muesli's Blog

OpenOffice could look nice!

Go and try this package offered at http://www.kdelook.org. It's a resource generator for OpenOffice, which is able to convert your KDE iconset for OpenOffice.

That's neat.

According to heise.de, they found another three bugs of the exactly same kind in OpenSSH. They are all fixed now, and 3.7.1 is released.

Get it, compile it, go to bed

Update to the whole TC / TCG / LaGrande / NGSCB / Longhorn / Palladium / TCPA thinggy: Ross Anderson released his FAQ in version 1.1!

Please, read it, create your own opinion about TCPA and spread the news! Here are some other links, you might wanna follow:

- Paradome
- NoTCPA
- AgainstTCPA

Thanks.

This one's l33t.

Even Linux and its main services got bugs and security holes

Today, OpenSSH announced a security-hole in buffer_append_space(), which could enable an attacker to infiltrate malicious code.

Contrary to Microsoft, the bug is already fixed and a new version is available. Update it manually or check your distribution's update mechanism frequently. Some people already noticed increasing traffic on port 22, which could indicate active version scanners, looking for buggy SSH daemons.

...muesli

Only a few days have passed since my last "complaint" about Microsoft, again we have SEVEN serious security holes in one of their products: Internet Explorer.

Liu Die Yu announced them. Basically, those vulnerabilities would allow an attacker to bypass the settings of any security zone, you've chosen.

Here is the advisory, posted in Full-Disclosure, and an article on heise.de.

"Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe."

NO COMMENT.

Oh no, 50 cent did it again

I just caught me listening to one of his songs over and over again: 50 cent feat. Madd Rapper - How To Rob An Industry Nigga

Dissing everyone, who ever held a mic in the hand

This evening, I installed tMon 1.3, another Karamba Theme

I noticed, that I never installed lm_sensors on one of my systems, so I took the chance and patched my system.

Here is, what I did. It's really easy:

First of all, I checked if my chipset is supported. You can do this here. WARNING: If you're a IBM Thinkpad user, DON'T DO IT. It might seriously destroy your hardware.

If your hardware is supported go to the Download Section and download both packages:

i2c-2.8.0 (121kB)
lm_sensors-2.8.0 (656kB)

As always, the version numbers might have changed in the meantime. Extract the archives anywhere and go to this directory. We're going to create kernel patches, which we will apply to your kernel in the next step. Attention: Kernel 2.4.13 or higher required!

# cd i2c-2.8.0
# mkpatch/mkpatch.pl . /usr/src/linux > /tmp/i2c-patch
# cd ..
# cd lm_sensors-2.8.0
# mkpatch/mkpatch.pl . /usr/src/linux > /tmp/sensors-patch

Let's apply those patches:

# cd /usr/src/linux
# patch -p1 < /tmp/i2c-patch
# patch -p1 < /tmp/sensors-patch

Now configure your kernel as usual (make menuconfig e.g.), go to "Character Devices" and "I2C". Select as modules:

"I2C support"
"I2C mainboard interfaces"
-> "Pseudo ISA adapter (for some hardware sensors)"
"I2C device interface"
"I2C /proc interface (required for hardware sensors)"

Go back to "Character Devices", select "Hardware sensors support". Select your individual device there! To find it out, try: lspci -v

Last step, full kernel recompile:

make clean dep bzImage modules modules_install

After the reboot, you should at least load these modules:

- i2c-core
- i2c-proc
- i2c-isa
- your device module (in my case: it87)
- i2c-dev

To get the information out of the sensors, you'll still need the userland tools. Those are usually delivered with your distribution. Although, it might be possible, that your distribution is not up-to-date. In this case, you'll have to compile them yourself. They are stored in ".../lm_sensors-2.8.0/prog/...", which you recently extracted.

Good luck!

Enemy Territory has received some changes and bugfixing, so a new version (v1.02) was released some days ago. Finally, the Linux version got updated, too.

Here is the "ChangeLog".

...muesli

Hopefully, I'm not turning into a criminal right now, but I found out about smoothbeats.com, yesterday. I really don't know, whether they're legally broadcasting or not (please tell me, and I'll remove this blog entry), but what they are broadcasting is just the best hiphop & chillout beats 24/7.

