But you forgot it in the meanwhile…

Usually, you used Firefox’s “Remember my password for this site” to remember stuff *for* you. This works out, most of the time…. until you change your computer and you do not have access to the cached passwords anymore.

Likewise, simply copying the “signons.sqlite” file to the new machine will not work, the passwords are encrypted with the master password.

Luckily, I *do* still have access to the old Firefox running on the old laptop…

So, I visited the website I wanted to log into and lo and behold, it filled in the cached username and password… Firebug is an excellent tool that can help out here — find the input that contains the password field and remember its ID. Then, in the location bar, type the following, et voila, that’s your password right there:
javascript:alert( document.getElementById( 'password_field_id' ).value );

I hear you say, “there’s nothing spectaculair about this, this is a very old and known trick”. Yes, I know — all the more reason to find it ridiculous that this still works!

Amazing that such an unsafe ‘feature’ like the password field still exists nowadays.

Anyway, deciding I’d take a little peek in the first random Firefox filtering plugin that I could find, downloaded it from “some site”, and unpacked the XPI.

This immediately caught my eye, and any coders should see the obvious error:

    //don't hide page if within FoxFilter mgmt pages
    if(aURI.spec.indexOf("chrome://foxfilter") != -1)
        return;

That is definitely not the way to check for such an URL. Quite a “beginners” error actually. I wanted to confirm this makes the whole filter useless, but was incorrectly thinking that I had to register first before using the plugin — so closed the browser and deleted the add-on.

Later I thought differently, and couldn’t resist finding it again and re-installing it. This time I downloaded it from the Mozilla Add-On site; and an agreement I had to agree to. Oh well…

There this caught my eye though: “The FoxFilter Team has spent HUNDREDS of hours in development, maintenance and support of FoxFilter. We are very proud of our product and are very happy that is helping protect children, teens AND adults from inappropriate content on the Internet.“.

Hundreds of hours missed that obvious error? Took me barely 5 seconds… OK enough with the being cocky already…

Anyway, downloaded the thing again; re-installed it and confirmed filtering was succesful when I went to “http://www.playboy.com”.

And, confirmed that it horribly failed on “http://www.playboy.com/?chrome://foxfilter“.

Yep, it is that easy. Then to think people pay for something it cannot really do (well until it is patched of course):

Premium Features

In addition to all of the great filtering features that have always been free of charge, we also offer security features as part of our premium service. Security features provide you with the ability to secure your settings with a password and prevent FoxFilter from being bypassed, uninstalled or disabled. A small support fee is required to obtain a registration code which enables the security features.

I’ve always thought that one should never, ever, trust software to do things that they claim to do properly. Even the most advanced logic could be bypassed by a silly mistake before it even reaches your advanced logic. If you got the chance to check it out, you should — just to prevent surprises in the future…

OK back into my lair…

Quite annoying, I do not want that process to die (nor the “jackd” process).

After having stumbled upon this page about the OOM killer, I wrote this little script, which I run just after jackd and linuxsampler have set-up (as root of course).

It’ll write the value -17 (OOM_DISABLE) to /proc/<pid>/oom_adj for selected process-names and this ought to prevent the OOM killer from ever targeting that process.

Haven’t seen it crashing on me since — but of course, your mileage may very…

I had to use ‘midimon’ to find the correct values and changed the defines in nekobee_synth.h.

After doing this, I found that the Volume knob was not responding correctly (it was not updating while I twisted it, nor did the sound change). I had to mess around in another file as well…

If you also want to be able to use the X-Session Pro mixer controller as a musical instrument: here is the patch.

I was pleasantly surprised to notice that Rosegarden nicely records those tweaks as well, so if I play back my composition, the knobs in the interface turn, too. Nice

One word of warning though: this patch locks the controls to the X-Session Pro. In the event of other hardware and having changed these mappings again, all your old compositions in your favourite MIDI sequencer shall no longer play back like it sounded before. Keep this in mind…

But never gotten further than the actual script that generates all the different states of a “volume knob”:

As I never shall get around to finishing my own skin anyway, I have posted a sample of these knobs to the Mixxx mailing list for comments as I believe they can make Mixxx look better.

