Noughmad.org

Here are two three examples of what can currently be done with Opeke. Not much, but it’s a start:

And the latest one, which required about five minutes to build:

Also, it now has some more features. Collision detection, selecting and deleting bricks now all work.  The next thing I’ll code is probably shading and lightning to make it prettier.

So, I’m currently still working on my little programming project. Its name is Opeke which means “bricks” in Slovene. The program will probably enable you to build houses and such by putting different bricks together, similarily to Lego bricks. Then you can see what you’ve build and walk through it.

It uses KDE / Qt for interface and OpenGL for the actual rendering. It’s designed for KDE on Linux, but all the libs it uses are cross-platform, so it should work on Windows too.

The reason I started this thing is that it was the only thing my girlfriend would let me program. She was annoyed by me learning how to program instead of talking to her, so I asked her if there was anything she wanted me to write. Her answer was a Lego-like program, which I started writing right away.

It’s far from completion, only the most basic framework is currently in place. I’m trying to finish it by her birthday, which is in May. I’m setting up a page for monitoring its progress, which will reside at http://opeke.noughmad.org.

1. If you don’t use computers:

Then you shouldn’t be reading this. Also, you probably know more about women than any computer user, which means high above average. You most likely already know that a man can’t understand women, he can only get used to them.

2. If you use Windows:

Give up. You’ll get a BSOD every time you try to understand women. It’s an illegal operation. Just give up.

3. If you use Linux:

3.1 If you’re just a Linux user:

Give up. There’s no driver or interface that would let you understand women. Just give up.

3.2 If you’re a Linux hacker/developer:

Give up. Linux hackers generally don’t like giving up. So you can try to create a new interface to talk to women, you can try to disassemble them or whatever, write a new driver. However, the best advice I can give you is to give up. Let’s face it, Linux hackers cannot understand women. It’s a fact. You can’t change it. Stop trying and continue doing something more productive, like programming. Just give up.

4. If you use a Mac:

Mac users don’t have to understand things in order to use them. Applying the same to women is the best you can do. Good choice. If you’re still trying to understand women, having a Mac doesn’t help you here. Just give up.

5. If you use some alternative, less-known OS, such as BSD, BeOS, Plan9:

Then you probably just don’t care for women. If you do, see section 3.2.

If you ever felt a need to monitor a specific thread on a forum, but didn’t feel like browsing to it every time, you’re like me. There is one thread over at CivFanatics that I like reading, so I wrote a script to check a thread for new replies.

It only works with vBulletin forums, because they have the number of posts hidden in the source of the page, and phpBB ones don’t. It is a bash script, so it only works on Linux. Download here: ThreadCheck.sh

Continue reading ‘ThreadCheck’ »

Sudo corrupts. Sudo su corrupts absolutely.

I break it, therefore I learn it.

E pluribus Unix.

A Linux administrator has to be root. A Windows administrator has to reboot.

It required Windows XP or better, so I installed Linux.

Linux, Windows and MS-DOS - also known as the Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

I have just suffered a hacker attack on Linux. Yes, on Linux. I was relying too much on it’s security and I didn’t have a firewall set up.

The only symptom I noticed was when everything suddenly stopped responding and the keyboard light began flashing. I restarted the computer, installed firestarter and two rootkit detectors, chkrootkit and rkhunter.

The RK detectors found no known rootkits, but they discovered the following suspicious hidden folders:

/usr/lib/firefox/.autoreg
/usr/lib/jvm/.java-6-sun.jinfo
/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.03/.systemPrefs
/lib/modules/2.6.22-14-386/volatile/.mounted
/etc/.java
/dev/.udev
/dev/.tmp-2-0
/dev/.static
/dev/.initframes

Googling for them showed no results, so I suppose neither is a part of the distribution. I removed some of them, while the other couldn’t be removed, with rm returning “Device or resource busy”.

Edit: Other users have found them too, however no official response was given. I am currently not sure whether these folders are a part of the distro or the rootkit is so widespread, but some look very suspicious.

The next step was to fire up Firestarter. It showed a large number of connection attempts on port 52621 from a bunch of hosts, which I blocked. The bunch of host was really huge, it even included my girlfirend’s computer.

Then I discovered what I believe is the root of the problem: Skype. The firewall allows connection from trusted programs, including Firefox, Kopete the MSN client, and Skype. However, the services Skype’s connections used included traceroute and portscanning, both used by hackers to gain information.

Also, I haven’t received a connection attempt to port 52621 from my girlfriend since she deleted Skype (I told her to do so). So it was definately Skype’s fault. She also told me she had no idea there is anything going on her computer, and neither did I untill it froze. Neither Maja nor I have got any weird things from Skype, Messenger or anywhere else, to the worm apparently works without user’s help.

There is almost no way to detect it, since every firewall has to allow skype’s connections, and most user don’t actively monitor their web traffic.

So, my dear readers: beware of Skype. There is a large botnet of rootkited computers, running either Windows or Linux, connected through skype’s protocol. If you can get your firewall to selectively filter skype’s traffic, you should enably only the ones used for talking. Otherwise, if you look for alternatives, you can use wengophone. It’s not as good as skype, but it’s open-source.

In the beginning Turing created the Machine. And the Machine was crufty and bogacious, existing in theory only. And von Neumann looked upon the Machine, and saw that it was crufty. He divided the Machine into two Abstractions, the Data and the Code, and yet the two were one Architecture. This is a great Mystery, and the beginning of wisdom.

Continue reading ‘The Gospel of Tux’ »

The next K Desktop Environment release is scheduled for January 11, 2008. I’ve seen the beta, and I was impressed by the looks. However, the beta release was pretty unusable, especially the Kicker (system tray) and the K menu. I’ve heard that the Release candidates are much better, but I’m waiting for the final release.

For more information and help, take a look at kde.org.