November 30, 2005

Wishlist update

In the right site of this site I have an allways updated list of things that I'll eventually going to buy. At this moment I have the top eight items ordered, and I've just changed the ninth and the tenth... All thanks to Pandora, where I've found out that Björk has a new CD, and make me know about Esthero, a new band that mixes Björk's tunes with Anja Garbarek's experimentalism... I found it good, let's hear more from them.

November 29, 2005

Pandora [Juke]box

I've just discovered Pandora, a music webcast site with a really nice idea: you feed the site with musical bands that you like and it uses genetic AI to find out bands that you'll probably like too. There's nothing really big to say about it, it's up to you to read the site and use it for a while to find out if you like it... But if I'm really like the concept, the application is quite heavy, and the site quite slow. Things that they hopefully will enhance. Oh, and they know lot's of music that I don't like, but they've only found musics that I like from Marilyn Manson... I'll wait for improovements from the IA.

Recomended.

November 28, 2005

Engeneer certificate

Finaly, I've got my Informatics Engeneer certificate, that rules "certified as an Informatic Engeneer, having concluded sucessfully his 5-years degree with a classification of 14 (in 20)."

So, thanks to all that helped me in some way to have the degree, and a great "fuck you" to those who tried to make me finish the degree with only 13 values in 20. I rule, you suck.

Wicca IS NOT Satanism

Hey, fuckers, when will you start doing your fucking damned job as journalists and learn about the stuff you're going to write about before actually publish an article?

I hate that on journalism. Carl Jones, editor of Law.com, wrote:


The lower appellate court opinion reveals the Wiccan group was exempted from paying sales tax on copies of the Bible and Quran, but forced to pay sales tax on the Satanic Bible and the Witches Bible.

How sare you to write an article with "Wiccan" on the title without even knowing that Wicca HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH Satanism or the Satanic Bible?

Sucker.

Merankorii: On Links and Crash

Merankorii is a Doom Poetry Musical project of mine... If you want to know it's latest news, read Merankorii: On Links and Crash.

November 25, 2005

Fight Software Patents

Copyright protects authors but doesn't hurt any honest person. Patents, in contrast, are 20-year monopolies that the government grants on broad and general ideas. Patents are potential weapons against all of us. If you want to know more about why we should fight against Sofware Patents, please read this.

If you click here and vote for "Campaign for Creativity", you're fighting against the software patents.

If you click here and vote for "Florian Mueller", you're fighting against the software patents.

What are you waiting for?

Tux gallery

Does this

makes you recall anyone?

Tux Factory has all kinds of Tux's you can imagine of...

Google Analytics will change

Folks from Google sent me an e-mail about Google Analytics:


This is a quick update to address some issues you may be seeing in your Google Analytics account and what we're doing to respond.

First, due to extremely high demand, we've temporarily limited the number of new signups as we increase capacity. This allows us to focus on our primary objective--to provide a great user experience for our existing users.

Next, here is current information on the most common questions we're receiving:

1. The 'Check Status' button is being reworked to check for properly installed tracking code. This should be fixed by the end of November.

2. The '+Add Profile' link has been temporarily removed until we increase capacity. We'll alert all current users when the feature is restored.

3. While we increase capacity, you may see longer than normal delays in data showing up in your reports. All data continues to be collected and no data has been lost.

For additional help with your Google Analytics account, we encourage you to browse or search our online Help Center here.

Thanks for your patience as we improve Google Analytics and add resources to ensure a high-quality service.

Link fix

The link I had to my paper about Aardvark was wrong... Thanks to subv3rsion that pointed it out to me, the link is now fixed.

November 24, 2005

Help Center Live 2.0.6 Released

Help Center Live is a Live Support tool written in PHP, using a MySql database, that allows visitors on a webste to hold a conversation in real time with a representative of the website. Help Center Live also allows other projects to be integrated as modules.

Help Center Live 2.0.6 has been released. It fixes the problems with WinApp's error code 24 bug and errors when viewing a ticket in osTicket.

If you still receive error code 24 after upgrading, set the config file value $conf['boot_client'] to false.

Visit it's website or read the announcement.

