mikas blog

Till yesterday (18th of october) I had to finish my essay on stream ciphers for IPICS04. It is available online (PDF, 141kb) .

It has been the first time I was using BibTex “productive”. Whereas I was using Vim for editing literature.bib in the beginning I took a short look at gBibg (thanks for the hint – Stefan Sollerer!). I do not really like Gnome/GTK applications but gBib seems to work fine, especially if you don’t use an “LaTeX-IDE” like Kile. Finally I switched back to Vim because of my lazyness. ;-) Which BibTex editors are you guys using?

Very useful for me while writing the essay has been Wikipedia, of course Google and the book Computer Security by Matthew A. Bishop (ISBN: 0201440997).

The book is quite expensive but the content on the 1084 pages is really great. I couldn’t find any better books covering computer security on the theoretical layer than the one by Matthew Bishop.

$ irssi
/server VCG
/join #vc-graz

.. and you can talk on Worfs IRC server in VC Graz. Of course some other IRC servers are available too. Or run:

$ VPNUSERNAME=123 VPNPASSWORD=abc grml-pptp-vcgraz

and you have a PPTP connection in VC Graz. Run:

$ grml-x =wmi

and you’ll get a XF86Config-4 and WMI starts up. Of course you can choose between ion (ion2 and ion3), wmaker, fluxbox, twm and wmi as a window manager. More than 1600 packages will be included in release 0.1. Some screenshots are available online too.

No, I’m not dead. I’ve had a high load in the last few days, especially because of the upcoming grml-release 0.1. The todo list was quite long and most of it has been done now. Just some annoying bugs are left and I’ll try to fix them till monday (then the CD for OS04 will be burned). Besides that I’ve to finish my essay on stream ciphers for university till monday. And finally many new people in dormitory are asking for computer support. ;-(

Together with my girlfriend I’m attending to USI Graz (institut for sports at university) this semester . We’re playing table tennis and jumping trampoline once a week. (Achtung: Trampolin Springen und nicht Trampolin Hupfen! ;-)) Table tennis sucks a little bit – too many people and till now we even did not play with any trainer – grml. Jumping trampoline is much more fun. Nice people (many girls!;-)) and jumping is just fun. I hope my back is still alive after this semester. ;-)

BTW: You might have noticed the downtimes of my server. Sorry for that. The provider (domke) of my provider (pronet) is part of a fusion with Plusserver. And to keep it short: it just sucks. AFAIK my provider will leave Domke/Plusserver in the next few days and as it looks like I’ll get my very own rootserver. Hurray!

Martin started showing his wallpaper in his blog, AK, Niko and Thomas already replied so it’s time for me.

My current wallpaper isn’t very spectacular but I like it. It’s the grml-wallpaper created by Wolfgang Scheicher and me. Of course it’s included in the grml-release.

When I’m searching for new eye candies I usually take a look at www.kde-look.org, art.gnome.org and images.google.com and of course my local harddisc. :-)

Fans of the Simpsons might have noticed already that Season 4 DVD-Collection (amazon.de) is available.

But I have to rant: the epsiode running on PRO7 in the afternoon today was bad, really bad. It was ‘The Regina Monologues (#EABF17 / SI-1417)’ of season fifteen and the episode was pure nonsense. Nothing compared to the funny episodes of earlies seasons. damn..

Wenn ein Schizophrener mit Selbstmord droht – ist das dann eine Geiselnahme?

English version: If a schizophrenic person threatens with suicide – is this a hostage-taking?

— my brother Alex while watching the Gilmore Girls

Yesterday I finished the devel-release of grml called “0.09 Bughunter”. In the evening we’ve had the burning session at Kunstlabor Graz. Two people of the grml-team have been there – Jimmy and me.

I hold a presentation on grml, about 10-20 people attended it. Everything went fine so far *knock_on_wood*, feedback was very well and a girl (no joke! :-)) even gave me a feature-request which I’ll realize in the next days. :-)

At the end of the presentation I started moagg (hey Slash!) and xblast-tnt (hey Alfie!), two small but nice-to-play games included in grml. Hey – sysadmins have to relax ;-)

Sven Guckes took some pictures of the session – available online.