Since then, some comments have been applied and a seperate ‘balance knob’ is now rendered.

These buttons can be used as replacement buttons for the outlineNetbook skin, or any other skin that uses 29×29 size buttons.

Updated: The balance knob, when centered shows a single green led and the marker line is now darker.

If you want to use them as well: here it is.

The best I could get Mixxx to run using ALSA devices was with 32 ms latency. And even then, audio still occasionally popped and cracked (worse even when the Nvidia driver was still using agpgart).

Popping and cracking kinda ruins the whole experience, so the potential performance benefit of a functioning JACK set-up is something that I “needed”.

Not working
For some reason though, initially, I could not get Mixxx and JACK work nicely together with my AUDIO4DJ audio interface.

This USB audio interface has 2 stereo in- and outputs; and I could only get either 1 output and 1 input. Without a headphone output and a 2nd input for vinyl control using JACK would render the whole set-up useless…

Some Googling did reveal some hints, like modifying the /etc/asound.conf file. I thought I had already done that earlier; but apparently this does not work with JACK.

See, my “old” asound.conf split the audio device up to two devices (I used one for the Master, and the other one for the Headphone output in Mixxx.) JACK can only handle one (or I am doing something wrong), so that had to be changed…

Solutions suggested in this thread on the NI forums did not work for me either, I ended up with the same problem basically: only one input and one output.

Working!
That thread did give me a hint to the solution — the following /etc/asound.conf, works for me like it should: it exposes a single “AUDIO4DJ” device, which binds stereo channels A and B to it:
pcm.AUDIO4DJ {
    type multi
    # bind hardware devices
    slaves.a.pcm "hw:0,0,0"
    slaves.a.channels 2
    slaves.b.pcm "hw:0,0,1"
    slaves.b.channels 2
    # bind channels to virtual device
    bindings.0.slave a
    bindings.0.channel 0
    bindings.1.slave a
    bindings.1.channel 1
    bindings.2.slave b
    bindings.2.channel 0
    bindings.3.slave b
    bindings.3.channel 1
}

(Note that slaves.b.pcm “hw:0,0,1″ — which points it to the B channel.)

That way, I can now use that “AUDIODJ4″ as a device-name in qjackctl as Input- and Output Device, each giving 4 channels (2 stereo channels).

If I now go into the Audio preferences in Mixxx, I can select channels 1-2 for the Master output and channels 3-4 for the Headphones. Similarly, for Vinyl Control, the first input deck can be put on channels 1-2 and the second on channels 3-4..

It took a bit of tinkering but, again, it was worth it!

Now that JACK is properly working and Mixxx can use it, vinyl control response is amazing and the audio playback is exceptional — I haven’t heard a pop or crack since!

This wasn’t as easy as it seemed as for some reason, blacklisting the ‘agpgart’ module did not seem to have any effect.

Why is it still loading the agpgart driver?
Running “modprobe -nv nvidia” it showed that it kept depending on the ‘agpgart’ module somehow.

A quick Google only showed other people having the problem, but alas, no solution.

Further poking around, I noticed when doing a “depmod -v” — which outputs module dependencies to standard out — that the nvidia module indeed depended on it.

Aha!
Hmmm… So I dove into the NVIDIA driver source (which I had to modify for a real-time kernel anyways, so the unpacked nvidia installer package was still on my system), and noticed the culprit.

The nv-linux.h file contains the following lines:
#if defined (CONFIG_AGP) || defined (CONFIG_AGP_MODULE)
#define AGPGART
#include <linux/agp_backend.h>
#include <linux/agpgart.h>
#endif
The CONFIG_AGP and CONFIG_AGP_MODULE it gets from your kernel configuration and presumably, this is what compiles in stuff that makes it depend on the ‘agpgart’ module. I put those lines in as /* comments */ and tried loading the module.

Indeed, it now does not depend on ‘agpgart’ anymore and shall use ‘nvagp’ now. And the time spent on it was worth it: I even got about 200 frames per second increase with glxgears.

Interesting times ahead for my pet project NG-BASIC!

After long deliberation I have decided to transfer the ownership; transfer the ownership to a new owner that is going to breathe fresh life into the project.

