Ocho apellidos vascos

This Spanish romantic comedy plays on the stereotypes in Spain that consider Andalucians as 'dolce far niente' types while Basques are supposed to be 'frank and rude' and, of course, nearly all members of ETA, a terrorist organization.

A Basque opinion on Andalucians

The story is amusing: an Andalucian guy meets a Basque girl in Sevilla  (Andalucia) and falls in love, although the girl leggged it before he can make a move. He follows her to the Basque country. Since he knows Basques despise Andalucians, he tries to pretend that he is Basque, adopting the local dress, accent etc. At one point, when questioned by his hoped-for father in law, he proves his Basque ancestry by citing 8 pure Basque surnames  of his ancestors, hence the title.

All in all, a good comedy well worth watching.

☆☆☆

Setting up a local VNC server on Ubuntu 14.04

All of the information below can be found on the web. However, there are also many pages that describe methods that are more complicated than necessary, at least for Ubuntu 14.04. For instance, there is no need to install any new packages to get VNC working since both the server (Vino) and the client (Remmina) are already installed by default.

Configuring and starting the  VNC server is done by simply finding, and clicking on, 'desktop share' in the dash.

 

Clicking on 'Desktop Sharing' yields a window with some configuration options for the vino VNC server.

 

Note that all the security checkboxes have been unchecked. The idea is to make the machine running the  VNC server available to all the machines on the local area network. All the machines on the LAN are trusted, so there is no need for passwords etc. 

Once this configuration window is closed, the vino server is started. Since there seems to be no service associated with it, the easiest way to stop it -- if needed -- is to issue a 

     pkill vino-server

command. 

Next we use iptables to insert three "firewall" rules that prevent access to the port used by the VNC server, which defaults to 5900.

sudo iptables -A INPUT --protocol tcp --dport 5900 --source 192.168.1.0/24 -jACCEPT

sudo iptables -A INPUT --protocol tcp --dport 5900 --source 127.0.0.0/8 -j ACCEPT

sudo iptables -A INPUT --protocol tcp --dport 5900 -j DROP

Iptables requires administrative privileges, so each incantation is preceded by sudo. The 

"-A INPUT" option indicates that the rule applies to packets that arrive to the  VNC server while 

"--protocol tcp" and "--dport 5900" specify further restrictions to protocol and destination port (5900, the default port used by the VNC server). 

The first rule specifies the target action ACCEPT for packets that, in addition, come from a machine on the local area network. Such machines usually have an address of the form 192.168.0.N or 192.168.1.N where N is some small number. Thus --source 192.168.1.0/24 represents these subnet addresses using a mask. In short, packets that originated in the local network and are destined for the VNC server are accepted.

The second rule expresses that also packets from the server machine itself (the so-called localhost) are accepted. 

The third and final rule says that any other (i.e. packets that were not allowed in by the previous rules, that is why the order of the rules is important) packets for the  VNC server will be quietly dropped.

To see what rules are currently in use:

prompt> sudo iptables -L

Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT)

target     prot opt source               destination         

ACCEPT     tcp  --  192.168.1.0/24       anywhere             tcp dpt:5900

ACCEPT     tcp  --  127.0.0.0/8          anywhere             tcp dpt:5900

DROP       tcp  --  anywhere             anywhere             tcp dpt:5900

Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT)

target     prot opt source               destination         

Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT)

target     prot opt source               destination         

prompt>

It is possible to delete rules using a command like

  sudo iptables -D INPUT 3

which would delete the third (DROP) rule for INPUT packets. 

Contes Immoraux

An embarrassingly silly soft-porn (very soft) film. It dates from 1974, when hair (pubic or other) was left in its original state on actors and actresses. It consists of a number of disjoint stories, all of them boring. I found the one featuring a young Fabrice Luchini explaining the physics of tides to a girl, while said girl is performing some sexual acts on him, rather funny though.

Another story describes the crimes of Elizabeth Báthory, not sure how that could be erotic.

All in all: perhaps of historic interest but otherwise very boring and a waste of time.

