OMG OMG OMG my theme was hacked!
For fun I was checking out my statistics and discovered that my theme got hacked: the footer and header were replaced, inserting spammy URLs into the outputted page, together with some Google Adsense code.
Yay.
As a result I am now delisted from Google’s index.
Apparently, this has been going on for a couple of months, [...]
Why is Skype hogging my CPU?
I noticed Skype is utilising the CPU varying between 7 and 15 %. That’s insane, for a chat app ffs!
WTF!?
 by in Internet & Technology, Software |
More software patent craziness…
Things that make you go ngggggggggg
| by in Computers & Hardware, Software |
So last week, the hard-drive in my MythTV box started acting up — it was happily transcoding when all of a sudden, it showed an empty Recordings-list. I’ve had that before, so knew that MySQL was having problems due to not enough diskspace. Checking the logfiles however, I noticed more scary stuff was going [...]
I just bought a Playstation 3…
The thing I least expected happened: buying the Playstation 3 the same month when it got available here in the Netherlands.
Yeh, well, what can I say — it can run Linux, dude.
My first Apple Dashboard Widget
| by in Computers & Hardware, Software |
This weekend I wrote my first Apple Dashboard Widget because of a number of reasons;
- I wanted to get acquainted with the OS X Dashboard Widget stuff,
- I needed something to control my MythTV front-end because I wanted to be able to control it from my laptop because I so often loose the remotes and [...]
I hate cripple-ware!
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have now got an Apple MacBook Pro to work on, which obviously has its pros and cons. Sure, the machine supports X11 to a certain extent but I don’t want to basically run 2 different window managers that look and act a bit differently. I have been [...]
Flash player v9.0 for Linux (oh yeah, beta)
I today incidentally discovered the Penguin.SWF blog, which details the development of version 9 of the Flash Player for Linux.
Lucky, because I was just beginning to feel like a handicapped person not being able to reach some information over the last few weeks so.
Shows you how much I care about plugins — this [...]
Linux distro timeline
I just discovered the linux distribution timeline.
Cool graph…
Samba developer resigns from Novell
Gloklaw has an article about a software developer’s resignation from Novell as a result of Novell’s deal with Microsoft, yesterday.
Jeremy Allison, a Samba developer, thinks the patent deal between the two companies will be “damaging to the Novell’s success in the future”,
Whilst the Microsoft patent agreement is in place there is *nothing* we can [...]
Want to own a filesystem?
| by in Internet & Technology, Sad Stuff, Software |
I just caught this Wired article through Slashdot. Hans Reiser, the creator of ReiserFS — a computer file system — is currently in jail because he’s suspected of murdering his wife. (Yeh the tough reality is that the moment somebody dies or disappears, the spouse is the number one suspect.)
He was actually already arrested on [...]
Yay — my patch is in the mainstream kernel now
| by in Software |
A couple of months ago, I had bought the SmartJoy Plus adapter to connect my two Playstation 2 controllers, via USB, to my PC.
Initially, it didn’t work like I expected (it presented itself as 1 joystick rather than 2). After some tinkering and debugging I discovered that there is some blacklist defined in hid-core.c which [...]
VoIP (SIP), XS4ALL and Asterisk
My ISP (XS4ALL) is currently providing its clients with 1 or 2 optional VoIP numbers. I would’ve never imagined I would be setting VoIP up at home, but the mythical convergence box in my living room has VoIP capabilities — so why the hell not? (Why does a dog lick its balls?)
As VoIP calls are [...]
MythTV + MythStreams + lastFMProxy = fun too :)
Yesterday, one of my new colleagues pointed my attention to last.FM, an internet radio station. Well, there are plenty internet radio stations, but what sets this one apart from the rest is the fact that you can specify what songs you like, so that some kind of profile is created. I had already heard of [...]
Not having anything to hide; rather fearing other peoples interpretation of the facts…
| by in Computers & Hardware, Conspiracies, Freedom & Repression, Media, Religion & Politics, Security & Privacy, Software, Visions |
The title of this post has always been my biggest fear about Big Brother watching everybody’s move, registering everything they buy, et cetera.
See, I really have nothing to hide. I fear that ‘The Man’ only wrongly interprets the information and I get Red Flagged for nothing.
People always thought I was kidding when I said that, [...]
Quote Of The Week #21
Usually, the Quote Of The Week section is ‘reserved’ for quotes from famous and/or historical characters, fictional or real. This week, however, I’m making an exception to this.
