flapjacktastic

The Times [of London] are reporting, 23 July 2008. that a new trojan is now making waves in the UK having already hit US sites:

Eastern European hackers are suspected of placing the Asprox virus on more than a thousand British websites, including those run by the NHS and a local council, in the past two weeks. [...] Last week, Asprox infected the Norfolk NHS website, used by thousands of people a day. Hackney Council’s website was one of 12 local council websites also compromised, meaning that anyone logging on to pay a parking ticket or council tax was at risk over a three day period. [...] In the US, the virus has successfully penetrated mainstream sites belonging to Sony’s Playstation, the city of San Francisco and Snapple.

Asprox is an automated SQL injection attack that (more…)

I’ve a little note on my desk from last time I had to clean up a dodgy sermon recording. It was a spur of the moment idea to record onto the laptop, little did I know that the laptop had a built in microphone and so recorded not only on the line-in from the mono out (post-mix) of the mixing desk but also the hiss, flutter and buzz of the laptop via it’s own mic.

Here’s what I did in audacity to get a bearable result:

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Well having come from Slackware I’d obviously been enjoying the ease of installation with Synaptic (an apt-get frontend) too much and the gods of computing were watching my karma count(!) … the simple “update-manager” method of upgrading promised much and didn’t really deliver anything other than a rushed lesson in apt-get, dpkg, aptitude and the use of the recovery console option in Ubuntu’s GRUB menu.

Update Manager, problem!

The update manager appeared to hang when it came to restarting the X font server, it may have been something else that triggered it, what was clear to me was I had a frozen X session mid-way through a graphically managed dist-upgrade. Not great. I left it for a few hours to see if it was just taking its time, no joy.

I tried a few things by switching to a CLI with alt-ctrl-F1: apt-get and aptitude reported problems. Neither would run enough for a fix. apt-get reported that I should run “dpkg –configure -a” to reconfigure. dpkg reported “too many errors, stopping”. Now I didn’t like the sound of that

Reboot

On reboot, I chose the recovery console. After much playing around I found I could run “apt-get update” (after getting my net connection up by running “/etc/rc.local”; which just does a pon for my speedtch USB modem connection). Still not much use. I noticed that the first package being complained about was libgnomevfs2-bin, so attempted to install that by itself. No joy. Aptitude was useful here in listing what was broken, but not much use otherwise.

In the end after frantically reading through several man pages I discovered the –force options for dpkg, in a do or die moment I entered “dpkg –configure -a –force-all”. Well that seemed to do the trick, finished installing things, which all seemed to have downloaded already (so something was working right in update-manager at least).

Reboot to glorious KDE goodness.

Rebooting again I had the new menu options in GRUB for the new kernel, a good sign. Booted up fine and I logged in to my KDE session and was back in the now familiar territory of Ubuntu.

Well, I was kinda expecting something to have changed. Nothing seemed that different, this is however Ubuntu with the kubuntu-desktop package installed.

Didn’t take long to find what had changed … firefox 3 beta4 had been upgraded to 3 beta 5 and was broken! Oh yeah and I couldn’t launch GUI apps from a root konsole either.

I’m trying to edit a small clip from a larger program, add titling and post to YouTube. The clip is a section of TV program called Best of Friends and shows a pottery challenge throwing a pot on the potters wheel at Barefoot Ceramics.

Anyway, FOSS linux apps I’m auditioning (at least I think they’re all FOSS, definitely free-gratis):

1. Cinelerra [Update: look out if you get cinelerra from Akirad, it installs an app called akiranews, this seems to be some sort of spam gateway (as yetunexploited. I'm a little concerned about it as a security risk too. So I've uninstalled it as a precaution and removed all akirad repositories.]
2. Kino
3. Kdenlive
4. Open Movie Editor
5. Jahshaka
6. Avidemux
7. Cinepaint

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Well, I thought it would be nice to do some demo’s for using Inkscape. First up though I need to find a decent way to create video screencaps, preferably with audio and notes - though a video editor could be used later with the resulting video.