GNUnet 0.7.0a released

GNUnet is a framework for secure peer-to-peer networking that does not use any centralized or otherwise trusted services. A first service implemented on top of the networking layer allows anonymous censorship-resistant file-sharing. GNUnet uses a simple, excess-based economic model to allocate resources. Peers in GNUnet monitor each others behavior with respect to resource usage; peers that contribute to the network are rewarded with better service.

GNUnet 0.7.0a was released. This is a bugfix release for 0.7.0. Among other things, 0.7.0a fixes various crashes as well as connectivity, efficiency and routing issues. The new release supports MySQL 5.0 (in addition to MySQL 4.1 and SQlite).

More info and downloads on GNUnet's website.

Mamnuts: Mamnuts 1.1 is out!

Mamnuts is a bugless fully-featured talker base.

Mamnuts version 1.1 is just out.

November 23, 2005

Mamnuts: Mamnuts project created

After my last post, I had to create Mamnuts. Click the link to know why...

The "bad part" of this is that this makes me related to 14 software projects. This will by my prioritary one, but I guess I'll have to reduce that list...

Building a Talker

For those wanting to build a talker, there's a difficult choice to do: what development choices should I take? Should I build it from scratch or should I use a talker base?

I'm writting this 'cause Ironwood (God of the only Brazillian talker) made me think about this, when he said he was going to change his talkers code once again.

The main issue is, basicly, what's better yet easier to do. Building it from scratch takes a lot of time, which most people don't have. Noone will develop for years to launch his talker, so people doing this usually launches their talker with few features, which doesn't really attract users, and make people have a bad oppinion on that talker or even on talkers in general.

The existence of talker bases itself is a proof that they are useful: if someone wants to run a talker should choose which base to use instead of building one, like everyone who decides to have a mail server chooses one and uses it rather than writting one from scratch, based on the RFC's. Worse, there isn't a talker RFC yet!

So, which talker base should you use? ou have vaporware, abandonedware and only a few maintained talker bases. Ewtoo used to be the most popular base, but the most widely used was Playground 96, based on Ewtoo. There's Playground Plus, a branch from Playground 96 mainly with bugfixes, but the matter of fact is that, on Ewtoo and Ewtoo branches, the latest release is from 10/30/2002, EWToo.

Then you have NUTS and similars. I could talk about NUTS, Joot/Oot, Ncohafmuta, Amnuts, Moenuts, IFORMS, Avios OS, KTserv, KT code, TalkerOS, Slimepit, SouthWest, SCRUS, PHiNET, PyTalker... But to simplify, let's just say that, besides vaporware and abandonedware you have badforks, NUTS and PyTalker.

"Badforks" are forks of NUTS 3.3.3 or earlier that doesn't fix, yet, all it's bugs, even the well-known security-related ones. NUTS 3.3.3 development stopped in 1996, and Neil is now working on NUTS IV, which doesn't fit anymore on the definition of talker. Noone maintains NUTS, so choosing a "badfork" gives you the probability of having it's bugs fixed soon. What about PyTalker? Yes, being one of it's developers, I had to talk about it too. PyTalker is an effort to
turn this kind of writtings useless, building finaly a good talker. It is going in the good way, but you must have to ask yourself why the latest version isn't v1.0 but v0.1.4. Yes, it works but it doesn't have the features it has to compete with the other talkers. Unless you want to do some heavy coding, avoid it.

So, if we have to choose a badfork, what are our chances? Moenuts, stalled. RamTITS, stalled. Ncohafmuta, stalled. The choices? Only AmNUTS.

Let's examine AmNUTS: The latest stable version (2.2.1) is not stable, bugless nor secure. Then, we have 2.3.0 RC1, which is less stable than the CVS version. And then, we have AmNUTS CVS. Taking a look on Bugzilla, there are 12 bugs to be solved. From those, only 8 are bugs, the others are enhancements. So, if you want to build a talker, the best choice is to grab the CVS version of AmNUTS and fix eight bugs. Let's analyse them:

#3: The easy fix is to take out the .sreboot command;
#11: The easy fix is to take out the .kill command;
#23: The easy fix is to take out .xcom and .gcom commands;
#25: My understanding on this bug is that the bug is solved, but I'm waiting from Uzume's feedback on that;
#36: Revert "multi-line paste" changes. It will reduce usability but fix a security issue:
#38: The bug is probably fixed;
#42: It sucks, but it's not really a bug, only "lack of usability". You don't have to fix it;
#44: Changing "int" to "socklen_t" will probably fix the issue, but you'll have to live with the fact that it won't work in old systems.

