So the other day I was thinking what a pain it is to handle text in input boxes on web pages, especially when you're writing something longer. Since I started using vim for coding I've become aware of how much more efficient it is to edit when you have keyboard shortcuts to accelerate common input operations.

I discovered a while back that bash has input modes for both vi and emacs and ever since then editing earlier commands is so much easier. And not only does it work in bash, but just as well in anything else, like ipython, irb, whatever. :cap:

So now only Firefox remains of my most used applications that still has the problem of stoneage editing, and I'm stuck using the mouse way too much. It bugs me that I can't do Ctrl+w to kill a word. Thus I went hunting for an emacs extensions and what do you know, of course there is one: Firemacs. Turns out it works well, and it also has keyboard shortcuts for navigation. > gets you to the bottom of the page, no more having to hold down <space>. :thumbup:

Finger challenged women are complaining about the iphone because their uglyass [fake] long nails prevent them from using the touchscreen comfortably. :howler:

Oh man, this is too much. :D What's next, people who wear their hair down at shoe level will complain that it gets messed up because the street is dirty?

One clever missy has the answer, though.

I wouldn't go as far as to call it misogyny, but it sure is annoying. They should just do what I do, keep one fingernail short for hindrances such as this.

Rick Falkvinge of the Swedish Pirate Party gives a talk at google. It's one of the best talks about free culture and "intellectual property" I've seen. I also learned that the Norwegian Liberal Party (Venstre) has adopted the same stance on free culture, bravo!

If you have reservations about the implications of copyright reform, go watch this talk, he gets all these questions from the audience.

The soundbite from Falkvinge's talk for all you 24hour news media addicts:

Copyright, while written into law that it's supposed to be for the benefit of the author, never was. It was for the benefit of the distributors.

So we now all have broadband connections and everything is great, right? Well, not quite. Some providers have better services than others. My connection seems rather fragile at times and tends to die about once in three-four days. When that happens, no amount of resetting the equipment helps to get it working again. It's an upstream issue that I have no control over.

But there is another problem. Once the cable modem starts working again, the router (which receives an IP address from my provider, and serves LAN and wifi locally) doesn't seem to know this and doesn't automatically re-establish a connection. Or I'm not really sure what it does, it's a black box and there is a web interface to it, where there's a button to press to do this, which sometimes works. But what really is happening, who knows. There seems to be a weird timing problem to the whole thing, where if I kill the power for both the modem and the router and they both come back at the same time, it generally works. However, if the modem is taking longer to negotiate a link, the router will be disconnected. And apparently doesn't try to reconnect on its own, so I've been stuck rebooting the two a few times until the timing is right. Resetting them separately for some reason doesn't seem to work.

So what can be done about it? Well, the router does have that stupid web interface, so it's possible to make those clicks automatically if we're disconnected. Python's urllib makes this very easy to do. First we login with router_login, which submits a form with POST. Then we check the state of the internet connection with check_router_state, which just reads out the relevant information from the page. And if it's disconnected we run renew_router_connection to submit another form (ie. simulating the button click on the web page).

Testing connectivity

More than just testing if the router has a connection to the provider, broadband connections sometimes have connectivity problems. Even if you can get a connection, the provider sometimes has problems on his network, meaning your connection doesn't work anyway.

So I came up with a test to see how well the connection is working. It's an optimistic test, so that first we assume we have a fully functional connection and ping yahoo.com. It doesn't matter what host we use here, just some internet host that is known to be reliable and "always" available. For this to work these conditions must be met:

1. We have to reach the gateway of the subnet where our broadband IP address lives.
2. We have to reach the provider's nameserver (known as dns1 in the code) to look up the host "yahoo.com".
3. We have to reach yahoo.com (we have their IP address now).

So first we ping yahoo.com. If that fails, it could be because dns lookup failed. So we ping the provider's nameserver. If that fails, the provider's internal routing is probably screwed up, so we ping the gateway. And if that fails too then we know that although we have an IP address, the connection is dead (or very unstable).

