mikas blog

Yesterday evening I was (together with Sven Guckes) at JazzerSommerGraz where Chick Corea was playing a really great concert.

Some pics are available online.

There was – as usual – free entrance and I think some people didn’t know what kind of music Chick Corea and his Electric Band are playing because they left concert quite early 8-). At least you were able to figure out the non-musicians in the audience – banging with head on the wrong beat (or they were musicians but blowers 8-)).

Just found on planet.debian.net:

mailto:de_DE@euro.UTF-8

—
http://blog.drinsama.de/erich/2004/07/27#locales

My Kanotix/Knoppix-installation on my Sony-Laptop sucked. Hotplugging was quite crappy and using WLAN-card with WEP at IPICS04 did not work. So it was time for testing the Debian/Sarge-DVD I got by Fred Andresen from Linux-New-Media.

Installation of Debian/Sarge was quite comfortable. No (obvious) bugs in the installer, no loss of data and a fast way to get a current version of Debian/unstable. The takeover of my pptp- and wlan-setup was done quite fast. Sound is working and I’m running 2.6.8-rc2.

Notice: never try to start KDE when you don’t have a loopback-device. Not a single error-message, debugging due to the kdeinit-system is quite hard and you just notice a hanging ksplash at 25% – *doh*.

A cronjob sends me a daily output of my calendar for the next 20 days (pal -r 20). What I also like is ‘at’ as a reminder:

echo "mail -s 'check TODO-list' your@address.invalid < /dev/null" | at 23:42

Of course this can be used also with other programs like osdsh, [kgX]dialog,…

What’s your favourite way of handling reminders and todo-list?

Let me show the power of zargs. First of all let’s see wheter both commands do the same:

$ find /usr/include -name \*.h -exec grep printf /dev/null {} \; | wc -l
389
$ zargs /usr/include/**/*.h -- grep printf /dev/null | wc -l
389

Yes, seems so – so let’s compare them via ‘time’:

$ time ( find /usr/include -name \*.h -exec grep printf /dev/null >| /dev/null {} \; )
Real: 4,89s User: 1,41s System: 3,46s CPU-percent: 99%
$ time ( zargs /usr/include/**/*.h -- grep printf /dev/null >| /dev/null )
Real: 0,27s User: 0,14s System: 0,14s CPU-percent: 102%

Now I was searching for other zsh-addicts via Feedster. I couldn’t find really interesting blogs but what I could find is ZWS. ZWS is a simple web server written in ZSH. ZWS uses zsh/stat, zsh/datetime, zsh/net/tcp and tcp_proxy. IMO it’s just something like a prototype – but at least it demonstrates the power of zsh.

And now going on searching for other zsh-addicts…

Because I’m having internet-access while sitting at IPICS04@TUG I will give a short overview over the last week.

Tuesday (20th of July):
Ahmed Patel from Ireland was talking about ‘Investigative Computing’. Main topics were comparison of existing models (Interpol, Casey, DRWS,…) and some main parts of computer forensic. Günther Pernul from University of Regensburg took a 4 units lecture on ‘Authorization and access control’. Till now this has been to most interesting lecture for me due to I learned some really new stuff. Pernul was talking about discretionary, mandatory and role-based access controls and presented some case studies (DAC+SQL-security, CSAP and RBAC in IRO-DB). All together 198 slides and about 5 coffees. ;) In the evening we took a tour through Graz, drinking some beers on Schlossberg.

Wednesday (21th of July):
Vincent Rijmen (TU Graz) was giving ‘an introduction to cryptology [part 1]’. Rijmen’s topics have been historical ciphers, modern ciphers (DES, AES, RC4) and asymmetric cryptology. Afterwards Simone Fischer-Hübner from Karlstad was talking about ‘privay and privacy-enhancing technologies’, topics like LBS (Location Based Services), mix nets and P3P (platform for privacy preferences). Only 87 slides and about 3 coffees for the whole day.

In the evening my girlfriend came from Klagenfurt to Graz together with her brother Christian and we went to JazzSommerGraz where global.kryner were playing a really great concert. There we met Sven Guckes and Karl Voit who had 3 seats for us 8-).

Thursday (22th of July):
Javier Lopez from university of Malaga (spain) was talking about ‘network security’ for 4 units and afterwards on ‘advanced security services and public key infrastructures’ for the other 3 units. His main topics in network security have been ISO/OSI-model, IPSec and SSH/SSL/S-HTTP. In the PKI-lecture his topics were X.509 and other hierachical models. IMO Lopez should get an entry in the book of world records, he has done 1 slide per minute in average in 7 units(!).

Friday (23th of July):
Udo Payer (TU Graz) was talking in ’embedded intrusion destection’ [58 slides] about FSM-implementations, SOM (self organizing maps) and OS-fingerprinting. Erland Jonsson from Chalmers university (Sweden) hold a lecture on ‘dependability and security’ – 39 slides, very theoretical content like dependability and it’s attributes, security and dependability metrics. Finally Jorma Kajava from Oulu (Finland) was talking about ‘end user perspecitve’ (article of 38 pages) with an ‘ill voice’ – quite hard to listen.