Conclusion: someone should fork Amnuts to do this changes I've mentioned and build an out-of-the-box good solution to build a talker. Until then, do it by yourself.

PS -> This post lacks links, and I know I should add them. I'll do it later, if I get the time to do it...

Wishlist update

My wishlist (look at the right bar of this site) contains the top ten things I'm going to get (eventualy). I've updated it now, and the top eight things are already ordered. I won't order the other two because it they arrive all at the same time it will be a great "outch"...

WeBreakStuff is hiring

Fred created WeBreakStuff, and, until now, "WeBreakStuff" is "FredBreaksStuff". But now, "they" have this announcement:


Do you have design and development skills? WeBreakStuff is working with some of the most exciting companies and projects in the market today. We are looking for people with the right background and attitude to join us in the fun. We don’t believe in degrees or schools but quality work and the right mindset.

I'm glad that the announcement is now in black background instead of the initial green. So, do you break stuff?

November 22, 2005

Good news for web developers?

Seems to me that today we get good news for web developers, on a cooperation between Konqueror, Mozilla, Opera and... IE! The aim is to come up with future plans to combat the security risks posed by phishing, ageing encryption ciphers and inconsistent SSL Certificate practise. But, I hope, if all goes well in this cooperation, maybe they'll also cooperate on complying with Web Standards... Even if my worries are more on IE bugs, since I hope they're all solved when they release IE 7... It really sucks to stumble upon bugs like this.

SourceForge got a facelift

So, it seems that SourceForge got a facelift. This is supposed to increase usabillity to the website, but so far I've only found less usability and more commercial purpose. Well, at least they've updated MySQL from v3 to v4...

VLC developer on Sony's rootkit

As I've said earlier, Sebastian Porst and Matti Nikki found that Sony's rootkit contains parts of mpglib, LAME, faad2, VLC and other Open Source Software, breaking their licences...

Knowing that, Sam Hocevar, developer of VLC, decided to buy one of those CD's and check if they really have his code there.

November 18, 2005

The Talkers Tree

I've just updated "The Talkers Tree" document, where you can trace the history and development of talker bases. Talkers were born with Unaxcess, the first BBS to have a "talker" command. In paralel, there were MUD's and IRC. Soon, with the development of several kinds of MUD's and MOO's, the talkers appeared. The survivors of the talkers today are NUTS and NUTS based talkers. Unfortunately Neil (the author of NUTS) decided in 2003 to release "NUTS-IV" which doesn't fall into the concept of talkers anymore. Fortunately, there are still ideas of how to make talkers revive, prosper and evolute.

Site Update

As you can see, I've slightly updated this website. Lacking my own e-mail address was the thing that made me do it...

Intel and Debian

Seems that Intel is getting more focused on Linux... Intel's "Quick Start Kit" will now support Debian.

Portuguese Social Security sucks

Yep, since ever I have problems with the Portuguese Social Security. What's worse is that I don't know anyone who didn't have problems with them at any time... How is supposed to have a good economy when workers are fucked up by their state?

Seems that they have lost some documents related with my work at UniOne. Now, it seems that I'll have no problems or worries about that, but at first I was astounded to know that, and, specially, that they wanted me to send copies of those documents via fax to my next employers so they could send them to Social Security, even knowing that I now work somewhere else... What the fuck is this?

I just hope that I won't have more problems related to their incompetence...

Merankorii

I've updated Merankorii's website.

November 17, 2005

Bite me, Sony

Thanks cha0s for pointing me out this blog entry. It starts with:


Sony.
Sony has a rootkit.
The rootkit phones home.
Phoning home requires a DNS query.
DNS queries are cached.

Wanna read the rest? Click here!

