The Graphic Graffiti Designs Blog

“Melbourne Bound” to be integrated into blog…

2009-07-11T07:34:02Z

Just a quick note to let everyone know that I am integrating our existing photoblog, “Melbourne Bound” into this blog in the next few weeks. I have taken all the photos down off Melbourne Bound, and it will be locked out to public access in the coming week. I have decided to do this to up the quality of the blog, instead of focusing on multiple projects. I hope you all agree this is the right thing to do.

How To: Micropolis (a.k.a. Sim City) on OS X

2009-07-01T07:10:08Z

I’ve lost track of most of the old blog entries. I’ll probably be able to eventually track them down, but for the time-being here’s a bit of Sim City goodness… for the Mac of course! Sorry for the step-by-step, but I haven’t got too much time on my hands!

Note: If you want an updated, easier approach to running Micropolis, go to the bottom of the post!

Terminal Time…

Make sure you have X11 and the Developer tools installed on your Mac. X11 is on by default, as it allows you to run X Window System applications off Linux and Unix, but I don’t think the Developer Tools are installed by default. You can download them here if you haven’t got them. Likewise, X11 can be found here (translated from French for your convenience).
Now you’ll want to download the patched version of Micropolis (SimCity) which can be sourced from here.
Now extract it.
Open the Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app) and ‘cd’ into the directory. The best way to do this is to type ‘cd’, space bar, then drag the folder where the ‘micropolis’ folder decompressed into the terminal. You should end up with something like ‘cd ./ExampleFolder’. Press Enter.
Now type (without the quotes):
‘cd ./Micropolis/src’
You are now in the ’src’ folder. Type this without the quotes:
‘make & & make install’
You’ll see a lot of geeky looking code pass by in the Terminal. This is normal. Sit down, relax and watch. It’s like your watching the Matrix.
Now run the game using this command:
‘./Micropolis’
If successful, you will see this header message:
Welcome to X11!
Multiplayer Micropolis Version 4.0 by Will Wright, Don Hopkins.
Copyright (c) 2002 by Electronic Arts, Maxis. All Rights Reserved.
The actual game will now launch.

The Updated Method

If you didn’t read the concealed text above, well then you just wasted 10 minutes of your life! Download this file, then extract it into a folder of your choice, open the Terminal and run it!

Example:
If, for example, you extracted the archive into your documents folder.

Open the Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app)
Type (without the quotes):
‘cd /Documents/micropolisX/’
Now type (without the quotes):
‘./Micropolis’
Enjoy.

Well I hope you learned something today, plus got the actual thing running! If you didn’t, or you have another question (or even a thank you!), leave it in the comments below.

A Quick Update On Things

2009-07-01T06:24:26Z

Hello to everyone.
I thought I’d update everyone on a few things as there have been almost no posts on here for a few weeks now.

As you are already aware, we have recently moved our servers from NetRegistry to a small hosting provider, Rise Media (highly recommended). We have also had to move all of our DNS entries (not yet completed) and fixed up some of the backend code to cope with these changes (minimum). We are now 90% functioning!

Small things still need to be fixed, such as the RSS Feeds for WordPress. I’m currently fixing all this, so it should be fully functional within days, DNS, RSS and all. There is some great content on the way as well, so stay around!

Thanks, Tim.

How To: Use SSH Tunnels

2009-06-08T00:15:28Z

Today everyone is on the Internet. And I do mean everyone. Hackers, identity fraudsters… even general criminals! These days a lot of people on the Internet have the skills to infiltrate a unsecured connection. Now you may think for a second, where wouldn’t I connect to the Internet securely. Think mobile.

People on the road; people in coffee shops using ‘wireless hotspots’. That’s where you use the Internet unsecured. But not all is lost. There are numerous ways to secure your connection without the risk of the connection being infiltrated by a third-party. But cutting down the list of these ‘numerous fixes’, I’m going to show you one sure-fire way to secure your traffic without any compromises.

Please meet Secure Shell… or SSH…

Secure Shell, or SSH for short is a network protocol that allows data (that’s your web traffic or any other connections you want to stuff through it) to be exchanged between two networked devices. In past times, SSH has been confined to the tech-savvy, only readily available on Mac and Linux and prior UNIX operating systems such as Solaris. SSH was designed to replace the TELNET protocol, one which was the backbone of the early Internet, providing access to networked bulletin board systems (BBS) and directories. But let’s talk tunneling.

