Earlier today someone uploaded a php shell to one of my web servers. Luckily there was no possible way for them to get it to run.

The shell seems to be called ashshell and written by Erisim Engellendi. From browsing the source it seems pretty full featured. Looks like it even includes functions to access and dump running mysql databases. Maybe I'll run it just to see what it does.... then again maybe not.

A google search on some identifying strings don't seem to turn up any information (at least not in english).

Seems like someone in the security field would be interested in collecting shells like this one, but maybe they are too common to bother collecting now?

I will probably forget that I have it by tommorow and that will be the end of it.

Hmm, been a while since I updated this.

Submited a few patches for gtk+ 2.0. Mostly UI stuff. I don't mean making the widgets look prettier which is what many people think of when you mention the UI word. I mean making the users interactions with the widgets richer and more predictable.

I've been testing the performance characteristics of different coding styles on pixel manipulation lately. Results from these tests will be used to make sure that GEGL pushes pixels faster than oil companys destroy wildlife refuges.

Things I've learned so far:

• On the sgi good code beats bad code by about 50%
• On a P3 or Athlon good code beats bad code by about 600%
• On the G4 good code beats bad code by about 375%
• Altivec is a well designed, well documented, well suported and easy to use instruction set.
• MMX is a half-assed, less-well documented, unsuported pain in the ass.
• Altivec can with only a very small investment of time speed up your code by 350% (even without using the memory prefech instructions)
• MMX takes a signifigant amount of time and effort to code with, but eventualy you will have a faster less understandable program

MMX has been out for years now. Why can't compilers generate MMX instructions automatically. Why isn't there a simple to use interface to the SIMD instructions on the pc platform? Why can't you write programs that take advantage of MMX without dropping down to asembly language? Why the heck hasn't intel submited patches to gcc to make it easy for programmers to take advantage of their SIMD instructions? It would sell a heck of a lot more chips than paying those blue apple using freaks to dance around on their television commercials.

I put up my scitex ct file format docs at http://electricmessiah.org/jay/ct.html. Its amazing to me that a file format that has gotten so much use for so long didn't already have any information about it online. I guess I'd should send an announcement to the various graphics file format faq sites.

I put gegl "opgen" into cvs the other day. I am pretty happy with it so far. We will have a crazy pipeline to compile the code... XML formated source code -> opgen -> gil -> gob -> c compiler ->linker

My scitex ct docs are pretty much finished, just have to figure out which server I want to put them up on.

After months of negligent effort my xml to gegl/image filter code is nearly ready to put in cvs. I'd do it this weekend, but it is snowing in the mountains right now and I may be forced to go snowbarding instead:).

Found some slight brokeness in cvs gtk+, sent a fix off to hp at redhat