Using ssh forwarding to retrieve papers instead of VPN

So far I was using VPN to connect to my university network when I needed to download a paper from home, but that meant to temporarily lose my network connection, with all the hassle attached.

Today I discovered a much simpler method:

1) Open a ssh port forwarding to the remote machine (university server with IEEE or ACM subscription) in this way:

ssh -D 8080 -N <username>@<server address> &

where -D indicated the local port to forward, and -N avoid opening a shell.

2) Download the FoxyProxy Firefox extension, and configure in order to use a proxy on localhost:8080.

3) Add rules to FoxyProxy so that the proxy is active only when needed (*.ieee.*, *.acm.* etc…).

Thanks to Timo Reimann for having suggested that.

P2P Conferences

http://hausheer.osola.com/cfps

How to give a good research talk

This paper might be of interest for anyone that has to give a talk.

Power-Law Material

Interesting material on Power-Laws:

So You Think You Have a Power Law — Well Isn’t That Special?

Power-law distributions in empirical data

Zipf, Power-laws, and Pareto – a ranking tutorial

Download papers via SSH

Want to download a paper from home, or from a poor different university which doesn’t have all subscriptions? Try this paper-get script.

Usage: paper-get URL [filename]

#!/bin/sh

SSH_TARGET=user@mymachine

if [ -n "$2" ]; then
    DEST="$2"
else
    DEST="$(basename $1)"
    echo Saving to $DEST
fi

if [ -e "$DEST" ]; then
   echo Warning: the destination file already exists.
   echo Press Enter to overwrite, Ctrl-C to abort.
   read ANTANI
fi

ssh $SSH_TARGET wget -O- \"$1\" > "$DEST"