Centroid.EU Blog

(this blog is mostly encrypted - adults only)

Dan, Rest In Peace.

May 21st, 2010

You were a true friend. I'm saddened by your death.

"I wonder what life 500 years from now will think looking back at this period of time, and what it is we take for granted as fact now that will be proven ignorant somewhere along the way. Cool. :)" - Dan Moschuk, August 2009.

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OpenBSD 4.7 Install movie

May 13th, 2010

Like I usually do I make an install movie with vmware of the latest BSD. Here is OpenBSD 4.7:

OpenBSD 4.7

Too be honest I attempted this movie 3 times. There is some things I noticed while making it. First if you specify the X server to start immediately it's sorta hard getting a config file since "Xorg -configure" won't work with a running server. Second vmware seems to slow down with every attempt at making the movie so it drags on, just fast forward the parts that are slow.

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Added a bit of style (CSS)

May 13th, 2010

I've been attending 3 classes of learning how to use CSS (cascading style sheets) and I've learned a bit. These are the changes I've put in place after the first class and I like them. Notice the hovering on the right side that's new. Also if you went through this site a little you may have found the hackepedia backups which I've attempted to translate to german. That has a bit of style as well. Enjoy.

BTW have you noticed the changes on the english wikipedia as well?

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Article in the BBC about IPv4 address exhaustion

May 11th, 2010

I think I've blogged about this before. The predicted date is September 9th, 2011 when all IPv4 addresses are given away. Here is the article. To quote the article...

Companies are being urged to get working with IPv6 now, to forestall any problems caused by the shortfall.

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My new computer: conceived

May 10th, 2010

On january 27th, I blogged about my 24 year old history with computers. I have now decided on a new computer and it'll take a considerable chunk of my savings. The computer is going to be built with upgradeability in mind, so that 3, 5, 7 years down the road I can upgrade it to what is decent then. Basically I'll be getting an Intel Core i7-930 with 8 GB of RAM (2x4GB DDR3 modules) and a 160 GB Intel SSD , BluRay burner and a wicked socket 1366 motherboard. Also I'll get a semi-decent graphics card with 1 GB of RAM. The store I got an estimate on priced it all at 1625 Euros, and since I have to get some other things like speakers I'm counting on paying around 1700+ euros.

This computer by no means is a top-of the line, but it's powerful nontheless and I think I can call it my own personal supercomputer. ;-)

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The non-latin character domain names

May 10th, 2010

This was all over the news a few days ago. Basically Egypt, Saudi Arabia and UAE now have the TLD (top level domain) in their language now. The DNS system basically piggybacks a code (really punycode) representation of the unicode for these domains. It's still in ASCII downbelow, take a look:

country	punycode equivalent
Egypt	.XN--WGBH1C
Saudi Arabia	.XN--MGBERP4A5D4AR
United Arab Emirates	.XN--MGBAAM7A8H

source: IANA.ORG

So it's not a glitch in the sytem if you see something like domainname.xn--wgbh1c that's just egypt instead of it's previous domainname.eg.

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Learning from Hackers

May 7th, 2010

I was once a system administrator. One system I administered was BSD/OS and it had a "gcc" group in /etc/group. The other administrators thought it was a good idea to restrict gcc to a set of people who asked to have gcc access. One guy didn't ask and he exploited the fact that the "ld" and "as" commands were not in the gcc group. He created an assembly file possibly with FreeBSD and then copied that over and assembled and linked the possibly very compatible assembly file. I thought the guy was brilliant and I want to show you rudamentally what he did, watch.

romeo$ uname -a
FreeBSD romeo.solarscale.de 7.2-RELEASE FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE #1: 
Wed May  5 21:28:23 CEST 2010     pjp@romeo.solarscale.de:/usr/
src/sys/i386/compile/ROMEO  i386
romeo$ cat -n hello.c
     1  #include <stdio.h>
     2
     3  int
     4  main(void)
     5  {
     6          printf("hello, world\n");
     7  }
romeo$ cc -S -o hello.s hello.c
juliet$ uname -a
NetBSD juliet.solarscale.de 5.0.1 NetBSD 5.0.1 (GENERIC) #0: 
Thu Jul 30 01:39:11 UTC 2009  builds@b8.netbsd.org:/home/bui
lds/ab/netbsd-5-0-1-RELEASE/i386/200907292356Z-obj/home/build
s/ab/netbsd-5-0-1-RELEASE/src/sys/arch/i386/compile/GENERIC i386
juliet$ as -o hello.o hello.s
juliet$ ld -static -o hello /usr/lib/crt0.o hello.o -lc
/usr/lib/crt0.o: In function `___start':
: undefined reference to `_fini'
/usr/lib/crt0.o: In function `___start':
: undefined reference to `_init'
juliet$ ld -static -o hello /usr/lib/crt?.o hello.o -lc
juliet$ ./hello
hello, world
juliet$

Let that be a lesson to anyone. I sure learned from this guy.

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Educating the me

April 30th, 2010

I've started attending a class for CSS (cascading style sheets). The main purpose is that I have a lot of HTML documents (including this blog) that could use a bit of style. I've already written a style sheet for this blog in a test environment and will be putting it up perhaps next week.

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Random Hackepedia

April 30th, 2010

The RH for this week is Traceroute.

BTW if you're interested in contributing to hackepedia it now allows people to edit without logging in.

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Playing with compression, fail.

April 25th, 2010

I made a small program that can compress a file on less space than gzip. It was fun writing it and under nominal conditions it performs very well. The reason this design didn't make it into our list of programs is because if the conditions aren't favourable and it hits an out of disk space problem then repairing itself is next to impossible. So it isn't used. But you can still study the failings of programs to understand why working programs work well.

compress.c

Inside the program source code you'll see a typescript clip from the program working better than gzip, but add a bit more space in the sparsefiles in the filesystem it explodes badly.

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