HackNBlog @ Salamanteri Server

So, on my last post, “1,234,567,890th second since UNIX epoch. Where will you be?“, I predicted that on that particular second in time I would propably be sleepind or high. But I wasnt. Instead I was very sober and still awake - watching Futurama movies with my friend. It was all good time but now it’s gone. Still asking, what did *you* do on that moment?

“At 11:31:30pm UTC on Feb 13, 2009, Unix time will reach 1,234,567,890. Where will you be at this momentous second?” - from Bell Labs

Surely you would want to find out what time this second comes in your local time? Well, provided that your *nix system has perl installed you can run the following command in shell:

perl -e 'print scalar localtime(1234567890),"\n";'

Here in Finland this will not happen on Friday 13th but very soon after midnight on Saturday. More precisely at “Sat Feb 14 01:31:30 2009″, as was reported by the above line of perl code… I myself will most likely be high or sleeping at that very moment - where will you be?

P.S. See also: One of those magic times: On Friday the 13th! by Jon maddog Hall & The 1,234,567,890th second approacheth at Linux-Watch.

Lately I have been somewhat bored with my regular computer activities, programming, hacking, and such. Almost so badly that I decided that I needed something else to get addicted at or I would get depressed… So I decided to pick up my old hobby and passion: computer games - 1st person shooters that is.

So I got myself a copy of Half-Life. Yes, some consider it old but I still love DooM, so age was not an issue - and there is a huge amount of games that I always planned to play but never got to. Half-Life is one of them and it has been reviewed excellent and also highly praised by most of my friends (well, one said it sucks). And it was mentioned to work perfectly with Linux+Wine.

So, it’s been 2 days since I started and I got hooked into it right away. Yesterday I in fact played it for several hours without any breaks - boy did my mouse hand hurt after the session :) So thats it for now, time for my other hobbies.

On the right is one of the wallpapers I found on Bablotech blogs article 12 Wallpapers in which linux criticizes windows. While I personally have little use for wallpapers, beeing user of Ion3 Window manager, I know that many visitors here might find these amusing :)

To quote osnews.com article Nokia To Add LGPL to Qt Licensing Model…

After Nokia purchsed Trolltech last year, doubts arose about how Nokia would handle the dual licensing model of Qt, the advanced cross-platform toolkit which lies at the base of the KDE Free software desktop. As it turns out, these doubts were unfounded, as Nokia today announced it’s going to add the LGPL to Qt’s licensing model, starting with Qt 4.5.

…and the press release…

The move to LGPL licensing will provide open source and commercial developers with more permissive licensing than GPL and so increase flexibility for developers. In addition, Qt source code repositories will be made publicly available and will encourage contributions from desktop and embedded developer communities. With these changes, developers will be able to actively drive the evolution of the Qt framework.

Personally I’m eager to see if this will result in code exchanging between the GTK and Qt projects - something that the licensing has prevented before. It would seem logical and beneficial to both sides to take on that path but only the future will tell…

Perhaps you, like many *nix users, like to remotely connect to your desktop and/or servers and thus are propably running an ssh-server. If so and you have ever checked logs for failed attempts to log in then you know that attempts to login with random usernames and passwords are made constantly. And finally, if you are like me, you are constantly worried that your username and the password, even though naturally a hard one to come up with, might one day be entered by person - or rather a brute force password cracking script - and thus your system getting compromized. There is a simple tool to deny hosts from connecting the ssh-server (couple tools even, but here is one) after failing defined number of times - and if configured to, the program will send email report of new denied hosts and suspicious connection attempts. denyhosts is the program I use for this, and here is how to set up it:

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I’m proud to have released my first WordPress plugin, phpinclude… It allows to include any file apache can access into your post or page. Including PHP files it also executes them. Naturally there is some security settings to make sure that only editors authorized for that can do it. You can check the overall info, view syntax highlighted source and download the plugin at Software / Wordpress Plugins / phpinclude page. Naturally it’s released under GNU GPL license.

Also, if you havent glanced the “Quick News” list on the left of the posts you might want to know that I have released a proramming example of DOS tree command implemented for *nix bash shell in Shell Scriping subsection. So to check tree.sh, go through any of those or go straight to tree.sh for full info and that syntax hihlighted fabulous source (I make a joke, hehe).

Thank god we dont have software patents here in Finland and hopefully we will never have. Hopefully…
Here’s a quote that I read on one blog:

Patent: Application-Specific Windows Colourisation
posted by Thom Holwerda on Mon 8th Sep 2008 23:23 UTC
IconThe US patent might be a bit daft, especially when it comes to software, but it does offer some interesting insights into what crazy things the big companies might be working on for future products. One such patent emerged today: Microsoft applied in 2005 (and was granted in 2008) a patent which describes how different windows may be coloured differently, or that they may have different transparency settings. This sounds a bit weird, but it may actually prove to be quite useful.

I wonder how is it possible that this feature in fact already DOES EXIST on at least one but propably in several window managers and desktop environments under *nix systems. In America you can get these silly patents called “software patents” that have very different purpose from the original idea of patents (which I then again do support) - but not only that: you can also get a patent for something that SOMEONE ELSE developed, released and has been around for years.

I don’t care - if any b-shit company ever comes to tell me that I break their patent to “creating shell scripts running under unix or unix-resembling systems” or something equally silly (and the fact is, many s-patents are way more ridiculous) I will tell them to stick their patents where the sun don’t shine - so that I wont have to.

Me is angry!

Yes, you read it right, Linus-blog, not Linux… What I actually meant was not that some random Bob has started a fan-site/blog about Linus but that it’s Linus Torvalds own blog… The future of it’s content is still unknown and currently is ran on test basis…

…but whatever, you should go and read Linus’ blog anyway, decide if you like it or not and… well, do what you do :)

I decided to enable SSL-secured access to this server. The system running Salamanteri is Fedora 7 Linux + Apache 2 (at the moment of writing) so at least with Fedora 7 anything I did should work too. Yes, I wrote a description for those webmasters without knowlege about everything (should be easy enough to adapt my “guide” for other distributions or unixes.

Whatever the reason you might want to connect securely (https://salamanteri.homelinux.net/wordpress/), my reason was gaining a way to securely login to administration page without separate ssh-tunnel.

How to do it?

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