Just follow those 128kbit (32k avail on website) streams:

http://dc2.smoothbeats.com:8002
http://dc.smoothbeats.com:8018
Playlist file (open with Winamp, XMMS)

What is your favourite stream / webradio?

My notebook got an ATI Radeon Mobility 9000 and it took me quite some time to get everything working, including OpenGL and all that stuff. Now everything is running fine and I think, it could be useful to give you some instructions for setting up your system, too.

Here we go

Once again, Sourceforge is your source of information. Get the following two files from the GATOS page:

ATI-4.3.0-10.i386.tar.gz
drm-kernel-1.100.0-10.tar.gz

Of course the version numbers could have changed when you're reading this, but I'll assume, that those tips are valid for some time

Okay, lets extract the archives:

# cd /usr/local/src
# mkdir gatos ; cd gatos
# tar xvfz drm-kernel-1.100.0-10.tar.gz
# tar xvfz ATI-4.3.0-10.i386.tar.gz

Next step: Compiling the kernel module.

# cd drm-kernel
# make -f Makefile.linux radeon.o
# mkdir /lib/modules/`uname -r`/gatos
# cp radeon.o /lib/modules/`uname -r`/gatos

A bit tricky: The last step is to replace the X11 modules, so that OpenGL is working:

# cd /usr/X11R6/lib
# tar -cvf X11modules-orig.tar ./modules
# cp X11modules-orig.tar /where/it/is/safe
# cd /usr/local/src/gatos/X11R6/lib/modules
# tar cvf - . | ( cd /usr/X11R6/lib/modules; tar -xvf - )

Puuuuh
You'll just have to assure to load the radeon.o module before X11 startup. I added this line at the end (before ": exit 0") of my /etc/init.d/bootmisc.sh:

insmod /lib/modules/`uname -r`/gatos/radeon.o

Make sure, your XF86Config-4 has the correct values and options (driver is ati, not radeon!). Here are mine:

Section "Module"
Load "GLcore"
Load "bitmap"
Load "dbe"
Load "ddc"
Load "dri"
Load "extmod"
Load "freetype"
Load "glx"
Load "int10"
Load "record"
Load "speedo"
Load "type1"
Load "vbe"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "Generic Video Card"
Driver "ati"
EndSection

Done.

Have fun,
muesli

Go and read Microsoft's Bulletin Board. They did it again

There's another bug, enabling hackers to take the full control over your PC. Except Windows ME, every Windows version is affected. It's quite the same bug, they tried to fix some days ago, but they found another three RPC/DCOM security issues.

Quote:

"A security issue has been identified that could allow an attacker to remotely compromise a computer running Microsoft® Windows® and gain complete control over it. You can help protect your computer by installing this update from Microsoft."

Time to switch

George tries to sell a song on eBay, which he legally bought from the iTunes music store. At the time of this writing, it's already up to 3.550$. Just as a reminder: iTunes sell its songs for 0.99$.

But hey, this is a great idea in my eyes Let's see, if real-life is able to handle DRM. He also promised to delete his copy after the auction is over. But there is a problem: the song is bound to his PC via a signed key. How will this be transfered?

I'll keep an eye on it...

Be careful of SuperKaramba, it is addictive. Today I noticed, what a good example SuperKaramba is for the great pleasure of OpenSource development. I watched this process over and over again, now. You just have some ideas, some slices of imagination coming up in your head. Then you're going to write them down, either as headwords or by actually starting software development. Some rules to guide you to a happy developer.

First rule: Release early and often. People will take up your ideas, improving them, giving you feedback. Sometimes it's helpful enough just to get a good tip by some old, long-bearded guy, which will keep you on the track and in the right direction. Bugs could be found quickly, since everyone's able to track even the "un-reproducable" errors down to their source-code line.

Second advice: Keep a clean coding style, close to some known standard. Comments are important, too, since others will have a chance to find a good entry point for their development. Just think off yourself looking for the start of a change at some other's source code. You'd be thankful for nice comments.

Use standards and accepted interface types, don't create own ones. There's an exception in my eyes: If you're going to create a static client/server system, I'd prefer self-defined protocols, which are traffic-savvy and adapted to the project's purpose.

Last point: Why do all the work by yourself, if there are so many people interested to help you? Just start the project, just do the start-off. Wait, release and annouce, and others will soon help you, bringing new thoughts to the project, helping you gaining more freetime.