I recently deleted one of my Google+ accounts (I forget how many I had – it was at least two, possibly 3). I’m not going to suggest that I’m normal and that the real figure is more like 40 million people, but I do think it’s disingenuous to talk about “people” when you really mean “accounts”.

Before I deleted the account, I signed in at least once a week – to deal with the annoying notification that infected my gmail to let me know that some random I didn’t care about had circled me.

I ended up deleting my account for reasons I outlined in my last post. I’m now using one of my other accounts to follow a select few people who are doing interesting things with Hangouts – so few people that Google wastes around 220 pixels of vertical space on a message nagging me to follow more people.

I hope these numbers, although meaningless, will at least trigger large bonuses for all my friends still working at Google. That would be nice, right?

[Edited to add]To be clear, I’m not accusing Google, or anyone at Google, from intentionally trying to kill the web. I know that most Googlers, and Google itself, strongly believe that an open interweb is a good thing. I’m fairly sure, although I don’t know anyone involved, that the people working on Plus have good intentions about making it open; and probably believe that their custom API is better than an RSS/Atom feed because it offers more functionality.

I’m only commenting here on what I see as the net effect of Google+, as it is today, on the interwebs.[/EDITED]

Plus is killing the web because even Facebook offers more ways to track and be notified about that content than Plus does. Plus doesn’t export any RSS/Atom feeds. The only way to pull data out is a custom API that nothing much supports yet – I can’t even follow Google Plus from within Google Reader! I can follow my Facebook activity from within Google Reader – it’s a limited feed that doesn’t give me all the information I see within Facebook, but it’s enough that I know I haven’t missed any interesting activity from my friends. Plus makes it almost impossible to see anything but the last few posts, so I know that the interesting people I’m following are posting stuff that I’m missing. Stuff that if they posted to some open platform – their blog, twitter, hell, even Facebook – I’d be able to catch thanks to use of standards like RSS.

Plus is killing the web by tricking people into putting interesting content here that they would otherwise have put on their blog; then making it hard for me to find that content. For a while I’d considered “blogging” here (not that I blog much); but now that I’ve realised that posting here makes it next-to-impossible for anyone to find my content later, I won’t be. My second thought was to have my WordPress use the limited API to pull the content here into a post on my blog, but everything I’ve found that does that is ugly (and no, I’m not going to waste my time developing something when I could just post on my blog, on the open internet, and avoid the problem).

Plus is killing the web because it’s driving comments here, for much the same reason as the above. It’s easy for me to track down a comment someone made on +Robert Collins blog post about dmraid six months ago; if it was a post here, that would be impossible to find the post, let alone the comment.

Worst of all, by intermingling “Blog post” and “Link blog” type traffic (via the recent changes to gReader, amongst other things), Plus is killing the web by intermingling shallow commentary on half-read web trash (the kind of thing that used to be safely contained in gReader, delicious, or other linkblog type things) with interesting new content. Two-thirds of the reason why it would be impossible to find a six-month old post +Robert Collins had made would be the 7500 bits of crap in his stream since then – “Esconced for the wait until the flight”, “Checked in in some random hotel in eastern europe”, “aieee” being paraphrases of 3 of his 4 most recent posts. Blogs are for blogging; linkblogs are for sharing potentially interesting content, Plus is for dumping all your shit in and flushing.

In summary: Plus makes it harder to extract content than even Facebook; Plus encourages intermingling of the banal and the profound; and thus Plus makes it impossible to not miss quality content that would be found if it were posted on the open internet.

I hate to harp on about how Friendfeed got this right, but it really did. Friendfeed, although it aggregated my Twitter and my Blog, kept their identities as seperate streams. Friendfeed allowed you to choose if you wanted to see my tweets, my blog posts, or both. Friendfeed re-exported the stream I was watching as a single integrated RSS feed that I could then track in an RSS reader of my choice to make sure I didn’t miss any content. Friendfeed made it easy to re-share posts onto other services such as Digg or delicio.us. Friendfeed made it easy to pull the comments made on an item inside Friendfeed back into the source, so that the conversation did not get splintered or lost.

