BenV's notes

So those assholes from BREIN finally managed to get a somewhat real block through the legal system in the Netherlands.
My home ISP XS4All simply has to block them because of a court order, and not just the DNS entries as usual, but actual IP addresses this time. A traceroute to thepiratebay.org simply dies at the second hop.
Obviously this is about as effective as putting up a roadblock on only half the road, you can simply drive your browser to a ton of alternatives to still get the piratebay content. (continue reading…)

While updating wine-1.4-rc1 I thought it would be interesting to see if I could get their OpenCL stuff to work. The lack of information on how to do so is really annyoing, so here’s what I did to get it to compile. (continue reading…)

After setting up a new trac installation (v0.12 stable) I tried to get notifications up and running.
I’ve done this plenty times already so you’d think this should be easy.
Edit the trac/conf/trac.ini, set smtp_enabled=true and make sure the smtp settings and always_cc address make sense.

However, this time it just wouldn’t work for some reason. No errors, nothing in the trac log, but no emails on ticket changes. (continue reading…)

This morning my mailbox opened up with an email inviting me to the Diablo 3 Beta. After checking the headers
to make sure it wasn’t another battlenet phishing scam I noticed that the Received headers really came from blizzard.com, and they even signed the mail with a domainkey. Also they didn’t include some link but simply told me to go to battle net and get the goods there.

Diablo 3 Beta Invite

We also invite you to share your Diablo III beta experience with the world! All participants can take screen shots, capture video, and/or publicly disclose information about their beta test experience.

(instead of the usual non-disclosure agreement). So thanks Blizzard and a friend who works there who is no doubt responsible for getting me this invite in the first place 🙂 (continue reading…)

Today I decided it was time to get rid of both backscatter and the useless spamfiltering of mail that will bounce anyway.
Obviously I’m not running a vanilla qmail, but a patched version (by John M. Simpson) of Qmail that adds lovely antispam features such as checks for reverse dns records, SPF records, fixes a ton of annoyances and generally makes Qmail a lot nicer.
On top of that I run Spamdyke to apply graylisting for some domains, add blacklists/whitelists and do some more spam checking. (continue reading…)

Obviously dealing with windows isn’t my favorite, but it comes along as part of the job.

Today my boss wanted to view some car site in internet exploder, because “Some sites don’t show properly in Firefox, Internet Explorer does a better job sometimes”. So I was like “You mean garbage sites that still write IE specific html… oh never mind, show it :)”

First he showed his problem in Firefox. As far as I’m concerned it looked like a failing search engine on the site and nothing html related, but whatever. (continue reading…)

While trying to craft a custom firewall traffic logger using iptables and syslog-ng to run it through a script I ran into this lovely error.
Syslog-ng is happy to spam 2458734597 lines (or more if you have lots of diskspace ;)) like this into your syslog:

Aug 5 15:11:47 ss syslog-ng[18731]: POLLERR occurred while idle; fd='17'
Aug 5 15:11:47 ss syslog-ng[18731]: POLLERR occurred while idle; fd='16'
Aug 5 15:11:47 ss syslog-ng[18731]: POLLERR occurred while idle; fd='17'
Aug 5 15:11:47 ss syslog-ng[18731]: POLLERR occurred while idle; fd='16'
Aug 5 15:11:47 ss syslog-ng[18731]: POLLERR occurred while idle; fd='17'
Aug 5 15:11:47 ss syslog-ng[18731]: POLLERR occurred while idle; fd='16'
Aug 5 15:11:47 ss syslog-ng[18731]: POLLERR occurred while idle; fd='17'

The reason was -not- that it could not be executed…. the reason was that the program (“test.sh”) quit (or at least closed its input) instantly.
Good to know for next time.

And here we go again (and again!)!

Get 5 games, donate to charity / the EFF, and support developers at the same time. Or only get the games. Or only support the EFF. Or whatever 😉
Do it now! Humble Bundle 3 is here!

The games this time: Crayon Physics Deluxe, Cogs, VVVVVV, Hammerfight, and And Yet It Moves.

The last one has an interesting graphics style: it looks like it’s all put together from ripped up magazines.

As for weird graphics, the first one features drawings made of crayons… which you draw yourself!
Here’s a video of it:

Crayon Physics Deluxe from Petri Purho on Vimeo.

The rest you’ll have to find out for yourself.
Did I mention you get them on Steam / Desura as well for that price? 😉

This is already 20 times on google, but I hate searching so here we go another time.
And without tools that slack doesn’t have. Just the normal (s)fdisk etc.

Steps:
1. Figure out start offset for your image. You’re interested in “sectors of X bytes” and the number in the “Start” column for the target partition.

root@images:~$ sfdisk -lu sources.img
unrecognized format - using sectors
Disk sources.img: cannot get geometry

Device Boot Start End #sectors Id System
sources.img1 63 4192964 4192902 83 Linux
sources.img2 0 - 0 0 Empty
sources.img3 0 - 0 0 Empty
sources.img4 0 - 0 0 Empty

2. Convert the offset in sectors to bytes by multiplying the two numbers you read from the output.
63 * 512 = 32256
3. Mount with an offset:

root@images:~$ mount -o loop,ro,offset=32256 sources.img /mnt

Done.

This just made my day.

First I read on slashdot that their insurer sues them, and personally I hope they win because of Sony’s incompetence regarding their ‘security’. Not that I like insurance companies much, so they can burn as well… which makes this almost perfect. In a lawsuit only the lawyers win, so once those lawyers die in a fire this will be perfect. (continue reading…)