I use powwow which is a derivative of tintin I believe. It supports aliases, actions, and all the other good stuff, but I found it too limiting without using external scripts to handle database lookups, so I embedded a perl interpreter in it and I maintain a branch based on powwow 1.2.5 called perlwow, which also supports using any perl modules installed allowing you to pretty much script anything that you can do in perl.
Re:how many hack books do i need to buy?
on
Linux Server Hacks
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· Score: 1
I think a lot of slashdotters must have picked up safari because after I pointed out that Google Hacks was on safari, it's now skyrocketed to the #1 book place ahead of Beginning Programming which has been there for months.
This is available on the Safari website for those that have subscriptions, which is nice because it's not a very long book. I was able to read most of it in a day, and I would have felt a little robbed had I bought it, but just checking it out gave me enough time to read what I wanted.
It's not that simple I think. True that active content is overused, but it can really be helpful when you don't want to roundtrip to the server just to calc some numbers, and twiddling settings is annoying for the user, if they choose to turn it off and on. It would be better if the thing was secure. The problem IE has in particular is they try to "zone" thing, local zone, trusted zone, internet zone, secure zone, etc. They do this so that you can have stuff in the local zone executre programs or virtually do anything on the system. And that's the problem, by trying to make javascript in to a generic scripting language, they've opened up the local zone to anyone that can break through the zone barrier.
Most exploits involve one javascript generating a second window which comes into the local zone and posting content to that, though I think that's somewhat patched now, they can also use ActiveX controls to screw you. There is obviusly something flawed with the model, and had they just made javascript a web only scripting language like it was designed, none of this would have happened.
Basically this is the same as another exploit posted to the list earlier, but with a new command. And for that matter, jelmer has been posting a new IE local zone exploit like every week... Any of them could have been used to make something like this, it's just no one has tried to do a format. True the jelmer posts didn't include the "run a program with arguments" thing that was posted this week, but they did show how to read/write arbitrary files and execute them. So batch file somewhere and here comes a HD format.
So the only reason we haven't seen this I think is because like always, virus creators want their program to spread, and the quickest way to stop the spread is to kill your host, so instead we get mass mailers, trojans, etc. It was going to happen eventually.
The only 15 letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable.
Yeah this is OT, but I just wrote a perl script to solve this kind of problem last week.:) First off, uncopyrightable doesn't even show up on dictionary.com, however there is a 15 letter word that does not repeat any letters: dermatoglyphics
I just posted a set of tools for automating X at my website that I recently created to make a bot that could play Yahoo! Spelldown. There are 2 parts to the tools, finding things on screen using a "visual grep" program that finds images inside of images, and xte, an app built on the XTest extension that allows scripting of moving the mouse, clicking, dragging, keypresses, etc. Together you can use them to make scripts that can identify buttons on screen or letter or words or numbers, whatever, and interact with programs. Still a pre-1.0 version, but it does everything listed above so far.
BTW, don't use xse, which is a wrapper for XSendEvent, if you roll your own. There are so many places where it just doesn't work, or doesn't work right, because the XSendEvent function just doesn't work reliably. I lost a lot of sleep over that before I gave up and just wrote xte.
This is a great idea, and would be fairly cheap to add to computers I'd imagine. I don't know about other machines, but the AS/400 has a little display on the front that can post error codes during an IPL (basically a boot) and also has a status counter because it takes so freakin long to get going on some of those boxes. And even if it only worked for POST that wouldn't be bad either... I mean really, trying to decide if the beep is 4 short 1 long 2 short or 2 short 1 long 4 short isn't exactly easy!
You're half right. They did use creative accounting to hide losses, but they weren't booking it as income as I understand it. Instead they claimed expeneses as assets, which has the effect of making the spending look like they are retaining something. The reason it's bad is because expenses are considered just that, expenses and you pay out money. Assets are a little different in that you may have paid 2000 for that new P4 workstation, but if you were hurting for cash in theory you could sell it and get some of that money back, unlike paying for example your power bill, where after you've spent the money you have nothing to sell and retain nothing of value. By accounting for expenses as an asset, you would depreciate it so that it doens't hit your bottom line until the end of the products usefullness, at which point you can't sell it anymore and it's not really worth anything. But for big purchases, it can make a business show it's having a profit instead of a huge loss at the time when it bought the equipment.
