Author: gpanther

  • Google survey beta

    So Blogger wanted to know my opinion. I happily clicked along to express my desire to be able to include syntax highlighted code easily. Five point question: what is wrong with the webpage below? Hint: how do I submit this thing? While the looks of the questionnaire were spartan (not like some people who feel…

  • Checking out CVS and creating patches

    Update: Qemu moved from CVS to SVN. While the CVS repository is (and will be) available for some time, you should look at the new checkout instructions. Lately I started to dive into open-source development, specifically Qemu. Since I’m relatively new, here are some commands I found useful: cvs -z3 -d:pserver:[email protected]:/sources/qemu co qemu – to…

  • Two quick tips

    Via the .:Computer Defense:. blog: the Windows command prompt has a history feature: just press F7 in a command window. One of the great features of Firefox 2 is the session saving (I know, there were extensions before that to do the same thing, but they somehow never worked for me). If you want to…

  • Why not to chain remote desktops?

    Quick tip (learned the painful way): do not chain remote desktops, meaning don’t open a remote desktop (or VNC sessions for that matter) to one computer and open in that session a remote desktop to an other computer, unless you have bandwidth to waste and don’t mind the increased delay :-). The explanation is rather…

  • Regex magic

    First of all I want to apologize to my readers (both of them :-)) for bein AWOL, but real life sometimes interferes pretty badly. I always been a big fan or regular expressions and one of the main reasons I love Perl is because they are so deeply integrated in it and are natural to…

  • Installing and using Truecrypt on Ubuntu

    Update: while truecrypt still doesn’t offer native packages (ie. .deb / .rpm) for Linux distributions, their shellscript installer works just fine. So the simplified version of the installation procedure is: Download the correct package from Truecrypt (either 32 or 64 bit – you can find out which you need by typing uname -a – if…

  • Mixed links

    A new Ethical Hacker Challenge is on. X for Windows without Cygwin! GreatFireWallOfChina – test any site and see if it’s blocked in mainland China – via OffTheHook Via the All About Linux blog: a very fun (and very addictive!) flash game: Desktop Tower Defense.

  • Cleaning it all up – temporary files in Perl

    One of the most frustrating things in programming is doing all of the extra plumbing. You can just say (if you are trying to create a stable product): open file A, read a line, transform it and dump it to file B. You have to think about all the error conditions which may appear: what…

  • Hack the Gibson #88

    Read the reason for these posts. Read Steve Gibson’s response. A question which popped up twice in this episode was the problem with broadband user and the answer provided was very good: even if 50% of the people who have broadband would to turn off their connection when they are not using it, the other…

  • Hack the Gibson #81 to #87

    Read the reason for these posts. Read Steve Gibson’s response. Here is again a long overdue post about the recent Security Now episodes. I have to say that the quality of the information provided in the recent episodes deteriorated (or maybe it is that they started talking about more concrete things where the errors are…