPN on there, but nothing seems to work. The next step is trying to get it to work with Penn State’s ISP VPN, but even that seems like a losing battle. Hopefully I’ll find something before the 18th…

With the posting of the list of speakers for the upcoming HOPE conference last night, I guess the cat is out of the bag: I will be presenting a talk on the NYC Taxi system, the technology enhancements that have been going on this last year, and the trade-off between privacy and utility that comes with the new technology.

For those out of the loop, the NYC taxi system has been undergoing the T-PEP (Taxi Passenger Enhancements Project) upgrades, which bring a few new things into the cab. The passenger gets a PIM (Passenger Information Monitor) with real-time GPS location, TLC news, and other programming provided by the company that made it (there are 3 companies doing the installations). The driver gets a text messaging device so TLC can communicate with any cab driver in the field. The cab gets GPS tracking which records the start, end, distance, time, and other metrics of the trip. And, in addition to cash, cabs should now accept credit cards.

However, all these great enhancements come with some drawbacks. There are questions about the security of private information, and people are concerned about the government being able to track them. Thanks to a ton of research, and working with the Taxi and Limousine Commission, I’m going to be discussing these issues in depth at the conference.

There is one small hurdle, though: I need to clear my presentation with TLC before I can give it. I’ve got a gigantic non-disclosure agreement I need to appease thanks to my internship being through ComSys (the company Bear Stearns hired to place us), and I’ve already submitted the presentation for review, so it shouldn’t take that long.

Here’s the blurb from the HOPE conference website:

The New York City Taxi System: Privacy vs. Utility

Nick Leghorn

When people think of New York City, three icons come to mind: the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, and the classic yellow taxi cab. However, even the most seasoned New Yorker barely understands the complicated system that transports over 241 million passengers every year, includes more than 40,000 vehicles, and generates in excess of $2 billion every year. During this presentation you will learn about the New York City taxi system and how the new technologies (such as GPS tracking, credit card transactions, SMS messaging, and touch screen kiosks in the car) are being implemented, including the privacy and security concerns that surround them. You’ll also take a peek at some of the proposed changes that will make the New York City taxi system more accessible and more efficient.

The presentation and all related materials will be published here on this blog as the presentation is beginning, followed by the audio (and possibly video) from the presentation as soon as it concludes.

As a gift to myself, I ordered 2 new hard drives this week. One is a 500 GB replacement drive for the 200 GB one currently in my desktop. The other is a 16 GB solid state drive for my IBM X30. Interestingly, this now means that the hard drive alone cost me more than the entire remainder of the laptop did.

Anyway, I’ve only had time to swap out one of the drives, as the laptop took longer than I anticipated. I’m a big fan of selfImage, which images an entire disk at a hardware level and writes it to a file, or even another disk. I first tried smply copying the data from the old IBM hard drive to the new SSD, but it turns out that I’m 4 GB short. So I spent the next two hours trying to figure out how to shrink the Fedora filesystem (in LVM) to fit, and I finally came up with the solution.

• Back up your system. I reccomend making an image of the disk, as even if everything goes according to plan, you might want the whole sector-by-sector copy again later.
• Boot from a Fedora CD. Nothing can be done while the filesystem is in use. Select “Recovery Mode”, which is like the recovery console in Windows. Take the defaults, and make sure to NOT set the drive to read-only.
• Scan the disk using the “lvm vgscan” command to look for LVM groups. After that, use “lvm lvs” to see the names and sizes of the volumes. Note the name of the volume you want and the size.
• Now we need to prep the filesystem by doing a check on it. So run “e2fsck -f /dev/Volgroup00/LogVol00” substituting your LVM name for the one used. This should take about 15 minutes. This is the linux analog of chkdsk -r for Windows, and works kinda the same way.
• Before we shrink the LVM, we need to shrink the file system. Not doing this would be like trying to shrink a tupperware container full of jello without removing any of the jello. The container would explode and there would be jello everywhere, and while that’s fine and dandy when scantily clad females are around, doing that with your data is a bad idea. So we run “resize2fs /dev/Volgroup00/LogVol00 15G“, with the “15G” being the final desired size of the file system.
• Now we can shrink the container. “lvm lvresize /dev/Volgroup00/LogVol00 --size 15G” should do the trick. Again, the “15G” is the desired size of the final container. Leaving some wiggle room might be a good idea if you’re using more precise numbers.
• Reboot and pray to St. IGNUtious that your system doesn’t die a horrible death.

After that, I imaged the hard drive to a file, then imaged the file onto the SSD. I haven’t had many complaints, except that the kernel now complains about not being able to read sectors that don’t exist anymore (kinda like phantom limbs for computers, no?), and it feels like my computer is in PIO mode every once in a while. Tomorrow I’ll figure out how to image a 200 GB drive onto a 500 GB one using nothing but a half-full 250 GB drive and a laptop with barely 80 GB storage on it, which I get the feeling will be just as exciting.

Thanks to FedoraBook.com for finally stopping the urge to bas my head against the wall.

I’ve taken the time to update the website, changing the template from the old, slightly disgusting looking one to a new, rather spiffy one that works with the blog’s template a little better. Let me know if there are any bugs or missing information.

On another note, it seems Oliver Woods (Olorix), an old buddy from the various incarnations of Antica, is running for a seat as MP in New Zealand! I donated about $50 US to his campaign, and I figured I’d post his blog here too, raise his Google rank a little bit.

Oliver Woods – Auckland Central Candidate