I miss Friendfeed. I wish Google had managed to bring +Paul Buchheit and the rest of the team back into the fold – Friendfeed would have made such a fantastic open platform on which to build a social network.

A few months earlier, I’d gone to the US for work, and flown Premium Economy on VA there and back. That flight was fantastic, not least because I got bumped up to business on the way over there. That flight, together with some domestic flights I’d taken earlier in the year, was enough to bump me to Silver status with VelocityRewards, so a secondary aim of my trip to Europe was to bump me up to Gold, so that I’d be able to have ongoing little treats for myself every time I have to fly over the next year. So, I booked Premium Economy fares for this trip too.

At the time, the alliance between VA and EY was fresh and shiny, so I decided to give it a try – especially as it seemed like the best way to maximise my chances of hitting Gold. All the flights to Europe were VA SYD-AUH, followed by EY between AUH and your destination. In my case, I flow AUH-CDG, caught the Eurostar to London, and flew back LHR-AUH.

At one point during the booking process, I was considering going Business class, as the fares seemed surprisingly cheap. That’s when I noticed the fine print: these fares were Business only on the VA leg, but economy on the EY leg. A few, far more expensive, fares offered Business all the way through – but even though this trip was about me splurging, I didn’t want to splurge *that* much.

This made me check the fine print on the Premium fares, and discover that they too put you in economy, as EY has no Premium service. This was my first disappointment: I wanted to splurge on myself just a little, but VA had chosen a partner that didn’t allow that.

The VA legs were fantastic: comfortable seats, plenty of room, good food, good IFE. Absolutely no complaints about those legs.

The layover in AUH outbound wasn’t terrible. The strange layout of the airport means that, after deplaning, you are forced to go through security just to enter the terminal; and terminal 3 at AUH turns out to be tiny – 5 or 6 obligatory high-priced fashion outlets, a token chemist/travel goods/bookstore, and a perfunctory food court above. The whole thing is closed in and claustrophobic – the longest line of sight anywhere in the place is standing at the base of the escalators up to the food court and looking up two stories to the roof. There are no windows in the terminal proper.

The terminal is shaped like the letter p – all the shops are in the circle at the top, with all the gate lounges in the long tail trailing off. If your flight is at one of the distant gates, allow a good long time for walking down there – and once you’re there, you won’t want to walk back.

After my layover, boarded the EY A340-500. The good news was that seating is 2-4-2, and I had one of the 2s to myself. The bad news was that I had detritus from the last passenger on and around the seat – most memorably, half a plastic cup on the ground in front of the seat, but also random bits of plastic in the seat pocket in front of me, and stuff down beside the seat. Aside from having to clean away someone else’s rubbish, that particular flight went fairly smoothly. I was disappointed to find out that the “Bakery Selection” the menu had promised for breakfast turned out to be “A Croissant”, but as I was about to be landing anyway it didn’t seem to matter much.

Coming back from LHR was less pleasant. I discovered that my Velocity Silver status didn’t get me priority checkin – but I had arrived well before the flight, so the line wasn’t long anyway. This time the plane was clean, so I thought that maybe the problems on the previous flight were a one-off – but as we were descending into AUH, I realised that this time the Bakery Selection had consisted of nothing at all. Suddenly the paltry “Selection” from the first flight seemed positively luxurious!

(Yes, I did just complain that, in the midst of being whisked quickly and without fuss from Merry Old Englande to the center of Erotic Arabia, they forgot to give me a pastry. You did notice the “#firstworldproblems” tag, right? If you want to read about people with *actual* problems, look elsewhere)

Then we landed at AUH Terminal 1. This is obviously a much older terminal, and seemed to be undergoing its first maintenance in decades. The whole terminal is one giant dome, with a supporting pillar in the center. Once again, the terminal lacks meaningful windows, turning would could be a glorious view out over the runways towards the sea into a claustrophobic world of concrete. As a concession to smokers, the terminal offers a smoking booth in the center of the terminal.