To Tunnel, or not to Tunnel…

Even if you do use an unsecured connection in a public place, it’s still very unlikely that your traffic will be intercepted by a third-party. If your still reading this article, you probably are that paranoid to use SSH Tunneling, and that’s OK! Maybe it’s for fun. Who knows, it’s none of my business and I surely won’t be going down to my local wireless hotspot to be infiltrating another peer’s connection. But that apart, SSH in general is also a great way to learn how to use the Terminal (like Command Prompt on Windows, but way more powerful).

Things That You Will Need

Now I’m doing this on a Mac, but I will show you how to tunnel with whatever operating system you use (that means the general three… Mac, Linux and Windows). Let’s get into it then. View the checklist below that caters to you:
Mac OS X/Linux/UNIX
If you are working with a Mac like I am, you will need the following. Don’t worry if you don’t recognize any of the tools as I’ll be guiding you through. Also note that some tools are optional.

Mac OS X Terminal: Already installed!
Optional: Meerkat – US$19.95: Link (this is an alternative to text commands in the Terminal).

Mac is built on UNIX, which is very similar to Linux which was designed as a free, open-source alternative to UNIX. This means the prerequisites are very similar to Mac OS X.

xterm or another terminal emulator…
SSH (it should already be installed on most distributions).

From now on Linux users will have to try to interpret the Mac commands. I’m pretty sure they are all the same, but if you find yourself in trouble, just add a comment below and I’ll reply to you as fast as I can. I’m all for open-source.
Windows
Windows isn’t really built for this sort of stuff, but you can still do it quiet easily with a one-program-does-it-all application.

PUTTY – $Free: Link.

Let’s Begin!

Follow the steps outlined that suit your operating system.

Using Mac OS X's Terminal to start a tunnel.

Mac OS X/Linux/UNIX

Fire up a Terminal session. The Terminal on Mac OS X can be found in “/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app”. On Linux and other UNIX distributions, it should be under the Applications menu if you are using a GUI, or if you are using a CLI distribution your looking at it now.
Type this in, substituting words to your configuration:

ssh -D 8080 -f -C -q -N username@servername.com

I’m going to try to break up this command into easy-to-understand language for everyone. In the first section of the command (’ssh’) we are calling on the Terminal to use the SSH protocol. Next with the ‘-D’ modifier and the port number (8080) we are specifying the port we are going to use as a tunnel. The ‘-D’ modifier is just there to tell the Terminal this, you shouldn’t have to really know all this, but it’s handy if you start using the Terminal regularly. The other modifiers you see are related to security specifications and methods of using SSH, which I won’t get into at the moment, but your welcome to read up on it at the SSH man(ual) page. The next section is very important. This is where you login to your remote server. You should be able to pick up on what goes where, and if your wondering where to enter the password, you’ll be glad to know that a password prompt will appear once you execute the command.
That’s it for the command line. Now on to the browser/network configuration which you can find down the page.

Windows

Once you have downloaded PUTTY from the link above, open it.
Once PUTTY has opened, find the ‘Host Name (or IP address)’ text box. Enter your server address inside without the username at the beginning. Make sure the port specified is where you have your SSH daemon set to listen on your remote server. If you’re not sure, most of the time it is port 22. Please make sure the connection type is SSH.
In the category tree on the left, expand the ‘Connection’ category, then expand the ‘SSH’ sub-category and select ‘Tunnels’.
Since we are focusing on tunneling HTTP/Web Traffic in this article, we are only tunneling one port with specified settings. Tick the ‘Local ports accept connections from other hosts’ box, and leave the ‘Remote ports do the same (SSH-2 only)’ box unchecked. In the source port type ‘443′ without the quotes, and for destination type ‘localhost:443′ again without the quotes. Tick ‘Dynamic’ and ‘Auto’.
Now to avoid going through all these time-consuming commands again, go back to the ‘Session’ category and save the configuration. You should be able to work this out as it says ‘Save Configuration’, then you have to name it. Simple.
Next click the ‘Open’ box at the bottom of the window. A xterm emulator will appear (you don’t really need to know a lot about xterm other than it’s an emulated terminal) with a username prompt. Type your username and execute (press enter). Next a password prompt will appear, enter your password and execute.
Your in!

