mikas blog

I wanted to know which (rss)readers people use for reading my blog. I created some stats based on logs from 26 july to 20th of august:

RSS-Reader                    | Counts
========================================
"blogg.de-Crawler"            | 8
"BlogPulse                    | 123
"centericq/4.10.0"            | 16408
"centericq/4.10.1"            | 4962
"centericq/4.11.0"            | 495
"centericq/4.9.10"            | 4308
"centericq/4.9.12"            | 18436
"Feedreader"                  | 27055
"Feedster                     | 386
"Gnus/5.10.6                  | 32
"Googlebot/2.1                | 5976
"ia_archiver"                 | 1
"Java/1.4.1_02"               | 51
"Java/1.4.1_05"               | 7
"LinkWalker"                  | 430
"Mediapartners-Google2.1"     | 51
"mm-url"                      | 20262
"Mozilla/4.0                  | 8073
"Mozilla/5.0                  | 70061
"msnbot/0.11                  | 2712
"NetNewsWire/1.0.8            | 2295
"Opera/7.51                   | 148
"Opera/7.52                   | 147
"Opera/7.53                   | 10480
"Opera/7.54                   | 1431
"PHP                          | 110
"PubSub.com                   | 3040
"rssfetch                     | 20957
"Seekbot/1.0                  | 50
"Snownews/1.5.3               | 6693
"Syndic8/1.0                  | 2547
"UniversalFeedParser/3.0-fc-1 | 14
"W3C_Validator/1.305.2.148    | 16
"Wget/1.9.1"                  | 301
"Wget/1.9-beta-unoff"         | 56
"www.adressendeutschland.de   | 438

Note:
Mozilla/5.0 includes browsers like MSIE 6.0 andKonqueror/3.2 but also Mozilla itself.

Toogle is a Text version of Googles Image Search. Currently it creates images out of the very term that was used to fetch those images, later we will endeavour to create images out of the search terms entered by users past and present. But for now please, go play.

  — http://c6.org/toogle/about.php

Have a look at Toggle :)

An absolutely great zsh-tip by Jesper Holmberg I would like to share with you because I find it very useful.

The motivation for the following snippet is the fact that I often do a ‘find’ or a ‘locate’ to find some files I’m interested in, and then want to do some action on one of the files I just found. This function provides a way to put completions from the output of the previous command on the command line.

What this does is that it repeats the previous command, saving the output in a string. It then splits the output string on new-lines, and quotes each element (so that for example file names containing spaces get properly quoted). I then bind the function to a menu-complete-like widget, so that I can step through the alternatives.

Test it together with ‘loocate’ or ‘find’. Perhaps someone finds this
useful, and any suggestions for improvement would be appreciated.

  — Jesper Holmberg on zsh-users mailinglist

Put this in your zsh-setup an press esc -e if you want to use this function:

_jh-prev-result () {
    hstring=$(eval `fc -l -n -1`)
    set -A hlist ${(@s/
/)hstring}
    compadd - ${hlist}
}
zle -C jh-prev-comp menu-complete _jh-prev-result
bindkey 'ee' jh-prev-comp

$ dpkg-buildpackage
zsh: segmentation fault (core dumped)  dpkg-buildpackage
$ dpkg-buildpackage --version
zsh: segmentation fault (core dumped)  dpkg-buildpackage --version
$ 

Same version of dpkg-buildpackage of course works on my laptop.
Argl.

Update: The solution to fix this problem is to change the shebang-line of the shellscript dpkg-buildpackage from /bin/sh (which is a symlink to zsh on my workstation) to /bin/bash.

