Category: Geek

After another thorough scan on my systems, including cross-scans from different OSes, I have confirmed that my streak of being virus-free is still unbroken from ever since I got my first PC in 1993. Sometimes it pays to be paranoid…

Avoiding them has actually been fairly simple:

1) Never run e-mail attachments directly. EVER. If you do get what you think is a legitimate attachment, save it to disk and then open it from within the appropriate program.
2) Don’t use Outlook. That’s just asking for trouble.
3) Firewall off every port and only open the ones you absolutely need. Preferably with a physically separate firewall device.
4) Don’t use IE on untrusted sites. If you do use IE, deactivate ActiveX objects and Javascript. If you have to leave them enabled, don’t ever say yes to those ‘toolbar’ downloads.
5) Be suspicious of .exe files from untrusted sites. Virus-check the hell out of them, see if you can open them in WinZip instead (sometimes they’re just self-extracting .zip files), etc.
6) If it has an unfamiliar extension, don’t run it.
7) If you browse Usenet, don’t auto-display HTML and images. Treat them like e-mail attachments in 1).

It turns out that my iTunes ID3-editing problem was indeed permissions-related, thanks to NFS brain damage.

(Warning: *so* boring. Zzzzz…)
Continue reading “NFS Can Also Blow Me”

I can never keep these straight since I keep forgetting the exact rules around pointer type qualifiers, so for my own reference:

const X * foo;    // Cannot change what is being pointed at, can change the pointer
    foo = &bar;   // Allowed
    *foo = bar;   // Not Allowed

X const * foo;    // Equivalent to the above

X * const foo;    // Cannot change the pointer value, can change what is pointed at
    foo = &bar;   // Not Allowed
    *foo = bar;   // Allowed

const X * const foo; // Cannot change either the pointer value or the target
    foo = &bar;   // Not Allowed
    *foo = bar;   // Not Allowed

I love you guys and all, and the occasional power trip is fun, but when you make me a moderator three times within five days it starts to become more of a chore than a treat, and it tempts me to decline moderation permanently…

Looks like there’s a security vulnerability in recent versions of Mozilla and Firefox on Windows. Fixes are already up at mozilla.org.

As much as we like to crow about IE’s vulnerabilities (and they’re still far ahead in sheer number and severity), it has to be remembered that nobody is perfect. No development method is invulnerable. No target is immune from attack.

Tip for the day: Restarting ‘udev’ on a running system is a really, really bad idea if you ever want to see any of your pseudo-ttys again. I couldn’t log in via SSH or even start another xterm until I rebooted.

Otherwise though, it seems like it works fairly well so far under Slackware 10. The entries in /dev are minimized to those actually relevant to the system, and I can assign node names based on things like vendor strings, so my camera always appears as /dev/camera instead of varying between /dev/sda1 or /dev/sdb1 depending on what order I plugged things in.

As always, there are quirks. My USB multi-card reader only shows up as the basic whole-device node (e.g., /dev/sda) if no cards are actually in it at boot time, as is usually the case. In order to actually get at the files though, you need the partition nodes (e.g., /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2, etc.), and they don’t show up. Unfortunately, with these kinds of devices, inserting a card doesn’t actually cause a USB event, so the kernel and udev don’t know that there’s now a card there on which it should go scan the partitions.

Fortunately there’s a workaround; you can force udev to always create the partition nodes with something like the following in udev.rules:

BUS="usb", SYSFS{product}="Multi-Card Reader", NAME{all_partitions}="usbcard"

Then I can access my SD card in the reader with /dev/usbcard1.

And, of course, the above pseudo-tty problem…

Whoo, fully upgraded from Slackware 9.1 to 10.0 in just under two and a half hours. And without rebooting, even — uptime is still 77 days and counting…

The only major pain was updating config files in /etc, but even then the differences were pretty minor (Slackware’s major draw is that it keeps things pretty simplified and straightforward for power users, so there aren’t umpteen zillion layers of wrappers that get completely rewritten from release to release). The only annoying one was Apache, due to some loadable modules being moved around.

Now to see what all the hubbub over GNOME 2.6 and the new Nautilus is… Tomorrow. Zzzzz….

Update:
So far only two things seem broken: SpamAssassin had to be reinstalled because it likes to hardcode paths to the Perl library directories when you ‘make’ it, and the session startup path to ‘gkrellm’ had to be adjusted since it’s an official package now and thus moved from /usr/local/bin to /usr/bin.

I don’t really like the new ‘spatial’ method of traversing folders in Nautilus in GNOME 2.6; I like my directories deep and don’t want six gazillion windows open just from browsing through them. Fortunately though, it’s configurable. Somewhere…