I read a translated poem about Russia being "the Motherland" and its vast bosom years ago. Having driven through a significant part of it, I can agree on the "vast" part...

Also, as I am on a train and without access to the Internet, I will refrain from linking to a lot of pages; sorry. (Turns out I am posting this a week later, but I will still not link to stuff now; no time).

Russia in general

• All receipts you receive are torn before you get them; this is most likely due to the old Soviet voucher system, more on that below.
• Russia was hot with temperatures ranging from 27 to 32 degrees Celsius between Moscow and Ulan Ude.
• There aren't a lot of pedestrians bridges, but a lot of pedestrian tunnels. The sides of those tunnels are packed with tiny shops, often only two meters wide and 50-70 cm deep. Everything from stockings to candy over glasses to flowers and watches is being sold through a tiny window by some poor woman who somehow managed to get in there.
• Toilet brushes stand in water. In Germany, that's a sure sign of a really dirty toilet; in Russia, it's the thing to do. If you are lucky, there's blue cleaning stuff added to the water. If not, it will still have color. You are free to guess which.
• Queuing is war.

Moscow

Sights

Kreml

Our remaining time in Moscow was spent with touring the usual suspects; the Kreml is a lot less impressive in real life, the Red Square is tiny when compared to the stories I heard about it and the Chapel ofi St. Basil is even more colorful and impressive in real life. Lenin's body was inaccessible because workers built seats for the May 9th parade to the left and the right of it and they apparently thought it would be a good idea to block access to one of the main tourist attractions while doing so. A river tour of Moscow was a nice cool-off and we got to see quite a few things.

We managed to see the weekly military parade within the Kreml grounds, but it was mostly pomp and little substance. The National Treasure which you can access with an extra ticket within the Kreml grounds is nice, but less impressive than the tourist guides would make you believe. That being said... There's another museum within the museum and.... Whoah... Tourists pay extra, visitors go through the only non-security-theater check I encountered in Russia, guards are armed, people can only enter and leave in batches, and the stuff which is presented is mind-boggling. Disregarding the fist-to-calf-sized chunks of gold and platinum which are still in their original form directly from the mine, there is real, actual treasure galore. Little heaps of uncut and cut diamonds, an outline of Russia filled with cut diamonds and other random "we have this stuff" displays can be found as well. Then, you have various tiaras and other jewellery made from various gems. Not incorporating, but largely made of. All that pales in comparison to the crown, royal apple, scepter, etc. It's hard to put the amount of tiny multi-colored light points that shine at you into words. I was just standing there, swaying back and forth to catch the moving pattern of pinpoints. It's said that this collection is equalled only by the ones in the Tower of London and the one Shaw of Iran had and boy do I believe it.

TV Tower

Getting up there was funny.

The old-style Soviet queuing system was used:

• Go to a counter to tell an attendant what you want; receive stub
• Go to another counter, hand over stub to another attendant, pay for what you want; receive voucher
• Go to third counter, hand over voucher; receive ticket for tower The whole thing was made even more absurd by the fact that counter one was in the middle, counter two to the right and counter three to the left. As Russians do not believe in queuing and everybody just tries to get in first, this made for a nice little exercise.

"Security" for approaching the tower was multi-level, the guards see you approach along a long walkway way in advance and the main guard shed had several small cabins separated by thick glass. So good so menacing. But in a twist that would make Bizarro and Garry Larson proud, I was required, by means of metal detector gate, metal detector wand and even an x-ray machine to remove every shred of metal and other hard objects from myself and the camera bag and put them onto a table. Once I was without anything except my clothes and the bag was completely empty, I could pass. Everything I had had to remove was just laying there, not inspected in the least, for me to stuff back into pockets and bag and to take with me. This "everything" included a Spot Messenger 2 with lots of green and red blinky lights. The guard did not even glance and it. Security theater? Security theater.

The view from 364 meters down on Moscow was nice, but there was a lot of Smog so I couldn't see very far. Jumping on the glass floor while looking down was a lot of fun, though.

Subway to Thiefing

I bet Christopher Nolan rode the subway in Moscow at least once. That unnerving sound you hear during several key scenes in "The Dark Knight"? Two thirds of all subways make the same sound while moving.

Also, I had an encounter with a pickpocket down there; very classical, too. Guy approaches quickly, talks loudly and sounds as if it's really important (in Russian... duh... that's sure to keep me interested). His approach made me turn and protect my left leg pocket automatically, most likely marking the target for the tiny woman standing behind me. Now, I have to tell you something about my usual travel layout. As my normal pockets are very deep, it looks as if their content was in the leg pocket. Plus, there's an extra, hidden leg pocket where I keep the passports and train tickets. The outermost leg pocket is protected by a velcro flap, but it contains nothing of value; usually the appropriate phrasebook, local map, maybe a tissue or chewing gum. Due to this layering, the outermost pocket looks as if it's full to the brim with stuff. Also, I took pains to make it a habit to protect said leg pocket with my hand, nothing else. This looks as if that's the target, but what I am actually doing is protect my normal pocket with my forearm. The right side is different, but the most easily accessibly pocket always holds some small change. I pay from that stash but my actual wallet is well out of reach. Anyway, once the guy ran off, talking to several others, most likely marking all them for the actual pickpockets, I wanted to enter the subway. While the Russian-style queuing took place, I felt an unusual tug at the velcro flap. I looked down and saw a tiny woman to the left of me with a jacket held over her right side with the left arm; I look up to check no one is trying to steal from my permanently assigned female, feel another tug, look the woman into the eyes, look up again and around me, look down again and she is gone. All that took maybe three seconds and I had boarded the subway after an additional two.

In hindsight, it makes sense to choose the time of entry for attack. It's crowded, you are being pushed around, and once you are in the subway, it will start moving more or less immediately while the thief remains in the station.

In this case, she would only have gotten a grubby map of Moscow's subway and an English-Russian phrasebook, but she got nothing at all.

