mikas blog

http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/interviews/v5i11_weber.html (pointer by Sigi Herzog on luga-ML)

I bought a Samsung ML-1510 Laserjet for 157 Euros a few days ago. Installing it via CUPS was no problem but I had problems with the margins. Changing the options in the ppd-file did the job:

$ grep 'ImageableArea A4' /usr/share/cups/model/samsung.ppd
*ImageableArea A4/A4: "14 20 581 822"
$

Yeah, absolutely great – now printing is fun 8-)

First day of GLT04 was nice. Interesting talks, no serious incidents and social event at Brot&Spiele was fun. Pictures are online. Now I am going to sleep due to I have a workshop together with Sven Guckes early in the morning – at 10:00 ;-)

From: Garry Mahoney <vmtnw@hotmail.com>
Date: Wed, 05 May 2004 01:33:55 -0200
Subject: Vim this size gets anyone
To: vim[at]michael-prokop.at
Message-Id: <jwkgfovivofnufxstxgpkctmt@hotmail.com>
X-Spam-Status: Yes, hits=17.6 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_99,CLICK_BELOW_CAPS,[...]

Yes! I am one of the 5 students at TU Graz who can take part in IPICS04 – Intensive Program on Information and Communication Security: Secure Embedded Systems – in July 2004. Absolutely great!

No – it’s not a rant cause it’s quite funny 8-). Today an icq-spammer named ‘Andrea’ with UIN 234701251 wrote me. Have a look to the log:

02.05 03:11 Hi, what You do?
02.05 03:11 * Authorization request : Empty authorization request message
02.05 03:11 * Authorization request : Empty authorization request message
02.05 03:11 Has found you in the ICQ... I think you can help me...
02.05 03:11 I can not send you the information, it is not sent... Add in contact list please

Ok, I just wrote some lines and regardless of what I now write and send I get the following reply-message(s):

02.05 23:50 You can advise as to fix this site? http://info.url.biz.ua/

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=6864

# ps 1>/dev/null
# uname -srv
Linux 2.4.25-grsec #1 Sam Apr 24 11:49:51 CEST 2004
#

It’s running… I’m just thinking of a (smart and hidden) lart for the guys who pulled the power plug… Any ideas?

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=245718
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=245849

No, that’s not funny:

# ps 1>/dev/null
{ide_get_best_pio_mode} {GPLONLY_ide_get_best_pio_mode}
Warning: /boot/System.map-2.4.22-ow1 does not match kernel data.
# hdparm -tT /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
 Timing buffer-cache reads:   128 MB in  0.23 seconds =556.52 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  64 MB in  1.78 seconds = 35.96 MB/sec
#

And it’s a productive machine running with RAID. No option for remote-reboot. Compiling kernel 2.4.25 with grsecurity and ea+acl+nfsacl+sec-0.8.71 was definitely no fun. Ok, but after changing some lines of code it compiled without any errors and I installed the debian-package:

# dpkg --get-selections | grep 2.4.25
kernel-image-2.4.25-grsec                       install
#

Googleing for ‘{ide_get_best_pio_mode} {GPLONLY_ide_get_best_pio_mode}’ does not bring me anything useful ;-(. I hope the problem solves itself with 2.4.25 on monday….

No – it’s not really a rant. I just installed Opera 7.50 B1 on my laptop. The DNS-confirmation and the close-transfer-window have been fixed in the Preview-4-version. Due to the changelog Opera now supports ‘Auto-detection of RSS file (link rel=”alternate”) displayed in navigation bar’. Ok, so I added such a header to my webpage. What the changelog does not mention is that Opera crashes when clicking on ‘Newsfeed’ 8-).