Last weekend while installing some new hardware in my home-network, innocent to terms like ‘proprietary API‘ or ‘vendor lock-in‘, my girlfriend made the following remark noticing that, as [...]
Web2DNA: Convert your website to a ‘DNA-like’ image.
| by in Arts & Poetry, Humour, Interesting Links, Software |
Through Sean’s site, I discovered this neat thingy that converts your websites’ HTML to a DNA-like sequence:
WEB2DNA will take you website, analyze it, crunch it to little bits and spit it out as a graphic representation of a human DNA.
The brightness of the lines is determined by the importance of the tags in terms of [...]
Amarok: Re-discover your music
Introduction
Yesterday I was upgrading the KDE and noticed the media player ‘Amarok‘. I did look at this a long time ago but forgot all about it. Actually, when I saw the package I initially mistook it for the Amusing Mis-use Of Resources….
Amarok’s main screen while playing media; the right panel showing the playlist and [...]
Sure, telephone numbers, etcetera, will all be replaced by a single email-address
| by in Computers & Hardware, Ideas & Concepts, Internet & Technology, Random Rantings, Software, The Netherlands |
Some Dutch researcher suggests that, in the long run, (mobile) telephone numbers will disappear and will be replaced by one email-address.
Although we can put people on the moon and make money of prolonging the problems of sickness, the spam problem most probably still won’t be solved. Not even touching the privacy-related issues there arise if [...]
Native Google Earth for Linux — beta, of course ;)
A colleague send me a link to this post telling there’s a (beta) Google Earth for Linux now!
Finally, no more tinkering with Wine, which doesn’t really enhance stability and stuff….
You can download it here.
Google Earth, Linux
Windows Server more reliable than Linux?
LOL this (Dutch) is what you get if journalists simply repeat other peoples words and don’t do their own research. The article compares UNIX and Windows servers, and somewhere it says that ‘the reason for the longer downtime on Linux servers is caused by the lack of proper documentation.
Lack of proper documentation?
Ever compared Windows API [...]
MythTV + PVR150 + PVR350
| by in Computers & Hardware, Software |
So, to experiment with MythTV, I bought this relatively cheap Hauppauge PVR-150 to see if the software works on the relatively old hardware I had lying around — an old 530 Mhz, Pentium III IBM 300GL machine seemed to suffice.
Using a laptop, or other machine, as a front-end I could happily watch TV.
But, after having [...]
MythTV and Internet streams (MythStream)
Lately I’ve been actively using MythTV, the open source PVR. Because my FM tuner is broken, and one of my favourite radio channels is available on-line as well, I decided to look around for something that would enable me to listen to that stream.
Enter MythStream, that does exactly that job.
First problem was, getting it [...]
MythTV is fun!
For the last couple of days (you might’ve noticed the lack of new posts here), I have been playing around with MythTV, the open source PVR. It is a very decent implementation too, allowing plugins for various additional functionality, such as an image gallery or the possibility to play your downloaded pr0n, err I mean, [...]
Kill Bills Browser
| by in Humour, Interesting Links, Random Rantings, Software |
A colleague pointed out this site and this one, in order to convince more and more people to switch from the bug-ridden and vendor-lock-in-causing Internet Explorer browser.
If you know me in real life, you must have heard me say that I have always thought ‘Mozilla‘ to be the ‘Explora Killa‘.
Any self-respecting technician, which ought not [...]
Deniable filesystems
Bruce Schneier, on his blog, mentions the project Rubberhose that implements a ‘Deniable Filesystem‘.
The whole idea about these ‘deniable’ filesystems is, that, and I quote Bruce here:
The basic idea was the fact that the existence of ciphertext can in itself be incriminating, regardless of whether or not anyone can decrypt it. I wanted to create [...]
A Boot Camp you can’t get out of…
| by in Computers & Hardware, Humour, Software |
I noticed this news on Mac users being stuck with Windows XP after installing the Boot Camp boot-loader that allows Mac users to boot an alternative operating system. Incidentally, I have seen this running on a friends’ laptop yesterday.
Honestly, other than compatibility or inoperability issues I can see no real reason why one would want [...]
When things get too complex to comprehend…
| by in Humour, Internet & Technology, Software |
…stuff like this happens. This was already posted on The Register last friday — but in case you missed this excellent act of stupidity, here is a quote:
This tale kicked off yesterday when Tuttle’s city manager Jerry Taylor fired off an angry message to the CentOS staff. Taylor had popped onto the city’s web site [...]