It shall be actively developed on — something which I can’t do anymore as I seem to be wasting more and more spare time on work.

I must say it feels weird to let go of it… I guess it’s similar to what an artist feels when he sells a painting (well I like to think so anyway).

When I initially wrote it I never expected anyone to be interested at all. Perhaps one or two like-minded people — I did not expect more for a “toy” programming language.

The emails I got and the amount of downloads over the years show differently: there’s still quite an interest in BASIC, be it because of the geekiness of it running in a browser; to quickly get some calculations done; to explain somebody the basics of a programming concept; or — for people born in the 70s and 80s — just out of pure nostalgia.

So, that’s all very cool and I’m glad that people enjoyed it and hope they will do so in the future.

I believe it will be in good hands at its new home. In a different context (read: not on my personal weblog with, for perhaps some people some non-subtle opinions) it can even reach a broader audience…

It will surely be interesting to see how it’ll develop, literally.

Farewell — may it be in for a nice ride!

Yay.

As a result I am now delisted from Google’s index.

Apparently, this has been going on for a couple of months, but I was too busy with actual work so I never read any articles about it on the security-sites I normally occasionally visit.

Oh well, shit happens, and stuff has quickly been cleaned up (thank you, backups!) … and for safety have upgraded to the latest WordPress version. Not having upgraded a while ago, I was really just waiting for this to happen (yeh, lazy sysadmins et cetera )…

Seeing that basically the attacker could run any PHP code of his/her choice, which could include calling system binaries to retrieve information about user accounts or passwords. As I can not be a 100% sure about that at this moment, all the passwords have been reset to protect the innocent.

I am curious how long it’ll take before I get listed on Google again (as I still see Googlebot regularly visit the site)…

This wouldn’t be a ‘real’ issue if the machine was just storing recordings but, no, of course I had to cram the HD with all my photo’s-, video- and music collection, to free up space on the other machines.

Running fsck gave me *severe* errors, and the logfile was barfing up errors about group descriptors being corrupted. That did not look good at all.

I have had problems with drives before but I never had the pleasure getting thrown the warning **SEVERE DATA LOSS POSSIBILITY** at me. I quickly aborted the filesystem check because, to me, it seemed like the superblock was corrupted or something. Knowing the filesystem stores backup superblocks, I tried running it with an alternate one….. That seemed succesful … until … fsck hit me with a segmentation fault. Ouch.

That did not seem good. (All-in-all things were hopeful because I could mount the drive (with errors though) and access the data — and my adrenaline-level lowered.)

A bit of googling revealed that the problem could be solved by adding some swap space, there might be too little. I didn’t see the machine with 1G internal memory use any swap during the check process, but hell, I gave it a shot anyways, using dd, mkswap and swapon to make a temporary swapfile another 1 G in size.

That didn’t help either … As soon as it hit:

i_frag for inode 302 (...) is 152, should be zero.
Clear? yes

i_fsize for inode 302 (...) is 170, should be zero.
Clear? yes

Segmentation fault

Yikes. After a bit more googling I learned that this specific issue, segfaulting on setting the i_fsize for an inode, should be resolved in the latest version of e2fsprogs.

So I downloaded, compiled, and ran it on the seemingly un-fixable partition to see it nicely fix all the errors without hitting me with the segmentation fault again.

The machine is now up and running again, playing Eric B and Rakim as I write this. So I’m happy.

Yeh, well, what can I say — it can run Linux, dude.

So I took some time out to write this widget that now enables me to use my MacBook as a very expensive remote control:

If you are thinking about downloading it, please note that this version (0.2) is the first public release and although the code has been cleaned up a bit, there may surely be some issues with it.

Apple, OS X, Widgets, MythTV

Nope, it doesn’t seem enough anymore that somebody else even wants to try your software — no, people have to pay to get an un-crippled, functional application.

I don’t mind people making an honest buck, but the crippling of functionality seem like mob-extortion practices to me.

And it’s really starting to become an annoyance… again (hence this rant). It seems that money is more important than showing off what you can do. Back when I was a kid, it was fun to write software and share it with people I knew. The idea that somebody else was using my software or playing my game was cool — somebody else that would think ‘Wow this is a great, I’m glad he wrote this‘.