November 16, 2005

Reading

When they talk about "geek books" or "nerd books", I read "interesting books". Having that in mind, I've checked Jack's Top 20 list and Jaldhar's Top 20 list. Conclusion: I've read only 7 of the first and 5 of the second. Damn, and I thought I was an heavy reader...

Merankorii

Merankorii's site has been updated just now.

November 15, 2005

Sony Update

If you want to be updated about the Sony issue, read this /. article. A sum up: Sony will take out those CD's from shells, but they still suck.

PDF Templating

Steinar: since your blog doesn't have any way to post comments, here's my reply... I've used PDF::Reuse for a similar purpose and it does just what you need and lots more. It has a nice and friendly way to use, so it will be a piece of cake suiting it to your needs. You can do stuff like

prText( x, y, 'sentence', 'alignment');

... Please tell me if it worked for you, and, if not, why.

libextractor v0.5.7 released

libextractor v0.5.7 has been released. This release eatures an updated German translation and improves support for the TAR and PDF formats. Mime-type detection for OLE2 streams was improved. The extract tool now returns an error code if files passed as arguments could not be accessed. A double-free problem under BSD was fixed.

For those who don't know, libextractor is a library used to extract meta-data from files of arbitrary type. It is designed to use helper-libraries to perform the actual extraction, and to be trivially extendable by linking against external extractors for additional file types.

November 14, 2005

Google Analytics

So, Google offers us now "Google Analytics", a service that "tells you everything you want to know about how your visitors found you and how they interact with your site." As the tech junkie that I am, I subscribed to it as soon as I knew about it and added it to this site, as you can see if you check out the source. My first insight is that it is slow as hell (and I work on an ISP, so don't tell me it's my networks fault) and it shows nothing of relevant: the data is useful but not in the way it is shown. I think that it will probably change over the time and this is has all it needs to turn into a really useful product. I'll check it again in a month or so and see if the data shown is more relevant, of if this is just another hype product...

Debian 3.2 beta 1 is out

Debian-Installer etch beta 1 is out, The feature I find most interesting is the kernel update (from 2.6.8 to 2.6.12), but I think most people will enjoy the new graphical installer. Be aware that, in the graphical installer, during the step "Finish installation", the installer will hang when trying to unmount all filesystems. You can work around this by switching to VT2 (using ctrl-alt-F2) and entering the command 'reboot'.

On Web 2.0

Ian has this nice writting that shows more or less my thoughts on what Web 2.0 will bring to us. Nice reading.

Patent laws about to change?

Hey people, I hate the patents as they are now, but changing to this is completely ridiculous. It's like all the ranting we did about software patents were completely ignored, and a new step is about to be made... In the completely wrong direction.

November 11, 2005

Sony retreats for now

It seems that Sony retreats for now and pulls their DRM'd CD software. You know what? "For now" isn't good enough. You know why the techniches you've used for "avoiding piracy" (yeah, right) are called malware?

Windows vs. Singularity

OK, so despite of Microsoft's main product is an "OS" called Windows, they're researching in other ways of "doing the job", and started another "OS" called Singularity. They claim that's only research, and I really hope it is, because Singularity is way worse than Windows. Yeah, it's possible to create something even more unstable.

Linux alliance

I despise Sony, I hate software patents and I surelly think that this is completely riddiculous.

Boycott Sony

I don't steal music, but I won't buy Sony stuff... But it seems that Fred thinks that Sony's music should be downloaded. I understand perfectly Fred: Sony SUCKS. I just think you've messed two things on your post: boycott Sony vs. downloading their stuff...

Marilyn Manson's 6th album

Seems that Marilyn Manson's 6th album (PT) is recorded. I wonder when will we know it's name...

Talking about the Kernel...

Speaking of which, this is the funniest from Linus for a long time. Finally, he's getting harder on the developers for stability's sake.

Best issue on Linux Kernel Ever

Damn, this is the best issue written about Linux Kernel ever. It explains why Linux rocks, why kernel space and user space are distinct, why Linux Kernel development is the way it is, and it explains it a way your mother would understand. Doc: thanks.

A Good Way To End (Part 2)

Following the same guidelines of other previous projects I had, it was decided today that Open Lusimed will cease it's development and instead make their contributions to a better sollution: FreeMED.