I don't know why the original poster didn't list the mirror information, after all the gif has the site name printed on it, but oh well. The mirrors are a lot faster, and I think it should be pointed out that the gif is 4.1M and the mov is 13.4M
I ran in to that just last week trying to set up an MSN Messenger account (my gf uses messenger) and was greeted by the fun "You must upgrade to IE or Netscape 4+" type of message. What a crock. Luckily I had been playing on MozDev and found lots of cool toolbars, like the google toolbar, and the UA bar which lets you set your useragent from a handy dropbox, like IE4, 5, 5.5, 6, etc. There I just set it to IE6/NT and the page loaded fine, set up my Messenger account, and I was done. Yeah, I need to "upgrade" for what reason again?
If you use the UABar, though, remember to reset your UA string to the default before you close Mozilla. If you don't, it gets saved to the prefs.js file and next time it starts, will barf an error because the UA number is too low (I think IE uses part of the NS4 version string), not a huge deal but you do have to edit the prefs.js to fix it.
(BTW, I hear in the next (last?) WinXP patch, you'll be able to strip IE from your system entirely? Where can I find detailed information about this?)
Well, I don't know about removing IE, but you can use gecko in IE instead of mshtml by making it use the mozilla activex control. Sounds like it works with most programs that used mshtml because it's binary compatible as an activex control... almost the same as removing IE.
(somewhat ot, but funny how someone who is a "master of marketing" yet doesn't even understand 4th grade english)
From the PR link you posted (emphasis mine):
The quality of the design and graphic arts department here at MonsterHut is unsurpassed by no competitor.
So, given the double negative, does that mean that the graphics arts department at MonsterHut is surpassed by all competitors? heh.
I think it's also worth mentioning sketch. It's not gnome or kde specific, but I've found it superior to both sodipodi and kontour. It does gradients correctly unlike sodipodi and allows creating individual line segments instead of "auto-lines" where they create a bunch of segments for you. Plus it runs with fairly low requirements, under python and pygtk.
Here's what I've learned. Virtual PC is your best bet for running virual Windows based machines.
I think millions of Windows users on a regular PC would argue that point. After all, surely a dedicated windows machine can send out more viruses/sec than a virtual one.:)
Kind of funny you mention the whole document compatability thing, because my friend just ran into an interesting problem the other day. He has MS Works at home, because he didn't want to buy office, the PC came with works, and he didn't want to "borrow" a copy. Works was good enough, and he'd been using it for a long time and had a lot of documents in wps format.
He wanted to bring a document to the office so he could work on it, and we run MS Office 97. You'd expect similar applications to read each other's formats within the same vendor, so it seemed like a good idea. Except Word97 can't read MS Works files, even though MS Works can read MS Word files. Doesn't make any sense to me.
So instead, he was playing around in Linux since we just installed it for him, and he was looking at the office apps. He opened KWord and thought "I wonder if I could open those Works documents" and gave it a try. Worked great. Then I told him about OpenOffice and he's been using that instead, the special 6.0 version that comes w/ Mandrake.
So now, instead of using MS Office for anything anymore, he just uses OpenOffice because for him it's been more compatible with documents than MS Office!
I agree the back button thing can be irritating, but sometimes you can't really work around it, e.g. if the page is dynamic and the data can change and the back button can become a data-integrity nightmare. Sure it can help to use transaction ID's and make sure nothing happens twice, but it's annoying to me as a web developer. Sometimes I wish there never was a back button.
For a concrete example of problems w/ the back button, check out acmemail. It's a cool webmail client, uses perl and pop3, but if a user clicks back, usually after reading a message and wanting to get back to the message list, it will cause strange problems and eventually auto-log them out. It took a long time to teach the outside sales staff at work that you just need to click the "inbox" button instead of back, and to this day every time there is a meeting they mention that webmail is broken, then I check it out, find out they're using back, and explain the solution. Then the next meeting comes and it's square one all over again...
I thought the same thing at first, but after a second I realized maybe this is just a slashcode feature I didn't know about because I've never seen it written anywhere. After a quick experiment, I see I was right:
And so on. Pretty neat idea really, now it can offer niche news on special sites plus the big enchilada on the main site. Best of both worlds it seems.