Remember my rant about the mailinglist of securityfocus? More than 80 mails in my spam_securityfocus-folder ;-(

I unsubscribed multiple times but still receive newsletters – grml. So I tried to unsubscribe via webpage for another time. Have a look:

An unsubscribe request has been sent for «censored»michael-prokop.at to the following mailing lists:

sf-news 
ms-secnews 
linux-secnews

Hint: notice the position of the ‘for’ and ‘to’ – how true 8-)

Maybe my KMail-rant was a little bit polemic (hey – it costs time! 8-)) [I’ll have a look at the source], but what really sucks is Outlook. Am I telling news? :o)

At work we still have two persons using Outlook. One at it’s own risk and the other one because importing in thunderbird didn’t work as expected ;-(

What’s the problem? One pst-file (a binary file from and for Outlook) crashed. I could recover the file using C:\Programme\Gemeinsame Dateien\System\MSMAPI\1031\pstscan.exe. Costs time, is quite thrilling (binary format for important files – argl!) but worked at least.

But what’s really stupid: one person changed her password on the server but did not recognize that also Outlook prompted for the new password. Due to the existence of multiple mail-accounts it was not clear enough which password should be entered ;-(. Ok – shouldn’t be a real problem, nor? But: Outlook prompted for password just once, when entering a wrong one it just switched to offline-mode. Which means you will never see the new mails – great! More than 20 days without checking mails on a account ;-( Hey, KMail is great!

Laserprinter at work is now not only available through IPX/Novell-crap but also via plain TCP/IP, especially via remote-CUPS. Together with the new fileserver running Samba 3 instead of Windows NT4 a main reason why I could switch to Linux on my Desktop *happy*

Because I think KDE is a really great desktop for using it at work, I set up KMail (together with ‘kontact’). IMAP-Setup was done in about 2 minutes – great. Setting up GPG-stuff worked fine with kgpg. Sending signed and encrypted mail to my private mailaccount (using mutt as a client) works. But: KMail can’t handle my MIME-GPG-stuff. Inline-GPG works of course. grml. According to this howto inline and MIME should work, but it does not. Even compiling the libs as mentioned in the howto did not help – grml. Any ideas except using mutt?

But what really sucks: I wanted to add the contacts from LDAP-server to my addressbook. LDAP-search, add entry. Ok. I had to send a mail to 5 people. First of all I couldn’t figure out how to create a group (send a mail to many persons with ‘a single click’) – huh? So I had to choose the 5 entries manuallly, then sent mail. But only 1 of the 4 persons received the mail – huh? So let’s have a look at the addressbook: KMail added a blank/space at the end of the e-mail addresses. Instead of using e.g. ‘<michael.prokop@tugraz.at>’ KMail stored ‘<michael.prokop@tugraz.at >’. Argl!

Just for checking out:

[mika@dufo: ~]% ldapsearch -x -b "OU=Bedienstete,O=tug" -h ldap.tugraz.at sn=prokop | cat -e | grep TUG
mail: michael.prokop@TUGraz.at$
[mika@dufo: ~]%

So it’s not the fault of the LDAP-server. And even if it would – why can’t KMail recognize (and then store) what’s a valid mailadress? grml.

Found A, B, C, … D! The Programming Language on osnews.com (an online-ressource I really like btw).

A Comparison – D vs Other Languages.

I don’t know whether ‘D’ is interesting enough (I hope that’s not a new version of ‘640kb are enough’ 8-)), but I’ll add it to the quite long list of programming-languages I’ll have a look at ;-).

C:\Dokumente und Einstellungen\prokop.UFO.000\Desktop>type "office-update.cmd"
@echo off
REM Filename: office-update.cmd
REM Purpose:  run office-update as root/administrator
REM Author: Michael Prokop / www.michael-prokop.at / www.grml.org
REM Latest change: Mo Apr 19 00  2004
REM #####################################################################################
ECHO Starting office-update as Administrator
runas /profile /user:%COMPUTERNAME%\Administrator "C:\Programme\Internet Explorer\IEXPLORE.EXE \
http://office.microsoft.com/officeupdate/"
C:\Dokumente und Einstellungen\prokop.UFO.000\Desktop>

Yes – this should work. Should. Because it does not work – the following line is the content of the address-bar:

http://explorer/IEXPLORE.EXE%20http://office.microsoft.com/officeupdate/

It really sucks!

A Taste of Qt 4 – by Jasmin Blanchette

Fundamental Issues with Open Source Software Development

http://a9.com/grazer%20linuxtage – it seems to work ;)

Some more details on a9 is available at John Battelle’s Searchblog

References in Major Papers to Weblogs and Blogs