by R.I. Pienaar | Nov 8, 2003 | Front Page
For years now my daily hobby is to nurture my ignore list on freshmeat, its an obsession, each morning I check the days page (and what i missed on the last day) and I ignore things that do not interest me. The things that do interest me gets a visit to the home page and I check it out, if its something I do not like it gets ignored.
Scoop has been making my work easier with the addition of buttons on the front page for quick ignore. Today I asked him to enable a bulk unignore on the list of the days ignored projects and he turned it around in less than 30 minutes, amasing. So I asked him about ignore lists, mine being 11 986 projects big at the moment, turns out I am 10th largest and the largest is about 40% larger than mine!
Maybe I should remove the category ignores on things like Python and start ignoring those individually ๐
by R.I. Pienaar | Nov 4, 2003 | Front Page
Today I noticed something very strange on a few Linux machines.
I needed a 10 Mb file to do some bandwidth tests, I would just put it on a web server and download it often. I used dd to create a file that I thought was 10Mb and checked it with du -h:
# dd if=/dev/urandom of=10megfile.dat bs=1024 count=10240
# ls -l 10megfile.dat
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 10485760 nov 4 16:38 10megfile.dat
# du -h 10megfile.dat
11M 10megfile.dat
So I thought I am going mad since surely du cannot be wrong, I checked with the Google Calculator and it agrees, 10 485 760 bytes does make 10 Mb.
I then checked the same on FreeBSD and it finds it as 10Mb, RedHat 6.2 agrees it is 10Mb but RedHat 7.2 and a number of Mandrake machines thinks it is 11Mb.
I guess I need to have a chat with bug-fileutils@gnu.org
by R.I. Pienaar | Nov 3, 2003 | Front Page
Today comes the official notice from RedHat that it is pulling out of the Free distribution business and focussing on its Enterprise market.
Their recent allignment with Fedora Linux project will no doubt be the future for the free RedHat in what seems to be a re-branding rather than a huge shift in their business. I have been a RedHat user since pre version 1 and this is a bit of a sad thing for me, but on the other hand I have become rather unimpressed with RedHat since the 6.2 days and later.
I have now installed a little working machine running Debian and am considering moving my single production Linux server to that rather than the current RedHat 7.2 which runs out of support end of December. I am hoping that before then the options from Fedora will become clear and I will be able to make a more educated decision, but for now I am all for Debian, it certainly seems nice and minimal while doing just what you ask it and no more.
by R.I. Pienaar | Oct 30, 2003 | Front Page
I somehow missed the initial mention of this on Bugtraq and the other usual sources but finally picked up on it via SANS.
There is a vulnerability in the Sun JVM that is used in browsers to execute applets that can be exploited by a malicious web site or HTML email to bypass all security restrictions imposed by the applet sandbox. This is a major issue as it will allow for mass exploitation of machines – not just Windows but all desktops with Java enabled browsers – by spammers, worms and other nasties.
This may possibly be the entry point that could lead to the first true multi platform worm. Developing such a worm would be a big challenge especially if it is to be truly multi platform, but you would only need to target certain distributions of Linux and Windows in general to make a big impact. The days where every Unix user will notice an additional process on his box is also long gone, how many of the masses of recent Linux converts run ps regularly and even if they did can tell you what the processes mean?
by R.I. Pienaar | Oct 30, 2003 | Usefull Things
Via McGee’s Musings I got a link to Tapestry which contains a lot of web comics in RSS format, finally a way to keep up to date with these things.