I’ve seen smoking booths at other airports. SIN has some of them – decent sized rooms, with strong ventilation, so that people standing outside get only the faintest whiff of smoke as people enter and exit. EY’s booth was as pathetic as the rest of the terminal – about the size of 6 standard Telstra phone boxes joined together. Free-standing in the center of the terminal, with no attached ventilation that I could see. For the convenience of people entering the booth, it had an automatic sliding door, which opened into a gaping maw about 50% of the length of the booth – and then stayed open, because there were constantly people walking past and triggering the sensor.

As a result, even the few people who were actually smoking inside the booth were just resulting in a constant trickle of smoke heading up to the ceiling and adding to the already foul haze and miasma in the room. Yes, room – this entire terminal is just one big domed room.

Using the smoking booth was clearly pointless, so most smokers didn’t bother. Sure, they mostly stood *near* the booth – but also sitting near the booth, surrounded by smokers, was a mother and her baby, who couldn’t have been more than 2.

I noted all this in passing as I was proceeding, post-haste, towards the comparative bliss of T3 – yet again, EY had managed to turn the downsides of the last trip into longed-for pleasant memories.

It was while I was in T3 eating in the ersatz food court that I realised I’d left my Kindle on the plane. No problem, I thought, cleaners will have found it. I’ll just ask customer service too retrieve it for me..

Well, it turns out that customer service is a two-person desk on the edge of T1 – so back into the smoke I had to go. It turned out that an EY flight to BKK had just been cancelled. It turns out that most of the people on the flight might have been able to get accommodation in Abu Dhabi – if they’d thought to get a visa before they left home. As it was, the customer service desk was surrounded by a swarm of people who weren’t happy at being told that their only option was to remain in that smoky dome indefinitely, until another plane could be found for them.

Neither of the customer service people behind the desk seemed interested in doing anything about this. They spent a lot of time staring at people, and asking questions like “So what am I meant to do about it?”. You know that Little Britain motif, where someone bashes away at a computer for a bit before blandly responding “Computer says no”? It was exactly like that, except without even the pretence of blaming it on the computer.

I waited in this morasse for about an hour, gradually managing to inch my way towards the desk as the people at the friend of the huddle gave in and left. I was almost there when some ground staff from another airline led in a woman through a back door. She’d left a scarf on an EY plane, but as she couldn’t get to EY’s customer service people, she’d made enough of a nuisance of herself to staff of other airlines that they’d dragged her in behind the desk just to get rid of her.

EY customer service> What are you here for>
Woman> I left my scarf on my plane
EY> *blank look* So? What are we meant to do about that?
Woman> *furious* I want you to see if the cleaners found it and handed it in
EY> *sigh* I guess.

At this point, the sketch I alluded to earlier played out in full: the customer service person picked up a phone, bashed a few keys, said a few words, listened for a few seconds, then put it down and announced “Cleaners say no”. He then stared at the woman until she gave in and went away.

Even if I hadn’t given up all hope of recovering my kindle at that point, my flight was now boarding – I’d been in that line for over an hour. I went back to T3 and boarded.

Actually, two more things happened while boarding. Due to Australian regulations, we had to undergo “Additional Screening” before getting on the plane. This consisted of EY ground stuff rummaging through our hand luggage in case we were smuggling hot beverages or vast quantities of drinking water onto the plane. The man in front of my had some roll-on deodorant in his bag, and the EY staff started thrusting it in his face and loudly asking him “How big is this? Is this bigger than 100mL?”.

Firstly: no, it wasn’t. It was nowhere near big enough to be 100mL, so it was a silly question.
Secondly: Why are you relying on *passengers* to tell you whether or not they’re complying with your regulations? If you’re going to conduct these silly checks, train your staff to have some vague idea of what 100mL looks like
Thirdly: printed right on the front of the bottle, it says “30mL”.

I know this because I happened to have exactly the same thing in my luggage. I made a point of pointing at the label when mine was being searched, which saved a lot of time.