Saturday (24th of July):
The trip to the vineyard-street in styria was quite funny. Visiting a vine-museum and an accident from the bus with a car in a small city on countryside which took us for about 1,5 hours (till police arrived ;-)) were quite ‘interesting’ 8-).

Sunday (25th of July):
Some of the other visitors of IPICS04 were going to Schwarzlteich, but I decided to relax on this day (suffering from short of sleep over the last few days) and just did some work at home and watching movies.

Notice for ipics-visitors: check the password-restricted ipics04-webpage.

If you don’t read Andi Krennmair’s (AK) weblog you might be interested in being pointed to his tool tpp. tpp is a tool for presenting “slides” on a textconsole. It works like a charme and Andi already implemented some of my suggested features.

What you need is Ruby 1.8, a recent version of ncurses and ncurses-ruby, get tpp on http://synflood.at/tpp/.

Great job – Andi!

I wanted to have this feature for quite some time. Today I realized it with osdsh. osdsh in combination with osdctl now displays a blue text in the centre and top of X (when it’s running) on every virtual desktop. So I don’t have to check for new messages such often (centericq is running inside a screen-session). I receive this message only in online-mode so it won’t disturb while playing dvds, working,…

# snippet of ~/.centericq/external
%action display-message-via-X
event msg
proto all
status online
options nowait
%exec
#!/bin/sh
if [ -z $(ps aux | grep "[X]11/X") ] ; then
  exit 0;
else
  nname=`head -n 46 $CONTACT_INFODIR/info | tail -n 1`
  if [ -z $(ps aux | grep "[o]sd") ] ; then
    DISPLAY=:0.0 osdsh -c blue -n 19 -o 1 --a 1 && sleep 3 &&
    osdctl -s "centericq: $nname,"
  else
    osdctl -s "centericq: $nname,"
  fi
fi

What I’d like to have is using such a feature while sitting on remote hosts. Any ideas? 8-)

Update: Changed the osdctl-command due to it expects two lines in any case, seperated by a comma. Thanks for the hint to Karl Voit.

2nd Update: corrected a spelling-error in the commented line of the script, of course it’s ~/.centericq/external and not external’s’ ;)

178 slides, 5 units in >7 hours (including pauses) – first day of IPICS04 has taken place. Prof. Karl C. Posch gave us an ‘Introduction to Information and Communication Security and Secure Embedded Systems’. Steven Furnell of University of Plymouth (UK) was talking about cyber crime.

35 participants from all over the world are here in Graz for the next two weeks. The organisation is absolutely perfect. Free(!) coffee and snacks in the pauses, a free map with >500 pages of the slides – seems to be a really great event!

Due to I’m concerned in IPICS04 for the next two weeks I assume I’ll blog more often on this events, for the upcoming lectures refer to the program.

I just found a perl module for gmail via Planet Debian.

This perl module uses objects to make it easy to interface with Gmail. I eventually hope to implement all of the functionality of the Gmail website, plus additional features.

Anyone writing an extension/wrapper for mutt? 8-)

Opera’s look and feel can be changed with one-click setups. These setup files bundle popular browser settings so you can select a style that suits you best.
Setups can change Opera’s skin, toolbars, menus, keyboard shortcuts, and mouse gestures.

— www.opera.com/startup/customize/

I really like those setups. The Safari look and feel (skin) together with the Web Developer toolbar is very useful for me. Now I’ve more space for the many tabs inside Opera on my 14,1″ TFT on my laptop.

If you are zsh-user you probably know the german “zsh-liebhaber-seite” of Matthias Kopfermann. Because the webserver of the old and original webpage is often under high load we (Matthias and me) decided to overwork the webpage and locate it on my website.

So if you are interested in zsh and are capable of reading german have fun with the new zsh-liebhaber-webpage [currently german only].

Groups Google 2 Beta is online. It’s interface is quite similiar to the one of gmail.

Check out the new interface via going through some postings. One of the new features I could find is the option “Recent groups” on the left side of the panel, displaying recently viewed newsgroups. It’s also possible to “Clear this list”. Another nice feature is that searching for a posting via it’s message-id works via the normal search field.

What I noticed is a problem with the utf8-charset. Have a look e.g. at
this posting and the following screenshots.

Opera, Konqueror, Firefox, links2 and w3m on my laptop are displaying wrong characters:

Displaying source of the posting works as it should. A nice(?)/new feature is the protection of mailadresses, message-ids don’t get touched 8-) [many people can’t distinguish between mail-addresses and message-ids]:

Have a look at the javascript-stuff. Most of the important navigation-stuff seems to work without javascript:

As you maybe know I’m currently working on the book about texttools. I’d like to include a chapter with some details on terminals. But documentation about raw-, cooked-queue and so on sucks^Wdoesn’t really exist ;-(. The only useful documentation I could find is the Single UNIX © Specification on “General Terminal Interface” and of course sourcecode of texttools working with terminals 8-).

