Open Source – Grumble Grumble

Mad marking

15 February, 2009

I’m marking the first assignment for the data structures and algorithms course. Two problems – a painful but well-defined majority element and the other a linked list. I’m reading this code and I’m getting a headache. I need to take a break every 30 minutes, it’s so hard. The problem is I’m looking at the …

Hacked! Part 3 – Teaser

12 January, 2009

I left off with my server almost completely back up, but not yet Apache. I’ve had to make sure the web apps off the internet weren’t full of security holes before allowing access to them again. Though this is my third post 4 days later – in real time it’s been less than 24 hours …

Hacked! Part 2 – Open source hacking

11 January, 2009

First things first – my server had to be brought back up. But bringing it back up was not a matter as simple as reinstalling Slackware and plopping the home directories back in. So the first thing that needed to be done was to figure out how the server’s been compromised. The quickest way to …

Hacked! Part 1 – The Surprise

10 January, 2009

On thursday evening I had a couple of hours to spare, so I’ve SSHed to my server (yours truly littlesvr.ca) to get the Apache logs from the last couple of months. I do this now and then because I like seing the ammount of traffic going up every month. But this time it was not …

ISO Master has been cracked

9 December, 2008

For the last wo days or so I’ve been suffering from bandwidth troubles. I throttled the children’s upload to 10K so it wasn’t that. Finally I’ve decided to watch the web server logs for a minute, and I’ve noticed a pattern: 63.226.153.189 – – [09/Dec/2008:17:48:05 -0500] “GET /isomaster/wp-content/themes/ISO_master/images/ss-started-vista.png HTTP/1.1” 200 26112 “http://scenereleases.info/category/applications” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE …

Nice guys finish last

15 November, 2008

Whomever didn’t know that already? But knowing a fact without understanding the causes or implications can be pretty useless. So here is a summary of my wonderings of the last couple of weeks. For me to remember and you to enjoy. All of this year I’ve persistently worked on one thing and have signed up …

Lost in the sticks

12 October, 2008

It’s getting cold. In a few weeks it will be way too cold to ride my Vulcan 500, so I’m trying to make use of it as much as I can before I have to put it into storage for a half a year. Now it’s 2 AM and I just came back from a …

Open source projects can be full of it too

15 September, 2008

I work on the Canvas3D project, a Firefox extension. Actually I work on JavaScript that uses it, not the extension itself. So every now and then I need to download the thing, from addons.mozilla.org And it’s bloody annoying. The addon is classified as ‘experimental’, which I assumed means that it’s not really ready for general …

The worst thing a browser can do

24 June, 2008

You know what is the worst thing that a web browser can do? I just learned what – lose bookmarks. Not just the favicons, not just the order, not even the URLs – lose all the bookmarks completely. This is what Firefox 3 did. As part of the upgrade I made sure to recreate the …

How to open your spec but not lose to competitors

17 May, 2008

I’ve recently learned that Adobe has opened the Flash spec. Which, from an open source user’s point of view is really cool. But then I put on my competitor hat and started thinking of making a Flash editor. I won’t bore you with the technical details, of which there are lots (and no it’s not …