We all got caught in an awkward place where our computer is infected with god knows what malware and we can’t scan our computer with our antivirus software because it won’t work anymore (simplistic explanation of what might happen!)

There are many live cd utilities, some with a lot of utilities for resetting passwords et cetera.  If you are looking for a solution to scanning your computer for malware though, one solution is to use live CDs provided by anti-malware vendors such as the one Kaspersky is offering.  Although not commercially supported and perhaps a development stage solution for a future commercial solution, it does the job and it is legit!

You can download it by going to http://devbuilds.kaspersky-labs.com/devbuilds/RescueDisk/  download and burn it on a CD, then insert it to your CD driver, reboot, and boot from the CD

For a list of other live CDs of this category visit http://www.askvg.com/download-free-bootable-rescue-cds-from-kaspersky-bitdefender-avira-f-secure-and-others/ and try others out.

Kaspersky is running on a customised version of gentoo (r8).  one issue you will encounter here is that the boot CD will automatically pick up the IP settings of your operating system on the hard disk (or at least appears to be doing so).  To set DHCP settings on you will need to do the following:

• Go and edit /etc/conf.d/net using nano (not sure what other text editors are available)
• for dhcp settings use config_eth0=(“dhcp”)
  delete anything else in the file, save the file and exit
• now to restart the eth0 interface:
  /etc/init.d/net.eth0 stop
  /etc/init.d/net.eth0 start
  or restart might also work
• type ifconfig to view the new IP settings

Now run the update and scan!!

Rsync is a great tool for syncing files between 2 remote locations and it is also used for backups by sys admins.  But for those  Windows users out there who love GUIs and are looking for a quick way of syncing files without a lot of reading up on functionality and going through complex configurations then 1 solution i found does just that, rsync.net Windows Backup Agent

You can find the Windows Backup Agent for free here.  It is a great free tool with a lot of functionality including syncing files both ways, handling locked files, scheduling automated backups et cetera.  Have a look and play around with it.

Thanks to the Rsync.net guys for the great free tool!

Any comments?  Please let me know!

http://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/windows_backup_agent.html

The setup: 1 old sparc machine (makes enough noise to be confused for an airplane engine) running solaris, 1 Debian net install cd (to install debian as the new operating system), 1 serial cable

The idea is this: connect one end of the serial cable on the sparc machine and the other on an ubuntu machine, start the sparc machine, insert the cd rom, install debian.

As the sparc machine has no vga card and since it defaults to the serial terminal connection when no keyboard is installed this is the only way of installing debian. (any suggestions please do tell )

Firstly: go to http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/sparc/install.txt.en and keep it open.

Reality:

Once you have plugged in the serial cable on the ubuntu machine you will need to make sure that it is picking it up.  To make login as root using sudo -i .

Then read this page: http://www.debuntu.org/how-to-set-up-a-serial-console-on-ubuntu .  Have in mind that you will need to restart your system  as in my case checking for the serial connection (ttyS0) turned up nothing.  After a restart everything ran smoothly.  So from the page above the useful thing to pick up is $ dmesg | grep ttyS0 to make sure that the serial connection is alive.

Now, we will need a program such as minicom.  Google minicom up and remember to set the speed to 9600 (Control + A takes us to the option menu).  When we start up the sparc machine we will need to send a break command.  To do this, once we boot it up we will need to do a Control A and then press F.  An ok prompt will pop up.  This means that we are in the boot loader program of sparc, OpenBoot.  Open Boot has several options, have a read here http://www.adminschoice.com/docs/open_boot.htm.

One problem that i have read about when install Debian on a Sparc machine with solaris installed already is that you will get a memory alligment error.  The solution is to set the boot sequence of the sparc machine to boot from the cd first.  This is how to do it: setenv boot-device cdrom disk net .  Then reboot by typing boot and pressing Enter.  More on this can be found on this thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=588088 .  When you reboot you will see the proper debian install menu over the console.

This is all for now, any corrections or suggestions please let me know

For those using internet explorer, Stop Using It. It is a security bug by itself!!

The following error kept coming up using internet explorer with a joomla site of mine “can’t execute code from a freed script” . I had no idea what caused it but in the end it turned out to be the order of the script and meta tags in the head section of the page.
Make sure that all meta tags are before any script tags.  Joomla will add its own meta tags that don’t appear hardcoded in the template itself. It turned out that some plugin also added some script tags in the head section in this rather unorthodox way. A meta tag which followed caused havoc! I ended up moving the content meta tag at the top of the head section and the problem was solved. Kudos to the following website:

http://www.akatombo.com/en/comments/cant_execute_code_from_a_freed_script/

The following regex replaces multiple white spaces in a string with a single white space:
$location =~ s/\s+/ /;

It will actually replace occurances of a single space with another single space, so if you have a more elegant solution please share

Since perl doesn’t have a php like trim function, one way of getting around this is to use regular expressions replacing spaces. You can create subroutine to handle this inside the code or just use the following 2 regular expressions directly

