teh bigbro blog(tm)
Bigbro's foray into the scary world of blogging
07 2005

Fri, 29 Jul 2005

meh! Some links...

http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/doc-php/asoundrc.php?module=Generic#naming

A useful reference page for lots of ALSA configuration information.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4727919.stm

Following on from yesterday's link to the outcry at the Black Hat conference, it now looks like it was indeed a deliberate action by Cisco to stop information on an exploit technique being released into the wild. What a very scary legal precedent to set! And today they release inforomation on an IPv6 potential DDoS hack... Oh Cisco, cisco, cisco...

http://www.actsofgord.com/Annoy/chapter01.html

Some light weekend reading... :-)

Wed, 27 Jul 2005

Today I have mostly been trying to make Word do what I want it to (and sometimes even succeeding), but here are some things that other people found for me :-)

http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2005/07/mending_a_hole_.html

It could be that the report had some glaring flaws in it, or was just outright wrong - or it could be that Cisco are trying to hide something... who knows... conspiracy theories abound.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=24923

Yes! America! Though I must admit that the UK is not far behind in its craziness regarding incessant telemarketting.

http://www.lbedford.org/ilug.html

Noone told me there were statistics being gathered on #linux... p3h4r!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1536628,00.html

Makes you wonder what the rest of the handymen who visit your home get up to ... and what risk they put you and your family at.

Mon, 25 Jul 2005

...that a child only yay big (not to scale) could eat most of a large bag of popcorn and drink about a litre of Sprite during a film?
In other news, Madagascar is quite entertaining.
posted at: 02:53 | path: /observations | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 18 Jul 2005

In memory of those happy days playing scrabble late at night in CB2, myself and Jo ignoring potential vast sums of scoring points in order to play a comedy (or rude) word on the board - Sinéad and Gilby playing quite seriously and getting cross with us for taking ages over each turn and giggling incessantly the entire time ;-)
Gilb, I hope this Urban Dictionary entry brings back fond memories of your blatant cheating in order to win the game one evening - and especially I hoep you remember completely taking us all in with your straight-faced definition of it as a painting and decorating term... I hope you're fooling another generation of innocents in CB2 with your scrabble antics now and that you've found someone else to play 'Is this my house?' with at 2am :-)
posted at: 13:06 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Sun, 17 Jul 2005

I found these URLs and thought of... erm...

http://www.paulgraham.com/hackpaint.html

A book that I really must purchase and read. Apparently it's very good.

http://linuxreviews.org/howtos/l33t/index.html.en

A useful guide to being l33t ;-)

http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,,74866,00.html (caution: flash nonsense)

I want one of these to play with. Once it can run IRC, doesn't get too hot (a fault my laptops have) and can pull up raddiotimes.com to tell me what's on telly, I'd be happy.

http://www.artlebedev.com/portfolio/optimus/

I really want one of these. It has the potential to make lots of audio apps really usable. And lots of other apps as well I guess, but I only really care about audio ones - and debuggers :-)

Thu, 14 Jul 2005

Thanks to [ILUG Mailing list person] for pointing me in the direction of some helpful Ubuntu Forum, solving my wireless problem under Ubuntu. Installing and configuring a Belkin 54g card (F5D7010) under Ubuntu is really quite simple, once you find out that the generated config file will never turn the card on (until you edit it, that is) :-)

1. Install Ubuntu and get some networking going (the wired ethernet port on this laptop worked out of the box - Broadcom Tigon3 chipset)
2. Install the ndiswrapper-utils: apt-get update; apt-get install ndiswrapper-utils
3. Install the Windows driver for the wireless card: ndiswrapper -i /mnt/cdrom0/Driver/bcmwl5.inf
4. Check that the driver and hardware are installed and detected okay: ndiswrapper -l
5. Don't modprobe the driver yet... under Ubuntu (or due to the version of ndiswrapper with Ubuntu - I don't know) the config file for the card itself gets generated with RadioState set to 1, which means that the card never gets powered up. Using your favourite editor (vim) edit the config file for your card and change the line to read "RadioState|0" My config file is called /etc/ndiswrapper/bcmwl5/14E4:4320:1799:7010.conf, line 30 of which is the RadioState line.
6. Start the ndiswrapper module: modprobe ndiswrapper
7. Configure your wireless network as appropriate. Ubuntu has some good tools for this, but I did it manually in my previous post
8. That's it

Wed, 13 Jul 2005

Ubuntu hates me. Took me all of a couple of hours to install and configure WiFi under redhat on my laptop - I started installing and configuring it under Ubuntu 3 days ago... and it still doesn't work. Anyone who mocks gentoo (which just works) and suggests Ubuntu as a replacement is now due some serious mockery from me - and possibly a slapping.
<flame_retardant_suit="on" /> ;-)
posted at: 01:00 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry

Fri, 08 Jul 2005

And lo! The internetweb did issue forth great wisdom and spake thusly:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3001103.stm

It could so easily happen... I think I might evaluate my career choices and consider joining the police-force ;-)

Thu, 07 Jul 2005

Planet Evil seems to be being overtaken by the womenfolk. I wish I had time to write blog entries. Also, I'm tired.
posted at: 01:42 | path: /observations | permanent link to this entry

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