That makes me an happy contributor of 13 OSS projects. I just wish I had the time for all...

22C3

As requested, here's a post about 22C3, the upcoming hacker conference in Berlin.

The 22nd Chaos Communication Congress (22C3) is a four-day conference on technology, society and utopia. The Congress offers lectures and workshops on a multitude of topics including (but not limited to) information technology, IT-security, internet, cryptography and generally a critical-creative attitude towards technology and the discussion about the effects of technological advances on society.

The congress (sub-titled "Private Investigations") will be held from December 27th to 30th, 2005, in Berlin, Germany. Unfortunately I won't be able to attend it since I still can't take vacations time...

November 10, 2005

Web 2.0 frameworks

Since I intend to start a revamp on Open LusiMed and change it's code to something Web 2.0, and, being somewhat of a language agnostic, I google'd on every type of web 2.0 frameworks I've found. So, there's Django TurboGears, Rails, RIFE, Link and Catalyst. If you know of more, please tell me...

RIFE and Link are both Java-based, which is not good for Web 2.0. Django has one cool feature TurboGears hasn't, but TurboGears is more headed to be a stable framework than Django. Django's out. Melo convinced me that Rails is better than Catalyst, so...

There's TurboGears and Rails. Besides I don't liking the idea of everything being an object (the only thing I don't like about Ruby), it seems that Rails sucks on scaling. I'm somewhat tight in a decision between the two frameworks and I think that we only will know what's the best choice in a year or so. Although, it seems that using TurboGears has more advantages than using Rails.

Oh, and WASP just... sucks. I'll add further thoughts soon...

Defacement

I don't have a clue about what is the message here, since I don't know Turkish, but since they've defaced a Portuguese Government site and it seems to have some sort of political message, they should know that Portuguese people usually don't know Turkish... And have their message in English. Of course that this is probably just one script kiddie playing around...

Open Lusimed

Open Lusimed's website is up and running again. I'll soon be working both on the website and the roadmap for it.

November 09, 2005

Still on OSDL

Seems that there's a discussion on /. about if the binary Kernel Driver Layer is a good idea or not. And it seems that there are 10 types of people in the world, those who can see the big picture and those who can't.

OSDL (one more time)

For those who think that my rants are "only" about the violation of GPL, think twice.

RPM sucks

For those who still think that RPM's don't suck, just read this. And Matt, I don't know if you've tried yum, but if you didn't give it a try. RPM's still suck, but at least yum developers try to do the stuff apt does for ages...

November 08, 2005

Selva Update

Selva's website has been updated.

Merankorii update

Merankorii's website has been updated.

OSDL (again)

Still on OSDL, it seems they're not that evil, but evil enough to make Kroah not wanting to meet them again.

November 07, 2005

Evil We Are

They say "don't be evil", but they keep geting software patents...

Nice idea, expand its use

And so I've found randomplay, a command-line tool to play music files randomly, that has this great improovement on the way the random is not that random, but will make you sure that you listen all your music almost the same number of times... Great features, but I would like to see the idea implmented in other players, like the one I use...

Creative Commons content

So, there seems that now it's easier to find Creative Commons content. Great tool, specialy for finding free images, icons and stuff like that. Way to go Google!

I must learn...

...how to STFU;
...to quit using my cell phone while I'm drunk;
...that there are two kinds of friendship.

November 04, 2005

On binary kernel driver layer

The only thing I have to say is that OSDL can Kiss My Ass (TM). OK, they pay Linus, but they are also trying to violate flawlessly the GPL. Tsk tsk.

Hacker Publishes Oracle Proof-of-Concept Worm

"A worm that can attack Oracle Corp. databases has been posted to a security-related Internet mailing list, raising the specter of possible future worms with dangerous payloads.", says CSO.

November 02, 2005

Justice

Is it right for me to bring to you a little of my hell? Should I do it? I think it would be better for myself, but how about you? Is there justice in making you pass through a small portion of my hell?

Fifty

I have now fifty Marilyn Manson Audio CD's. Yes, 50. From 1989 to 2005 (even if the band supposedly begun in 1994) each year with at least one CD. Even tho, I'm not satisfied with my collection...