This is probably just a ploy to get us/.'ers to buy a bunch of these things before "Nintendo makes him give them over to them.":)
All kidding aside, I used to like the big N a lot back in the day, but how can this break the DMCA? Is the fact that there are not readily available cart readers mean that it's a "circumvention device?" It doesn't appear to decrypt anything or break any kind of circ. device, looks like it just copies bits off the cart.
So someone more knowledgable want to explain how this falls under the DMCA?
I would have to argue that. I own a GBA and a few games that I'd like to play more. Advance wars works OK, but Castlevania COTM is almost unplayable unless you're in direct sunlight. I'm sure everyone is aware of the problems with the screens being too dark. I wouldn't mind loading up the Castlevania ROM in an emulator and playing it on a PC, it's a great game but I've given up finishing it until the summer, when I can get all the sunlight I need even on work days.
Granted I know there are a lot of people out there that are not quite so honest when it comes to emulation, basically the same people that distribute 0-day movies and playstation ISO's.
Make sure you install the mesaglut-devel package. It's needed.
Good to see they've finally included one of the most-needed functions ever for a geek, the megaslut package. I know I've been asking for it for a long time, I can't wait to see what kind of development stuff is in the devel- package...
looks again
Crap... Oh, mesaglut... well, I guess it's back to autopr0n...
I think they're right, for the most part webpads are ahead of their time in the consumer market. I know I'd like one, but I've also got 3 pc's and a wireless lan, not exactly average.
I do believe that their right on the mark though about the so called "Vertical Markets." I can think of many uses for this in industrial applications. I think it'd be great for things like physical inventory, instead of sending out hordes of people to count inventory and report back on sheets to be keyed in the main system to be reconciled, they could just walk the floor with these and eliminate the data punching. Or for replacing pick tickets for order fullfillment, no more printing and it could even show mass-overstock locations in a warehouse so if the shelf is empty the picker doesn't need to look up the overstock location.
Basically I could see it used anywhere there is a need for information on demand, allowing the users to be untied from their PC connection to the mainframe system, so they can get the info they want when they need it, instead of going back and forth. If priced right, it could easily show an ROI quickly in reduced labor and increased productivity. Especially good in times like this where the economy is bad and things like hardware distribution are already low-margin businesses at best.
Since it's basically a computer with not harddrive, all that's needed is a little gateway programming, and if done right that could spill easily into enabling things like the SPT-1700 wireless scanning palm pilots. The webpad could be used for more interactive applications where the added screen space would benefit, and the SPT-1700 could fill in where scanning and minor keypunching is needed, especially receiving product on the docks. No more keying item codes, just scan barcodes and the system can automatically do the recieving!
I can't wait until these things start coming down in price and commodity so they become a viable option for medium sized business.
Find me a story where a company that has a $100M invested into their custom accounting/billing solution has decided to throw it out and spend another $100M to rewrite the software for Linux.
Where I work, custom software is the norm. We purchase almost nothing in terms of off the shelf packages and the main system just does it all. The code has been around for about 20 years or so, ported from platform to platform. Currently we're on the NT platform, but after a few bullying letter from MS stating that since we haven't purchased anything in the last year or two from them that we must be pirating software.
Well, that was it, we started looking for a way to move off the NT platform. Our codebase is roughly 4.5 million lines of COBOL code, and the data is archived back many years as well. So we had 2 problems, there was no COBOL compiler for Linux, and anything resembling one was not data-compatible. Until about 4-5 months ago that is, now MicroFocus has spun off from Merant and become a single entity (again). So now there is a source and data compatible compiler for our backend apps. Just change around some directory separators and it just works. No export/import/etc.
I guess my point here is that I've found most anything can be targeted for the Linux platform, especially those systems that are character-based, as many that I've seen are. The GUI interfaces are relative newcomers to the field. And with borland porting toolchains to linux, I'm sure it will just get easier to retarget -> recompile and have shiny new binaries. Even better when the toolchain is just a port by the tool vender, then most likely your data will be fine too. The only exceptions I see that will probably never change are the MS toolchains, MSVC++, VB, VFP, etc. And if you're starting MS, then you probably don't have much choice of platform, though I have seen a gnome project somewhere trying to build up to source-level compatibility with VB.
