Advogato blog for tef

11 Dec 2001

Tue, 11 Dec 2001 15:35:12 GMT

idling in the labs

Why dont they polarise laptop screens (ignore the warwicism) so shoulder surfing bastards cant see your porn?

2 Dec 2001

Sun, 2 Dec 2001 16:04:15 GMT

great balls of fire

Well, uni seems to be going along fine, i've come up with a few ideas, but i'm trying to rally together all the pyros i know and start a society.. :). Apart from that It seems that i'm a society whore: (Juggling,Compsoc,gamesoc,scifi,anime..), but if anything, i find that paraffin will cure bad breath.

unicycling

My legsa arms and hands are littered in bruises but oddly enough i'm enjoring learning to unicycle. although it is painful, it is fun and does look cool.

plug

thanks to lord_inh for the temp hosting :)

9 Oct 2001

Tue, 9 Oct 2001 16:37:10 GMT

uni

bleh! resnet still isnt up, and i'm bored at uni.

21 Sep 2001

Fri, 21 Sep 2001 23:51:36 GMT

cunningplan

build secret tunnel to stirling, break into mieks flat and steal bubblegum crisis tapes 4-8. i gave up at number 4 last night about 6 am. (shame)

19 Sep 2001

Wed, 19 Sep 2001 23:48:25 GMT

keysign

just saw a very nice web page on running a keysigning party got me thinking, maybe I could arrange that at my next LUG. then again, maybe I should go the full geek and get my GPG Fingerprint on a tshirt :)

apache

If i ever find the need, I will patch apache so it produces XHTML valid code, instead of the broken HTML3.2 it generates now :/

19 Sep 2001

Wed, 19 Sep 2001 22:59:27 GMT

blogger stuff

this is something I mentioned to peen and rt, but didnt post. for a webblogger, when adding a post, add it to the front page *and* the archive at the same time. so when a post is too old (on the front page) you dump it. simple :)

more specifically, the post script copys the news into two files, news/<unix time> and appends it to archive/<month>-<year>.html. and then removes the oldest entry in news. the front page generator the latest 10, or whats on in the last week (depends) and removes the old news items. el nifty.

19 Sep 2001

Wed, 19 Sep 2001 22:02:07 GMT

evil for dummies

In case you don't know me, im /evil/ (and i have a whole channel of idlers to prove it), anyway just had an idea for email worms (don't believe write them [then again, when have I ever had the effort to code] , i find a hatchet is a more efficient way of getting revenge [bwahah]) most email virii make up a random subject and body of the text file, or piece together a sentence from words in an array. I thought it would be more efficient to do grab a rss file from your favorite news site (possibly a random rss) and use that to generate the subject/body (fools detection algorithms), and then attaches more-info.(evil extension).

not that i'm a vx'er or anything but sometimes virii are coded better than the platform they infect (unless they're written in vbs *eugh*). another evil idea i had was parsing the inbox of infected host and then randomly replying to mail with some odd reply with the usual attachement. (my-thoughts.doc) etc.

enough evil for now. idling is calling me.

19 Sep 2001

Wed, 19 Sep 2001 21:18:01 GMT

kernel patches (putting the 'fun' back into dysfunctional)

hmm after much bickering^H^H^H^H discussion with xs the resident security bigot of #argv it turns out there isnt a patch to assign root capabilities to specific gids (and then kludge setgid to set egid like it does for root as they are technically root privs). shame. *sniff*. and I'll just put it on my big TODO list.

17 Sep 2001

Mon, 17 Sep 2001 14:47:14 GMT

more filesystems (Noticing a pattern yet?)

Ended up talking to mike about filesystems, basically he's being using resier to avoid fsck on a webcache. (don't blame him though, I should be using XFS soon on /home). fsck is a problem on a 36gb system apprently.. so I got thinking about a temporary filesystem where data recovery is non existant. The idea instead of running fsck on the fs when rebboting after a crash, it would be quicker to mkfs then mounting. (this is why it's called tempfs) quicker yet would be a dd copy of a nice clean superblock). If I was serious about this i'd patch a copy of ext2 for speed (no updating timestamps etc), and have the stickybit permanently in effect. (so it could be used for tmp and a cache...). It would probably write a clean root dir when it mounted perhaps. and of course if you wanted to recover the data after a crash you could always fsck it and mount it as an ext2 drive. (Isn't technology wonderful)

weird

got certified as apprentice and I didnt even bribe the people :)

15 Sep 2001

Sat, 15 Sep 2001 20:28:22 GMT

more crypto

Hmm. I Was pondering more on steg fs'. Probably having a bunch of 1k files in a directory containign random data. you parse each one , decrypt it and check the hash/crc at the bottom to see if it's your file. any files that cant be decrypted would probably be declared as freespace and overwritten. its a bit of a duct_tape hack. perhaps they wouldnt be shown. then again. it has to be a pretend ext2 system allegedly.