pikuorguk

• C++ STL Tutorial
  (tags: c++ Programming tutorial vector development stl)

For those of you curious as to why it’s taking me so long to get home, have a look at this pretty image…

Danny the tropical storm

That’s Tropical Storm Danny, and appears to be about the size of the UK. For fairly obvious reasons, planes don’t want to fly through it and tend to sit around waiting for it to go away.

• C++ Operator Overloading Guidelines
  (tags: c++ Programming reference tutorial software code howto development overloading)

• Circular collision detection
  (tags: Programming collision-detection maths vectors)
• Line Segment/Circle collision detection?
  (tags: Programming collision-detection maths vectors)
• What's your method of collision detection?
  (tags: Programming collision-detection maths vectors)
• Snooker Balls
  (tags: Programming collision-detection maths vectors physics)
• Another question on Angles & Vectors
  (tags: Programming collision-detection maths vectors)
• Circle Collision Detection
  (tags: Programming collision-detection)

• Bletchley Park codebreakers recognized by British government – Boing Boing
  (tags: hacking war bletchley park)

• Apollo 11 audio recorded at Honeysuckle
  (tags: audio space science apollo moon)

Today’s Internet Meme comes to you from the front page of Wikipedia…

Wikipedia main page today

You can go and look at Milton Street through the magic of Google Maps.

You may also like to visit Twatt on Orkney, and this long list from the Rude Britain book.

• Atari ST cartridge port 64k r/w port
  The Atari ST's 128 Kbyte read-only cartridge port can be transformed into a 64 Kbyte read/write port by using this circuit.
  (tags: atari hardware hacking)
• Test Kit ATARI ST
  (tags: atari hardware hacking electronics)
• Atari-Forum • View topic – Atari ST cartridge port
  (tags: atari hardware)
• ST Cartridge Port Interface
  (tags: hardware atari hacking electronics)

• Source Code of Several Atari 7800 Games Released!
  (tags: programming atari games code)

• Thread // Message Board // Lambgoat
  It was Aw-some,
  Mike Strata.
  (tags: crackpots writing forum)

• U R A TWETARD
  (tags: twitter iran election)

• IP Tracer, IP Tracker, IP Locator and other DNS tools
  (tags: tools network security internet)

• Super Mario World Flash
  (tags: flash games)
• Stepper Motor Controller
  (tags: circuit control diy driver electronics hardware)

Aww look, the poor thing’s too full of random crap. Let’s all go back to our blogs instead.

Twitter failing...

If you’re trying to answer the question “How do I connect to hosts inside my network using my Internet connection’s IP address, and not the local IP address” or maybe “How do I test my port forwarding works from within my network” then you need to enable NAT Loopback on your router or firewall. To see why, keep reading. Otherwise go and Google.

Users of Zyxel routers (P-660HW-T1 v2 etc), you need to connect to the CLI and type in a command. Irritatingly the command is not saved when the power goes out so you will need to re-enter it every time the router is power cycled. Also, with Zyxel routers it will be necessary to enable a LAN / LAN Router firewall rule to explicity forward ‘any’ connection to the local IP address of the Zyxel router. Without doing this all admin (web and Telnet CLI) control of the router is lost.

Telnet into your router and issue the command ip nat loopback on. Here’s an example.

james@smeg:~$ telnet 192.168.1.254
Trying 192.168.1.254…
Connected to 192.168.1.254.
Escape character is ‘^]’.

Password:
Copyright (c) 1994 – 2007 ZyXEL Communications Corp.
P-660HW-T> ip nat loopback on
P-660HW-T> exit
Connection closed by foreign host.

Why? Keep reading…

With an ADSL or other NAT based router/firewall it is possible to use port forwarding and other firewall rules to get from the Internet (WAN) to the local network (LAN). Once configured, hosts on the Internet are able to reach your internal machines by visiting your Internet IP address.

Imagine you have an Internet connection that goes through a firewall. Behind the firewall is a laptop, desktop and a server. On the server is webserver software and the popular Subversion repository software.

Using port forwarding it is possible to allow people on the Internet to access both the web and SVN server, but prevent them from accessing the laptop or the desktop computers. Internally the desktop, laptop and server can all communicate with each other, the firewall having no control over this.

So a user on the desktop PC can browse the webserver by simply connecting to its internal IP address – 192.168.1.100. So can the laptop. The Internet users could connect to this using the port forwarding set up and use the router’s Internet address – http://photos.piku.org.uk. Note how there are two addresses for everything now – the actual internal IP address and the external Internet address provided by port forwarding.

Having two addresses is no problem for most things. It can just become a little confusing or impractical. Imagine the laptop user wants to check out sourcecode from a Subversion repository. They install the excellent TortoiseSVN and, while connected to the internal network, check out source from ‘192.168.0.123′. Suppose now they want to go outside the network and continue with access to the repository. Port forwarding allows them access, but due to the way SVN works they will now need to check out a second copy of the source.

And now things are confusing. It seems impractical and overly complex to need two copies of something just because the address of the computer has changed. This is where NAT Loopback comes in. It allows the laptop user to enter the Internet address of the SVN server into their client and use that from both within the local network and out on the Internet.

Weird German GMail error

The error message says

Lieber Nutzer,

in Deutschland heißt unser E-Mail-Service Google Mail, nicht Gmail.

Sie können Ihre E-Mails in Deutschland direkt unter http://mail.google.com abrufen.

Ihr Google-Team

Der E-Mail-Service von Google ist in Deutschland nicht mehr über die von Ihnen eingegebene URL abrufbar.

Allgemeine Informationen zu Google finden Sie in Deutschland wie gewohnt unter www.google.de oder www.google.com.

Which translated using Babelfish comes out as

Dear user, in Germany is called our email service google mail, not Gmail. They can call up your emails in Germany directly under http://mail.google.com. Their googleteam The email service of does not google is in Germany any more over the URL entered by you callably. General information too google find you in Germany as used under www.google.de or www.google.com.

I get some really bizarre spam…

Finance Minister Mr..P. Chidambaram has approved a Bill which comes into effect on 01.04.2009  and it states that all Privately owned companies need to give a minimum salary increase of 15% to all employees every six months.

This comes as a relief to petitioners appealing against the growing work hours in the Privately Owned organizations and which do not have a proper system to check overtime.

The bill also mentions that all employees be provided 20 days casual leave every year.

Please see the attached document for the list of companies which be brought under the umbrella of the Bill in the first round of implementation.

And if the name of your company features in the list, kindly circulate this mail among your colleague.
Pls refer the attached list of companies.

So thank you she28phool2c@yahoo.co.in for the weird email.

Please stop ringing me during the day when I am at work. If you must, leave a message on my answering service! Every day for the past week you’ve rung and not left a message. I bet you’re phone spam, if so please go away as my number is registered on the TPS.

I know MSN is full of little kids and spambots, but it looks like MSN themselves are now in the v1agra s3lling bu5iness… or so the phishers would have you believe.

Buy pills on MSN

Best not to click this if you’re at work, or the type of person who gets all upset about rudeness…