Moscow-Novosibirsk

Where to begin...

If you think a few hours on a train are a long time, try over fifty hours. Things get so bad, you start getting land-sick while not in a moving train. You even start missing the familiar tunk-cachunk, tunk-cachunk, tunk-cachunk... of driving over rails with gaps in them when you are not moving.

The defining element of the Trans-Siberian Railway are birch trees. And birch trees. And then more birch trees. You would not believe how many birch trees there are. This is made "worse" by the way the Russian Railway protects their rails. Left and right of the track, there's a cleared area of maybe ten to twenty meters, sometimes as little as three. Outside of that, they plant ten to twenty meters of birch trees, presumably to catch snow during winter. Beyond that protective perimeter, there's the normal landscape.As a result, on top of the near endless stretches of birch woods, you see most if not all scenery through a layer of birch trees. You get sick sick of birch trees after a few hours and you see them for days on end.

Bullet points to save myself some typing and you some reading...

• More than a thousand kilometers without a single hill. Flat as a pan.
• The whole route is powered by electricity. No diesel engines in sight.
• Many stations are little more than a heap of smoothed gravel, bordered by some wooden planks. Some stations have obviously been built by locals and are even less well-defined.
• You can see people in the middle of nowhere, walking along the railway tracks. At first this seemed counter-intuitive, but most if not all roads out there are dirt tracks. As there seems to be standing water across a third of Russia, this dirt is turned into mud. After walking maybe twenty meters across a parking lot, I had to scrape a heavy, thick cake of black earth from my soles. The railway is the only functioning footpath those people have. Many people even build shoddy bridges towards the tracks from their homes, obviously preferring to walk along the tracks over walking through the village.
• Railway crossings along the Trans-Siberian route, no matter how tiny, have a small cabin beside them. While the train passes, there's one guy or gal standing in said cabin, holding a yellow stick vertically out towards the train. Sometimes, you have not seen any living thing, other than birch trees, for twenty minutes and there, in the middle of nowhere right beside a dirt track, there's someone holding a stick out towards the train. Weird.
• Railway crossings of paved roads will always have two steel plates coming out of the ground, angled towards oncoming traffic on each side. This may not stop a heavy truck at full speed, but a car will disintegrate on these barriers without touching a passing train.
• The railways is important for Russia. Two parallel tracks cut across the whole country, transporting everything back and forth. Where "everything" means mostly coal and birch wood, I guess.
• All freight trains are usually 70 tanker waggons or 100 box waggons long, but you see the odd 100 tanker waggons, as well. You have more than enough time and opportunity to count them and then some.
• There are supposedly women at every station, selling what they cook at home. Unfortunately, this was only true for two stations. The things we did manage to get were very nice; I do wonder why anyone would offer (or buy) cooked and peeled potatoes, though.
• Every waggon has its own hot-water stove. They are powered by coal. Yep, you have a coal fire burning in every single waggon on the Trans-Siberian.

Novosibirsk

The non-existent hostel

We arrived at ~0200 local and made our way to the hostel we had booked a room with. Walking to the correct address, we saw several signs but they all turned out to be for a police station and some other state agency. We walked back, forth, double-checked, triple-checked: no hostel. We then walked around the building through some not-quite-nice back alleys, but other than a few entries to private flats, there was nothing. Thankfully, the booking slip included a number which we called and after at least twenty rings (no kidding), when I had given up and wanted to hang up, it stopped ringing. Dead silence. After maybe ten seconds, someone started talking in Russian. I asked him if he spoke English and told him that we could not find the hostel. He mumbled something about being sorry and that we should wait, he would come down. Fast forward a minute or two and someone walked towards us.

Again, he mumbled about being sorry, that the hostel "did not work" at the moment and that we would need to sleep in his private apartment. He ushered us into some back alley entrance, into his flat, and proceeded to remove the sheets from the couch on which he had slept; after putting on new sheets, we had our "hostel" bed, ready to sleep on. We briefly considered if he would murder us in our sleep, but him and me even got to talking a bit. Over cheese, sausage and rum (at 0300), he admitted that the hostel did not exist and he merely planned to turn his flat into a hostel for the summer while he and his family moved into their summer house (the Russian term of which escapes me, at the moment) in the countryside. He had accepted our reservation as he thought he would be finished by that time. He did not even get started, though. While he sent us an overbooking notice through booking.com two days before, we were on the train at that time, so... booking.com even called him to check what happenend to us as we did not book another place through them. Good customer service/protection, that.

Next morning, he didn't even want to take our money (we paid anyway) and, as a means of compensation, drove us into the city in the morning and to a train museum well outside the city limits, one of the fabled scientist cities, and a large lake which everyone in Novosibirsk claims is an ocean, in the afternoon.

Foreigners, foreigners!

All in all, Novosibirsk was relatively uneventful, safe for one bizarre episode. We took our lunch in a local fast food joint (why do all the good stories happen there, and not at the various truly local places?) and threw the cashier our well-rehearsed "Niet Russkie; anglisky?" with phrasebook in hand and he actually understood a few words of English (beef, chicken, fries). We told him, in our worst Russian, that we are from Germany wished him a nice day and went to sit down. A few minutes later, a girl approached us, literally hopping from one foot to the other and wringing her hands. She told us that the cashier had told her that we spoke English and if it would be OK if she talked to us. We suspected some sort of elaborate ruse, but went with it. Turns out, she had English at school and really wanted someone to practice English on. Two young men passed our table and exchanged a few words with her, sitting down out of sight. When she told us that she had to leave now but if it would be OK if the two boys joined us we suspected a ruse yet again. But those two were law students, one with a minor in English and one with a minor in German; both of them also extremely nervous, asking us if we would talk to them. When they had to leave, they told us that the three of them worked at the burger joint and that their shift was just about to start when the news that foreigners were here spread amongst staff like wildfire. The girl stopped by several times in between cleaning tables, getting in a sentence or two before being cussed at by her supervisor. All in all, this took about twenty minutes and seeing three people so nervous and grateful to talk with us felt beyond absurd.

