Search Results: "xam"

18 October 2005

Steve Kemp: Fortress updated.

Scanner Fortress the simple scanner, or scriptable network system is coming along nicely. For example the script test-port-identification.lua
--
--  Detect the ports open a host, and attempt to identify their services.
--
	
--
-- Create a helper function.
--
function identify_ports( host )
	
  print( 'Scanning: ' .. host );
	
  open = portscan( host );
	
  for i=0,table.getn(open) do
     service = detect_service( host, open[i] );
     print( ' Open port ' .. open[i] .. ' identified as ' .. service );
  end
	
  print( table.getn(open) .. ' ports open on ' .. host );
  print();
end
	
--
-- Now do some scans.
--
identify_ports( 'localhost' );
identify_ports( 'itchy' );
identify_ports( 'scratchy' );
This produces:
skx@lappy:~/cvs/fortress$ ./fortress tests/test-port-identification.lua
Scanning: localhost
 Open port 22 identified as ssh
 Open port 25 identified as smtp
 Open port 80 identified as www
3 ports open on localhost
	
...
...
I’ve also added primitives for working with SHA1 and MD5 hashes (both strings and file contents). Once I can get a few more primitives added I’ll make a 0.3 release and see if people care.
In other news, nothing much is happening. I’m waiting to hear about the results from my sleep study. I’ve had verbal results, but they don’t count for much and miss important details - hopefully not too much longer as I’m due back at work fairly soon ..

Uwe Hermann: I ordered the new video iPod today

Yes, that's right. I have ordered one of those shiny new video iPods today. I was never impressed too much by all this Apple hype going on all around me. In fact, I have never owned any Apple product (no iPod photo nano shuffle * , no powerBook, no iBook, no iMac, no Mac mini). Until now. I simply couldn't resist to replace my 256 MB noname MP3 player with the full-blown 30 GB of the iPod (the 60 GB version costs way too much for my taste). See the specs for more technical details on the new iPod. Apart from the usual iPod features you all know, this one's supposed to be thinner, can display photos and (the major improvement) videos. Yes, it's only 320x240, but it's videos. This thing will initiate a huge video blogging / videocasting wave, and those vlogs will soon become as popular as podcasts are today, I'm sure. I hope to get my hands on that thingy in a bit more than a week (shipping takes a few days, it seems). I already have a lot of things on my mind, which I'm gonna do with it: If you have any suggestions for more geeky things I could be (ab)using it for (think john the ripper on iPod and similar things), don't hesitate to write a comment! Hm, I might port bb to the iPod if nobody beats me to it...

17 October 2005

Joey Hess: thoughts (less random than expected)

This time of year it's great to curl up in the evening with a feather comforter and a good text file. I recently read all of Andy Hertzfeld's stories about the origin of the mac on folklore.org, pretty much straight through in chronological order during one long night. Only at the last story did I find out that he'd turned the website into a book. Reading a whole book in one sitting online is not a novel experience for me, though it seems to be for many, but doing it by accident is. My enjoyment of quantities of text online does sometimes come out in my own weblog postings, which are probably long enough, if not good enough, to be their own book. This weblog at least occasionally violates 8 of Nielsen's 10 weblog usability guidelines. The only one I think I should fix is point 5. Another book I read online recently is Karl Fogel's Producing Open Source Software. The contrasts between how Karl suggests doing some things and how projects I'm involved in work are sometimes large (he suggests voting on technical issues for example), sometimes due to differences in technology (the debbugs bug tracker makes conversations and other email-based use of a bug tracking system work much differently than the BTSes he describes using), and sometimes pointed to things that could be improved. More often though, he seemed spot on in extrcting and highlighting best practices. For example, he does a great job in pointing out that simple, consistent naming conventions, like #404093 for a bug report and r1021 for a repository revision, are more important than they appear. I also enjoyed reading some reviews of Katamari Damacy, which sounds like a truely unique and fun game. I'm looking forward to playing it (probably under emulation) one of these years.

Uwe Hermann: Tagging art

Interesting idea: create art (poems, haikus, fiction, ...) using tags from social tagging sites like del.icio.us, flickr, or technorati. A first example is available on flickr: an event invitation using tags. (via The Social Software Weblog)

16 October 2005

Erich Schubert: Winter term begins

Today winter term will begin at my university. Meaning I'll be really busy. I'll be doing rather many lectures, and my focus will be to get ready for the exams I plan to take in march...