The second thing that happened was that one of the EY staff asked me, as I was about to board the plane, if I’d enjoyed my time in AUH. I told him I hadn’t, which made him ask for details. He ended up taking my contact details and promising to try to find my kindle for me, but a few days later he had to tell me that no-one had reported it.

Would I fly with VA/EY again? Well, now that I’ve got Gold status, I had been thinking of giving it a try, to see if AUH is less hellish once you’re inside the lounges – but as EY have effectively rescinded lounge access for anyone not travelling business class (even their own Gold status frequent flyers don’t get lounge access any more, unless they’re travelling Business), I won’t even get the chance to find out. I could get into the Al Reem lounge in T1, maybe, if they have space – but I could have done that last time I flew too, as it’s open to anyone with $39USD to spare.

I’ve been meaning to learn Ruby for a while, and this seemed like a good opportunity, so I decided to write a scraper to get some more data into PlanningAlerts.

PlanningAlerts is a project of the OpenAustralia Foundation, and aims to provide you with email alerts of development applications near you. Development applications are scraped from council websites, alerts are sent (via RSS or email) to people who have requested notifications about applications in that area; and the site gives you a simple way to send your feedback back to the council.

Henare from OpenAustralia has written a guide to writing scrapers using the excellent ScraperWiki. Utilising that, cadging from some of his existing scrapers, and asking a few noob questions along the way, I created a scraper that pulls in information about development applications from the Redfern/Waterloo Authority site.

The good parts of the code I’ve scraped together come from the doc or from other samples; the ugly parts are my own invention.

When I started, the provided sample code when I started working looked like this:

 if ScraperWiki.select("* from swdata where `council_reference`='#{record['council_reference']}'").empty?
  ScraperWiki.save_sqlite(['council_reference'], record)
else
  puts "Skipping already saved record " + record['council_reference']
end

This breaks on a couple of corner cases: if the swdata table doesn’t already exist, this will die. If you want to trample on your existing data, you have to manually comment out 4 lines of code. As well, it results in one select code per record – fine in small cases, but potentially a time-sink for larger cases.

While I was working on the code, the first problem was fixed by changing the first line to:


if (ScraperWiki.select("* from swdata where `council_reference`='#{record['council_reference']}'").empty? rescue true)


I expanded on that (and along the way taught myself a little bit about Ruby classes):

class Saver
  def initialize
    #If you want to trample on existing data, set this to true
    @trample_data = false
    @references = (ScraperWiki.select("council_reference from swdata") rescue nil)
  end

  def save(record)
    if record
      if @trample_data || @references.nil? || @references.include?(record['council_reference'])
        ScraperWiki.save_sqlite(['council_reference'], record)
      else
        puts "Skipping already saved record " + record['council_reference']
      end
    end
  end
end

This will only do one lookup, and can then do in-memory comparisons to decide if the database needs to be updated for each record. This handles the case where swdata doesn’t exist yet; and if you want to trample on the data, just one word needs to be changed.

There’s some real ugliness in other parts of the code though.

* The entire page uses a tables-based layout, so to find the data I want I have to use page.search('table table table table table table table table tr')
* Both DAs on the site right now have the same data items in the same order; but rather than assume this is consistent, I have my parser iterating over the rows and using a nasty big case to interpret the contents of the second cell based on the value of the first cell in the same row.
* Each DA is on public exhibition from a specifc date to another specific date. The two dates are expressed in compact form: if the month/year values are the same for both dates, they’ll only be expressed once, on the second date. There’s another nasty case block to handle the different possible values here and extract useful dates.
* Every time the code encounters the start of a new record, it tries to save the old record. This leads to an attempt to save an empty record at the start of the parsing (hence the if record test in Saver.save); and a need to manually do One Last Save at the bottom of the code.

The complete code is available on ScraperWiki, and the data is already available on the PlanningAlerts site.