On the other hand, not a single traveller we met even considered stopping in Novosibirsk during their transit so there really does seem to be a shortage of non-Russians there.

Weird, and memorable.

Novosibirsk-Irkutsk

• Birch trees.
• Lots of burnt underwood, presumably to prevent larger fires.
• Birch trees.
• Sticky, stuffy, 30+ degree waggon with windows that could be opened but which were locked (this is why I always carry a Swisstool with me).
• Birch trees.

Irkutsk / Listvianka / Lake Baikal

Listvianka

Aah, lake Baikal... the oldest and deepest lake on Earth which holds a fifth of the global non-salt water reserves; a must-see in my book.

Quad tours at break-neck speeds, dry-suit diving with Russian regulators, walking barefoot in between and across drift ice that made its way onto the shorei, and extended hiking around the lake's coast...

All of which I could not do because I was ill and had to spend two solid days in bed.

The draft from the open window in between Novosibirsk and Irkutsk was enough to give me a rather bad cold which peaked at Lake Baikal.

Still, the area was lovely and we were glad to be out of a train and able to unpack our stuff without having to repack immediately for once.

I am not sure where my current losing streak with regards to diving is coming from (Grimsey, diving north of the Arctic circle with birds that plummet into the water and hunt fish: Only guy who does this is on the Icelandic mainland that day; Svalbard, diving north of the Arctic circle in permanent darkness: The few people who do this privately did not reply while I was there; Baikal, oldest, deepest, largest lake on Earth: ill), but I will most likely return to Russia for a week of ice diving in Lake Baikal next winter or the one after that.

As an aside, I saw several people walking to Lake Baikal with buckets to get their water. Other people got it from a well which was still half frozen. If you have running water consider yourself lucky...

Irkutsk

Nice city, largely uneventful. The farther east you get within Russia, the more normal women look. In Moscow, just as in Paris, they are way over-dressed and even service personnel will walk with high heels. Thankfully, I don't have to wear heels, but for the other males out there: Walking and standing in these things hurts and thus most if not all people who stand and walk for a living have flat shoes.

We happened upon preparations for a military parade, complete with cordon, viewing podests, at least half a dozen TV cameras etc, but were not sure if it would start soon enough for us to catch our train.We asked someone who told us it would start at 2100 local, at 1945 local it seemed about to start, and sure enough at 1955 sharp, the whole thing went under way. About a dozen groups of 50-100 people each, all in their own, respective uniforms stood against one side of a cordoned-off street and several higher-ups on the other side. Two highest-ups shouted into microphones and the throng of people on the other side shouted back answers. Then, the two highest-ups stood in the back of a jeep each and drove past said throng, stopping in front of each group, shouting into microphones mounted in the back of the jeeps and the groups shouted back once again. After that, all groups marched around the make-shift plaza once, saluting the higher ups. Once they were done, and they took ages, two trucks drove by with soldiers jumping out of the moving trucks and moving into crouching positions. They ran around in a circle a few times and engaged in pretend hand-to-hand combat. I am sure they are skilled at whatever style they wanted to show, but they were overdoing things so badly, they were funny, not imposing. When they jumped over some barriers, the barriers fell to pieces and everyone scrambled to make it look as if that was part of the show. While carrying off the gear, it fell into further pieces which was even more funny. An armoured personnel carrier ended the show; several tougher looking guys jumped off of that one and their mock combat involved fully automatic fire (of blanks), several flashbangs, smoke grenades and, to top things off, the machine gun mounted on the APC moving down the opposing team with blanks.

I never witnessed a "real" military parade in person but this one was somewhat disappointing. On the one hand, there was a distinct lack of ballistic missile carriers and tanks like you see in movies, documentaries and games, on the other hand, the whole thing had a make-do feeling to it. The cordoning police had designated spots to stand on, yet walked around. They were standing to attention, yet checking their cell phones. Several people in one uniformed group were wearing track suits and jeans. Another uniformed guy had a grocery bag with him; yet another one was carrying a huge water bottle. Bikers zig-zagged through the cordon and when the whole show was just about to wrap up the police finally started putting up barriers around the unmoving pedestrians, not blocking the bikers. One little girl was standing well within the cordoned area, watching with big eyes and after she did not react to the police talking to her, they just built the barriers in a curve around her.

And to top it all off, some guy with a cane walked all through the parade with his personal camcorder, trying to direct the whole show while being ignored by everyone. Still, I am sure he managed to mess up some otherwise perfectly good TV scenes.

Irkutsk-Russian border

• Diesel-powered trains.
• Single track most of the time with frequent stops to let other trains pass.
• Distinctively less developed cities, stations, streets, and other infrastructure along the road.
• 32+ degrees in our waggon.
• The train attendant was extremely unfriendly and just generally miserable even by Russian standards.
  • No toilet paper or towels at all on toilets.
  • While the other attendants made a point of presenting themselves well, he shuffled around in slacks all the time (not bad per se, but Russia is big on uniforms, so...)
  • He took all our tickets and stubs (including the ones not from this part of the journey) and kept them without comment. After we asked for them several times, he barked at us that we would get them back before Ulan Bator. Why? No idea...
  • He refused to let us exit the train during the very few stops. We were unable to exit through other waggons as the connecting door was locked. Being stuck in a train sucks.
• Border and customs took NINE HOURS!!! Stuck in blistering heat without a breeze, without access to a toilet, just waiting for bureaucracy to go its way. I checked all doors, we were locked into said waggon and there were no 'break glass to leave in emergency' windows. Especially nice as there's a coal fire burning in the hot-water stove and the whole train is plastered with warning signs about fire and what to do. In our case, presumably, burn to death; preferably without disturbing the attendant.
• The Russian stamp for entering Russia (by plane) has a plane on it, the departure one a train.
• The Russian side of the border is built like a fortress. There are several towers and bridges over the rails so trains can be checked from above, and reinforced holes dug into the ground in which soldiers stand and check the train from below.