Do you know how every monday morning should start?
Read “Lustiges Taschenbuch” and find a story where Donald wins against Dagobert. :-)

Greylisting sucks. Downtimes suck too.

Maybe you noticed that my website (including the blog) and grml.org have been offline for some hours. It’s a problem at my hoster (not pronet.at but the provider behind them) due to an “amalgamation of business”. Yes – this sucks.

It doesn’t only suck because web isn’t available and I can’t work on grml’s changelog online. My ISP (VC-Graz) uses greylisting (even for mails sent from “internal”). Mails sent with a “From: *@michael-prokop.at” can’t be sent when my domain isn’t available. Did I mention that greylisting and downtimes suck? grml.

While setting up PPTP and the TV-Card on my brothers computer I downloaded Monado – the Microsoft Shell [MSH]. And I had to use the Internet Exploder because of the great (haha) “Microsoft File Transfer Manager”-feature. No chance to download the .exe with Opera, Firefox or Konqueror – you just don’t get a connection to the server. *d’oh*

Being back at work today I was setting up Service Pack 2 on my Windows XP Box (which I haven’t used for more than 4 months now). I also installed the .NET-Framework and MSH. It’s awful slow on my box. I just took some screenshots.

There does not exist any useful documentation for MSH besides the internal help and some blogs. So I started to download “The .NET Show: Longhorn Fundamentals”. I was able to get it with opera but guess what’s the file type? dotnetshow43_300k.EXE. So no chance to use the movie outside a microsoft operating system. Ok, let’s uncompress the file and see what’s inside:

MSH>gch dotnetshow*


    Directory: FileSystem::E:Microsoft


Mode    LastWriteTime     Length Name
----    -------------     ------ ----
-a---   Okt 01 12:22   246.395,K dotnetshow43_300k.EXE
-a---   Jun 08 09:15   250.608,K dotnetshow43_300k.wmv

MSH>

Argl…

Goal: replace files in /etc/zsh from package zsh with files from package grml-etc. Store original files via dpkg-divert and when purging grml-etc restore them.

Ok: use debian/preinst with dpkg-divert and don’t put the config files in the file ‘conffiles’. And wonder why it doesn’t work as it maybe should. Why? Files are put into ‘conffiles’ on “their own”:

find debian/grml-etc/etc -type f -printf '/etc/%P' >> 
     debian/grml-etc/DEBIAN/conffiles

So you have to work around it via:

dh_installdeb
cp $(CURDIR)/debian/conffiles $(CURDIR)/debian/grml-etc/DEBIAN

Might be a well known issue but if you don’t know that it can cause pain till you set DH_VERBOSE=1.

And why does www.debian.org/doc/ not provide an index? grml.

My load is quite high. I’m working for OS04 (Open Source Event on 22th of october in Graz) and therefor miss the Gilmore Girls in the afternoon (*grml*). I should study for an exam and grml takes the rest of my time. And of course I should prepare my slides for my lecture on grml @ OS04.

Some news on grml: Andreas Gredler and Daniel K. Gebhart joined the grml-team. It looks like grml won’t accomplish the DFSG (Debian Free Software Guidelines) at all because we’ll integrate mplayer. And now we can present a final roadmap for the first releases: Version 0.1 will be available on OS04 (also via web of course). A public bughunter release (0.09) should be available on the burning event in Kunstlabor Graz on 4th of october.

Number 32 in my spamcatcher-trap.

It looks like this in the webserver log:

62.178.201.106 - - [26/Sep/2004:02:38:24 +0200] "GET /suche/ HTTP/1.1"
200 - "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; CHWIE_AT71; SV1)"

And it’s not just one entry:

$ grep 62.178.201.106 log/access_log  | wc -l
    204
$

Of course I’ve sent an abuse mail to chello.