When doing web development, it’s often handy to have one browser signed into the site as an admin, another signed in as a regular user, and one not signed in. Chrome’s “Incognito Window” feature can help with one of these, but you can’t have two Incognito windows at the same time (at least, not on Mac/Linux – I hear tell that the Windows version may have supported multiple incognito sessions at some point, but I don’t know if that’s still the case)

So.

I’ve created a little script. I call it chrome and it lives in ~/bin on all my machines. It detects the platform and calls the appropriate binary.

More importantly, it takes one (optional) parameter, which it uses to figure out which profile to run.

I usually start my day by running this script twice: once as chrome work and once as chrome personal. The order is significant, as clicking on urls in other applications will result in them being opened in the first profile that ran. So, while I’m at work I want most things to open in the work profile; if I’m not working I want a different default behaviour.

If you don’t pass a parameter, the script will invoke the default profile – the one that gets used if you don’t specify a profile at all.

I’ve put the script on github for your amusement and pleasure (and hardcore forking action).

This is made easier by the fact that the SIM lives in my Nexus One (given to me by my employer as a Christmas gift last year, but this post, as always, is entirely my own opinion), which runs Android 2.2. Unlike on an iPhone, this means I can have all sorts of applications always running in the background – and those apps can take access the SMS database, respond to incoming SMSes, and sending outbound SMS.

I tried a few apps, but ended up settling on Ultimate SMS. This app allows me to set an auto-response sent in reply to any incoming SMS (‘James does not use this number any more; he can be reached on 0407123456 instead). This app also forwards a copy of the inbound SMS on to my new number – so I usually get it, and respond to it, while the person who messaged me is still reading my auto-reply.

One last special feature from Telstra makes this twice as useful: SMSes sent from their Message2Text service show the original caller’s number as the origin of the SMS. This means that if anyone calls me and leaves a message, they still get an SMS in response notifying them of my new number. Even better, Ultimate SMS includes the original number when it forwards that SMS to me – so even if their call was from a number that can’t receive SMS, I still get their message on the phone I do carry, and I know what number the message came from.

–

Update: Between drafting this and posting it, my Nexus One went missing. I’m now doing the same thing on my G1 running Android 1.6.

When I ported my first mobile service to Telstra prepaid, I was delighted to find that I was getting this service for free. I had seen Voice2Text mentioned on Telstra’s site and assumed that this was the service I was getting.

A few weeks later I ported my second service to Telstra prepaid – but on this service, regular voicemail was in effect. I sent Telstra’s Twitter team a message asking how to activate this:

I have voice2text on my first prepaid account (0407123456); I’d like it on my second prepaid phone (0403654321) as well.

Unfortunately the team were only able to tell me that Voice2Text wasn’t active on my first service, and they guessed that ‘It may only be available for Post-Paid accounts‘. They suggested I call the standard support number just in case they were wrong.

All of this was a shock coming from Optus, where the team who run the @Optus account are knowledgeable about their product range and proactive about solving problems – their response would have been to call me and ask for more information to find out what I was actually seeing on my phone; they never wasted my time with guesses about what services might be offered, they would make sure they had all the information to hand before they called me – and they would never tell me that a service I’m receiving doesn’t exist.

(disclaimer: I worked at Optus 3ish years ago, my old team worked some of the backed that the @Optus team use – but as far as I know this had no bearing on the service I received from the team. Please don’t confuse my love of the @Optus team with an endorsement for the company overall – I had terrible coverage issues which they were unable/unwilling to address, which is why I’m now a bitter ex-customer of theirs. It’s a shame that such quality customer service couldn’t be backed by a network that has a semblance of coverage and the ability to make and receive the occasional phone call. But I digress…)

Today, a friend pointed me at a different Telstra service called variously ‘Call Back Notification’ or ‘Message2Text’. This service offers people leaving me a voicemail ‘the option to leave a short 10 second message that is converted to text and sent to you as an SMS‘. Sound familiar? This is identical to Voice2Text – except for the 10-second time limit, and the fact that it’s completely free and available even on prepaid.