$string =~ s/^\s+//;
$string =~ s/\s+$//;

#!/usr/bin/perl

# Declare the subroutines
sub trim($);
sub ltrim($);
sub rtrim($);

# Perl trim function to remove whitespace from the start and end of the string
sub trim($)
{
	my $string = shift;
	$string =~ s/^\s+//;
	$string =~ s/\s+$//;
	return $string;
}
# Left trim function to remove leading whitespace
sub ltrim($)
{
	my $string = shift;
	$string =~ s/^\s+//;
	return $string;
}
# Right trim function to remove trailing whitespace
sub rtrim($)
{
	my $string = shift;
	$string =~ s/\s+$//;
	return $string;
}

shamlessly borrowed this code from http://www.somacon.com/p114.php although the code itself is not at all complicated

For those who with a computer science background or any other background which included programing then you might be familiar with the concept of object oriented programing and functional programing.  Sadly the second was considered to be out of fashion by many and i remember people i used to study with in Cyprus demanding that they be thought OOP.  This article though gives us reasons why functional programing might be the way forward.  Click here!

Hey guys,

I wasted a day of my project time trying to connect an ubuntu feisty box without internet to a wireless network. Since Ubuntu doesn’t include drivers for this network interface and since you won’t find any on the Linksys page as they don’ support linux operating systems you will need to do the following:

Find an empty cd /dvd or usb stick. Find and download the following packages for ubuntu feisty:
ndiswrapper-common
ndiswrapper-utils
Then go to: http://floppyjoes.homeip.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=21 and download the drivers at the end and add them to the medium you are using. Then take that medium (cd / dvd/ usb stick) to your ubuntu machine. When mounted run the common and utils packages. They end in .deb so ubuntu will pick them up as installation packages. Install the packages and then go to the command line and run : sudo ndiswrapper to see if the command is available. The rest of the instructions can be followed from floppyjoes page above starting from the begining and skipping the part about getting ndiswrapper.

Remember that the default driver does not work the way it should so we need to go through all this process.

Thats all! Let me know if you have any problems with this!

UPDATE:

It appears to be something to be proud of if you  manage to get wifi working on any linux distro   Well the above kind of stopped working but i have an update on this issue.  This is what i did:

• Firstly have a look at http://offog.org/kentservices.html
• Then also have a look at: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=1455704#post1455704
• So in other words edit the /etc/network/interfaces file and under your wlan0 interface or whatever it might be add the following
  • wpa-driver wext  #from what i understand this is the generic driver which covers most cards around
  • wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
• Now go and create a file under /etc/wpa_supplicant/ named wpa_supplicant.conf
  • you can use the touch command to create the file or just go straight with vi or pico/nano and create it
• Then add the following:
• # this is the setup for the wireless network @ kent
  network= {
  ssid=”eduroam”
  key_mgmt=WPA-EAP
  eap=PEAP
  identity=”***”
  password=”***” }
• the restart your network service using: /etc/init.d/networking restart

One thing i did before this was also update the network manager used in Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty from here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=2663064&postcount=88 .  If you have networking via ethernet and a cable you are in luck.  If not, download all dependancies for the packages and put them somewhere.  WIFI on ubuntu using wpa is NOT easy and am guessing each problem has a unique solution

If you are running an ubuntu machine/box somewhere and you are using x sessions, or want to use them then you will need to configure your ubuntu installation to do just that. The first step is to go to System > Administration > login window preferences. Then go to Remote and select Style: Same as local. This should allow you to start remote XDMCP sessions. If you are using windows my favorite client comes bundled with the windows x server package called Xming ( look it up on the internet). I do not use the server it self but i use the client that comes with it. If you choose to start Xlaunch, choose 1 window, “Open Session via XDMCP”, click next, enter the IP address of the host to connect to (or choose the Search For Hosts option) and then finish it will let you start a remote X session with that server using the XDMCP protocol. If you come up with a problem similar to the one i had today, i.e. the x server crashing after trying to loggin (which happened after my first restart) , all you see remotely is the background, when trying to log into the machine entering the username and password simply prompts you to enter it again, then the solution i found and worked for me is to restart the Ubuntu machine, log in localy, go back to System > Administration > Log in Window Preferences and under general tick the option that says “Restart the Xserver with each login”. That should fix it!

To see what wireless linksys cards are supported in ubuntu go here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HardwareSupportComponentsWirelessNetworkCardsLinksys

Take a look at the link here and the website it self if you are a fun of apple. I also wrote the following comment there:

Is this another case of microsoft’s xbox suddenly being able to run things like the xbox media center, and pretty much running like anything from a media center to a computer for browsing the internet et cetera? (in that case ofcourse information was accidentally released from microsoft it self….) That pretty much helped sell a lot of microsoft’s consoles which would have stayed on shelves for a long time (unlike sony’s consoles). I think apple isnt going to shut these guys down, it wont aprove of them but it will simply benefit from the fact that many people will run out to buy their tv boxes and trying to run os x on it et cetera. It wont do wonders as it comes with 256 MB of ram and a 1 ghz processor from what the guys said.