Distributed compiling is fun!
| by in Computers & Hardware, Software |
This weekend I had a kernel 2.4.26 -> kernel 2.6.16 upgrade gone terribly wrong leaving me with a laptop without any network support: the latest version of ndiswrapper was incompatible with the version I had installed various files in /etc/ndiswrapper and I found that out after the reboot.
Anyways — to make a long story even [...]
OpenOffice 2.0 kept crashing when selecting a font…
…and after it seemed that it kept happening after installing the latest 2.0.2-version, I had to look further.
The stupid thing was — if I logged into my gf’s machine (the machine having issues), and set the DISPLAY variable to point to my own X-server — nothing bad happened, no matter what font I selected! Weird, [...]
Gmail — growing pains?
| by in Internet & Technology, Software |
Recently I have been getting these a lot:
Today, too, I got an internal server error when I wanted to view an image somebody mailed me…
Gmail, Google, Growing Pains
Slackware 10.2 + WINE 0.9.10 + GoogleEarth = OK ;)
| by in Software, Space & Beyond |
I tried it earlier, to no avail, but today I downloaded the latest version of WINE to try again to see if Google Earth works.
I didn’t have to go through this hassle of re-installing everything. I just upgraded the WINE package and started up Google Earth, using:
WINEDLLOVERRIDES=”ole32,usp10,msvcrt=n” wine Google/Google\ Earth/GoogleEarth.exe
As you see, there are some [...]
Firefox 2.0alpha1 available for preview!
I just discovered through Digg.com that Firefox 2.0alpha1 has been released:
I’ve been test-driving the Mozilla suite for years now, so I’m already downloading it. You too can check out what’s new here and download it from this FTP site.
NOTE: Do not install this version if you don’t like to test-drive bleeding-edge stuff. This version will [...]
HOWTO: Extracting SNMP data from an Alcatel Speed Touch Home without SNMP support
| by in Computers & Hardware, HOWTOs, Software |
My ISP gave me this crappy modem, an Alcatel Speed Touch Home. Additionally, I recently started playing around with Zabbix, which nicely supports SNMP. I can create nice statistics from the machines in my network, including nice graphs and stuff. Well, almost all. Not the modem, because it does not support SNMP.
So, I needed a [...]
Utilities: alcatell
I just created the page about ‘alcatell‘ — a utility born out of necessity. This utility enables one to easily extract information from the Alcatel Speed Touch Home modem — a piece of crap hardware that doesn’t support SNMP.
I created this utility so I could configure a UNIX host to act as a ‘proxy’ for [...]
WinXP on a Mac contest won, probably
According to The Register, The WinXP on a Mac competition has been won. I’d advise to wait until detailed instructions have been posted though, before buying a Mac. The video does look rather promising though!
Now, if it’d run Linux, I’d buy one. Although that shouldn’t be too big of a deal now, I can imagine.
Computers, [...]
Several vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office software
| by in Computers & Hardware, Media, Religion & Politics, Random Rantings, Security & Privacy, Software |
More specifically, the piece of shit they dare call ‘Excel’. Yes, it excells in fucking up documents. But I slightly digress.
Let’s look at the timeline that this vulnerability was reported:
Yesterday, ZDI reported:
2006.01.24 – Vulnerability reported to vendor
2006.02.21 – Digital Vaccine released to TippingPoint customers
2006.03.13 – Vulnerability information provided to ZDI security partners
2006.03.14 – Coordinated public release of advisory
Ah, so Microsoft knew about this [...]
Ten best security live cd distro’s
Yesterday, an article on 10 Best Security Live CD Distros (Pen-Test, Forensics & Recovery) was posted on Darknet.
Live CD’s are the type of operating systems that fit on a CD, can boot almost any hardware, and allow you to use the machine to quite a large extent. The distro’s mentioned in the article are not [...]
WordPress 2.0.2 Security Update
In case you did not know already (like I did), a security heads-up if you use WordPress 2.x:
An important security issue has been brought to the attention of the WordPress team and we have worked diligently to bring you a new stable release that addresses it. Our latest version 2.0.2 contains several bugfixes and security [...]
GNU Privacy Guard vulnerability discovered
According to this post on the GPG mailing-list, GPG doesn’t detect the injection of unsigned data. That is rather a serious issue, so upgrading to the latest version is advised:
In the aftermath of the false positive signature verfication bug
(announced 2006-02-15) more thorough testing of the fix has been done
and another vulnerability has been detected.
This new [...]
Hahaha — MS Anti-Spyware removes Norton
| by in Humour, Random Rantings, Software |
Just read this blurb about Microsoft’s latest experimental piece-of-shit anti-spyware software accidentally removing Norton’s Anti-Virus software.