And I don't want to here any whining about "what if you don't have the source," all I have to say is, if you payed $100M for some software and didn't even license the source, you've got bigger problems than blue screens and crashed desktops. We are a medium sized company, and our code didn't cost that much. And we get to keep it to if the developers go under, plus add anything we want to the source. Now that I'm somewhere that has done that, it makes no sense to buy software for XX thousands or millions of dollars and not get the source... That is a huge risk.
Slashdot Mirror
I use powwow which is a derivative of tintin I believe. It supports aliases, actions, and all the other good stuff, but I found it too limiting without using external scripts to handle database lookups, so I embedded a perl interpreter in it and I maintain a branch based on powwow 1.2.5 called perlwow, which also supports using any perl modules installed allowing you to pretty much script anything that you can do in perl.
I think a lot of slashdotters must have picked up safari because after I pointed out that Google Hacks was on safari, it's now skyrocketed to the #1 book place ahead of Beginning Programming which has been there for months.
This is available on the Safari website for those that have subscriptions, which is nice because it's not a very long book. I was able to read most of it in a day, and I would have felt a little robbed had I bought it, but just checking it out gave me enough time to read what I wanted.
It's not that simple I think. True that active content is overused, but it can really be helpful when you don't want to roundtrip to the server just to calc some numbers, and twiddling settings is annoying for the user, if they choose to turn it off and on. It would be better if the thing was secure. The problem IE has in particular is they try to "zone" thing, local zone, trusted zone, internet zone, secure zone, etc. They do this so that you can have stuff in the local zone executre programs or virtually do anything on the system. And that's the problem, by trying to make javascript in to a generic scripting language, they've opened up the local zone to anyone that can break through the zone barrier.
Most exploits involve one javascript generating a second window which comes into the local zone and posting content to that, though I think that's somewhat patched now, they can also use ActiveX controls to screw you. There is obviusly something flawed with the model, and had they just made javascript a web only scripting language like it was designed, none of this would have happened.
Basically this is the same as another exploit posted to the list earlier, but with a new command. And for that matter, jelmer has been posting a new IE local zone exploit like every week... Any of them could have been used to make something like this, it's just no one has tried to do a format. True the jelmer posts didn't include the "run a program with arguments" thing that was posted this week, but they did show how to read/write arbitrary files and execute them. So batch file somewhere and here comes a HD format.
So the only reason we haven't seen this I think is because like always, virus creators want their program to spread, and the quickest way to stop the spread is to kill your host, so instead we get mass mailers, trojans, etc. It was going to happen eventually.
Yeah this is OT, but I just wrote a perl script to solve this kind of problem last week.
Yeah yeah, too much time.
I just posted a set of tools for automating X at my website that I recently created to make a bot that could play Yahoo! Spelldown. There are 2 parts to the tools, finding things on screen using a "visual grep" program that finds images inside of images, and xte, an app built on the XTest extension that allows scripting of moving the mouse, clicking, dragging, keypresses, etc. Together you can use them to make scripts that can identify buttons on screen or letter or words or numbers, whatever, and interact with programs. Still a pre-1.0 version, but it does everything listed above so far.
BTW, don't use xse, which is a wrapper for XSendEvent, if you roll your own. There are so many places where it just doesn't work, or doesn't work right, because the XSendEvent function just doesn't work reliably. I lost a lot of sleep over that before I gave up and just wrote xte.
This is a great idea, and would be fairly cheap to add to computers I'd imagine. I don't know about other machines, but the AS/400 has a little display on the front that can post error codes during an IPL (basically a boot) and also has a status counter because it takes so freakin long to get going on some of those boxes. And even if it only worked for POST that wouldn't be bad either... I mean really, trying to decide if the beep is 4 short 1 long 2 short or 2 short 1 long 4 short isn't exactly easy!
You're half right. They did use creative accounting to hide losses, but they weren't booking it as income as I understand it. Instead they claimed expeneses as assets, which has the effect of making the spending look like they are retaining something. The reason it's bad is because expenses are considered just that, expenses and you pay out money. Assets are a little different in that you may have paid 2000 for that new P4 workstation, but if you were hurting for cash in theory you could sell it and get some of that money back, unlike paying for example your power bill, where after you've spent the money you have nothing to sell and retain nothing of value. By accounting for expenses as an asset, you would depreciate it so that it doens't hit your bottom line until the end of the products usefullness, at which point you can't sell it anymore and it's not really worth anything. But for big purchases, it can make a business show it's having a profit instead of a huge loss at the time when it bought the equipment.