$ svn up
svn: Working copy '.' locked
svn: run 'svn cleanup' to remove locks (type 'svn help cleanup' for details)
$ svn cleanup
svn: XML parser failed in '.zsh'
svn: Date conversion failed
$ mv .zsh .zsh.old
$ svn cleanup
svn: Can't open directory '.procmail/.svn/tmp/svn_io_remove_dir': No such file or directory
$ mkdir .procmail/.svn/tmp/svn_io_remove_dir
$ svn cleanup
svn: Can't open directory '.procmail/.svn/tmp/svn_io_remove_dir/svn_io_remove_dir': No such file or directory
$ mkdir .procmail/.svn/tmp/svn_io_remove_dir/svn_io_remove_dir
$ svn cleanup
svn: Can't open directory '.procmail/.svn/tmp/svn_io_remove_dir/svn_io_remove_dir/EðEìEìÄ$[]ÃUåSìtèÚWÿÿÃ': No such file or directory
$ mv .procmail .procmail.old
$ svn update
svn: Working copy '.' locked
svn: run 'svn cleanup' to remove locks (type 'svn help cleanup' for details)
$ mv .svn/lock .svn/lock.old
$ svn update
svn: Working copy '.opera' locked
svn: run 'svn cleanup' to remove locks (type 'svn help cleanup' for details)
[...]
$ for i in `find .opera -name lock`; do mv $i $i.old ; done
$ svn update
[...]
Updated to revision 44.

Grml.

I can’t believe it – but S4 is running (using linux-kernel 2.6.8.1) on my Sony VAIO FX602!

Disassembling the AML into an ASL-file with Intel’s IASL-compiler (part of the ACPI CA – Unix Build Environment), creating the AML in a c-hex-table and patching the linux-kernel did the trick.

I’ve documented the essential steps on my german laptop-webpage. What I have to check out in detail(!) is which daemons I have to stop, which modules should be removed and how to automate this process in best practive. But this has been a big step forward for me and my Laptop. ;-)

Lout is a document formatting system designed and implemented by Jeffrey Kingston at the Basser Department of Computer Science, University of Sydney, Australia.

   — http://snark.ptc.spbu.ru/~uwe/lout/lout.html

If you are interested in it also check out the project’s homepage @ sf.net.

Credits for the pointer goes to the faboulus Karl Voit, a friend of mine who is also an active contributor of the german-speaking project LaTeX@TUG.

For german-speaking people: check out the lout-thread in de.comp.text.tex. An interesting hint I found there is a pointer to ConTeXt.

Absolutely great. Jerry Peek (you might know him from the absolutely great book Unix Power Tools), Oliver Kiddle (a well known zsh-geek) and Stephenson Peter (author of the well known zsh-users-guide) have written a book on zsh named “From Bash to Z Shell: Conquering the Command Line” (book@amazon.at). It will be available in November 2004. Argh – that long to wait ;-(.

This book is very very interesting for me because my texttools-book will cover zsh too and till now there don’t exist any books on zsh. Since last week it’s a fact that I’m a trainer on KDE Community World Summit 2004 “aKademy” in Ludwigsburg (I’ll be there from 21th to 28th of August) and I hope that I can talk to people from some publishing companies there.

I wanted to take a closer look inside the current debian-installer of Sarge. I checked out the current svn-trunk and for fun (and inspired by Debian’s newsletter) I ran David A. Wheeler’s ‘SLOCCount’ for getting some stats. Have a look:

Totals grouped by language (dominant language first):
ansic:        30452 (59.93%)
sh:           16674 (32.82%)
perl:          2739 (5.39%)
yacc:           763 (1.50%)
lex:            126 (0.25%)
python:          57 (0.11%)

Total Physical Source Lines of Code (SLOC)                = 50,811
Development Effort Estimate, Person-Years (Person-Months) = 12.37 (148.41)
(Basic COCOMO model, Person-Months = 2.4 * (KSLOC**1.05))
Schedule Estimate, Years (Months)                         = 1.39 (16.71)
(Basic COCOMO model, Months = 2.5 * (person-months**0.38))
Estimated Average Number of Developers (Effort/Schedule)  = 8.88
Total Estimated Cost to Develop                           = $ 1,670,695
(average salary = $56,286/year, overhead = 2.40).

While being in city yesterday afternoon I went to the IMO best bookshop in Klagenfurt called ‘Heyn’. There I again met my “old schoolfriend” Michael and his girlfriend (I have been in city because I met them and another friend before the unofficial meeting at Heyn ;-)).

Michael isn’t a computer geek and I too didn’t want to buy a book related to computers so we have been at the fiction-section of the bookshop.

When I told Michael that I don’t want to buy a computerbook he was joking that all the books right up here are computerbooks too but their content is hidden behind a more relaxing story.