Making it work…

Now we have to put the tunnel into action. This differs from one browser to the next, but is very similar. Since I’m working on a Mac, I’ll guide you through how to configure Firefox and Safari. For all those Internet Explorer users out there, you should upgrade to Firefox. It is faster, safer and more compatible with a wider range of websites. But if you’re that keen on sticking it out with Explorer, the settings dialog is pretty easy to pickup. From what I can remember the part you are after is under ‘Proxy Settings’. Set it to ‘localhost:443′ or substitute it if you used a different configuration. It should work. Again, comment below if you’re having trouble. Now let’s continue.

Firefox's 'Proxy Settings' dialog.

Firefox
Firefox is my default browser (actually Minefield is, it’s the nightly build of Firefox… but let’s not get into that now…). It is open-source, speedy on a well thought system and very secure. Now let’s configure it to use our tunnel.

Open Firefox.
On a Mac, click on ‘Firefox’ and go to Preferences. On Windows & Linux I’m pretty sure it’s under Tools > Options.
Once in the Preferences/Options dialog, click on the ‘Advanced’ tab.
Now click on the ‘Network’ tab.
Under the ‘Connection’ options, click the ‘Settings’ button.
Once in the dialog, tick the ‘Manual proxy configuration’ checkbox.
In the ‘SOCKS Host’ text box type ‘localhost’ (without the quotes) and in the port box type ‘443′ (or whatever other port you used).
Make sure SOCKS v5 is selected.
Click ‘Ok’ and exit the dialog box.
Try a website of your choice.
If it worked, well done. If not, check all of your settings. If that still doesn’t work, comment below and i’ll try and help you.

Mac OS X's system-wide proxy settings.

Safari/Mac OS X Systemwide
Now for Safari and any other browsers that use the Mac OS X systemwide proxy settings. I cannot guide you through configuring proxy settings on Safari for Windows. Sorry.

Click on System Preferences and find the Network icon.
Choose how you connect to the Internet (e.g. AirPort/Ethernet/Bluetooth… etc…) and click on the ‘Advanced’ button.
Next click on the ‘Proxies’ tab.
Click on ‘SOCKS Proxy’ and type in ‘localhost’ and ‘443′ in the corresponding text boxes.
Tick the box next to ‘SOCKS Proxy’ and click ‘OK’.
Close System Preferences and open Safari.
Open a website.
If it works well done. If not, check your settings. If you still fail to get it working, comment below.

Please Note: If you used the Safari/Mac OS X Systemwide method, the proxy/tunnel takes effect for all applications that connect to the Internet through the interface you modified (e.g. AirPort/Ethernet/Bluetooth etc…), of course excluding applications that don’t follow the systemwide preferences such as Firefox. Yes, this means Mail clients and IM… etc…

And That’s It!

Well done on getting to the end of this article. It’s been a long one. Hopefully you got your tunnels working and you’re no longer paranoid about your traffic being infiltrated. You may notice some extra delay on websites load time, that is the letdown of secure traffic. It does differ on different connections, but it does slow down browsing. But if security is your number one priority you will probably find SSH Tunnels super-useful. And this is only the tip of the iceberg. With SSH Tunnels you can basically tunnel anything. POP, IMAP, SMTP, VNC, SMB, AFP, FTP, SFTP, whatever. Just substitute the ports we used earlier (e.g. 8080/443) with the ports of whatever service you want to tunnel. Soon you will be a terminal genius. But for now, that’s it. If you need any help or want to speak your mind, put it in words below.

Hosting Changes & Downtime…

2009-05-28T01:14:08Z

A little update for all our devoted readers.

There is a lot going on at Graphic Graffiti Designs at the moment. We are currently in the process of moving hosts and optimizing our new website for the new servers that we are moving to. There may be a little bit of downtime during the transfer, so if you do encounter some ‘404 Not Found’ errors, don’t worry! We’re just moving the website over and redirecting all our DNS entries.

If you have any questions on the changes, or want to contact me, you can do so through email or through twitter @timhoward.

Thanks, Tim.

Lest We Forget

2009-04-24T15:00:57Z

For those who aren’t aware, today is a major day for Australia & New Zealand. Today is ANZAC Day (Australian & New Zealand Army Corps) where we remember those who fought for their country and made it the safe place it is today. I’m going to keep this post at a minimum, as it is a day of reflection and remembrance, but may I leave you with this famous poem [The Ode of Remembrance] that is just as important as the day itself.

The poppy is a traditional symbol of ANZAC Day.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young.