Murphy won. At least for all the people who don’t have a 24/7 connection to our gateway in Virtual Campus Graz. The gateway (handling stuff like PPTP/VPN, HTTP/FTP and SMTP) does not work anymore as it should. My PPTP-tunnel is still alive *knock on wood* and Martin provided me a ssh-tunnel for sending mails. Thanks, Martin!

On saturday or sunday probably nobody will fix the problem. :-( I hope the tunnel lives till at least monday. If you can’t find me online Murphy took the gateway as a whole.

Suckers. More than 20 spam comments within a few hours. Using the antispam feature of wordpress – which requests for approval – didn’t help. First of all I still get mails requesting for approval (you can turn off this feature but I don’t want that). What sucks more is that the comments including the common spam words are left behind in the moderation queue. :-(

mp.at $ cat .htaccess
[...]
Deny from 66.120.210.29 # producing 90% of spam in my blog
Deny from 165.194.121.227
Deny from 203.151.63.145

Update: Thanks to AK who pointed me to WordPress Hack: AuthImage. I’ve had some problems installing it due to some security options of apache+php but I could fix it and it seems to work like a charme. If you notice any problems please contact me!

Tomorrow (thursday) is the devel-day for grml. Inspired by SuSE’s sitar I wrote a small shellscript named ‘grml-hwinfo‘. It just prints out some hardware information which should help us (the grml-team) to fix bugs in hardware-detection and/or software.

Please test it on your Debian system and report bugs and additional ideas!

KDE has a lot going for it. It’s attractive and powerful. Its breadth of functionality is inspiring. Where it could benefit most is a consistent eye toward usability, particularly in not overwhelming new users with its capabilities. Easing new users into KDE, rather than throwing everyone into the deep end of the pool, would broaden its appeal to a wider range of users.

— KDE 3.3 Usability Study and Review – Conclusion

Yesterday I’ve been at my dentist in Klagenfurt. Now I’ve one tooth less and I’m feeling really bad. The procedure of removing the tooth itself was “ok” (not recovery but fast and no real pains) but afterwards it was horrible. Abdominal pain, ague (Schüttelfrost), headache, sore throat,… Being back to Graz I even didn’t want to see my computer, a clear sign. ;-(

Today I’m feeling a little bit better, but even no chance to go for work. I hope to feel better tomorrow so I can study for my next exam at university and in the afternoon a devel-meeting for grml was planned.

Man nenne mich ignorant oder auch Bernhard-Nichtkenner. “Der Untergeher” von Thomas Bernhard ware ein Versuch von mir, wieder mal österr. Literatur zu schnuppern. Die Geschichte dreht sich um drei Pianisten die nur das Höchste als die wahre Kunst gelten lassen.

Eine nette Geschichte, dachte ich mir beim Buchkauf. Bei ungefähr der Hälfte des schmalen Buches musste ich aber aufhören. Die Phrase “sagte er, dachte ich” zieht sich dermaßen aufdrängend durch den Text, dass sich eine depressive Stimmung im monotonen Monolog bemerkbar macht. Diese mag der Leser zu schätzen wissen (Bernhard beherrscht das Spiel mit der Sprache durchaus perfekt), mir aber war es zu deprimierend. Vielleicht war es nicht der richtige Einstieg in die Literatur von Bernhard oder meine Stimmung einfach die falsche. Unter meine Lieblingsbücher reiht es sich momentan auf alle Fälle einmal nicht ein.

My wisdom teeth are growing since months. It seems that I don’t have such a bigbeautiful mouth such as Julia Roberts. So some teeth are hurting now. :-(

Because I still don’t know a reliable dentist in Graz I think I’ll have a one-day trip to my familiy and my dentist to Klagenfurt next week. I hope my dentist has time for me pretty soon. Otherwise I’ll visit the dentist of my girlfriend.

What I’m missing is a simple ‘[hostname == $BODY] && (apt-get update; apt-get upgrade)’. Any volunteer coders? ;-)