I used Google and Sourceforge to expand my search and limited the contenders to those with Linux versions. The top app on SF was VirtualDub but it’s Windows only.

Contenders are:

1. http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/vnc2swf/
2. http://live.gnome.org/Istanbul
3. http://recordmydesktop.iovar.org/about.php : I got my package from the getdeb site.
4. http://www.debugmode.com/wink/ : Wink version 2 is currently only available for Windows, which might suggest a move away from Linux.
5. http://epresence.tv/ : they call video captures “screencasts”. Their Producer and Player applications aren’t currently available for Linux.
6. http://xvidcap.sourceforge.net/

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So what does a self confessed geek do for relaxation. Once J is in bed, slashdot and digg are exhausted. My Kubuntu box is finely tuned and there’s no dream shopping to do on ebuyer / amazon. No bargains left on Ebay … well you get the picture.

Well I discovered Enemy Territory: Return to Castle Wolfenstein (ET:RTCW) over a year ago and have spent many happy hours playing it.

What’s so good about it? Well for me I think it beats other games because of hte community surrounding it. Splash Damage released it to the world for free some years ago and there are clients for Windows and Linux. I play on a server run by the HarryHomers clan who have a website, forum and active community. A clan is just a group of people that play together often competing against other clans (teams); a gamers community group if you will.

So am I a traitor?

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Have you seen Piclens from Cooliris? It’s awesome. Actually came across this from watching >Click from the BBC - they arrogantly said “just install it” - so I thought, *huff* how good can it be. Well I’ve got news: it’s flapjacktastic!

Only downside is that it’s not yet out for Linux - I tried it on Windows Vista (FF version) on my new comp and it rocked my techy world! Also ran it in a VMWare Windows XP environment (FF again) on which it was a tad slow for me but still cool enough to use.

My next effort now is to use the information in the Gallery2 forums to enable Piclens on Barefoot Ceramics’s gallery. Code available from Suprsidr on FlashYourWeb.com.

Update:

It works. Go to a gallery and you can get the piclens view if you have the plugin installed. I simply followed the instructions to alter the template.tpl, album.tpl (in the $templateName/local/ folder) and piclensRss.php (in the gallery root) files.

Can I edit a pdf file

It’s not easy but …

My Dad asked me how to edit a pdf. Here’s my response:

It’s not quite a “forget it” situation but nearly … I suspect that your scanner / copier is embedding images files (JPEG or TIFF) in a pdf “wrapper”. It’s unlikely that it performs OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on them, so the text you see isn’t in the PDF, it’s just a picture - you can test this by using the text selection tool (looks like a capitla I) in Adobe Reader and clicking and dragging over some text … if it’s text you’ll be able to select it. Or, you could send me one of the files and I’ll have a look (if you’re not my dad, don’t do this!).

Abbyy

PDF Transformer and Finereader

The leader in this area is a company called ABBYY (sometimes their software is bundled with scanners, so have a check and see).

They have a couple of products that would suit:

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Firewall administration in Slackware Linux

Which front end?

These programs configure a script, usually rc.firewall, which in turn sets up iptables. Iptables then handles all the filtering mangling and NAT requirements for you.

As ever there are lots of options, I used to use Guarddog which was great. However I now need to do NAT and guarddog required me to use a companion program called guidedog. Instead I thought I’d try the native KDE options, the closest thing to that seems to be KMyFirewall.

KMyFirewall (KMF)

This is pretty good.

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Favourite Open Source Applications

This is a quick list of some of my favourite applications, originally written in 2007. They are either free gratis or free libre or both; many are open source.

If you don’t know what that means then all you do need to know is that you can safely use these without worrying about the police knocking on your door. Big companies like Microsoft do prosecute the little guys that illegally copy their software … so use these apps and don’t worry anymore.

The winners are …