BenV's notes

Since I keep forgetting how the heck I create these favicon.ico files, it’s time to put it here. (continue reading…)

As I often instruct people to do:

Cry me a river

Stolen from Wayfinder’s blog – check it out, it has many more funny face pics, not to mention great music!

Everyone loves them (except for idiots of course), pretty graphs that show fancy lines and stuff. Especially stuff.
For instance stuff like this:

Traffic graph

Disk I/O

HDD temperature

Why make these graphs? Because you can. Because they can show you gradual changes that you normally wouldn’t notice because the change per day is only very little. Because they’re fancy. Because they can give an indication on how hot stuff runs. Because they can kill your mother while you sleep. Because they got all the legendary items that you’ll never have. Tons of reasons.
But mainly because they’re pretty (continue reading…)

Nope, no computer stuff this time.
When I’m not behind my computer I sometimes dare to enter the domain called “outside”.
If you like plants, and especially plants that are in some way ‘useful’ (in other words: they produce edible parts), you might want to grow some of them yourself. (continue reading…)

Don’t ask me why, but as usual Firefox (3.5.3 in this case) has issues. If it weren’t for lotjuh I didn’t even try to fix them. But since she smiles at me in such a cute way sometimes, I’ll fix it for her.

The issue was on teigetje, you remember the box from the NFS story earlier today.
Starting firefox gave nothing, it was just stuck. Running a strace on it:

The exact reason isn’t known to me, probably NFS related, but this works to get it going:

In other words, this comments out the /lib/libsafe.so.2 line so it wont be loaded anymore using LD_PRELOAD.
“But isn’t that unsafe?”
Pfffrt…. if you insist on firefox you’re probably opening yourself up for Adobe issues anyway. And libsafe doesn’t really make stuff “safe”, it only tries to protect your machine against buffer overflow attacks. So now it’s up to your kernel to ‘safe’ you instead.

Lately I’ve heard some rumors about this new mmorhghhghg coming up called “Aion“.
Fileplanet (you know, the cancer popup site you sometimes get when you need to download a game patch and then need to click through 23894723897 registration things etc… which is barred from bugmenot…. *sigh*) handed out open beta keys. So I got one. And so did lotjuh.

Did I mention my machine doesn’t have windows? Makes it… interesting.
First we obviously tried wine. Well, it installs without much hassle, which is a good thing.
However, it doesn’t launch. Some piece of garbage called GameGuard doesn’t work on wine. And because it doesn’t, neither does Aion.
Great going Aion guys! Needless to say they couldn’t be arsed to write a linux binary for it, so they SUCK per default! They couldn’t even be arsed to write a Mac binary for it. Pffrt.

However, to make an interesting attempt to test out Virtualbox’s 3d acceleration support, I decided to install Aion in a virtualboxed windows xp that I “borrowed” from lotjuh.
Virtualbox is at version 3.0.6 these days, so first I installed the latest version.
The installation went fine:

Aion installation on XP in Virtualbox 3.0.6

Aion Updater

Aion GameGuard part`

Aion dies

Anyway, from what I’ve seen of the game (it runs ‘fine’ on lotjuh’s PC with her “Seven” failure install), it’s a World of Warcraft wannabe.
Graphics are a lot better, they put in some cute stuff like when it rains and the character idles it’ll put a leave over their head. The movies are cute, the quests sometimes even show you stuff (like a little ingame movie of the target area) to go along with the text. But all in all it doesn’t look like a wow killer. No linux support (not even with wine), no mac support, and so far I haven’t seen a major reason for people to switch from wow to this game, except for the graphics. Then again, I’ve only looked at it for a short amount of time, maybe it’ll get better
I’m sure they’ll get a decent amount of players though, it’s a good wow clone.
Story wise the game is fail, I could sum it up with “There were gods, and a planet, and now the planet is split in 2 half planets and the ‘people’ on those halves fight eachother”.

It asks for a stellar converter if you ask me. (master of orion 2 reference, can’t find a good image/video on google)

So I was bored and went through the usual slashdot, kernel.org, freshmeat.net, etc.
Once reading through the news on happypenguin.org I noticed it must be mario season or something.
After checking the descriptions I decided to check out Super Mario^W^WSecret Maryo Chronicles.
(continue reading…)

This is trivial stuff, but nice to know.

Do they have a cute little firewall at your work that only allows outgoing traffic on a certain port? Does some site have retarded IP restrictions? Does the piratebay block you from home?
Have no fear, ssh is slow as a bear. (huh?)

Anyway, you could use an anonymous proxy to get around all of this, but they are often slow and hard to find. Not only that, they often require you to use a specific port.
So the simple solution for all this: use ssh. Of course this requires you to have ssh access on a machine outside of the network that you’re trying to get out of.
But if you don’t even have that, you probably suck anyway. (get lost with your micro~s fail piece of cardboard).

