Category: Site News

This website is very old. It’s been with me for many years. There are plenty of articles which are useful both for myself and the rest of the world. Bit by bit, word by word, link by link, image by image, this site was filled and filled over the years. Technologies changed. Some new techniques and concepts came up. Some old ones faded away. Spending as much time as I possible can (after everything else) on this site, sometimes I manage to introduce big changes – like a new bit of functionality or a totally different look. Not to confuse and scare everyone, I try to be open about the changes that were made. When something big is changed I post a description of what it was and why I felt the change was needed. These updates are published in this category.

Back from holidays

I am back from holidays. Most of the time was spent on rearrangements of my home network. I have downgraded the CPU to PII 200MHz on my home server and upgraded it’s memory to 256 MBytes.
There is also a brand new 1.2 GHz Celeron with 128 MBytes of memory, which is dedicated to DVD playing and other illegal activities :)

The topic of DVD playing is still new to me. I have found few projects on Freshmeat.net, including Ogle, xine, and Mplayer. For those happy Red Hat users, most of the above software is available in RPMs from FreshRPMs.net. I was also able to output DVDs and DivX to my TV using the instructions for Nvidia drivers. GeForce2 with TV-OUT easily does the job.

Meanwhile, it is nice to notice that while I was on holidays lots of people worked hard. I am very glad to discover announcements of Red Hat Linux 7.3, OpenOffice.org, Gnome 1.4 snapshot, and several other nice pieces of software in my mailbox. Congratulations to the developers!

Gucho 0wned

I am pretty busy these days. My home server has been cracked via old ssh. I had to clean up the machine, then decided to use it as a honeypot for some time. By now, I think I have everything I need, so machine is reinstalled. Red Hat 7.2 has been installed on it. I am occupied with configuration of the server and I am using these downtimes to reorganize my home network a little bit. So, no usefull staff today, except for the promise that I will put together and publish here the information I got from this attack. Get back later! :)

Christmas updates

Long time no updates again. I have put the reminder in my ical, so now updates should really be more often.
Meanwhile, I have been busy with few things and here we go:

  • OpenOffice.org office suite appeared to be VERY much like StarOffice – same code base, help and printing available, etc. Good alternative if you want to stay free and open.
  • Running different online game servers may be fun. In particular Quake III Arena servers with Rocket Arena and/or OSP mods. For those, seeking log analyzer’s for games.log – the only one I managed to force to work was Q3LA (Quake 3 Log Analyzer). My samples are http://games.thunderworx.net/q3osp/ (OSP) and http://games.thunderworx.net/q3ra/ (RA).
  • I spent some time with perl/tk programming. Tk appeared not bad at all for something more advanced than xmessage type of things. Clear, object-oriented, readable code, especially when done for Tk perl module (check out CPAN for more information).
  • Coming to surprises: it was a big one for me to find out that xsnow actually has a manual page and a handful of options. Thanks to certain someone I can now nostalgie about real winter with winter background and xsnow with -notrees and -nosanta options on.
  • It looks like finally one of my old dreams will come true and I will be working during the night time, being additionally a techical support guy during that time. Nice anyway.

That looks like all. Last thing I wanted to mention is that I will be out of the island for the first time in several years – Christmas holidays is a good time to visit my mom and bro in Malta (another small island in the same sea…hehe). I will be out from 24th of December until 3rd of January, so I guess there will be no updates during that period.