Now people are like, ‘I’m a l33t coder — gimme gimme gimme and you get this fine application without crippled functionality.‘, before you have actually started using the program. (And everything being released as a binary, it’s pretty hard to find out if they actually wrote it themselves and didn’t steal logic from known Open Source projects. Being I’m Dutch, I don’t think I would even want to pay up $20 to attempt to find out.)

Man, didn’t you write that utility or program because you wanted the functionality yourself? People downloaded and used your program and have possibly sent you bug-reports, feature requests and new ideas. And then, suddenly, your great free program turns into a cock-teasing prostitute that knows what the users want and you depend on the fact that a few people that have taken it for a lap-dance will pay up for the complete job — just showing enough to make the average guy horny.

No wonder there are guys (and girls) out there that crack that type of software. To continue the analogy in the previous paragraph, that isn’t rape, the software is asking for it.

No, today it seems that the crackers are the really smart guys out there. At least, they unconditionally release their tools — for their own egos or whatever. If the ego of any author of a cracked application was just as equally pleased he wouldn’t have had to lock-up his piece of software to begin with.

But relax, I wouldn’t use a cracked version of your program anyway — there’s no love, man — I’d only make love to a woman that actually wants to, for free.

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 thing seemed to have been available since at least the 20th of November of the last year.

Anyway, so far the plugin seems OK — I noticed an slight audio/video de-sync problem seems to have gone, too. So that’s cool.

I think it’s sad that the really handicapped people are still unable to reach any of those flash-based sites out there. It still baffles me people think they are really ‘protecting’ text by shoving it into a flash animation — all it really does is cut off the people that don’t have any way of viewing or hearing it in an alternative way.

Even sadder the fact that — hey, being human and all — I can’t be bothered no more, ’cause I got a viewer!

Cool graph…

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 do to fix community relations. And I really mean nothing.

We can pledge patents all we wish, we can talk to the press and “community leaders”, we can do all the right things w.r.t. all our other interactions, but we will still be known as GPL violators and that’s the end of it.

The Groklaw article also mentions that Google has now hired him.

He was actually already arrested on the 10th of October earlier this year. *

According to his lawyer, it seems he doesn’t have enough money for his defense and so, Mr. Reiser is seeking to sell his company, which of course could be sad if it falls into the hands of people that want to exploit the rights to the filesystem, close it and sue the hell out of every open-source implementation.

Well, the most sad thing here of course is the fact people worry more about the filesystem than this guy and his family…

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 sets some characteristics so the OS can work with it correctly, in which the relevant vendor- and device ID did not show up although similar devices were in there. Putting 2 and 2 together I decided to hack up an extra entry to see it it worked. Lo’ and behold: adding the vendor- and device ID of the device to some blacklist in hid-core.c actually worked — and the OS could read the devices properly; seeing 2 joysticks.

And that’s what I love about open source and this community thang working on high-tech stuff like that — something is wrong, or you don’t like something: you change it. Imagine the state of our world if all those companies were working on one and the same product in stead of trying to lock each of us into their own proprietary crap so they can make more money.

After noticing the modification worked, I immediately posted the resulting code (well, the patch adding one line, actually) to the linux-usb-devel list on the 30th of June, 2006. Being curious I also wrote this post to see how long it’d take before it was in the mainstream kernel.

On the 3rd of July, I got a notification telling me that gregkh had included my patch in his tree.

The 13th of July, all those patches (with mine included) was included as patches against linux-2.6.18-rc1, so it was about to be included in the 2.6.18 version of the linux kernel…

And I noticed yesterday that, while downloading the latest kernel to install on someones’ new MythTV box, since 20th of September, the 2.6.18 kernel is released — and my patch is in. Yay!

Linux, Kernel, Patch, Cycle

As VoIP calls are a bit cheaper as well I thought it would be worth taking a shot at. So I registered my first number, one that doesn’t cost me a single dime (I can only get called on that number). Of course, running linux and shit, one has always have to be careful choosing because it could sure as hell be that some thing ain’t supported because vendors don’t produce shit for the sake of the produce, but for the sake of keeping on selling it. But I digress — only slightly.

