Category Archives: Computers

Miscellanious Computing

Keeping your Life in Subversion

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Here’s an interesting one, something I’ve thought of doing myself ever since I first came across RCS and then CVS back in the early 90’s, but never quite got around too.. Basically it’s keeping everything in your home directory under revision control, so that whatever happens (as long as you remember to constantly make sure you’ve checked things in) you can get any file back, or revert it to any date.

It’s an interesting project, but given that my home directory here at home is currently about 24GB and I’ve only got about 4GB of disk free, I think it’ll be a while before I can try this out. 🙂

Anyway, you can read the entire article at the O’Reilly network, here’s the blurb they automatically create for folks to blog with:

Keeping Your Life in Subversion by Joey Hess — Revision control is great for collaborative projects and distributed projects. How well does it work for individuals? According to Joey Hess, fantastically. He’s kept his home directory under revision control for years–here’s how he does it with Subversion.

Live CD for Security & WiFi Folks

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For those folks who need to do computer security stuff, whether that’s as a sysadmin or as a consultant, there’s a nice Knoppix based Live CD called Auditor that you can run on your laptop or system without needing to install it.

It’s also handy if you’re doing WiFi stuff such as site surveys..

Google Goes Psychic

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OK, well not quite, but this is fun.. Google has launched a beta version of Google Suggest which analyses what you type and gives suggestions for what you want as you type.

It only gives you a list of 10 suggestions for each word combination you’ve typed, but if it does offer something you are after then you can just select it, and then it’ll give you 10 more (if it thinks there are any).

Dutch city of Haarlem migrates to OpenOffice.org

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The website of OpenOffice.org, the free, integrated, office suite for Windows, Linux and MacOSX users is reporting that the Dutch city of Haarlem has migrated to OpenOffice.org instead of buying the new version of MS Office. They did look at StarOffice (the Sun version that has paid-for support) but couldn’t use it because it wasn’t available in Dutch! 🙁

They even had one of their MS Office training people do an evaluation beforehand which found that OpenOffice.org beat MS Office in a number of areas..

Don’t use Internet Explorer – banner ad exploit for anything earlier than XP SP2

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Oh happy day, it would appear that a major banner advertising company has been spreading naughty programs via an Internet Explorer exploit, it would appear that they were hacked, along with Comedy Central, and the exploit added to their advertising banners.

Basically if you’ve been using Internet Exploder, sorry, Explorer to view websites under Windows and you are not running Windows XP SP2 then you may well have been infected with either annoying advertising software or with a trojan. Oh, and apparently there is also an exploit circulating for SP2 too now. 🙁

Use Firefox instead – it’s not only more secure, it works better!

You can read the Internet Storm Center’s wrapup report which contains the damning message that:

We have not mentioned the potential damage to Microsoft’s reputation but that also must be taken into consideration when you consider that except for WinXP SP2, the Internet Explorer has no patch for this vulnerability. It will come back again to visit more unprotected sites.

There is an excellent explanation of the attack by LURHQ Managed Security Services.

SCO claim to control files crumbles in light of BSD agreement

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OK – so way back when SCO sent a letter to Lehman Brothers claiming ownership of a set of files in the Linux kernel and that they were never intended to be redistributed but were to be strictly controlled.

Asides from the fact that it’s likely that AT&T USL forfeited copyright on anything in V32 UNIX by distributing without any copyright notices it looks like there is even less that SCO can claim any sort of control over.

Now that the BSD settlement is public there are some interesting discrepancies to note between what SCO claim and what the settlement (which bound any successors in interest) says. This defined 3 categories of files, those that were “restricted” from further distribution (Exhibit A files), those that were USL UNIX derived but “may be freely reproduced and redistributed by others without payment of any royalties or fees and without execution of any license agreement with USL and/or the University” as long as they included the USL copyrights (Exhibit B files) and files derived from the BSD Net2 release and included in USL’s UNIX (Exhibit C files).

SCO claims to own an allegedly “copyrighted” ABI contained in errno.h, signal.h, stat.h, ctype.h, ioctl.h, ipc.h, acct.h, a.out.h, ecoff.h and bsderrno.h (yes, really, the BSD errno.h, not USL’s!).

So lets go through them..
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