Well. We took a look at the titles of the books and we could find a relation to computers at almost every book. Just take a look at this titles (sorry, german ones but they have been the ones I can remember):

* Die Dämonen ruhen nicht (Patricia D. Cornwell)
* Stabilitätspolitik (Helmut Wagner)

Of course this also works for english books:

* Horse and Stable Management (Jeremy Houghton Brown)
* Design and Crime: And Other Diatribes (Hal Foster )
* No More Company Crap (Ed Bayless)

At the weekend I recorded Rubeo and Petzi with the digital videocam of my father.

About 1,5 hours of video – resulting in ~16 GiB capturing-data. I don’t have that much free space on my laptop so I had to work on the windows computer of my brother.

In the semiprofessional area of movie-editing it’s (AFAIK) about 1 hour you have to work an a 1 minute resulting scene. The final movie takes 21 minutes, all together I’ve worked for about 10 hours – quite fast but I hope the video is ok.

My familiy enjoyed watching the video. The MPEG2-stream of it has 4.3 GiB, too much for the web ;-). A smaller CD-ROM version has 634 MiB – even too much. So I have a Microsoft ASF-file (.wmf) of 155 MiB which I uploaded within the last 3 hours (while being in Klagenfurt city) to the webserver.

Please don’t slashdot my webserver 8-):

Rubeo and Petzi in summer 2004 (WMV) (155 MiB)

Have fun – feedback is welcome :-)

As you maybe know I’m running Debian unstable (with 2.6.8-rc3) on my laptop. X11 is working and I even have support for XVideo. Now I wanted to add 3d acceleration (the gatos-drivers don’t provide 3d acc.).

Ok, first of all I tried to use the debian package of the mach64-CVS-branch by Michel Dänzer.

cd /usr/src/modules/drm-mach64 && make
[...]
In file included from /usr/src/modules/drm-mach64/gamma_drv.c:34:
/usr/src/modules/drm-mach64/drmP.h:51:27: linux/wrapper.h: No such file or directory

Seems to be kernel 2.4 specific stuff… Ok, let’s do it on our own.

I downloaded ‘ATI Mach64 Driver‘ with build date 20040716. Compiling, installation and even modprobing of the DRM-module worked. Now let’s try to start X:

$ grep EE /var/log/XFree86.0.log
(EE) module ABI minor version (7) is newer than the server's version (6)
(EE) Failed to load module "ati" (module requirement mismatch, 0)
(EE) No drivers available.

Argl… :-(

Ok, now I’ll try the dri-trunk: I had to remove xserver-xfree86-dri-mach64 manually, otherwise it wouldn’t have been possible to install the new packages. Hey – X is at least running (without falling back to fbdev ;-)), but:

$ glxinfo | grep rendering
direct rendering: No

Ok, I’ll have to check this out in more detail later – now I’ll have a go for some beer^Wcoffees with old friends from school. 8-)

Yes, Apple seems to hunt me ;-).

As you can read in my last blog-entry I evaluate(d) iPods.

Today Karl Voit pointed me to the baghira-look’n feel for KDE which tries to simulate Apple-feelings. And hey – it works! I really like it. (Take a look at the screenshot.)

Jimmy (who set up his weblog today) pointed me to a special book of O’Reilly’s series called ‘Hacks’. There I found iPod & iTunes Hacks. Argl.

In many of the blogs I’m reading Apple is mentioned. For example Tim Pritlove is blogging abobut “Apple: The Microsoft of the Music Market” and “OSX del.icio.us client”. And even in the news I read Apple-news, e.g. Mac Keeps Lead on Linux (OSNews.com).

Grml. Steve – I know that Apple provides great notebooks (an ibook is on my wishlist for quite some time) and that I should take a look at Mac OS X. But give me some more time, let’s say till you release Mac OS X v10.4 AKA Tiger. Thanks. :-)

My girlfriend wants to buy a mp3-player. Of course I’m the one who evaluates which one she should buy.

I didn’t have any experience with that stuff (I’m proud owner of a minidisc-player since many years) so I posted to the TUG-newsgroup tu-graz.hardware and got great feedback.