And what I don’t like (hey, this should become a rant 8-)): I’d like to have image-support (which looks really great in “links -driver x”!) in framebuffer-mode, but:

[mika@tweety(545): ~/tmp/links2-2.1pre15]$ ./configure --with-fb --enable-graphics
[...]
Configuration results:
GPM support:            NO
SSL support:            YES
Javascript enabled:     NO
Graphics enabled:       YES
Graphics drivers:       X
Image formats:          GIF PNG XBM JPEG
xterm for OS/2 support: NO

And of course a “ldd ./links” shows that ‘links’ is not compiled against libdirectfb & CO. Grml! Ok, I’ll try to figure it out in the next few days. The duel links vs. w3m is still going on :)

Since Wednesday 16:00 I’m at holidays 8-). No work, no university – at least not official ;-). Now I’m listening to Nils Landgren’s Funk Unit at Jazz Baltica on tv (3sat).

Today I met Sven Guckes at Kunsthaus in Graz. Sven is in Graz for the next three months. Together with Sven I’m writing a book on texttools. The LaTeX-framework already exists and the subversion-repository is working fine [At revision 17.].

Sven gave me some posters from FFII and for LinuxTag 2005 in Karlsruhe. And Sven – you’re absolutely great! Sven brought me Linux DVD 2004 from LinuxTag 2004. Now I’m browsing through the documentation-dvd, thanks – Sven!

Legende:
T = Türkenkind
M = Mika (ich ;-))

T 02.07 23:56 * The user has added you to his/her contact list
T 02.07 23:57 hi bist du der von http://www.michael-prokop.at/person/#real
M 02.07 23:57 wieso?
T 02.07 23:57 wenn ja dan wollte ich dich was fragen
M 02.07 23:58 ja, bin ich
T 02.07 23:58 kennst du einen guten hacker programm
M 02.07 23:59 vim
T 02.07 23:59 was ?
M 02.07 23:59 vim
T 02.07 23:59 was heißt das
M 03.07 00:00 www.google.com -> vim
T 03.07 00:00 da finde ich nichst richtiges du kennst dich doch gut auß oder
M 03.07 00:00 http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
T 03.07 00:01 okay ich kuck mal danke
T 03.07 00:02 ach ich such selber cu

In den letzten Wochen habe ich viel für das Projekt LaTeX@TUG getan. Heute ist das Projekt offiziell online gegangen, mal schauen wie das Feedback ausfällt.

Zitat von der Homepage:

Das Projekt LaTeX@TUG soll Anfängern beim Einstieg in das Thema LaTeX helfen, typische Fragen in einer Sammlung (FAQ) beantworten, Vorlagen zum Arbeiten mit LaTeX zur Verfügung stellen und Fortgeschrittenen bei Problemen Hilfestellung geben. Am Projekt arbeiten Mitarbeiter der TU Graz, es sollen aber nicht nur Studenten bzw. Mitarbeiter der TU Graz davon profitieren, es werden nur Dokumente/Vorlagen speziell für die TU Graz angeboten.

Today I attended at a lecture of Bart Preneel at university. Bart Preneel was talking about Cryptology and it was a quite interesting lecture. Bart Preneel is a professor at the Electrical Engineering Department of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Together with Prof. J. Vandewalle, he is heading the research group COSIC at the K.U.Leuven, which currently has 35 members.

He was talking about hash functions, MACs, block ciphers and so on. I’ve heard some terms like as RIPEMD-160 and MDx-MAC for the first time. I should take a deeper look into the book ‘Abenteuer Kryptologie’ of Reinhard Wobst [ISBN://3827318157] which want’s to be read when I have time to do so 8-).

Check out the Homepage of Bart Preneel for more details.

Today I did some zsh-hacking. I was sick of sourcing special files in my ~/.zsh/ to change my prompt – which is quite essential for me to change between a comfortable prompt for working and one for copy/pasting. So I wrote my own prompt-functions.

Some predefined prompt functions are located in $ZSHDIR/functions/Prompts/. I named my prompts “smart” (the one I usually use by default), “copypaste” (quite simple for easy use with copy/paste) and “heavy” (based on the layout of Matthias Kopfermann[thx!]).

I noticed a quite strange behaviour when you are using the preview of zsh prompt themes. Check it out on your own (pasting output would make no sense and would be quite to much):

$ zsh -f                             # start up zsh without config-files
$ echo $PROMPT                       # print out value of $PROMPT
$ vared fpath                        # edit $fpath if necessary
$ autoload promptinit && promptinit  # now initialise the prompt-feature
$ prompt -p                          # print out preview of available prompts
$ echo $PROMPT                       # print out value of $PROMPT