Straight of limb, true of eyes, steady and aglow.

They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,

They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning,

We will remember them. Lest we forget.

I’ve kept this post short, but if you would like to learn more about ANZAC Day, read some more here and here.

Twitter Goes Mainstream

2009-04-23T23:30:47Z

You can’t deny social media has already left a lasting impression on the way we use the Internet. When the Internet was created, it was an open-platform for sharing information to a worldwide audience. Fast forward a few years later and you’ll find computers got relatively cheap. I won’t go into the Economics of it at this minute, but instead talk about the huge news companies. Now, you’re probably thinking; why am I comparing cheap computers to huge news companies? Audience.

Once products go cheap, consumers purchase them. And nothing changed with the computer. Larger audiences mean big companies pay attention as it usually means big profits for them. When the huge companies hit the Internet, they took their traditional newspaper/TV brands and transferred them to online format. It was a change for the better at the time when news wasn’t added to the Internet for maybe days after an event occurred. Now, with the major news companies on the web, breaking news could be delivered to a reader within minutes, in some cases even seconds. But who knows… maybe the news was censored… not the full story? Bias towards the news company?

And this is where the social media revolution comes to play. Social media wasn’t created just for news. It’s alternative name is Web 2.0, but I try not to say that too often because it sounds stupid. Anyway, social networks we’re the predecessors to social media for the fact that they allowed people to share information freely, to their friends, relatives or even strangers. Now, with social news sites like Digg, people can upload articles, videos and a whole range of content to a large audience who can add their opinion to the content by digging it up or burying it.

Twitter, founded in 2006 has only recently hit mainstream.

But Digg is a large-scale website that filters out a lot of niche content added by users, but don’t have a large enough audience that is appreciative of that content. And this is where Twitter comes in. Twitter was created in 2006 in San Francisco, California as a social network for micro-blogging. Not too long ago, Twitter was relatively niche, secluded to the web’s techies. It’s original function was micro-blogging, in other words a replacement for the blog when you didn’t have enough time to post to a blog. It only takes under 30 seconds to create a ‘tweet’ and post it to your ‘followers’ and a larger public audience.

With Twitter you can chat with celebrities without going through loopholes to get to them. You can chat with strangers, and meet alike people. And this is why it has recently taken the world by storm. Only around a week ago, user @aplusk (a.k.a. Ashton Kutcher) reached another major milestone for the relevance of Twitter by reaching 1 million followers. Kutcher created a media storm by publicly advertising a ‘battle to 1 million’ with traditional news giant CNN and their @cnnbrk (CNN Breaking News) account. Kutcher won, and celebrated by sending the message that ‘the people have talked, and the social news revolution has begun where people can get uncensored news without resorting to the major news channels’.

Twitter in fact has recently been mentioned on the radio more than other, more popular social networks such as Facebook and MySpace, and has had it’s submit buttons added to a majority of traditional news websites so users can share an article with their followers.

Ashton Kutcher recently archived 1 million followers.

But one of Twitter’s greatest uses, as mentioned before, is news. Breaking news is tweeted by it’s users on to the service almost immediately following an event. One example that I know that happened is when a series of earthquakes occurred here in Melbourne, Australia. Twitter’s #Melbourne hashtag swarmed with news of the earthquake, and it took at least 30 minutes for the first major news website to pick up the incident and post a brief [and I mean brief, uninformative] article. It took over an hour for the United States Geological Survey (USGS) to post up the incident and it took over an hour and a half for the major news websites to write up a proper, half-informative article when compared to what was already available on Twitter. They even had Twitter as a source!

But it’s not all negative for news companies. They have an extra constantly-updated source they can add to their list, providing good, usually accurate information from the public to a greater, already established audience. I, personally don’t think Twitter will ever reach the audience that the news companies have available to them at the moment. And this is where news companies have to allow Twitter to act as a news source, so information posted on the service can reach the wider audience. Then the people can actually have a say on the news instead of been locked away by the traditional sources. Now that Twitter has hit mainstream, this dream is now possible.

The Future of The Pirate Bay and Piracy in General

2009-04-21T08:52:53Z

The [self-proclaimed] world’s biggest BitTorrent tracker, The Pirate Bay, used by millions of users each day has just finished their first court session with a negative verdict towards the BitTorrent and online file sharing communities in general. The tracker, which links to files of all-sorts, from Mac applications to high-definition movies attracts millions of users from all walks of life, looking to get “freebies” uploaded with other BitTorrent users also using the site. In other words, it’s basically the traditional Sunday market online, and [mostly] everything is illegal.