Now — being able to call out and in would of course be cool.. But it would be even cooler if I set up a little PBX-kind of thing so I can have phone extensions throughout my house (it’s not that big though, mind you). It would be cool if I was able to dial the upstairs desktop by dialing 666, some something.

Having worked in the phone-communications business I knew about Asterisk, the open source PBX software (actually the same that Kevin Mitnick used at one point to spoof his caller-ID), but only a few days ago I read that it could do SIP — the protocol VoIP phones ‘do’ — as well.

So — a couple of days ago I downloaded it and setting it up — without the actual dialing in and out — was actually a breeze.

It took some research — and some patience to finally set it all up though.

Luckily, I could find ‘working’ examples of sip.conf and extensions.conf which ought to do the trick, but I shouldn’t have tinkered with my modems’ port forwarding settings at the same time. I could spoonfeed you and dump my configurations here, but a google search using the queries “xs4all +asterisk +voip” should put you on the right path, my grasshopper.

Decent VoIP/SIP clients for Linux
Well — there aren’t any. There are plenty of applications that claim they are though.

My ISP links to a program called X-Lite; available for Linux as well. It works, but its kinda bloaty and it looks more fancy than it has features.

The X-Lite thing is, well, close, but it’s too much of a Windows program; it makes me feel like I’m back behind Windows 95 with some software whose idiot author just found out that windows don’t have to be rectangular. Also, anything that displays something that seem like pointer addressess, well, I rest my case….

Speaker, Microphone and Ringing device show very weird device names.

Note that there are other programs, some of which look pretty good, but they are simply too big a pain to install. I don’t mind the odd dependency, but dependency upon dependency upon dependency upon dependency upon dependency … Let’s just say I have my limits…

Just at the moment I almost came to the conclusion that there is no source-libre version of a decent SIP client — I discovered another program, written by another Dutch guy, it seems. *cheers*

The program’s called Twinkle and although it looks pretty basic; it does all that I require. It even has a decent sound configuration screen:

Twinkle’s audio configuration screen.

Concluding; it seems that Twinkle‘l be the thing I’ll use for VoIP communications, at least for the time being.

Asterisk, VoIP, XS4ALL, Netherlands

Based on your own music-profile, you can find similar music, or choose to listen to the internet radio of people with similar taste. And it’s pretty good quality radio, too.

Using the service for a couple of hours, I thought it’s pretty cool. And it actually was a breeze to set-up (the guys over at last.FM even supply a Linux-client).

I had already fixed the patch to MythTV to include internet stream support, so the only thing I needed to do was to set up the proxy.

This proxy, called lastfmproxy is a nice piece of code that can serve any old media player with an MP3 file, but can also be used to skip, love and ban tracks. The only thing the proxy program needs, is a username and password to use (and a working-directory, of course).

Another nice thing (and I’m refering to the remark this being the 21st equivalent of booming your car-stereo), is that you can include your personal charts on your website (just like in the header of this one’s).

So that’s cool..

Update Hey I just discovered this old patch which, after some manual intervention, embeds Audioscrobbler support into MythMusic, so tracks I play will be scrobbled to the profile.

MythTV, Linux PVR, Open Source, Internet Radio, Last.FM

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, but I’m ever so serious. Recently I was thinking that, basically, some anti-piracy dickheads would dare to state that, if one buys computer components, or a PC, from a retailer and he doesn’t include an operating system, the person would be a software-pirate.

When I today read this article here, well, my fears are confirmed.

The BSA wants more enforcement and I can see them convincing ‘the law’ that people that do not buy an OS are pirates.

Which is, of course, a big load of crock.

Piracy, Surveillance, Privacy

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 usual, the installation CD hasn’t been touched:

Quote Of The Week, QOTW

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 structure.
[..]
Basically a semantically rich site will appear brighter than one with messy old-style code.

Using this website as input, I got this one (clicking on it will load the unscaled image):

Cool stuff because there’s bound to be a few related websites, if you know what I mean: there could be a twin-sister or -brother site of this one.

Interesting…

Web2DNA, Analysis, Rendering