I have no idea if the literal translation carries over, but to be on the safe side: I like what I've seen up to now.

First impressions are always the most honest (and I may have sketchy access to the Internet at best in the coming days) so here goes. I haven't even been here for 24 hours so take everything I say with a sack of salt.

• I was told, repeatedly, that Russians tend to keep even more to themselves than us Germans; unless they see a reason to open up, that is. By and large, that seems to be true. Thankfully, "a reason to open up" seems to include "these guys look lost and I want to practice my English". This led to a Russian asking me what the best German beer in a random supermarket was while I ended up with what he thinks is the best Russian beer. Yay.
• As expected, most Russians don't speak even the tiniest shred of English. Sometimes, they even keep talking in Russian after you've made it clear again and again that you don't understand them. The same thing happened to me in the middle of nowhere in India; it's strange, but I suspect (I don't know!) that some people are simply not very firm with the concept of different people speaking different languages and that someone can't speak their own.
• Moscow's Metro system is very nice
  • They have a circle line. Why doesn't Munich have a circle line? Again: why doesn't Munich have a circle line?
  • All lines have two dedicated tracks, one for each direction
  • Trains arrive and leave every few minutes. I don't think we waited more than two minutes for the subway today, even though we saw the prior train depart. The monorail has longer waiting times, but I'd say that's five to ten minutes, tops.
  • Once you figure out how their signs etc. work, it's very simple and quite efficient to follow them:
    • Every line has a color. Follow the colored bars on signs.
    • Once you reach the color/line you want, look at the tunnel walls. There's an arrow depicting the stations in the direction of this tunnel; your station is marked red. Below every station where you can board other trains, there's a list of possible destinations right underneath the station name. The newer trains have the same arrow (sans transit lists) with a blinking indicator of where you are.
  • The tunnels are deeply underground. I knew those tunnels were designed to function as atomic bomb shelters if the need arose. Now I believe that this would actually work.
  • One big minus is that people in a wheelchair or similar are SOL. Escalators, stairs, uneven ground, gaps and height differences between station floor and train, you name it. Everything that shouldn't be there is there and plenty. Things that should be there are not. Accessibility does not seem to be a concern at all.
• Labour must be incredibly cheap. Every escalator has its own operator, watching the moving stairs in theory and a tablet/smartphone in practice. You have one person selling metro tickets and right beside that someone who watches the ticket-checking gates.
• The local McDonalds (we needed a trusted default) is swarming with employees. It looks chaotic, but it's quick. Also, they put tons of onions and different sauces into and onto stuff. Me gusta.
• Once you start getting the hang of converting Cyrillic into Latin characters in your head, you can read the words out as if they were German. People will understand you without problem. Useful, that...
• There seems to be a social or religious agreement to not inflate car tires properly. I have literally never in my life seen so many cars zipping around with half-flat tires.
• (Many) Russians are tall. I am used to being the tallest person around; I will meet someone taller every few weeks or months, in Germany. Today, I saw three people who were taller than me; two of similar size. Again, this is literally the first time in my adult life that this has happened in such a short time.
• Stuffing things into your checked-in shoes to save space is good. Not removing a piece of cloth from a shoe and not realizing it while walking all around Moscow... hurts.
• Before buying anything at a street stall, ask for the price; also, carrying a calculator to show numbers to others is useful.
• Blueberries don't seem to be very special. While Nordic countries tend to have saner prices than Germany, Russia is cheap when it comes to blueberries.
• All food that's been imported from Germany is priced insanely high. €20 for a box of cheap chocolates? Check. € 50 for four packets of dried fruit? Check.
• As an amusing aside, the supermarket was swarmed with and subsequently deadlocked by Chinese (yes, they spoke Mandarin as far as I could tell) who were stockpiling chocolate in ridiculous quantities. We were in line for about 45 minutes; the store, a two-story, higher-end location, ran out of change. As we paid by card, that didn't affect us other than the long waiting time. Chocolate in China must be really bad, really expensive, practically unavailable or a mix of the three. I guess we will find out in two weeks :)

Google rant

Seems venting can be a worthwhile once in a while; the content of this post made its way into Google. No promises of any kind were made, but it's good to know that this is getting some exposure within Google :)

That was quick.

moreutils et al

Steve Kemp is right; moreutils is very useful in some situations. And yes, it's a pity that we all have our own scripts without a central repository to host them all. The problem is one of diminishing returns and information overload; if any given collection becomes too large, it becomes tedious to look through it. You may have the Most Awesome Ever solution to any given problem, but unless whoever needs it can find it quickly, it's useless to them.

Thorsten Glaser suggested this collection, but it suffers from the same basic problem: Not enough content? You won't find what you need. Too much content? You won't find what you need. Finding the right balance is highly non-trivial.

Linux storage

Russell Coker shared yet another chapter of his continuing quest for modern, reliable, software-based storage on Linux. The short version is "ZFS is not that good on Linux while btrfs is not ready for prime time, yet." That's, unfortunately, not much of a surprise. fsck.btrfs is still too new and the lack of RAID 5/6 is an absolute show-stopper as far as I am concerned. COW solves the writing speed issues so, hopefully, that old argument can finally be laid to rest. And on top of the "wastng" of more disks for RAID 10, the minimum number of failed disks that can lead to data loss on RAID 10 is two whereas it's three for RAID 6. No-brainer, imo.

Anyone who does not agree with Dell's pricing structure should seriously consider looking at SuperMicro, by the way. Cheap(ish), reliable, high disk densities.

Password hashes

Saku Ytti talks about password hashing and the relative merits of different algorithms.

While I agree that bcrypt incorporates a good approach inasmuch it's designed to be slow to compute and can be made slower as needed, I think he focuses on one aspect while disregarding all others.