The requirements are:

* linux compatible
* good (life-span of) accumulator
* good sound (not high-quality)
* available in austria (via shipment or shop in Graz or Klagenfurt)
* price of max. 150 euros

The following mp3-players have been proposed:

Archos Ondio SP MP3-Player 128MB (68 Euro)

dnt Fun256 (102 Euro)

Acer MP3-Player/USB-Stick 256MB inkl. FM-Tuner (AG.MP3F2.256) (125 Euro)

Apple iPod mini Musicplayer 4GB silver (M9160ZR/A) (258 Euro)

Commodore MP3-Player (~150 Euro at Niedermeyer)

So it’s my turn and I have to choose one. I really like Apple’s stuff but the mini iPod isn’t really an alternative (price, no apple-computer,…). About 100 euros would be ok. A FM-Tuner would be nice, a possibility to record talkings would be great.

A very hard decision and I still don’t know which one to choose. Any more comments which could cause me to go to bed before googeling for another few hours? ;-)

My new blogsystem provides feeds (RSS .91, 2.0 and Atom 0.3) which can be parsed by aKregator without any problems. So I wanted to import all the snownews-URLs without doing too much 8-)

See the power of DCOP:

$ sed 's/(.*)||(.*)|/dcop akregator-1808 aKregatorIface addFeedToGroup 1 2/' urls >| /tmp/cmd
$ chmod 700 /tmp/cmd && /tmp/cmd

And now I’ve all the URLs from snownews inside aKregator without a single mouseclick. I’ll write a script which can handle snownews -> aKregator and vice versa for integration into my subversion-system of config-files.

In November 2003 I was inspired by Andi Krennmair (AK) to do some blogging. At that time AK used b2 so I also installed b2. b2 was ok but a few month later it began to suck. First of all development ended due to it was published as a merge of b2 and cafelog under the name wordpress. So no new features, no bugfixes. A few days ago I was testing aKregator (a KDE RSS-reader) but reading my own feed failed because of some “^M” at EOL (end of lines). :-(

I tried to migrate to wordpress but failed :-(. AK migrated his blog to wordpress and wrote down the stuff he did. So I also tried to migrate. And hey – as you can see here we are :-). Thanks to AK who helped me at the migration!

If you notice any bugs/problems don’t hesitate to contact me. Thanks.

Note: Don’t forget to update the URL of my rss-feed in your rss-reader!

This might have become a rant too. First of all because it’s not possible to log the “apt-get upgrade”-process in detail with (on-board) debian-tools. What IMO sucks too is the missing documentation for some tools like apt-listchanges and apt-listbugs. So I tried to figure it out via manpage in combination with the provided example-scripts of apt-listbugs. Corresponding to google-output and #debian.de it seems that most of the debian-developers even don’t know of their existence.

Ok – what I was searching for:

* log upgrades in detail to be able to reconstruct possible errors (very important on productive systems)
* check for open/outstanding bugs (also on selected packages only) and list them
* show bug-reports with different severities without using a webbrowser

What’s my solution? First of all I tried to do some logging via strace. Problem: does not work while using the configfiles /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/10apt-listbugs and /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20listchanges which are calling DPkg::Pre-Install-Pkgs-commands.

So I wrote a small shellscript:
www.michael-prokop.at/computer/config/bin/debstrace

I’m also using some adjusted apt-listbug-examples in my zsh-setup:
www.michael-prokop.at/computer/config/.zsh/zsh_debian
and a ruby-script:
www.michael-prokop.at/computer/config/bin/listbugs.rb

WFM (works for me). Suggestions are welcome.

Currently I’m building my own chroot-environment. Now I’ve a static zsh from cvs-tree:

[mika@tweety(519): ~/Source/zsh-cvs-040803/zsh]$ ldd Src/zsh
        not a dynamic executable
1 [mika@tweety(520): ~/Source/zsh-cvs-040803/zsh]$

Now I’m trying to modify my zsh-setup so it works without any more modifications out of the box in the chroot-environment.

In a chroot you’ll probably find no GNU-date so I wrote a zsh-wrapper for it:

zmodload -i zsh/datetime
alias datereplacement='strftime "%Y-%m-%d" $EPOCHSECONDS'
export DATE=`datereplacement`

Now you can use “$DATE” in zshrc for dynamic stuff.

