Recent blog entries for ak

I just moved my blog to geekshow.blogspot.com. Good bye, advogato!

In the last few days, the Ars Electronica Festival was going on. There were quite a number of interesting talks and panels. I especially enjoyed those about copyright, DRM, DMCA, intellectual property and all that stuff. Cindy Cohn was giving much insight on what's going on in the US regarding all that kind of stuff, and IMHO, she was definitely the highlight, and so thought many other people, because most questions that were asked by the audience were directed to Cindy.

After watching the panel on Tuesday, I sat together with Erich Moechel and Tim Pritlove, chatting a bit and listening to several quite interesting stories. Tim then showed us nice pictures from the Chaos Communication Camp, including a 360 degree panorama shot.

After that, I met Tamer, Kyrah, Thomas Warwaris and OJ, and OJ showed us parts of the AEC including an exclusive demo of the currently on-going port of Unreal Tournament to the AEC's CAVE.

The first day was not really interesting -- the lectures were actually pretty boring, and hardly anything was going on. Not much to tell about it.

On the contrary, the second day was quite interesting. First of all, I held my lecture on network intrusion detection with cinderella. Many people attended my lecture, and tent A was almost full, although the lecture was at "high noon". The questions from the audience were quite good, and nobody was out to flame me. Unfortunately, I rushed through the lecture too quickly, so it actually took only 40 to 45 minutes, including the Q&A with the audience.

Other lectures I went to was the one about software patents by FFII, the SIMD hacking lecture by Felix von Leitner, the Hacker Jeopardy that was organized by `Sec` and the pretty weird Nazi UFOs lecture.

After that: social events! We partyed with the quintessenz guys, and it was definitely a good party. During that, some 2600 guy told us that there was a huge orgy going on in the cypherpunks tent, so we went there. All we found were about 10 people sitting around and chatting (IRL). Then, they showed us a pretty funny website: www.haXXXor.com. There you can buy a DVD showing hot women reading manpages, configuring Apache and describing installation from source while taking off their clothes. They showed this DVD at the OpenBSD tent. After that, we went back to quintessenz, had another beer, and then I went to bed.

We arrived yesterday in Berlin, and stayed at Sven Guckes' place. We showed us all the important places in Berlin, which was quite interesting.

Today, we went to the camp ground in the early afternoon. The camp ground, which is located 30 km away from Berlin, in Altlandsberg, is beginning to fill. We are staying with the guys from quintessenz. Hopefully, some other guys from at.linux and people from CNGW will arrive at midnight.

Currently, most people are still building up their tents. So, the camp will hopefully fill tomorrow.

Yesterday, I took snort's TCP state machine, translated it to Ruby, and built it into cinderella. So, finally, I've got a nice decent state machine that is quite fast (faster than my own, broken one) and work's correctly.

The slides about cinderella are already prepared, so I'm already looking forward to doing my lecture at the Chaos Communication Camp. (I'm mentioning this so often, see how excited I am? :-)

Recently, my brother gave me a nice CD, "Music Monks" by a band called Seeed. Pretty cool reggae, ragga, dancehall. I can only recommend it.

My lecture at the Chaos Communication Camp is now in the official conference schedule: http://www.ccc.de/camp/2003/conference/event/533.en.html

Sync2NAS is not really a lot of fun in unswitched 10 MBit environments. ;-( Too many collisions.

MS Office sucks. Suddently, MS Outlook wanted to install some missing components, while it was running as non-privileged user, so it couldn't, and stuck in some kind of infinite loop. On the other side, I'm so happy that I don't have to work with that crap.

On the other side, Sync2NAS looks pretty good. Sync2NAS is a free mirroring solution for Windows, and it's based on rsync. Actually, it's a frontend to rsync, written in Perl/Tk. I haven't looked at the executable file, but the developer doesn't give away the source. But I got it already. :-) (in case you have sf.net account, have a look in /home/groups/s/sy/sync2nas on shell1.sf.net).

Yesterday and today, I built a system completely based on dietlibc (mostly). It uses dietlibc as C library and several components from www.fefe.de. And: the system just rocks!

The memory usage after boot and first login is 3.7 MB of RAM, which is so awesome. These 3.7 MB include a kernel of 750 kB (that's the size of the vmlinuz image, which is actually compressed), 4 instances of fgetty, a running sshd, and properly mounted filesystems. The time it takes from the last kernel message to the login prompt is less than 1 second. That is due to the fact that the minit init system is not based on shell scripts, but only compiled code, which makes it extremely fast.

After installing a few more utilities I think I'll be able to make it completely self-hosting.

It looks like my lecture about cinderella at the CCC Camp has been taken:

https://wiki.camp.ccc.de/Camp/view/Main/CampConference

Only two more weeks 'til CCC Camp, and I'm already soooo excited! :-)

Customers suck, they only make problems. Doing support keeps one away from the actual work. What also makes problems are old houses with thick walls, since you can't use WLAN inside of them. WLAN at one of our customers (with such thick walls) is extremely flakey and unstable because of that, as I realized today. You do not even get a good, reliable connection 10 meters away from the access point!

Today, I did some work on dietlibc, I simplified the malloc/free routines, until I realized that, with my modifications, any program linked against the dietlibc and allocating small chunks of memory will be a memory-eating monster. Anyway, my patch still simplifies the malloc/free routines, so that they're much easier to understand. Currently, I don't know whether I will even publish this patch.

Today, I also got my answer regarding my patches for config.{guess,sub} so that these two well-known and often used scripts manage to detect dietlibc. When I compile and links programs with dietlibc, I want to have "i686-pc-linux-dietlibc" instead of "i686-pc-linux-gnulibc1", since programs linked against dietlibc are most likely _not_ GNU software.