Still, the premise that deterring brute force attacks on known hashes is the only concern is wrong. Avoiding collisions, reasonable certainty that there are no computational shortcuts, irreversibility, pseudo-random output, full use of the output's possible values, and thorough analysis by experts in the field are important concerns, as well.

Brute forcing known hashes is hardly the only attack. When brute forcing a service, i.e. against an unknown hash, no matter if the system is remote or local, the computational cost of hashing is mostly irrelevant. Rainbow tables help mitigate computational cost when trying to extract clear text in case the hash is known. And if there are a lot of collisions or an easy way to find them, knowing the clear text password is not needed. Simply use whatever generates the correct output and you're done.

Again, I am not saying that bcrypt is a bad idea; it's just that there are more concerns than computational cost alone.

Travel

If you know your way around Novosibirsk, please contact me. We have almost no idea what to do while there other than visiting the railroad museum; part of the reason why we are stopping there is to have a break after ~50 hours on the train and because Novosibirsk is just an awesome name.

Our focus while there will be on seeing interesting industrial or research sites. Given that there are large industrial complexes and formerly secret cold war secret research cities situated around Novosibirsk it would be a pity not to see any of them. We may end up hiring a taxi via the hotel and having that drive us around a bit. Somewhat boring and potentially costly, but a feasible backup.

Blogging frequency

I have to admit being am a bit worried about spamming the various aggregators which are fed from this blog. Writing this catchall post is an attempt to mitigate this. While I am getting a surprising amount of positive feedback, I would be interested to hear anything negative, if applicable, as well. You know how to reach me.

Now that our departure is looming ahead of us, it's time to give a short update. (Turns out it's not so short, after all...)

Preparation

Visa

Mongolian and Russian visas are done; we will apply for the Chinese ones next Monday.

Travel

All train tickets, hotels, hostels, and tents have been booked and both a horse-back tour through Mongolia and scuba diving in Lake Baikal have been pre-arranged.

The Russian railway seems to do maintenance and development on the live website all the time which meant we were forced to book through a local travel agent. We paid a hefty extra charge for that privilege but still, that was less than half of what we would have paid if we had booked through a German agent.

With the help of #china-lug on irc.freenode.net, we found accommodation in a traditional Siheyuan in an old Hutong. Hopefully, this will be a interesting as it sounds.

Locals

By the power of attending conferences and this blog, I now have local contacts in Moscow, Beijing, and Shanghai. Everyone who contacted me was extremely nice and helpful. I have been getting hints and tips galore; I doubt our preparations would be as neat as they are without this invaluable help. Thanks; you know who you are :)

Packing list

Apparently there's an interest in what we will be bringing; also, this will be a nice reminder for the future.

Information and note-keeping

• Travel guides for the Trans-Siberian and Beijing (in case you use Lonely Planet books, the new layout they are using as of late is a lot better)
• Phrase books for Russian, Mongolian, and Mandarin
• Print-out of all bookings, etc.
• Paper notebook to track expenses, make notes, cross-reference photos, and various other uses
• Several sturdy ball pens
• Post-It notes and those neon-colored self-adhesive marker flags
• Permanent marker

Luggage

• Two Backpacks
• Deuter Helion 80, a duvel bag with wheels which transforms into a proper backpack. This. Is. Awesome.
• Rain covers for all bags

Clothing

• Heavy-duty hiking boots
• Sneakers
• Fleece jacket
• Hard shell jacket
• Worker's pants (pockets, pockets, pockets!)
• Base-ball cap (against sund and for propping up the hood of hood if neccessary)
• Wind-tight hat with close-fitting ear flaps (looks like crap, but is the best I ever had)
• Long underwear
• Assorted T-Shirts, socks, etc.

Personal and computer security

• Kubotan
• Copies of all documents, tickets, visas, etc.; apparently you should never hand originals of any documents to Russian police
• Hand-held GPS
• Two-way GPS tracking beacon with satellite uplink
• US Dollars as backup currency
• Second pair of glasses
• Old laptop with 1 TB drive and a fresh installation of Debian with no personal data, ssh keys, etc.
• VPN & SSH access to a throw-away virtual host back home
• Old dumbphone

Fastening, storage, and tools

• Reflective guy-wire with knot-less tighteners
• Bracelets made from braided para cord with whistle built into the clasp
• Stainless steel bolt-snaps
• Zip ties, assorted lengths
• Zip-Loc bags
• Plastic clamps for open bags, etc.
• Victorinox Swisstool with ratchet and bits (Leatherman, Gerber, you name it, can't even get close in quality)
• Pocket knife
• Cut-proof Kevlar gloves with latex anti-slip covering
• Ballistol (oil, skin protection, dealing with cuts, and for cleaning cutlery)
• Silicone grease
• MoS₂ grease
• Duct tape
• Super-glue (for deeper wounds, closing holes in fabric, etc.)
• Power outlet adapter (Russia and Mongolia use CEE 7/4 while China uses four different sockets)
• Electrical extension cord with multiple outlets
• Swedish firesteel
• Cigarette lighter
• Make-up remover pads (compressed cotton wool; great for starting fires)
• Various flashlights, headlamps, and key-chain lights (no power in the Mongolian desert, remember?)
• Laser pointer
• Tritium everglow key-chain marker
• Chemical hand and foot warmers

Health

• Gold/silver foil rescue blanket
• Water purifying tablets
• Medkit with painkillers, disinfectant, bandages, you name it

Photography

• DSLR with spare battery and battery grip that uses AA cells (again, no power in the Mongolian desert)
• Wide angle, prime and super-zoom lens
• Filters
• Backup point-and-shoot
• USB thumb drive
• 2 external HDDs
• SD cards
• Tripod