I relaxed at the weekend without touching any computers (expect for about 20 minutes on saturday). Quite uncommon feeling ;-).

What I’ve done on friday before driving back to Klagenfurt was setting up chroot on two of my linux-boxes. Based on the work of Wolfgang Fuschlberger and hisssh-scp-chroot-jail-script (thanks Wolfgang!) I tried to set it up but noticed some traps. I sent some bugfixes to Wolfgang and he already merged them into his script (great!).

I wrote a small webpage with some notes on setting up chroot and mentioned it on my german linux-tipps-webpage.

What’s on my todo-list (as 423 other things 8-)) is to check the security-state of the chroot-environment. And I’ll try to check and provide some static binaries inside chroot for providing shellaccounts on my boxes for scp, svn,…

Second week of IPICS04 has been done too.

Monday (26th of July):
Bart Preneel (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium) was giving “An introduction to cryptology, Part II” in 5 units. Main topics were MAC, PKI and GSM-security. Herbert Leitold (Secure Information Technology Center, Austria) was talking about ‘Electronic voting in Europe’ and it’s main problems. Afterswards Karl Scheibelhofer (Secure Information and Communication Foundation, Austria) give us some information about ‘Java Crypto Solutions for Embedded Systems’ like J2ME and IAIK Java Crypto Products.

Tuesday (27th of July):
Keith Martin (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK) held interactive 4 units on ‘Electronic commerce’. Main topics were B2C, B2B and clients vs. managers point of view – no real news for me. Eugen Brenner (Graz University of Technology, Austria) held a lecture on ‘Writing secure code’. It’s content has been development process, threat modeling, risk mitigation, security testing, root causes and secure coding techniques.

Start 3-Days Industrial Seminar

Wednesday (28th of July):
Stefan Mangard, Elisabeth Oswald and Vincent Rijmen (Graz University of Technology, Austria) were talking about ‘Side channel attacks’ and ‘Defense against side channel attacks’ including demonstrations. Taling about SPA (Simple Power Attaks), DPA (Differntial Power Attacks) and Timing Attacks was very interesting!

Erkay Savas (Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey) hold a lecture on ‘Sensor Network Security’ – including topics like SNEP, microTESLA and PKC in sensor networks.

Johannes Wolkerstorfer and Martin Feldhofer (Graz University of Technology, Austria) were talking about ‘Authentication with RFID Tags’.

Thursday (29th of July)
Bart Preneel (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium) was talking about GSM-, WLAN-, UMTS- and bluetooth-security in his talk ‘Mobile communications security’. Very interesting!

Ernst Haselsteiner from Philips Semiconductors (Austria) was talking about ‘Common Criteria Evaluation of a Smart Card Cryptographic Library’.
Afterwards Dieter Gollmann (TU Hamburg-Harburg, Germany) give us an introduction to ‘Evaluating Protocols’.

Quite interesting was the lecture from Holger Bock (Infineon Technologies, Austria) about ‘Random Numbers in Security Applications’. Main topics were Kalmogorov Complexity and systems like RANDy, Protego and SLE66C(X)xxxP and some more theory.

IPICS Presentation Day – Friday (30th of July)

Very detailed information on ‘Computer architecture for pervasive security’ like as “fast cryptographic processing” and “attack resistance” was telling us Ruby LEE from Princeton University (USA).

Bart Preenel (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium) told us some news on ‘Trends in cryptological research: The European Network of Excellence in Cryptology’ – again very interesting!

Dieter Gollmann (TU Hamburg-Harburg, Germany) was talking about TCP (Trusted Computing Base) , MLS (Multi-level security) and TCPA/TCG in his talk ‘Trusted Computer Platform’.

An introduction to the topic bometry gave us Reinhard POSCH (Chief Information Office, Austria) in “Biometry and Identification”.

Conclusion: IPICS04 was very interesting. I got many new keywords I could/can google for. Organisation of the event was also absolutely great. Thanks to Prof. Karl C. Posch!

BTW: I’ve done some urlblogging during the second week of IPICS04 – it’s available online: http://del.icio.us/mika/ipics04