I don't know why the original poster didn't list the mirror information, after all the gif has the site name printed on it, but oh well. The mirrors are a lot faster, and I think it should be pointed out that the gif is 4.1M and the mov is 13.4M
I ran in to that just last week trying to set up an MSN Messenger account (my gf uses messenger) and was greeted by the fun "You must upgrade to IE or Netscape 4+" type of message. What a crock. Luckily I had been playing on MozDev and found lots of cool toolbars, like the google toolbar, and the UA bar which lets you set your useragent from a handy dropbox, like IE4, 5, 5.5, 6, etc. There I just set it to IE6/NT and the page loaded fine, set up my Messenger account, and I was done. Yeah, I need to "upgrade" for what reason again?
If you use the UABar, though, remember to reset your UA string to the default before you close Mozilla. If you don't, it gets saved to the prefs.js file and next time it starts, will barf an error because the UA number is too low (I think IE uses part of the NS4 version string), not a huge deal but you do have to edit the prefs.js to fix it.
From the PR link you posted (emphasis mine):
So, given the double negative, does that mean that the graphics arts department at MonsterHut is surpassed by all competitors? heh.
I think it's also worth mentioning sketch. It's not gnome or kde specific, but I've found it superior to both sodipodi and kontour. It does gradients correctly unlike sodipodi and allows creating individual line segments instead of "auto-lines" where they create a bunch of segments for you. Plus it runs with fairly low requirements, under python and pygtk.
I think millions of Windows users on a regular PC would argue that point. After all, surely a dedicated windows machine can send out more viruses/sec than a virtual one.
I think it's also worth noting that CTRL-w will close the current tab, so you don't have to click the little X either.
More great shortcuts like this can be found at this link. I believe mozilla.org had a similar page aat one time.
Kind of funny you mention the whole document compatability thing, because my friend just ran into an interesting problem the other day. He has MS Works at home, because he didn't want to buy office, the PC came with works, and he didn't want to "borrow" a copy. Works was good enough, and he'd been using it for a long time and had a lot of documents in wps format.
He wanted to bring a document to the office so he could work on it, and we run MS Office 97. You'd expect similar applications to read each other's formats within the same vendor, so it seemed like a good idea. Except Word97 can't read MS Works files, even though MS Works can read MS Word files. Doesn't make any sense to me.
So instead, he was playing around in Linux since we just installed it for him, and he was looking at the office apps. He opened KWord and thought "I wonder if I could open those Works documents" and gave it a try. Worked great. Then I told him about OpenOffice and he's been using that instead, the special 6.0 version that comes w/ Mandrake.
So now, instead of using MS Office for anything anymore, he just uses OpenOffice because for him it's been more compatible with documents than MS Office!
how would the energy be transfered back to the Earth? Microwaves?
:)
I would guess they do the same thing I did in my old apartment that had only 2 outlets, use really long extension cords.
I agree the back button thing can be irritating, but sometimes you can't really work around it, e.g. if the page is dynamic and the data can change and the back button can become a data-integrity nightmare. Sure it can help to use transaction ID's and make sure nothing happens twice, but it's annoying to me as a web developer. Sometimes I wish there never was a back button.
For a concrete example of problems w/ the back button, check out acmemail. It's a cool webmail client, uses perl and pop3, but if a user clicks back, usually after reading a message and wanting to get back to the message list, it will cause strange problems and eventually auto-log them out. It took a long time to teach the outside sales staff at work that you just need to click the "inbox" button instead of back, and to this day every time there is a meeting they mention that webmail is broken, then I check it out, find out they're using back, and explain the solution. Then the next meeting comes and it's square one all over again...
- bsd.slashdot.org
- apache.slashdot.org
- yro.slashdot.org
And so on. Pretty neat idea really, now it can offer niche news on special sites plus the big enchilada on the main site. Best of both worlds it seems.This is probably just a ploy to get us /.'ers to buy a bunch of these things before "Nintendo makes him give them over to them." :)
All kidding aside, I used to like the big N a lot back in the day, but how can this break the DMCA? Is the fact that there are not readily available cart readers mean that it's a "circumvention device?" It doesn't appear to decrypt anything or break any kind of circ. device, looks like it just copies bits off the cart.
