Category Archives: Computers

Miscellanious Computing

Hv3 – minimal browsing at its fastest

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Wow, this is really impressive. After reading this LWN article about Hv3, a Tk/Tcl based web browser I decided to give it a go and it’s just great. Lightweight and blindingly fast!

Now this is a browser that’s still in alpha, so expect odd behaviour and bugs, but it’s still remarkably useable. The biggest issue I’ve had with it in a few minutes of playing has been that it doesn’t support HTTP authentication but that just stops me testing it on a couple of sites at work.

Well done folks, keep up the good work!

Using Internet Explorer ? Switch Browser Now!

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Oh joy, the BBC is reporting…

Users of the world’s most common web browser have been advised to switch to a rival until a serious security flaw has been fixed.

It’s yet another security hole in Internet Exploder, this time a heap overflow that works against IE 7 as well as IE 6 and the betas of IE8.

It’s being actively exploited too (again from the Beeb):

As many as 10,000 websites have been compromised since last week to take advantage of the security flow (sic), said antivirus software maker Trend Micro.

I’m pretty sure the writer meant flaw, not flow.. 🙂

Please use Firefox instead!

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Bonnie++ Results for XFS on Dell E4200 SSD

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I’ve been playing with my new work laptop, a Dell E4200 (which I chose as I wanted something light) and thought I’d run Bonnie++ on my XFS /home partition on the SSD (a “SAMSUNG SSD Thin uSATA 128GB M” according to dmesg) to see how it compares to spinning disk. Here’s the results with Ubuntu Intrepid (8.10):

Version 1.03c       ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
                    -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP
sys26            2G           68551  27 38896  23           90404  30  1356   6
                    ------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
                    -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
              files  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP
                 16   556   8 +++++ +++   679   7   605   8 +++++ +++   442   5
sys26,2G,,,68551,27,38896,23,,,90404,30,1355.6,6,16,556,8,+++++,+++,679,7,605,8,+++++,+++,442,5

real    3m56.775s
user    0m0.580s
sys     0m36.930s

So comparing with some old results on my home desktop system seems to show that the block I/O numbers are better, but the file manipulation stuff is much worse! Once I can get btrfs on here I’ll have to try again. 😉

OpenMoko in Search of X11 Driver Developers for Glamo

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The graphics hardware in the Neo Freerunner (Glamo) is missing support for some of its 3D support, and so the OpenMoko folks are looking for developers who can help them out with this:

Having said that, if someone wants to seriously develop for the glamo, please get in touch with me and we will find a legally correct way to extend the smedia documentation to you.
In fact we have done that in a few cases before already, but I’m not sure how much actual codes have come out of that. I think very little 😉 So we need some really serious coders that don’t mind a tough challenge.

Looks like another person to contact might be Graeme Gregory:

Over the next few weeks I shall be working on Xglamo to bring it into the Xorg family of drivers. If people come up with interesting patches while I am working on this I can certainly give them a tryout.

Book Meme

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Seeing as everyone else on PLOA is doing it.. 🙂

Instructions:

  • Grab the nearest book.
  • Open it to page 56.
  • Find the fifth sentence.
  • Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
  • Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

So here’s mine:

This was spotted quickly, and a patch was shipped, but almost a hundred U.S. government systems in Germany were using unlicensed copies of the software and didn’t get the patch, with the result that hackers were able to get in and steal information, which they are rumoured to have sold to the KGB.

That’s from “Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems” (second edition) by Ross Anderson. I’m on page 76 of 891..

It’s the only book I have with me here for SC08 in Austin, Texas, so you can’t say I rigged it! 🙂

Patent Trolls Attack OpenMoko Project

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It appears that the patent trolls Sisvel are attacking the OpenMoko project, and as part of their strategy the project has chosen to pull all of their downloads whilst they remove any support for MP2 and MP3 files.

The short story is that we are in a protracted battle with some patent trolls. Google for Sisvel. In order to get ourselves in a stronger position, we want to make sure no copies/instances/whatever of patent-infested technologies like MP2 and MP3 exist on our servers. Our phones never shipped with end-user MP3 playback features, but we want to use this opportunity to make sure it’s not even in some remote place somewhere.

As Sisvel aren’t the only ones to sue over MPEG related patents (( note that Microsoft won on appeal very recently, reversing the decision )) it really does bring the message home that MPEG is not a safe technology for audio files and that things like Ogg-Vorbis and FLAC are far better (and safer!) choices in the long run.

Android Copies What You Type…

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…not in a malicious way, but in a rather amusing and potentially destructive one.. 🙂

It seems as though there is a /system/sbin/sh running in the background with
/dev/console as stdin. That could explain why typing “reboot” and then enter (in
ConnectBot or otherwise) will reboot your phone. If you type “telnetd”, telnet into
your phone, and look at the /proc/XX/fd tree for the /system/sbin/sh process, you can
see it clearly.

Until you’ve grabbed the RC30 update that fixes this it’s probably best not to do much sysadmin work from one, especially if that involves rm -rf foo.. 😉 This was via LWN, which has the priceless comment:

I wonder how many android phones were running at half speed after someone replied “yes” to someone…

🙂