To activate this, you need to disable the Messagebank service on your account. The Telstra site says that thai requires a call to their call center; but I can confirm that dialing ##002# turned off MessageBank (and thus turned on Message2Text) for me. I’m not entirely sure how to turn MessageBank back on – but as I don’t intend to use it, I don’t care.

Instead of the complicated shenanigans below, I now just add $40 of credit once a month, and convert $39 that to 750Mb of data. This means I’m paying just over $480/year, down from $708 on Optus.

—–

I’ve recently switched my iPhone from an Optus post-paid plan to Telstra prepaid. The primary motivation for the switch was coverage – I work only 500m from my home, and Optus coverage in the area ranges from poor to non-existent – but it turns out that Telstra’s pre-paid plans are better value (for my needs) than Optus’ post-paid contracts anyway.

On Optus, I was paying $59/month every month. This gave me 500Mb of data, of which I used around 300Mb/month on average. I was also making around 80 minutes of calls per month and sending around 120 SMS/MMS – I could have used around 4 times as much without exceeding my cap. In short, Optus were giving me lots of unneeded credit to spend on calls/SMS/MMS, but not as much data as I would have liked.

By contrast, I’m now paying $12.50/week to Telstra for a service that has ridiculous amounts of calls and SMS – even more than then the ridiculously high Optus cap, which I never managed to get close to using. Importantly, it also has 4 times as much data as the Optus plan did – and even better, the coverage and network quality is so much better than on Optus that there’s some chance I might use a good chunk of that data!

Telstra’s pre-paid service options are broad though, and it took me a while to figure out exactly what I wanted (even after I had help from workmates who’d made the same transition earlier). Largely this is because adding data onto the account is a separate step from recharging the rest of the account – but also it’s not clear when various things expire. This post is my attempt at making it easier for other people to negotiate the maze of Telstra’s prepaid options.

In order to end up with this, I have to:

1. Apply a $60 recharge to one of the prepaid plans – specifically, I choose the “Talk & Text+” plan as it’s the closest match to my needs. After applying the recharges, this gives me 300 minutes of calls and 600 SMS to use – as well as $60 credit. This credit can be used once I’d run out of free things – or it can be used for things that aren’t covered by the free calls, such as calling Telstra’s prepaid service number (Yes, that’s right: when I was activating my iPad sim, Telstra charged me $0.25 for the privilege of having them set up another source of income for them – calling Telstra for help from a Telstra service is not a free call)
2. Yes, I know I said I was paying $50/month and I’ve just started by paying $60 all at once.
3. So at this point, I have $60 of credit, and I have insane amounts of free calls/sms, but I don’t have any data to use. To get the data, I have to buy a PlusPack – paying for it out of that $60 credit currently in the account. In my case, I choose the $49 pack, which gives 2Gb of data.
4. At this point, I have: 300 minutes of calls, 600 SMS, 2Gb of data, and an extra $11 credit sitting on my account. All four balances expire in 30 days time. I’ve paid $1 more than I would have paid on Optus

28 days later, those balances are about to expire, so I go through much the same process:

1. Pay $60 to add $60 credit to the account. This extends the life of the previous $11 so that it expires on the same day as the new $60 – so I have a total of $71, expiring in 30 days.
2. Because I’ve chose the “Talk and Text+” plan, this adds another 300 minutes and 600 sms to those balances – and as with the main credit balance, the life of the existing credits gets bumped to the new expiry date, 30 days from today.
3. Convert another $49 of credit into another 2Gb data pack. This does *not* extend the life of the previous data pack. However, the new data pack won’t be touched just yet, as you still have an existing pack active – you need to exhaust the old pack first. If you’re dedicated to getting the best possible value from Telstra you could do your best to suck up the rest of the 2Gb by the time the data pack expires – or you could just let it expire at the end of the day.
4. At this point, you have 600 minutes (minus whatever you used during the month – so in my case, around 500 minutes) and 1200 SMS (minus whatever you used during the month – again, in my case, that’s about 1100 left), 2Gb of data (plus whatever is left in last month’s data pack – after my first month, that was a tad over a Gb left), and $22 of credit – all expiring 30 days from today.