So someone more knowledgable want to explain how this falls under the DMCA?
I would have to argue that. I own a GBA and a few games that I'd like to play more. Advance wars works OK, but Castlevania COTM is almost unplayable unless you're in direct sunlight. I'm sure everyone is aware of the problems with the screens being too dark. I wouldn't mind loading up the Castlevania ROM in an emulator and playing it on a PC, it's a great game but I've given up finishing it until the summer, when I can get all the sunlight I need even on work days.
Granted I know there are a lot of people out there that are not quite so honest when it comes to emulation, basically the same people that distribute 0-day movies and playstation ISO's.
looks again
Crap... Oh, mesaglut... well, I guess it's back to autopr0n...
I think they're right, for the most part webpads are ahead of their time in the consumer market. I know I'd like one, but I've also got 3 pc's and a wireless lan, not exactly average.
I do believe that their right on the mark though about the so called "Vertical Markets." I can think of many uses for this in industrial applications. I think it'd be great for things like physical inventory, instead of sending out hordes of people to count inventory and report back on sheets to be keyed in the main system to be reconciled, they could just walk the floor with these and eliminate the data punching. Or for replacing pick tickets for order fullfillment, no more printing and it could even show mass-overstock locations in a warehouse so if the shelf is empty the picker doesn't need to look up the overstock location.
Basically I could see it used anywhere there is a need for information on demand, allowing the users to be untied from their PC connection to the mainframe system, so they can get the info they want when they need it, instead of going back and forth. If priced right, it could easily show an ROI quickly in reduced labor and increased productivity. Especially good in times like this where the economy is bad and things like hardware distribution are already low-margin businesses at best.
Since it's basically a computer with not harddrive, all that's needed is a little gateway programming, and if done right that could spill easily into enabling things like the SPT-1700 wireless scanning palm pilots. The webpad could be used for more interactive applications where the added screen space would benefit, and the SPT-1700 could fill in where scanning and minor keypunching is needed, especially receiving product on the docks. No more keying item codes, just scan barcodes and the system can automatically do the recieving!
I can't wait until these things start coming down in price and commodity so they become a viable option for medium sized business.
Find me a story where a company that has a $100M invested into their custom accounting/billing solution has decided to throw it out and spend another $100M to rewrite the software for Linux.
Where I work, custom software is the norm. We purchase almost nothing in terms of off the shelf packages and the main system just does it all. The code has been around for about 20 years or so, ported from platform to platform. Currently we're on the NT platform, but after a few bullying letter from MS stating that since we haven't purchased anything in the last year or two from them that we must be pirating software.
Well, that was it, we started looking for a way to move off the NT platform. Our codebase is roughly 4.5 million lines of COBOL code, and the data is archived back many years as well. So we had 2 problems, there was no COBOL compiler for Linux, and anything resembling one was not data-compatible. Until about 4-5 months ago that is, now MicroFocus has spun off from Merant and become a single entity (again). So now there is a source and data compatible compiler for our backend apps. Just change around some directory separators and it just works. No export/import/etc.
I guess my point here is that I've found most anything can be targeted for the Linux platform, especially those systems that are character-based, as many that I've seen are. The GUI interfaces are relative newcomers to the field. And with borland porting toolchains to linux, I'm sure it will just get easier to retarget -> recompile and have shiny new binaries. Even better when the toolchain is just a port by the tool vender, then most likely your data will be fine too. The only exceptions I see that will probably never change are the MS toolchains, MSVC++, VB, VFP, etc. And if you're starting MS, then you probably don't have much choice of platform, though I have seen a gnome project somewhere trying to build up to source-level compatibility with VB.
And I don't want to here any whining about "what if you don't have the source," all I have to say is, if you payed $100M for some software and didn't even license the source, you've got bigger problems than blue screens and crashed desktops. We are a medium sized company, and our code didn't cost that much. And we get to keep it to if the developers go under, plus add anything we want to the source. Now that I'm somewhere that has done that, it makes no sense to buy software for XX thousands or millions of dollars and not get the source... That is a huge risk.