How I do things

As promised, here are some tips from the trenches on surviving in prison. (For those who don’t follow my blog, prison is where your Internet access is restricted.)

There are two things you need to know better: software and people. I’ll try and cover the software in this post, and the more important topic in the next.

Portable apps

You’re often not in control of your laptops / PCs. You don’t have administrator access. You can’t install software. The solution is to install Portable Apps. Most popular applications have been converted into Portable Apps that you can install on to a USB stick. Just plug them into any machine and use them. I use Firefox and Skype quite extensively this way, but increasingly, I have a preference for Portable Apps for just about everything. It makes my bloated Start Menu a lot more manageable. Some of the other portable apps I have are: Audacity, Camstudio, GIMP, Inkscape and Notepad++.

Admin access

The other possibility is that you try and gain admin access. I did this once at a client site (a large bank). We didn’t have admin access. I wasn’t particularly thrilled. So I borrowed a floppy, installed an offline password recovery tool, rebooted, and got the admin password within a few minutes. This is with the full knowledge of the (somewhat worried) client. This is where the people part comes in, and I’ll talk about that later.

Proxies

But before you do any of these, you need to be able to download the files, most of which are executables. Those are probably blocked. Heck, the sites from which you can download these files are probably blocked in the first place.

Sometimes, internal proxies help. Proxies for different geographies may have different degrees of freedom. When I was at IBM, the Internet was accessible from most US proxies, just not from the Indian proxy. So it may just be a matter of finding the right internal proxy.

Or you can search for external public proxies. Sadly, many of these are blocked. Another option is for you to set up your own proxy. You can install mirrorrr on AppEngine for free, for example.

The most effective option, of course, is to use SSH tunnels. I’ve covered this is some detail earlier.

Google

Google has a wide range of tools that can help access blocked sites. If the site you’re accessing provides public RSS feeds, use Google Reader to access these. Public feeds for Twitter, for example, are available as RSS feeds.

Google’s cache is another way of getting the same information. Search for the URL, click on the “Cache” link to read the text even if it’s blocked.

To find more such help, Google for it!

Peopleware

… but all of this is, honestly, just a small part of it. The key, really, is to understand the people restricting your access. I’ll talk about this next.

Eight years ago, I started typing out each of the Calvin and Hobbes strips by hand. Four years ago, I set up a site that let people search for strips. Early this month, I was asked to take it down.

This is the story.

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I can’t quite remember when I started reading Calvin & Hobbes. The earliest reference I can find in my blogs is in July 1999. I remember it didn’t take me long to become a fan. I’d read every strip on the newspaper; hunt them out at bookshops; and spend a fair bit of time searching for archives online.

At some point, I discovered a few archives of the complete Calvin & Hobbes images. These aren’t hard to find, and they’re still around in plenty. So that gave me a few more months of delight.

The trouble, though, was that I never could quite find a strip when I wanted to. A friend would refuse to accept something, and I’d want to pull out that strip where Calvin declares to reside in the state of “Denial”. Or if they said something fancy, I’d want to pull out the one where Hobbes says “I notice your oeuvre is monochromatic”. Or those strips where Calvin’s Dad explains how things work (“They build bigger and bigger trucks over the bridge until it breaks.”)

There were a few Calvin and Hobbes search engines around. None quite did what I wanted them to – which was to search the text, and show me the strip, with a nice scrollable interface.

So I set out to build one. I can’t remember when, exactly, but it was before Sep 11, 2002.

It took me many years. I’d spend several train rides and evenings typing this stuff out. My friends, employers and family were a bit puzzled, but just added it to my list of eccentricities and carried on. I was halfway there in 2005, pushed further in 2006, and with some help, I managed to finally complete it.

I was able to do a lot of cool stuff with this, like statistically improbable phrases and some amusing posts as well.

It also increased traffic to my site, which was a bit disconcerting. I didn’t want to attract attention. In 2007, I removed the page from Google’s indexes, which cut the number of hits a fair bit. Since then, the site was only visited by a few people that knew of it, and the occasional stumblers.

A month ago, I got reddit-ed and MetaFiltered.

It didn’t take me long to figure that a takedown notice would be on its way. It turned out to be quite a friendly mail, actually – scary only in parts. (A bit of a carrot-and-stick approach, perhaps.) Anyway, it took me all of 2 minutes to remove all of the pages and links.

Of course, the reason I went to all of this effort was because the original Calvin & Hobbes site does not have the search feature. I’ve reached out to United Media, offering my transcripts and code. Let’s see what happens.