☆

Tu dors Nicole?

This black and white film is set in the French speaking part of Canada. While I have no problem understanding other Canadian French spoken films, such as the delightful 'Les invasions barbares', I could not follow the dialogues in this one at all. Luckily, there were English subtitles.

The story describes how a young girl spends her summer, dividing her time between a boring job, her brother and his friends and her own best friend. Nothing much happens. That should not be a problem as many excellent French films, such as the ones by Éric Rohmer, rely on atmosphere alone to provide a memorable viewing experience. However, in this case, it did not work. At least not for me, the film seems to have had mostly very good reviews, see some of them at Rotten Tomatoes. I think most of the characters were boring and unsympathetic while the language they spoke sounded very unpleasant as well. Too bad.

☆☆

Le belle vie

A French film (2014) about a real story. A father kidnaps his 2 small sons to avoid leaving them with his estranged wife. The three of them live as fugitives for more than 10 years in different rural areas of France. The film describes the last phase, when the older of the -- by now almost grown up -- boys disappears to try to get his own life. On top of that, the younger one discovers the opposite sex and, after some hesitation, also decides to leg it. In the end, he reunites with his older brother and they get to see their mother. Not a great film but very watchable.

Who needs girls? Stay with your dad!

On the other hand..

You can read about how it turned out in the real world here.

☆☆☆

Summer Lovers

A featherweight 1982 US film. The story can be summarized as 'two pretty young things (m/f), one of which played by Daryl Hannah, meet an even prettier young thing (f), Valérie Quennessen

Valérie Quennessen

who sadly died at 31, and start a 'ménage à trois'

2/3 of the ménage à trois

on a beautiful Greek island (apparently Santorini) which is also full of beautiful young things having a good time.

The dialogues are toe-curling with an occasional French sentence thrown in for added intellectual weight. On the other hand, the film is so over the top in its silliness that it becomes charming. And Santorini is beautiful as well.

Santorini

Amusing.

☆☆

Blocking cookies from facebook and others

In a recent article in The Guardian, Nathalie Haynes praises Belgium's privacy commission for suing Facebook in a Belgian court. The company had failed to give satisfactory answers to questions re. its practices that were clearly in breach of the Belgian privacy protection laws.

One particular practice I find especially offensive: it turns out that Facebook tracks you even if you do not have a profile with them. If you happen to visit, e.g. as a result of a search, a 'public' page on Facebook, it sticks a cookie in your browser which is then used to track you in that whenever you visit a page containing the (Facebook) 'like' button, it knows you were there. Even if you did not click on the 'like' thing. In other words, you are followed, whether you agree or not. And that is against Belgian law, apparently. And rightly so, in my opinion.

Having read the story, I decided to try to block such evil actions by fiddling the settings of the browser, in this case Firefox. Since it was not immediately obvious to me how to go about blocking cookies from certain sites like Facebook, I summarize the procedure here, in the hope that it may be useful to others.

Here's the recipe:

First click on the menu button in the top right corner and select 'Preferences'.

This will bring up the 'General Preferences' page:

Then select 'Privacy' from the left pane and change 'Firefox will: Remember history' to 'Firefox will: Use custom settings for history'.

This will bring up more options on how to handle cookies: replace 'Keep until: they expire' by 'Keep until: ask me every time'.

To see from which sites cookies are accepted, click the 'Exceptions' button next to 'Accept cookies from sites':

Each time you visit a site for the first time, a window will pop up asking you how to deal with cookies from this site. Click 'Allow' for sites you trust and 'Deny' for sites that may not respect your privacy.

After a while, the list of Exceptions has grown, and Firefox will automatically handle the goodies and the baddies without bothering you anymore:

As you can see from the above image, you can always change your mind by explicitely adding to or deleting from this list of exceptions.

Google Chrome has a similar but much less convenient approach: it keeps lists of what to do with cookies from certain sites but the user has to maintain the list 'by hand', i.e. you cannot specify that Chrome should ask you about the cooking policy for a certain site as Firefox can.