28 days later, it’s time to renew again – but this time, only a $30 recharge is needed. Added to the existing $22, that’s still $3 more than is needed to top everything up by the usual amounts. This only adds an extra 100 minutes of calls and 200 SMS to the balance – but that’s going to leave me with around 400 minutes of unused talk time and 1100 SMSes at the end of the 28 days

28 days after that, I’ll have spent $150 in 12 weeks (compared with $177 I would have spent on Optus in the same period); I’m left with a large balance of free minutes/SMSes in case my usage ever increases (on the Optus plan, any of the freebies you didn’t use within the month just vanished), and if I try hard I might have used at least half of the data provided. After a full year, I’ll have paid $637 to Telstra, instead of $708 to Optus. If you recharge every 30 days instead, that would be just $600 (and a tidgy bit more for the extra 5 days).

Sheesh. 900+ words to explain the gymnastics I have to go through in order to save $100/year? If it wasn’t for the fact that this also gives me access to a mobile phone network that actually works, it wouldn’t be worth it!

PS: I believe my $59 plan was an older version; I believe the current plans give you 700Mb of data for the same price. Optus never bothered to suggest I move onto the better-value plan – and as far as I know the only way to do that would have been to sign another 12 month contract, which I wouldn’t be willing to do until they can provide coverage around the area where I live/work. Even so, more data (750Mb) can be had for just $39/month on Telstra prepaid – much better value.

miniupnpdlinuxigd: trivial. Click a few buttons to enable it, done. I tried miniupnpd first; but althought it initially looked good, I couldn’t get it to work consistently.

However, that’s when I start getting the MobileMe prefpane telling me that BTMM couldn’t start because “Your DNS server isn’t responding”. A little bit of searching on Google finds me pages like this one, which baldly state that “Back to My Mac isn’t compatible with dnsmasq.”

Well, dear internets, I’m here to tell you that you are wrong. BTMM is perfectly compatible with dnsmasq. Sure,openwrt’s default settings don’t work, but that doesn’t make the two incompatible.

It did take me a while to figure out what was going on. The clue also came from Apple’s forums, which told me to do this:

betelgeuse:~ james$ echo "show State:/Network/BackToMyMac" | scutil

<dictionary> {

  zhasper.members.mac.com : <dictionary> {

    ExternalAddress : 143.211.101.234

    StatusMessage : GetZoneData failed: _afpovertcp._tcp.username.members.mac.com.

    AutoTunnelExternalPort : 4500

    StatusCode : -65554

    LLQExternalPort : 5353

    RouterAddress : 192.168.0.1

    LastNATMapResultCode : 0

  }

}

The vital clue was the StatusMessage, which tells you exactly which DNS lookup failed. The important thing is that the hostname starts with an underscore.

Take a look at the dnsmasq man page, specifically the filterwin2k option. Once upon a time, SRV records (and records with underscores) really were a sign that you had win2k machines on your network. Once upon a time, “triggering dial-on-demand links” was actually something to be worried about. Those times are long past.

I turned this option off (vi /etc/dnsmasq.conf, add a # at the start of that line to comment the option out, save the file, and run /etc/init.d/S65dnsmasq to restart the service). As expected BTMM now works fine. Well, as fine as you could expect.

[1] I’m ideologically opposed to all things UPnP, and BTMM in particular. What’s the point of having a firewall if you’re going to allow everything inside to poke so many holes in it it may as well not be there? There’s nothing BTMM can give me that a small firewall hole (to allow SSH on a non-standard port) + ssh portforwarding can’t give me in a more controlled way – and without shelling out $$$ to Uncle Steve, too. Nevertheless…

Shtep One: Download the iPhone Configuration Utility from Apple

Shtep Two: Futz with the Stuffz

Not shown: there’s an option at the bottom where you can stipulate self-wipe after as little as 5 incorrect passphrase attempts.

Shtep 3: Upload config as per instructions in the “Installing Configuration Profiles” section of the Deployment Guide.

Phdone.