February 24th, 2011
Just in case you didn’t know already, Sony is suing George Hotz, also known as “geohot“, a talented young guy who among other things helped unlock the iPhone. Sony sued him for violation of the DMCA and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act because he hacked HIS OWN PlayStation 3. This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise however, as Sony once tried to sue a guy for getting his AIBO to do non-Sony approved tricks.
George even has a page on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz
I’m tempted to get a PlayStation 3 and hack it just to make a statement. Sony, this is not how you should treat customers. I was considering buying a Vaio because they’re some of the best laptops I’ve seen but I definitely changed my plans!
Posted in computers, hacks | Comments Closed
June 16th, 2008
This Friday the 13th was special. I’m not in any way superstitious, mind you, but I wasn’t expecting anything out of the ordinary either. So imagine my pleasure when, rather than bad luck, I got an unexpected phone call: my new BMW F800GS was ready, registered and fueled, a whole week before the estimate I was given about two months ago. Not that I was fearing any significant delay from the Bayerische, but I’ve come to learn that such estimates are usually a bit optimistic… Between me and her stood only an unending pile of papers to sign and, of course, a sizable check.
Already a few hundred km on the odometer, unfortunately most of them under cloudy skies and even some light rain. Smooth is the keyword — smooth engine, smooth handling. Now if only the weather could get a little bit better…
A couple of reviews and in-depth descriptions for you:
“He move in space with minimum waste and maximum joy…”
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Closed
May 26th, 2008
Do you know the value of eiπ (also known as Euler’s identity)?
Posted in math | Comments Closed
January 27th, 2008
Note to self: if you want to use iproute2, remember to enable CONFIG_IP_ADVANCED_ROUTER=y and related stuff in the kernel configuration.
If you don’t, the ip rule add command will answer “RTNETLINK answers: Operation not supported”.
Posted in Linux | Comments Closed
September 17th, 2007
Dear Apple,
I really love my iPod nano (1st gen). I also love Linux, but I’m told you don’t like the two things to live together. Fortunately, I’m also told that some good guys already worked around the protection, but still this really makes me wonder if I should keep buying your products; I didn’t know the story about DAAP and RAOP either. I’m not going to sell my nano outright, but why would I buy the new one if I can get the same functionality, minus the closeness, from my Nokia phone, for example? And I can also install any software I like on it.
Really. Your products are good. Your policy is not. Fix that, please.
Submitted this through Apple’s iPod feedback form, let’s see if I get an answer.
Posted in Apple, Linux, iPod | Comments Closed
February 24th, 2007
If a paranoid system administrator has blocked ssh access from Linux hosts to your office’s network — using the OpenBSD packet filter‘s fingerprinting — and you find yourself without access to the office’s mail server, you might want to make your Linux workstation’s TCP stack look like something else by changing the TTL, for example:
echo 128 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_default_ttl
The road to this hack is quite easy, anyway:
- install OpenBSD in a virtual machine;
- look hard at /etc/pf.os and look for possible useful differences;
- see that Linux uses a TTL of 64 while Windows XP uses 128;
- profit!
Item 1 was needed because I couldn’t find a copy of /etc/pf.os quickly, so I figured that it’d take less to just install an OpenBSD.
Posted in Linux, Unix, computers, hacks | Comments Closed
February 14th, 2007
Yesterday I found an article on digital rights management on the GNU web site. The article itself is interesting, although IMHO a little bit too biased towards the “see how many freedoms they could take away from us” angle — but that’s the way RMS thinks. However, I was disappointed to see that the article — the entire www.gnu.org site, in fact — was using the Bitstream Vera Sans font. Here’s the relevant part from the style sheet, and note the comment:
font-family: "Bitstream Vera Sans", sans-serif; /* favour free fonts!! */
Now don’t get me wrong, I like the Bitstream Vera fonts just as much as you do and I use them extensively, not just because they’re free, but because they do indeed look quite good — at least on Linux. But I was reading that article from the office on a Windows XP machine and the Bitstream Vera fonts don’t look good there, or at least not as good as Verdana. Anyway, that’s not the real point: if one prefers a different font, perhaps just as free like Isabella, what can (s)he do?
The funny part is, Stallman’s own site (http://www.stallman.org) doesn’t force you to use free fonts…
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Closed
February 8th, 2007
Finally, I put my bookmarks in a wiki.
(of course, it’s not user-editable; not yet, at least)
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Closed
December 5th, 2006
One of our programs wasn’t working when the input file was on a Linux server. You know, I make a living writing software on Windows, but I’m a Linux guy at hearth, so this was a bit disappointing. Initially, I blamed it on a misconfigured Samba, then I looked at the code and saw that it errored out on a call to tmpfile(). OK, let’s look at the documentation for tmpfile() in the Visual Studio help, just in case…
… The temporary file is created in the root directory. …
Say what?
No, really… WHAT?!?!?
Let’s put aside for a second the fact that any sensible administrator will never, ever allow write access to the root directory of a network volume. AFAIK, the root of the C: drive is read-only on Windows XP if you don’t have administrative rights, so this would break.
Posted in Windows, computers, programming | Comments Closed
November 16th, 2006
When one of your users complains that your mail server “doesn’t work”, 90% of the times it’s his own fault, and 10% of the times it’s someone else’s fault. You’ll notice that 90% + 10% makes 100% of the cases. Actual problems on the server do happen sometimes, but the chances that your users notice before you do are basically zero.
You guessed it, today I got one too much of such “the server doesn’t work” complaints.
Posted in computers | 1 Comment »