Minimal scuba gear

• Scuba mask
• Dive computer
• Dive compass
• Dive light

Food

• Picnic cutlery
• Plastic cup
• Folding 1.5 liter plastic bottles with sippy top
• Instant coffee
• Pulverized cocoa
• Teabags
• Muesli bars
• Hard sausages and cheeses
• Thermos
• Compact 8-spice shaker
• TupperWare box
• "Typically German food" that we will trade for local food on the train; Russians tell me that's their go-to food when in Germany and that we should bring it
  • Beer
  • Frankfurters
  • Mustard

Convenience

• Toilet paper
• Single-use washcloths
• Anti-mosquito head nets
• Silk sleeping bag liners (for train compartments and when sleeping in borrowed sleeping bags in the Gers)
• Old towel (can be thrown away if need be)
• Microfiber towel (light, packs to less than fist size)
• Sleeping mask
• Noise-cancelling earbuds
• Heavy-duty hand cleaning paste
• Washing paste for clothes
• Toiletries

Leisure

• Several card games
• Travel Trivial Pursuit
• Nintendo DS
• MP3 player
• e-book reader
• USB surround speakers
• Headphones
• Various movies and TV shows
• zsnes plus ROMs of legally-owned games
• Snuff tobacco (for socializing with Mongolian nomads)

That's it.

Re-reading this list, I wonder how we managed to fit all of this into an 80-liter travel bag and a 15-liter backpack, but we did and with room to spare.

Google seems to become more and more annoying.

Package download

http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ is slow. Not just slow, but slow. Any random apt-get update will take ages; just sitting there waiting for Google's servers to send any data. Downloading actual packages is slow, as well.

Ironically, Google's PageRank will punish sites for loading slowly; it's a pity they don't use their considerable server & bandwidth capacities to fix slowness they are causing, themselves.

Chrome

Copy and paste is a central part of what I use a mouse for. X has had two copy buffers for as long as I can remember, one for mouse selection, pasting with middle mouse button and one for CTRL-c/CTRL-v. Chrome merges the two.

That's bad enough in and as of itself, but every time Chrome gets focus, it will clobber anything you may have in your copy buffers at that time with anything that's selected. No matter if you selected it via mouse, via keyboard, a context switch autoselected something. Selection goes into buffer. Every time. Every. Single. Time.

To add insult to injury, this is dependent on which tab is active. And if you happen to search on the site (CTRL-f), it will always use what's in the search bar to clobber buffers, no matter if anything on the actual website has been selected.

I can't find the bug report about this at the moment, but Google's stance is that this is a feature and introducing an option for traditional copy & paste handling is not desirable.

Google+

I get that they feel a need to combat Facebook, but still, pushing Google+ on you is just annoying. At least the Android application has had a permission change on ICS so it can not auto-update. It's the little things ;)

WWW

Unified branding, the need to support touch-based devices in their UI, etc. Still, GMail's new interface sucks and the old one will be going away for good. And while making some UI elements larger or displaying them unconditionally makes sense for hand-held portrait displays, this is highly annoying on wide-screen landscape displays. 1366x768 may have overtaken 1024x768, but 768 is a constant here and still not a lot.

As an aside, hopefully the Apple Effect and the iPad 3 will break the age-long stalemate with regards to screen resolution. More is better, here.

Android

Bloatware

Using stock Android means you won't get Facebook and other useless apps pre-installed. Yet, uninstalling stock applications, like Google+, is impossible.

Rights management

It's nice that I get to see what kind of access an application would like to have. It's not nice that I can not choose what access I am willing to grant any given application. I can make a binary decision, install or not install, but I can't refuse random access rights to applications. There are custom versions of Android out there which allow you to do this and many applications seem to cope with being unable to do some things. This should be a standard feature.

Access management

The concept of "access to USB storage" meaning "whatver your SD card or, in the Galaxy Nexus' case, just a specific directory" is also broken. There is a middle ground between "this application needs access to a large chunk of storage" and "this application needs complete access to said large chunk". Just assign the application a specific directory to write into and read from and done's done.

Multi-user

I can not hand anyone my phone to play a game or surf the Internet without giving them the ability to look through all my email, contacts, calendar, you name it. While I only give my phone to people I trust completely, this still sucks.

How hard can it be to create a minimal guest mode which allows people to access a few pre-selected applications with a custom setting of if they are allowed to use cellular data and/or WiFi?

Data access

Authorized Access

Ah, the big one.... Keep in mind that I am using Google's latest and greatest, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus GSM. It's as cutting-edge as you can get.

Yes, having one continuous storage device is nice. But MTP support on Linux is abysmal and you are forced to access your data by means of MTP or PTP. gphoto2, gwenview, and gthumb are all unable to import any photos via PTP; no program I tried can transfer anything via MTP. gphoto2 will transfer the background images which APOD (highly recommended, by the way; there's also a donation application for this) stores on my phone. That's it.

So, unless I send email to myself, use WiFi-based hacks, or root my phone, I can not access my data. On the strongest mobile platform in the world. Using the most powerful and versatile OS with up-to-date packages. In 2012. Yay.

Unauthorized Access

Not being able to access my data is a Bad Thing. Even worse is when others can access my data. Contrary to older Android versions, someone decided that it would be a good idea to allow MTP or PTP, only. As in "you can not disable MTP and PTP. One of them has the be activated." This is awesome when you want to charge your phone at an airport or at an acquaintance's possibly malware-ridden Windows machine. Everyone and their bot-herder can potentially access my data while I can not.

Usability

And while MTP/PTP is an either/or decision, they are using check-boxes, not radio buttons. There's a decade or more of UI experience about check-box versus radio button, so why not use it? I know of at least one owner of a Galaxy Nexus who was not even aware that he couldn't turn off MTP (the default) as the UI pretends otherwise.

Opaqueness

And good luck trying to contact anybody about this. Having filed a few bugs against Google stuff in the past, I simply gave up on it. Back when Gmail's mailing list filtering and labelling system was somewhat broken, I spent months hunting down people who knew people who knew someone who was able to actually do something about it.

Q: How much wood would a Richuck chuck if a Richuck could chuck wood?

A: Quite a bit.

