[Murf]

Package : openssh
Vulnerability : predictable random number generator
Problem type : remote
Debian-specific: yes
CVE Id(s) : CVE-2008-0166

The recently announced vulnerability in Debian's openssl package
(DSA-1571-1, CVE-2008-0166) indirectly affects OpenSSH. As a result,
all user and host keys generated using broken versions of the openssl
package must be considered untrustworthy, even after the openssl update
has been applied.

Bugger.

Never knew this :

Due to the earth's magnetic field, cathode ray tube (CRT) monitors are manufactured to work in northern, southern and equatorial regions of the earth and may not produce a satisfactory image when moved between them.

Discovered while checking out Lenovo International Warranties.

No, not the drug, but the Asus EEE PC. Yes, Stephen Fry is a bit of a tech head. A recent review of the Asus EEE PC is certainly enhanced by Fry's rather excellent prose.

The Asus EEE PC perched on my knee combines GNU software with a Linux kernel powered by an Intel Celeron Mobile Processor to produce a very extraordinary little laptop. It weighs less than a kilogram, starts up from cold in about 12 seconds and shuts down in five. It has no internal hard disk and no CD drive. It offers 512MB of RAM, 4GB of storage and a seven-inch display; wireless, dial-out modem and ethernet adaptors are available for networking and internet connections, three USB ports, mini-jack sockets for headphones and microphone, a VGA out, an SD card slot and a built-in webcam. All for about £200 - less than the price of a show, dinner and taxi for two in London's West End.

Full Article

Whatever happend to the old 132-character dot matrix printers? They sure as hell printed source code better than a laser. I'm currently trying to solve a bug in a BSD pf ruleset, and decided to print it out. Sometimes, the printed word makes it easier to see typos, and I could also annotate it to try and trace the flow of packets.
The office laser gave me back 12 pages of admittedly nice large typeface, but the wrapped lines and multiple sheets made me long for the old matrix printer that used to sit at the top of Lab1 in Maynooth CS Department. Nice white/green alternate lines on big fan-fold paper.

Come to think of it, perhaps the reason they're no longer around is that they sounded like chainsaws in action.

The e^x Joke

Found by Niall

BBC's Panorama recently did an 'expose' on the dangers of WiFi networks in the home. Here's a succinct analysis of Panorama's approach.

Via Memex

Well, looks like Dell is going to pre-load linux on a selection of it's hardware (again!).

From el reg:

Dell has finally chosen a Linux distribution to offer on its desktop and laptop machines. Following news that Michael Dell was running Ubuntu on his personal laptop, the company has followed suit and from late May Dell machines will ship with Ubuntu 7.04 as an option.

However,

There's no official word from Dell, but several sources within the box-shifter have been talking to desktoplinux.com.

There's no official press release on the Dell website (as of posting), so they might just be flying a kite here, awaiting market response and possibly Microsoft's answer too. On the other hand, this article on techiqmag points to a possible reunion with redhat:

But wait. Hold everything. Now, sources close to Red Hat say the company could have some desktop-related news to share in a few weeks or by the summer at the latest. So let’s review the situation: Dell is prepping Linux desktops. Red Hat is prepping potential desktop PC news. Hmmm. Coincidence, right? Could be…

Most articles seem to point back to desktoplinux.com, so let's wait and see.

My other half recently got an iPod mini, so I plugged it in to see what it's like.

Result: Frustrating.

Why? The iTunes interface contains speedbumps. A speedbump in a UI gives you pause for thought on the road to getting something done. The best example here is removing songs from your iPod or playlist. You're asked to delete them. Sounds pretty strong! I find myself asking all sorts of questions before pressing the OK button. Delete? Er, do you mean just from the list or from the list and my hard drive? Do I have a backup? Should I risk it? Is there a remove from list option? No! Gah!



Now, it's quite possible that I'm just far too used to amarok, and iTunes simply does things it's own way, but it just doesn't seem to be all that nice to use. I let it scan a USB drive with some extra tunes on it. It discovered some WMA files and asked could it convert them. Another speedbump - what does that mean? Replace the originals with AAC or MP3 versions? Create copies in another format? Gah!

Another minor gripe is the 'Do Not Disconnect' warning that flashes on the iPod while it's connected. If you quit iTunes without ejecting the iPod, it doesn't unmount it. I suppose that's more of a nice to do rather than should do, but if it's meant to be easy to use, surely that should be a requirement.

Otherwise, I have to say it's quite a nice player. The device is neat, and the UI on the device itself is very nice indeed.

Most people are unaccustomed to publishing their ideas in any kind of forum. So blogging presents a terrifying challenge; it raises awkward questions like: to whom am I addressing these semi-random thoughts? And why am I doing it anyway?

Interesting point from John Naughton.