I won’t even rant here and I’ll just let that news do all the speaking for itself..
Microsoft coders are idiots, Norton, Spyware, AntiVirus
Why Google’s desktop search software will always be better than Microsofts’
| by in Random Rantings, Software |
The answer is simple: Microsoft is too busy with hiding information from an end-user.
If you want to change certain files or settings you got to buy the appropriate, licenced, tool. (Think of this, from their point of view, as a feeble attempt to secure through obscurity but from ours it can only be regarded [...]
NG-BASIC available with a larger font
Because of popular demand, I today found some time to quickly hack up a larger font variant of NG-BASIC.
Go and check it out.
NG-BASIC, BASIC, Javascript, Firefox, Canvas
More slight site changes
I played around with the StatTraq information in the database to create a Todays’ Most Popular section in the sidebar.
I put a mostpopular.php now resides in the plugins/ directory that looks up some information for display in the sidebar.
Additionally, I created a wp-mostpopular.php in the WordPress root-directory that can directly be accessed to view [...]
Webalizer getting political?
| by in Interesting Links, Software |
I don’t know exactly when this was put in place, but the Webalizer Homepage now shows a nice Impeach Bush banner on the bottom of the page.
Not that I can do anything about it living in The Netherlands, but I can sure as hell help advocate it:
Nice. Although being quite stale as a project [...]
WordPress upgraded to 2.0
After seeing that WordPress 2.0.1 is available, I immediately downloaded it to start the upgrade process as described here.
The upgrade went without any problems, or at least it seems so at this point…
WordPress
WinAmp exploit in the wild — better upgrade…
For you Windows-users out there, ISC reports that, apart WinAmp 5.12 being vulnerable to some exploit that allows for remote code execution, that also an exploit has been discovered in the wild.
Also, WinAmp 5.13 is already available, so you better upgrade as soon as possible.
Threats, Security
Google directly competing with Microsoft?
| by in Software |
So, although they wouldn’t want the hassle of making hardware, Google apparently does seem busy to prep a fork of Ubuntu:
Google is preparing its own distribution of Linux for the desktop, in a possible bid to take on Microsoft in its core business - desktop software. A version of the increasingly popular Ubuntu desktop [...]
Compiling the latest CVS version of WINE to see if GoogleEarth works OK.
Slackware 10.2, WINE and the GoogleEarth HOWTOs are incompatible. Maybe a self-compiled CVS version of WINE works just fine. Verdict: Don’t bother… 
Countering “Trusting Trust”
| by in Interesting Links, Software |
I just read a post on Schneiers’ weblog entitled `Countering “Trusting Trust”‘. You probably already have heard of the Reflections on Trusting Trust-article I, and many others, may have referenced to in the past.
To quote Schneier;
Way back in 1974, Paul Karger and Roger Schell discovered a devastating attack against computer systems. Ken Thompson described it [...]
Internet Exploder 7 reeks on the Internet
One is surprised this kind of stuff leaks?
MS Windows intensional backdoors: how the hell can you be sure?
A lot of talk last week on Windows vulnerabilities actually being intentional, mainly because Steve Gibson started the whole issue by stating that the recent WMF-vulnerability is possibly an intentional backdoor (link to Slashdot-thread), implemented by Microsoft, exactly for the sake of exploiting it to get on peoples’ machines.
Well, true or not, one has to [...]
MS’s WMF patch could be plagiarized
According to the post here, the patch released by Microsoft to guard against the WMF vulnerability, seems plagiarized from the ‘home-brew’ patch originally written by Ilfak Guilfanov:
Microsoft disallowed SETABORT. Same as Ilfak’s… rearranged a bit. See for yourselves below. If that is the best solution, we see no harm in that either. It just seems [...]
Dangerous WMF vulnerability in I.E.
| by in Internet & Technology, Software |
A nice, though quite typical, start of the new year for Microsoft: there’s quite a fuss today and yesterday about a new and pretty dangerous vulnerability in Internet Exploder (in the implementation of their own WMF format for f*ck-sakes!).
Obviously, no ‘vendor response’ yet (i.e. in the form of releasing a patch), and it seems not [...]
Excellent Richard Stallman interview
ZNet is running a nice interview with Richard M. Stallman (well, for the laymen anyways) that explains the Free Software principle, the movement, and the people.
It is really worth a read if you are wondering about this open, free software stuff you’ve heard so much about.
A noteworthy quote:
The idea is not just to [...]