The few times in the past when I was able to get my hands onto a tree or three, I thoroughly enjoyed turning them into firewood. It's good workout, you get fresh air, and you can actually see what you accomplished with your hands. Back then, I had access to a hatchet, a felling axe and a single wedge. Splitting anything larger than 20 or 30 cm in diameter was tedious work, though still enjoyable.

Two weeks ago, I was presented with several cubic meters of spruce; log diameters ranging in between 10 and 50 cm, pre-cut to two meters in length. Plus, access to a chainsaw. Yay. After some research, I ordered two helicoidal splitting wedges (they turn themselves when driven into wood), a splitting axe and a splitting maul. The rest of the equipment handed to me is probably older than I am, but still working perfectly fine. You have to admire the simple yet efficient design of the cant hook. Something I could not find an English name for is the German Sapie, in itself loosely defined as "any tool you can use to pick up, turn, drag or otherwise move logs". There's a surprising variety of these tools, but then, moving wood around has been a necessity of life for millennia so people are bound to come up with good designs.

Last weekend, the chainsaw wasn't running very smoothly or much at all, resulting in hours spent coaxing it to cut at least enough for some hacking (the wood, not the computer kind). Other than our chainsaw troubles, that weekend was very pleasant and I ended up splitting tons of logs.

We had the chainsaw overhauled and resharpened during the week and picked it up again on Friday, planning to resume cutting early Saturday, a plan that was spoiled by torrential downpour and hail.

In the afternoon, I started splitting some left-overs around the house and used a short break from the rain to head out into the woods to where the logs are piled. The place I chose for splitting is somewhat exposed and even though the mix of rain, sleet, snow, hail, and everything in between resumed soon enough turns out you simply stop caring at some point. While temperatures were around freezing, I ended up being drenched in sweat in no time at all. There is something primordial and deeply satisfying about simply working away at these logs, ending with piles and piles of firewood. Of course, using my favourite new toy, 4.6 kg of forged stainless steel fuck you, increased said satisfaction immensely. Between the two wedges and that maul, splitting any middle-European conifers is a breeze. Add in the splitting axe for slim trunks and splitting will take less than 60 seconds per cut, no matter how many branch knots or pockets of shock-absorbing partially decayed wood you encounter. If only I've had those tools a decade and a half ago...

While I am feeling muscles I forgot I had, I am planning to pursue this new-found old hobby for at least the foreseeable future. Especially since I sourced more logs and a few trees, already.

This one confused me for a moment; iperf did not do what I wanted it to do.

Quoth the manpage:

CLIENT SPECIFIC OPTIONS
       -d, --dualtest
              Do a bidirectional test simultaneously

Doeth the program:

host1:~% iperf -dc host2
WARNING: option -d is not valid for server mode
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to host2, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 16.0 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  3] local host1 port 42220 connected with host2 port 5001
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  3]  0.0-10.0 sec    376 MBytes    315 Mbits/sec
host1:~% iperf -c host2 -d
------------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 85.3 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to host2, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 63.1 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  5] local host1 port 42221 connected with host2 port 5001
[  4] local host1 port 5001 connected with host2 port 57550
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  5]  0.0-10.0 sec  98.7 MBytes  82.8 Mbits/sec
[  4]  0.0-10.0 sec    978 MBytes    817 Mbits/sec
host1:~% 

Ignoring the transfer rates, I invite you to spot the {premature,misguided} optimization.

This is quite subtle and probably non-obvious during implementation. The moral of the story is to collect all data before starting to evaluate it, at least if full information is needed for correct processing.

Before anyone points out the obvious, yes I filed a bug.

Funny, I had planned to use the same name for quite some time..

Good

English

• 60 Second Earth
• 60 Second Mind
• 60 Second Science
• Astronomy Cast
• Big Picture Science (the "story" they tell with every episode is superfluous, but the content is top-notch)
• BBC World Service Discovery
• BBC World Service Documentary
• BBC World Service The Interview
• BBC World Service Witness
• FLOSS Weekly
• Freakonomics Radio (annoying "natural" dialogues, but the content is OK-ish)
• guardian.co.uk Science Weekly
• guardian.co.uk Tech Weekly
• National Geographic Weekend
• StarDate
• StarTalk

German

• Bayern 2 - IQ - Wissenschaft und Forschung
• Bayern 2 - radioWissen
• Leschs Kosmos
• ZDF - abenteuer forschung

All aboard the Choo Choo train!

As some of you know, we are planning our trip on the Trans-Siberian (well, Trans-Mongolian to be exact) railway, at the moment. Given the wall of text my post about Svalbard turned out to be, I am trying to split early and often.

The plan

Our three-week itinerary is pretty much fixed, by now:

• Fly to Moscow, tour the city
• Take the train to Novosibirsk, tour the city and industrial area (if anyone knows of good photo opportunities, do let me know! Novosibirsk is supposedly incredible if you know where to look... and I don't...)
• Take the train to Irkutsk, continue to Listvyanka near Lake Baikal, scuba dive, maybe take train around Lake Baikal just because
• Take the train to Ulan Bator, tour Mongolia for five days
• Take the train to Beijing, visit usual places, have chinese candy
• Take the train to Shanghai, marvel at skyline at night, visit one of the water cities nearby
• Fly back home

Visa issues

Not wanting to just book any random package with any random travel agent, we are picking and mixing our own, as usual. Given visa requirements, language barriers and things that are plain weird, it's been an interesting ride before we even pack our bags a month or two from now.

Being European, visas are something that do not concern us a lot, normally. I am starting to realize how incredibly lucky we are... barring India, we never needed to do much to be allowed to enter any foreign country.

Not so on this trip...

While Mongolia has rather lax, or let's just say reasonable, terms, China and Russia are different.

