Entries by Nico Golde

Just wanted to make a quick note that this blog can't yet be considered dead. I'm just too busy with university, Debian and other stuff at the moment to spend time on blogging.Hopefully this will change soon.
You might want to use the time in between to check out the new shiny features of Firefox3^WOpera9.5 ;-P

If you thought the creation of the stop-motion animations you already know are time-consuming, look at this!

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu.

Thanks paul for the link!

I usually don't blog about uploads to the Debian archive but since I don't know any similar software in Debian I do in this case.
nitrogen is a wallpaper selection and setting tool with both a graphical (with image preview) and text based frontend to set wallpapers and restore them later.
That's nothing special, there are some tools doing that.
But nitrogen also provides great multihead and xinerama support and is the only tool in the archive I know that is able to set different wallpapers to different monitors!

From the description:

nitrogen is a graphical wallpaper utility that can be used in two
modes, browser and recall.
Some of the things to look for in nitrogen are:
.
- Multihead and Xinerama support (setting different wallpapers for each monitor)
- Recall mode to restore wallpapers via startup script
- Uses freedesktop.org standard for thumbnails
- Can set GNOME background
- Command line set modes for script usage
- Inotify monitoring of browsed directories

Check it out

A lot of people start throwing mud in the direction of Debian and especially the maintainer of openssl because of high impact security issue that was released today: DSA-1571.

Please notice that this was indeed discussed in 2006 with the openssl people before patching the package and it was an openssl.org guy who ACKed this patch after the maintainer asked for their opinion. So please stop blaming random people. Thanks!
Such things happen, so better use your time to fix your systems instead



UPDATE: people complaining about the "fact" that the "wrong" list was used to contact the openssl people, please read this

Security companies like coresecurity often notice vendors about found flaws before they are going to publish the vulnerability details to public resources.
Corelabs found a denial of service vulnerability in a product called SuiteLink. I never saw such a big vendor FAIL like in this case:

2008-02-29: Vendor acknowledges reception of the report and states that it understands the seriousness
of the problem and that its development team will look into it.
2008-02-29: Vendor asks for a copy of the proof of concept code used to demonstrate the vulnerability.
2008-03-03: Core sends proof-of-concept code written in Python.
2008-03-05: Vendor asks for compiler tools required to use the PoC code.
2008-03-05: ore sends a link to http://www.python.org where a Python interpreter can be downloaded.
2008-03-10: Vendor requests more information about the network and the firewall settings used during the tests and inquires about conformance
(or lack thereof) of the tested network with the vendor's security policies and recommendations.
2008-03-10: Vendor asks for details about how the advisory will be published.
2008-03-12: Core responds that the workstation running the vulnerable service had no firewall activated in the tests, but since the Wonderware
SuiteLink Service allows incoming connections it is assumed that the corresponding port should be allowed to receive inbound session
establishment packets.
...
2008-04-29: Vendor provides an official statement and indicates that versions of SuiteLink prior to 2.0 patch 01 are vulnerable. Multiple
products use SuiteLink.
...read on

Fixing this bug took the vendor 3 months!
(sorry for the bad formatting ;- P

I just uploaded openbox-3.4.7-2 to Debian unstable and wrote a patch that enables to set next or prev to the monitor attribute of the MoveResizeTo action. Without this patch you need to explicitly set a monitor number you want to send a window to but can't just toggle a window from one workspace to the other with one keybinding or to move it to the next/prev if you have 3 or more monitors. So if you use openbox with a xinerama setup it would be nice if you could test that and report bugs in case of errors.

A keybinding for that could like like:

Doom as an interface to kill processes exists for quite some time now.
However there is a new nice idea. Wolfotrack enhances Wolfenstein3D to use the conntrack extension of netfilter and links each person in the game to a connection from the connection tracking table, If you open a door the table will be refreshed.

Each person is linked to a connection from the conntrack table if it exists. Everytime a door is opened this connection tracking table is refreshed. If you kill the person in the game you kill the associated connection.


Best firewall GUI I saw so far!

Linus Torvalds on lkml:

In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd
people.

Not sure what this is about but dilbert is based on flash now while .gif images worked fine since 1995. FAIL!



UPDATE: looks like all the rants worked, the strips can be seen without flash again!

I read very often that people can't use copy & paste in a text mode application that makes use of ncurses. People who use elinks also know what I am talking about (ok, elinks doesn't use ncurses but the problem is basically the same).

All of these tools installed mouse handlers, in ncurses this is done for example via the mousemask(3) function. Copy & paste is not done by the application but by the terminal. So if you can't copy or paste from such a text mode application that's basically because your mouse button event (that you use for pasting or copying) is not handled by the application (e.g. there is no functionality associated with it) and it also doesn't reach the terminal because of the mouse handler.

But there is a simple workaround nearly every terminal provides to directly interferact with the terminal, the shift key (that's what lets you scroll up in a terminal using shift-pageup too)