#!/usr/bin/env python
#
# Author: Martin Matusiak <numerodix@gmail.com>
# Licensed under the GNU Public License, version 3.

import os
import re
import sys
import time
import urllib

ip_factory = "192.168.2.1"
password = ""

inet_host = "yahoo.com"


def write(s):
    sys.stdout.write(s)
    sys.stdout.flush()

def grep(needle, haystack):
    if needle and haystack:
        m = re.search(needle, haystack)
        if m and m.groups(): return m.groups()[0]

def invoke(cmd):
    (sin, sout) = os.popen2(cmd)
    return sout.read()

def ping(host):
    cmd = 'ping -c1 -n -w2 ' + host + ' 2>&1'
    res = invoke(cmd)
    v = grep("rtt min/avg/max/mdev = [0-9.]+/([0-9.]+)/[0-9.]+/[0-9.]+ ms", res)
    if v: return int(float(v))

def find_lan_gateway():
    cmd = "route -n"
    res = invoke(cmd)
    v = grep("[0-9.]+\s+([0-9.]+)\s+[0-9.]+\s+UG", res)
    if v: return v

def load_url(url, params=None):
    data = None
    if params: data = urllib.urlencode(params)
    f = urllib.urlopen(url, data)
    return f.read()


def router_login():
    form = {"page": "login", "pws": password}
    load_url("http://%s/login.htm" % ip, form)

def check_router_state():
    state = { "conn": None, "gateway": None, "dns1": None }
    router_login()
    s = load_url("http://%s/js/js_status_main.htm" % ip)
    if s:
        v = grep("var bWanConnected=([0-9]);", s)
        if v == "1": state['conn'] = True
        elif v == "0": state['conn'] = False
        if state['conn']:
            g = grep('writit\("([0-9.]+)","GATEWAY"\);', s)
            if g and g != "0.0.0.0": state['gateway'] = g
            g = grep('writit\("([0-9.]+)","DNSIP"\);', s)
            if g and g != "0.0.0.0": state['dns1'] = g
    return state
    
def renew_router_connection():
    router_login()
    form = {"page": "status_main", "button": "dhcprenew"}
    s = load_url("http://%s/status_main.htm" % ip, form)
    return s



ip = find_lan_gateway()
if not ip:
    ip = ip_factory
    write("LAN gateway detection failed, using factory ip %s for router\n" % ip_factory)
else:
    write("Router ip: %s\n" % ip)

while True:
    try:
        router = check_router_state()
        t = time.strftime("%H:%M:%S", time.localtime())
        if router['conn']:
            
            hosts = [(inet_host, inet_host),
                ("dns1", router['dns1']), ("gateway", router['gateway'])]
            connectivity = ""
            write("[%s] Connected  " % t)
            for (name, host) in hosts:
                delay = ping(host)
                if delay:
                    write("(%s: %s) " % (name, delay))
                    break
                else:
                    write("(%s !!) " % name)

            write("\n")
        else:
            write("[%s] NOT CONNECTED, attempting reconnect\n" % t)
            renew_router_connection()
    except Exception, e:
        cls = grep("<type 'exceptions.(.*)'", str(e.__class__))
        write("%s: %s\n" % (cls, e))
    time.sleep(3)

What a weird frickin movie. Picture a superhero comic book without the wholesome moral values and you're getting close. It's so strange to imagine that someone would have written and directed this, and just when the actors thought they were way off the mark would have said "yes, yes, that's exactly what I want". That someone is Luc Besson, who's gone considerably more Hollywood since.

So basically we have a timid, illiterate hitman who lives mostly on milk and cookies. Contrary to that whole ninja school of combat, he's not one of those "my body is my temple" types. He has a sort of rugged fitness which is kept in check by doing sit-ups every morning (and the constant milk, calcium mhm-hm). He's probably not very fast on his feet, cause at no point is there any running. His main gimmick is hanging from the ceiling, so that when the bad guys come into the room they don't see him (a poor man's ninja if you will). Oh, and he's the best hitman in town, sublime when on the job (less so off of it).

Not much is known about his past, but apparently he came to America as a poor, helpless immigrant, taken pity on by a generous Italian restaurant owner. All these facts are stretching poor Jean Reno's acting skills to the limit. Reno has a thick French accent with no vocal skills to get around it, how the hell do you claim he's Italian?

Besson makes no effort to justify Leon's career choice. It's not because he grew up in a war torn country, because his parents were killed or because he read too many comic books, he was just poor. And killing seemed as good as anything else, eh? Then again, he does put on those dark sunglasses when he clocks in, no doubt there is a deep and heart wrenching ethical conflict there, but it goes unarticulated. (Personally I would suggest his superego needs a small tune-up.)

And there is a girl. Dad does coke, family gets nailed by bad guys, same old, same old, yadda yadda yadda. Mathilda takes refuge at Leon's, teaches the big bear (or shall I say pig, that's his favorite fluffy pet) to read, he teaches her about guns, the usual story. If you've read this far just to find out if the "I love you"s are forthcoming, they are.

If you like the idea of Reno as a hitman and you want to see him in a far stronger part, check out "Ronin", it's quite good in more ways than one.