Matthew Palmer: Nokia 3120 with Gnokii

Holy $DEITY! A technical post! So, I've finally broken down and gotten a USB data cable for my Nokia 3120, after a brief scare where I thought I'd lost the phone (along with the voluminous phonebook therein), and a desire to see if I could get a bit of GPRS narrowband data love happening. Not wanting to boot the 4GB virus, I turned to gnokii for help. I got it working, but it was a bit of a trial. The first thing to consider is the cable. As far as I can tell, a lot of phones aren't really capable of talking USB directly to the PC -- they're wired for (presumably) RS-232 (or some other primitive serial protocol). So, the USB cable that you get will quite possibly have a USB-to-serial chip built in to it. The popular DKU-5 cable supposedly has a pl2303 chip in it (supported by the module of the same name), but the "current model" cable is the CA-42, which has a chip supported instead by the cdc_acm module in Linux 2.6 (2.6.10, at least, which is what I'm running). I've got the CA-42 cable, so these instructions are based on that, but I'm led to believe that the DKU-5 is somewhat similar. A side-effect of having hardware in the cable itself is that the cable is detected as soon as you plug it in to the computer, even if there's no phone connected. This weirded me out for a bit, but is nothing to worry about. So, you plug in the cable, and it should be autodetected. The dmesg command will tell you exactly what went on. The cdc_acm module should create a ttyACM0 (or ttyACMN, anyway) device node for you in /dev. Remember this -- you'll be seeing this material again. So now the time comes to play with Gnokii. I installed the version from Ubuntu Hoary, which I'm running on my desktop, but quickly gave that away as Google told me that much better support was to be had in newer versions (0.6.8 being the latest and greatest). I was persuaded, and whipped up a quick backport from the current Debian sid package. Next, we configure Gnokii. Despite having plenty of comments, the example config file is a little short on useful tips for a complete ph0ne n00b like me, but after a fair bit of trial and error, I got things sorted out. Relevant settings in my ~/.gnokiirc:
port = /dev/ttyACM0
model = 3120
connection = dlr3p
That's pretty short configuration-wise, but let me tell you it was a trial to get those two settings sorted out. To take the third setting first, the connection setting is more than a bit weird. The default is serial, which I suspect is only for rooly trooly 9-pin D-connector serial ports -- not pseudo-serial USB cables. There is a huge comment block above this setting in the config file, and none of it made the slightest sense to me, so I just played until I got it right. I suspect that dlr3p is the setting to use for all USB cables, but I can't be sure. The second setting (model = 3120) won't actually work unless you patch your Gnokii with the patch I just submitted to Debian. (Presumably this patch will end up in Gnokii upstream at some stage). It's a fairly trivial patch. Practically, I think you could put another compatible model number (like 5140) in the config file and it'd work OK, but I'm a neat sort of person. The port setting is a simple derivation from the device file created when the USB cable was plugged in. If you're using a DKU-5 cable, I think you'll need /dev/ttyUSB0 instead.

Axel Beckert: Galeon, GNOME and all the rest

I feel that I still owe a few answers on the recent Galeon discussion on Planet Debian and apparently also other planets, so here they are… (But I try to keep them short. :-) First, Erich’s question Why are not-gnome users complaining about Gnome? — Because some people do not use GNOME but do use GNOME applications like Galeon. They don’t use them because GNOME is cool, useful, user-friendly or what else — they use them because these applications are cool, useful, user-friendly or so. They would also use them if they were plain GTK or maybe even KDE applications. For example, I also use Gnumeric or AbiWord, because I like them and not because I like GNOME. (Which — in general — I do btw.) I also use KDE applications although I don’t like KDE in general. (I don’t like KDE for much more emotional reasons compared to Galeon 1.3 btw., so I won’t rant about that. ;-) ark is a nice example for a KDE application I like. Unfortunately some distributions seem to have dropped it. At least I missed it recently on some box. Then there was Gunnar Wolf’s question if it wasn’t Galeon 1.2 which went off the path. He maybe right, since I’ve never seen a Galeon version before 1.2 and the fact that the former Galeon lead developer dropped Galeon for the very spartanic Epiphany also suggests that. But since Galeon 1.2 took the right path in my eyes, Galeon 1.3 seemed at least to change (back) again to some wrong path from that point of view. We’ll see if Kazehakase really keeps following the “right” path. JFTR: Interesting to read were also the discussion between Og, Erich and some more in Og’s journal as well as Wouter’s postings on the subject. Oh, and in general: Thanks for the really nice discussion. Rants seem always to get more constructive responses than just asking for them. That’s one reason why I like to rant. ;-) Another reason is that it frees your mind if you know that people have read about what bothers or annoys you. So also thanks to all who followed the discussion (or still are following it if it hasn’t ended yet ;-).

Now playing: Roxette — The Look

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