Des Traynor, a researcher and lecturer in NUI Maynooth, and Andy Page have done some research into the Bebo phenomenon and it's implications for child protection (and exposure). Des was interviewed on Today FM by Matt Cooper yesterday. A recording in Ogg format is available here.

The key result of their research (press releases here) ? As Des said on irc yesterday,

1) Privatise the Profile
2) Don't make "bebo friends" with people you don't know
3) Once a month or so, check your kids bebo statement

So simple, yet the ISPCC spokesman (listen to the interview) seems to think that the parents will have trouble with this as they are 'computer illiterate'. Fair enough, but if I'm 'film illiterate' does that mean video rental shops and the Government are entirely responsible for what my children rent from the video store? I think not. Not to say that Bebo doesn't have a responsibilty to take measures to protect children, but it must be acknowledged that parents have a major responsibility too.

P.S. Well done to Des and Andy, it's good to see the CS Department mentioned on national radio!

I've been getting mightily annoyed at the amount of trackback spam I'm getting to the blog. Serendipity don't provide an option to turn it off, so Niall found a way to switch it off in the code for the blog. Nice. All you need to do is edit the 'comment.php' file in the root directory of your blog. Locate the 'if' statement below:

if ($type == 'trackback') {

// Insert these two lines to disable trackbacks. Comment out the rest.
// Basically, doing this disables trackbacks.
report_trackback_failure();

/*
if ($tb_logging) {
# PHP 4.2.2 way of doing things

By inserting the two lines above at the start of the if statement, and commenting out the rest of the code in that if statement, you can block all incoming trackbacks. Dave pointed out that I could just use Akismet API, a plugin for S9y, to block spammy trackbacks, but I'm happy enough to disable for the moment.

From a slashdot comment:

This really pisses me off. I'm so sick of reading newspaper articles that read something like this:

YoYoDyne, Inc. has created a new revolutionary product, a so-called "widget", which "frobs" and "fiddles" with so-called "gizmos".

...where all of the quoted terms are legitimate technical terms. If I turned the tables, and wrote a letter to the editor, saying:

I found the "article" published in the so-called "News" section of your "newspaper" to be quite interesting.

...you know that they would be annoyed, because the quotes and the "so-called" make it sound like the term is not really what it's called, and that it's not really true. If writers are concerned that a reader doesn't know a term, there's no point in putting it in quotes to reassure the dumb reader that they're not dumb. It's much more helpful to write something like this:

YoYoDyne, Inc. has created a new revolutionary product, a widget (a small gadget used to modify gizmos) which frobs (gently adjusts) and fiddles (adjusts more aggressively) with gizmos (common elements of world-domination machines).

Quite right too.

Sometimes you can be too close to the bleeding edge with hardware. I'm heading to the states for work for a couple of weeks, so I blagged an IBM X60 for the trip (I'll review later, so far it's small, light and fast!).

Now, I use Linux (Debian) full-time in work, so the easiest thing by far would be to simply stick Debian (or kubuntu or any linux distro really) on the laptop, copy my /home folder over, apt-get any missing aps, and I'd be away with all my settings, email, docs etc. Nice and neat.

Execpt, debian fails to detect the network card! And the kubuntu cd I have is dodgy and fails to boot.

Gaaah!


So, here I am now wondering if I can do the reverse to what all the HOWTO's say, I'm seeing if i can move from Linux to Windows. It's not nice. After working on Linux for so long the only initial good thing I can say about windows is that the manfacturer supplies the device drivers, and I don't have to go compiling myself. Otherwise, it's negative out of the box. Crap command line tools, no multiple desktops, no amarok


Update: Evolution for win32 is available, just ported all my mail by simply copying it from one machine to the other. Accounts didn't get ported, but all my filters did. (I have a lot!).

Well, that was good. The highlights have to be the mod_rewrite talk by Rich Bowen which dispelled a lot of the voodoo around rewrite rules, which have been likened to line noise. The last talk was very interesting, a load-balancing setup using mod_proxy_balancer by Paul Weinstein - could be a winner for something I'm currently working on at work as you can set it up to allow caching as well as proxy balancing.

There were a couple of sessions in the middle of the day on the new authentication schemes coming in apache 2.3, plenty on integration of LDAP and apache-auth (sweet!, you can do loads - like search for any combination of attributes, selectable authentication and seperate authorisation methods - nice).

Got to have a chat with Jean-Frederic Clere (JBoss & tomcat/httpd/apr committer) about an annoying problem we're having with a httpd/mod_proxy/tomcat setup we have in the office. Got a few pointers and a bit of a clearer understanding the whole thing!

Back again tomorrow for some performance tuning!

Well, arrived there a little while ago in the Burlington for ApacheCon '06. Wireless access abounds, so no fear of lacking any net connection for the day (in fairness, a tech conference without net access probably isn't worthy of the name )

Nothing in the first talks of the day for me, but there's some good ones coming up on load balancing and performance issues with apache www server.

Hopefully I'll even learn something!