The Pirate Bay's tracker connects millions of users together each day.

Coming of the recent Guilty verdict handed down by the Swedish courts, the four [main] operators of The Pirate Bay are off to jail, each for 1 year, and is being hailed as a landmark victory in the fight for piracy by the world’s record labels and movie studios. Although the four commit to the ongoing constant operation of the tracker, each will have to pay USD$905,000 each, following their 1 year sentence in prison. Although the record labels we’re asking for a further payout from the case, the sum is still a large amount when compared to the publicly known TPB [The Pirate Bay] ad-revenue figure of ~$105,000.

While the files aren’t actually stored on the site, it follows the principles of the wildly popular BitTorrent protocol, created by Bram Cohen numerous years ago as “a simple, bandwidth-conserving method of transferring and sharing content over networks, including the Internet”. The BitTorrent protocol needs the community to keep a file active. Two main aspects of the trade are the ‘Seeders’ and ‘Leechers’. Seeders are people who have completed the download [and include the original uploader] and are now uploading the file so that the Leechers [the people who are currently downloading the file - incomplete] can complete the download. The heavy-work is done by what is called a ‘tracker’. A tracker, like The Pirate Bay’s, controls trades between clients. Instead of a traditional two-way connection between the server and the client, each client acts as a server, constantly uploading and sharing. Where the record labels and anti-piracy companies come in is in how the tracker controls the clients. Each client’s IP address is publicly shown, meaning anyone connected can easily save the list of client’s IP addresses, and use them against them. Anti-piracy companies commonly also send fake-data into the stream, creating a lot of hashfails [or incomplete blocks] on the user’s side. BitTorrent is a lot more advanced then this, but I won’t go into it now.

A raided Pirate Bay server on display at the Stockholm Technical Museum.

But this decision shouldn’t affect the Pirate Bay’s operation, as the four have stated already. But think of it this way. If the tracker was a smaller one, maybe one of the hundreds of private BitTorrent trackers out there in operation; would the outcome be the same? The Pirate Bay can slide through this quite easily as it has built up enough money and supporters to do so, but a small private tracker serving a niche audience does not have the same reach, and most sites run off donations from their few users, whereas sites like The Pirate Bay and Demonoid display huge advertising campaigns on their websites.

But you have got to take into account that this is not the first brush with the law for The Pirate Bay. Back in 2006, in the once piracy-neutral country of Sweden [The Pirate Bay's traditional homeland], their hosting company’s datacenter [which is also operated by TPB four] was raided by police, who confiscated vital servers, including a few not even linked to The Pirate Bay. For the days following the raid, the public was told that The Pirate Bay will return… soon. In around a day The Pirate Bay was back online, using a multi-server setup spanning numerous countries around the globe.

Piracy will continue. My generation [I'm a teenager...], including others have grown up with file-sharing; a free way to getting what they want. They are used to getting this stuff for free, and it cant be helped now, it’s to late. The record industry has made headway into the digital world, including the huge Apple iTunes music store. But unless they lower the price of the product, no one who is used to buying it for free will want to buy it. And that’s the truth.

What the…. where has everything gone?

2009-04-19T08:47:55Z

Hello Everybody!

After a long hiatus I have an announcement for all of our valuable readers. For the last few months, minimal posts have been released on this blog. My addiction of Twitter, and my growing pile of school work has basically taken away all of my time available for writing posts. So I have made a decision.

After much thought, I have decided that the blog will stay operational. And I will be updating frequently, as much as I can in my limited time. I am also planning to redesign the blog to integrate it into the main website, and further integrate my Twitter & Flickr accounts into the blog, so you can keep track with me even when I’m not posting.

Now at the moment I don’t have a timeframe for the redesign. Please don’t start sending mass email to me asking when the site will be reopened because i’m really not sure myself. I am trying to get the blog back in operation basically ASAP. But the other thing you may be thinking is the disappearance of the archive. I’ll say it short and sweet. I deleted it. I’m restarting. You can email me if you wish to use any of the archive materials, because I am keeping them for a few weeks. But anyway, please visit again soon for heaps of exciting content. This blog will be back better than ever.

Thanks for Visiting,
Tim.