Everyone here is a winner, apple sells more boxes, gets its products into more and more homes, home users get to play around with a gadget that is not a replacment for a mac, but probably runs mac os on it anyway giving a taste of the operating system for users on a more day-to-day basis. And i guess if it is based on intel’s processors and on the i86 platform it might even run windows or any other operating system if one wanted to do that.

It seems like everyone is a winner here, and apple the biggest. Well done guys!

P.S. nice work with the wordpress modified theme

A couple of weeks ago i was about to post an article on my blog to make people aware of a possible security flaw in the gmail service. I then decided to let google know first before lettig anyone else know. It seemed ethical and right behaviour.

The following is what i intended to write

Has anyone noticed that you can be connected to googlemail either securely(over SSL / https ) or unsecurely (unencrypted http connecction)? Although the login pages them selfes are viewed over a secure ssl connection, once you are logged in to gmail, the connection redirects you back to an unsecure connection. You can manually change that by typing https:// google url here but not many people will notice or do that. Anyone with a network sniffer can see pages of your emails etc. There doesnt seem to be anyway of letting google know about this issue as there is no place where people can send feedback

After posting my email – request to google at 2 different feedback points, neither of which was to be used for technical feedback regarding problems with their service, but questions about things such as why people cant log in to their accounts(useful) or saying how great googlemail is (yeah.. right…). No feedback point exists for posting technical feedback regarding their service (overconfident arent they?? ). After waitting for a few days, i got a generic email reply letting me know my account was suspended due to security reasons. At that point i was furius! Trying to help them improve their service so that they can suspend my account? I couldnt believe it.

I calmed down and replied asking why my account was suspended as i was not in violation of the user agreement i agreed to when signing up for google (not using google for sharing illegal files et cetera) . After waitting for a few days and forgeting about it, i got an email 2 days ago basically giving me instructions on how to reset my password (can you believe this?) and telling me the following:

Also, regarding your first message, please note that because we are
testing Google Mail, there is some information we are unable to share. To
read more details about Google Mail, please visit:
http://mail.google.com/mail/help/about.html.

Indeed i have to agree with them. Google mail is still in beta, offers no guarantees of its service nor of the confidetiality, integrity and availability of our data. How many of us realise this though? Everyone is switching from microsoft’s email service to google’s one simply because it offers more space (in theory, i think they also dropped the 40 Gig space thing and just state how much space they “really” offer now, with some increase every day). Gmail does offer a simpler user interface, but does it offer enough for us to switch from using another email provider out there for our day to day emailing needs to go to gmail? I for one use microsoft’s hotmail service. It is not the greatest, it doesnt provide me with the assurance of confidentiality, as i dont have much trust over microsoft as a company, but it has proven to be reliable for my every day needs, including offering me with a secure connection to their end without expecting me to switch from one protocol to the other manually.

Isnt Google, the company of the future realising that this is simply a blow to its image? atleast to me. The idea of people being able to view the emails i am looking at, just by running a network sniffer on the network I am at, and not only, is not so nice. The solution to this issue is a very trivial one, all they have to do is redirect the traffic it self over https not only during the login page but through out the session, to allow the encrypted communication channel between us and google to be present.

Is this done so that google’s server load is not as much? SSL connections are resource consuming, i agree, but does google have that much of a problem that it is worried about its computing resources?? are they running low on cash? or are beta projects not that well funded?? OR is google monitoring traffic that comes and goes between us and its servers and having non encrypted connections makes it easier for them, and for other “organizations” to do so. (atleast if microsoft does it, it does it more discreatly). I guess this brings up the issue of being careful of what we save on gmail. After this i doubt there is much privacy offered by google’s services, or atleast not more than microsoft’s. Plenty of more to say here but i will leave it up to that. If you want me to post copies of the email correspondance feel free to ask me. Forgive my spelling mistakes

I was browsing the net and came accross an open source media center alternative for windows.� It seems to have a lot of features such as tv broadcasting of multiple channels and has some sort of support for encrypted channels.� It does have a few bugs from what i read but it looks like it has a lot of potential.� Check it out and tell me what you think.� It looks very interesting.� You can find it at

http://www.team-mediaportal.com/�

Leave a comment if this is interesting

Is it me or has Google turned into an “all about the money” service these days. Every time I want to search for something most of the results in the first pages are all links to shops selling products similar to what am searching for (sometimes not even similar!). Don’t you all miss the good all days when we could use Google just so we avoid all the useless links coming up? Power, simplicity and a friendly user interface was what Google was all about right? Isnt that why a lot of people moved away from search engines like yahoo et cetera?

I mean if we wanted to buy something, why doesn’t Google have a different section just for that?! I know I know it doesn’t always work like that, if people are advertising services et cetera, but isn’t Google taking it too far with their “pay for better rankings” schemes? I miss the good Old Google!