To get a visa for Russia, you need:

• Passport, valid for at least six months after your planned departure
• Photo, not older than six months
• Personal invitation (you simply buy those from agencies within Russia)
• Voucher from an accredited travel agency
• Detailed itinerary
• Proof of health insurance for exact time of stay, i.e. dates of entry and departure; make it too long and you may have trouble getting your visa
• Copy of one of the following:
  • Current pay slip
  • Bank statement
  • Registration of real estate
  • Registration of company in your name

For China, you need to provide a night-to-night itinerary of hotel stays. This may be a remnant of Mao's philosophy of restricting free movement of the population within China, I don't know. On the plus side, they don't require an invitation, health insurance or means of industrial espionage.

With processing times ranging from one to four weeks per visa, you will wait one to two months until your passports are back with you and properly visa'ed by everyone.

Tickets, please

Purchasing tickets in advance, but not through a travel agent, is turning out to be rather complicated. As you can not book train tickets with RZD, the Russian rail company, more than 45 days in advance, you end up with nice circular dependencies. We could pay a premium for faster processing of our visas and buy via travel agencies which sell train tickets from their special contingents, but that's kinda boring, innit?

Also, rzd.ru offers Russian order forms, only. With the help of Google translate, ##russian on irc.freenode.net, and a lot of guess-work, we were able to hammer out the connections from Moscow to Novosibirsk and from there on to Irkutsk.

Yet, it's quite a different experience not to not be able to fall back to English. No matter where we went in the past, English was the lingua franca, at least to some extent. That's not the case in any of our three intended destinations so those phrase books will get used a lot, I suspect...

We are still not sure if the 4-people cabins in second class have a door, let alone one that can be locked, but we decided that this is not too much of an issue. Generally speaking, people are nice and there are train attendants so crime should not be an issue. And even if things do disappear, as long as we stay healthy and I still have one of my several copies of all photos I will take, I will be reasonably happy.

As to getting from Irkutsk to Ulan Bator... even a Russian travel agent we contacted claimed you can only purchase tickets on site, not online. From Ulan Bator to Beijing, it's a different booking system. And from Beijing to Shanghai, it's yet another one.

This is the most fragmented booking process we ever went through. Other than a few moments of stress and frustration, the hunting for information, cross-referencing and having the occasional eureka moment is tons of fun, though; no complaints here.

When in Rome...

According to Lonely Planet, the Trans-Siberian is more or less one large picnic where everyone shares whatever they have with them with everyone else. I poked a few Russians about what typically German food they like and they came up with Frankfurters, mustard, and beer. Guess that's what we will be stuffing our backpack with once everything else is packed. And snuff; apparently it's common courtesy to offer your snuff to other men you meet in Mongolia and then snuff from their bottle. When in Rome... German snuff tends to be mixed with menthol, I suspect that will raise some eyebrows ;) No idea if there is any non-obvious social grease to bring to China; still working on that.

Initially, we wanted to tour Mongolia's main attractions, but we would either have to sit in a car for days on end or go by plane. Driving for days in between a solid week(!) spent on trains is not very appealing and neither is breaking our personal ground travel record by cheating flying.

Thus, we decided to take the eco-tourism route: After a two-hour orientation course in Mongolian behaviour and manners, we will travel a few hundred kilometers by public bus, be picked up by a local, driven out into the outback and ride from ger to ger by camel and horse before returning to Ulan Bator by bus. The stays at the gers are immersive, if short; we will live with the families, help them do their daily chores, and visit local places of interest in between. Oddly enough, I am looking to forward to the bus ride even more than to the gers. At the gers, at least one person is able to speak basic English. Not so with the local bus. People on the various trains will be used to strangers, as are the families at the gers. People on the bus are, most likely, not. Communicating with hand, foot, phrasebook, and a smile will, hopefully, be a lasting experience.

If time permits, we will try to visit kiva.org borrowers while in Ulan Bator; this is something we never had a chance to do before and it's been on the bucket list for some time, now.

As an aside, the local agent in Mongolia asked us if our sleeping bags are rated down to -26 degrees Celsius. I do hope he was joking...

On the privileges of living in a first-world country...

Travelling by horse means travelling light. Not a problem for us as we pack light by default and still manage to bring everything from Swiss Tool to water bottles, zip ties, medkit, and everything in between.

Still, there's one major thing I have been taking for granted all my life: electricity. Being without any source of power for four to five days is... challenging. Even more so as every single gadget I rely on uses a different type of battery. Flashlight: CR123A and AA; GPS: Ni-MH AA rechargeables and Lithium AAA primaries respectively; Laptop, cameras, cell phone, ebook reader, Nintendo DS and MP3 player: proprietary. I am starting to truly understand why NATO has a hard rule of allowing AA-powered devices, only; planning spares is a pain. Obviously, I am focusing on flashlights, GPS, and, above all, cameras. Battery grips with AA adapters to the rescue!

Another even more unsettling realization came when I asked if it would be possible to have boodog (vegetarians/vegans: don't click). Mongolians do not usually prepare boodog in spring as the animals which survived the harsh winter need to fatten and breed before being killed for food. All my life, I have never even once considered the remote possibility of not being able to slaughter domesticated animals due to outside constraints. Mongolian nomads need their animals. This is not about wanting to do things one way or another; this is about survival. Quite fascinating, and humbling, to think about.

I am incredibly privileged and, as you are reading this, so are you.

An exercise for the reader

If you have any information regarding:

• Good places to see in and around Novosibirsk in one day
• Social grease and tips, especially regarding China
• Getting from Irkutsk to Ulan Bator
• Reliable solar chargers for Ni-MH AA batteries
• Interesting things I didn't mention in this post

please let me know. As usual, but just a little bit more than usual, comments are appreciated.

By popular demand, commenting is now enabled. Authentication happens via OpenID only; all comments will be moderated to combat spam. Moderation in ikiwiki seems to happen mainly via the web interface (I know about the RSS) so there may be a certain delay until I approve new comments.

If anyone happens to know how to make ikiwiki handle moderation gracefully within a git-based workflow, do leave a comment. That's possible, now :)