Solution #1, for simple TCP port forwards. For instance when you’re trying to access a remote snmp server that has the irc port (6667 by default) firewalled:

After a successful login you can now connect an IRC program to localhost on port 1234 and it will act as if you were connecting to the remote machine directly. (bypassing the firewall).
Woei. Too bad this fails for UDP though. You also need to keep the ssh connection open, but that’s pretty obvious.

Solution #2, for a real proxy solution. When you’re trying to access a remote web server it becomes more annoying to use a simple port forward, since your browser will not pass the correct
information to the remote server. (It will say Host: 127.0.0.1 for where it was supposed to be Host: www.piratebay.org for example).
To make this work we simply turn ssh into a socks proxy like this:

Now you can enter localhost and port 1234 in your browser’s proxy configuration in the SOCKS proxy section. Magic, you can now go to any site and it will be tunneled through the nicely encrypted ssh session. (although it might be a bit slower).

Well, so much for the obvious stuff today.

These guys are so stupid, they never stop to amuse me.
Look what they’re coming up with now…. A new digital format.
What is it with these guys and being completely out of whack? Why on earth would people want yet another format? (probably crippled too).
MP3 files work fine for most, put them in a nice little directory structure, add a picture file and a lyrics file, and you have what they propose. Only better since it doesn’t need a special decoder/player.

Record companies: please die. Now.

So while messing around with some perl/curses stuff I got fancy with colors and soon found out about the limited support of colors in terminals and therefore also Curses.
Anyway, I made this little “fractal plasma” thingy with it, see if you can get it running
It’s not really a fractal plasma, so don’t get technical on that, but it describes it best I think.

To get it running, open up your favorite terminal that supports 256 colors and allows palette changing – I found both xterm and urxvt to work.
Make sure your TERM variable is set to something that allows this, for instance in urxvt:

or this worked for me with xterm:

Something like this is the result:

Enjoy!

Somewhere in my mailbox I found a link to Impulse. I’ve messed around with pulseaudio and have it running on my server together with mpd which allows for some network audio fun, but that’s not the story now. Back then I wondered if it would be possible to have a VU meter and stuff like that, but couldn’t find it. So when I ran into this I was curious (how implemented, is it any good, etc).

So what the fuck are screenlets? Looks cute, feels cute, and once you think about it for a bit you immediately realize that it’s cute for 10 minutes after which you’ll kill the thing because it slows down your PC and you never really look at it anyway, but regardless I feel like checking it out. (continue reading…)

Since I quit playing World of Warcraft again a while ago (seriously Blizzard, what are you doing to that game?) I find myself enjoyed playing tons of other things. Funny thing is, most of the games I play are ancient. Games from the DOS era (which means DOSBOX, I love that product) like Master of Orion (and it’s sequel), Master of Magic, Paratrooper, One Must Fall: 2097 (which is freeware these days! Download it here), X-Com, System Shock, and the list goes on and on. Yeah, come to think of it…. the games they made back then were pretty brilliant, and it’s not just nostalgia. (continue reading…)

So what do you do when you’re looking for something to do while eating your bread in front of your computer?
(or coffee in case of early days). You read the daily news (slashdot, local garbage, kernel.org, happypenguin, you know the drill).
Anyway, I ran into another time wasting online game with properties that I like (RPG like, leveling, items, upgrades) called Billy Vs. SNAKEMAN.

Give it a shot if you’re bored

Oh, and they have a nice list of why to play, including “It’s free!” and “This list goes to eleven”

Also, don’t blame me if you find yourself still clicking around while your coffee mug is empty again. I won’t refill it for you.

Billy Vs. SNAKEMAN

Oh yeah, here’s my char:

Be the Ultimate Ninja! Play Billy Vs. SNAKEMAN today!

So I was messing around with some new domain registrations, and just because I’m curious I tailed my tinydns logfile.
…. WHAT THE !@(#*!#%(* is THAT?!…. I think, as my eye catches a glimp of this:

Now, these things immediately reminded me of the ZeroConf/Bonjour/Avahi garbage. However: first of all, I don’t run that on my machine since it’s a relatively new install that doesn’t have it yet.
Second, those IPs…. they’re not mine. Whois tells me it’s Quicknet/multikabel/ziggo… which some of our friends and relatives have.
That’s the weird part here, I can’t stop wondering why they’re requesting my domain while they’re back at home, so they should have a new dhcp entry and ditched their “search” line in resolv.conf. (ignoring windows as an option for now).

Google tells me it’s indeed Bonjour DNS based “service discovery” related, great, looks interesting, but I’m not in the mood to mess with DNS now… at least not until I have a machine that can actually use it. I wonder who it was though….

Lotjuh was messing around with grub2 and its config…. fun!

Anyway, a nice tool to figure out uuids of block devices: blkid. (gives a nice overview per block device… you probably need to be root for it to work though)
Alternative: findfs, so you can search for a label or uuid.

Let is be known that grub2 is a kutproduct as far as documentation is concerned… but that’s no surprise given it’s infancy status
Works pretty good so far though, once you get the grub.cfg etc right. Also works with my ext4 partition these days (required a svn up and recompile/reinstall though)