Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Malaysia Rubik Association

It's been a while since I wrote something. Bz with final i suppose. Finally finish and yezza preparing myself for an enjoyable holiday.

One of my favourite pastime is solving rubiks cube. At first it was quite hard but eventually you turn out loving and craving for it. Unfortunely it's sad to see that most Malaysian are not into puzzle solving so much . Which is sucks ( i mean where the heck is Semangat Malaysia Boleh? Don't tell me we need political influence to be good in puzzles).

Our neighbours in Singapore and Indonesia have setup their own Rubiks League while we continue to be ignorance (in sense of puzzle solving lah.. ). So i got tired of waiting and decide to set up our association as quickly as possible . So if you are one of the cube freak lovers in our country come and join arms with me . Maybe we could create a local tournament or might be International one or tutorial class!

Here is our link : )

http://groups.google.com/group/my-rubik

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

So there is a service for Ubuntu.

After toyying and tweaking around after my F8 box , it 's time to give some care for my ubuntu. One thing i like about the fedora /redhat system is their service stuff. True you can just run the script by /etc/init.d/ but

So i went back to my room and out of the blues:

hub@Hub:~$ service dbhub stop
The program 'service' can be found in the following packages:
* debian-helper-scripts
* sysvconfig
Try: sudo apt-get install
bash: service: command not found


So there's a service package for all fedora/red-hat lovers . apt-get it and presto.. done.
hub@Hub:~$ sudo service squid stop
* Stopping Squid HTTP proxy squid [ OK ]
hub@Hub:~$ sudo service squid start
* Starting Squid HTTP proxy squid [ OK ]


Well it may seem nothing much important but it's better than go on typing /etc/init.d/

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Fun with LD_PRELOAD, libtsocks and Tor

I`m getting some troubles during the finals in UTP. Due to some of my sadistical slapstick joke.. regardless that i found it`s quite annoying as there are no compiz-manager for compiz fusion for ubuntu gutsy. So i prepare myself to download from gits and found out that :


Sigh .. owh well looks like we need to look around a little bit.. Kagesenshi mention it to me that we can sockcified the connection using tor. But wait a minute gits doesn`t support sockcification by default!!
So we must find a way to wrap non socks aware program into it.

Hence after googling around we can use LD_PRELOAD enviromental variable with tsocks library.
Taken from both sites:

Tsocks:

Tsocks' role is to allow these non SOCKS aware applications (e.g telnet, ssh, ftp etc) to use SOCKS without any modification. It does this by intercepting the calls that applications make to establish network connections and negotating them through a SOCKS server as necessary.

LD_PRELOAD:

LD_PRELOAD is an environment variable that affects the runtime linker. It allows you to put a dynamic object, that will create some sort
of a buffer layer, between the application references and the dependencies. It also grants you the possibility of linking with the
application and relocating symbols/references.

Install tor and tsocks respectively from your repository or compile from source (ubuntu apt-get install tor tsocks or fedora yum install tor tsocks

Next step is taken to configure /etc/tsocks.conf something like this

#Local-Address local = 165.0.0.0/255.255.255.0 # Otherwise we use the server server = 127.0.0.1 server_port = 9050


Done now let`s test our connection.


More info on LD_PRELOAD : http://neworder.box.sk/newsread.php?newsid=13857

Sunday, November 11, 2007

UTP Install FES 2007

Yeah, once again we manage to pull out some sort of ad-hoc event inside our local campus. At first i'm a little bit worried since we are making the Install Fes without any proper permission to use cafe . But it seems nobody mind us so with go back down to business.

We set up our booth around 11 am . Kagesenshi kindly provide us with his 16 switch box and Fedora 8 mirror repositery. Setting up our booth and network is a clinh. Due to some technical reason (most probably lazy) we only managed to provide installation for Fedora and OpenSuse . The reason why they ain`t any ubuntu? The color is kinda sickening these days.

At first i thought we only get hits around at most 10 people (usually the normal guys ) but surprisingly we manage to pull a lots of crowds too. I say around 30-40 people (one of em is a girl) have their box install with Fedora or SuSe which is pretty amazing.

Unfortunately not all installation are work out of the box. One guy who wish to remain anonymous couldn`t kick in to linux because of the PCI Bios Bug which had n`t been fix yet. Bios vender i suggest you checkout with linuxfirmwarekit to make sure it`s not ship for "Windows only" . That is sucks.

Special thanks to all our #linux@utpchat.net without u dorks this ad hoc event won`t be a success.
*Note.. i was not in the picture. There`s no way i would like to take pictures with bunch of dorks. no fun :p

Friday, November 9, 2007

Mirroring Fedora 8 Live-CD ISO

Admit it. not everyone can download from torrent . So i decided to mirror the latest Fedora 8 live CD for a week as showing my appreciation to the FOSS world you can access it by clicking the link here.

http://www.yondie.org/12/Fedora-8-Live-i686/

Well i hate hot-linking but i can`t force all of u to listen to my rants . If possible link it back here okay?

Wednesday, November 7, 2007

Rising moon and howling wolfs.

After 6 months of eternal full moon tomorrow comes the curse of mankind yeah Werewolf.

Note owh i`m not talking bout some RPG epics around here, it's Fedora 8 will making it ways to us on this 8 of November. I've tried the i686 LiveCD and surprisingly the gui is quite nice. It seems they have use the new rewritten gdm. Also includecd by default is the Pulse Audio server and etcx3. the interface is quite nice.


Althought i'm always feel comfortable with my ubuntu. It didn`t stop me from looking on what's goin on around fedora project. As those guys always got something interesting to do . Prepare to get curse with the rage of the wolfs :).

Monday, November 5, 2007

Dumping 101010 is fun but.,.

After purchasing my own PSP and done some modification to it's firmware special thanks to D.A , i figure out that dumping the firmware output ought should be easy rite? Heck it won't be easy but somehow i managed to get a string of bloated binary which is in imperfect forms.

I haven't archive anything yet since the whole chunk of bits and bytes need to be decrypted in order to understand what`s happening.

Firmware dumping can be archive in two ways. either we use the JTAG cable and short it out base on our chip specification or dump it out using specifc syscall software.

Fortunely i`m not going to mess up my PSP too much (since i only have one box of it). So i choose he second method.
The quickest method is just by hooking up flash0 into the usb port.. But instead of auto mounting it..
we use dd to extract the information ..

dd if=/dev/sda | gzip > ~/psp/firmware/image.gz
next step we need is to untar the image.gz (be prepare for it`s bout to extract large of files>
Now came the hardest part is to understand all the bloated 1010101

1010100100001100000000101000*000101001###11101111011111111110000001011011100
1010100111000001100101100#110100101001000011000000111010000100101001111111
0011101100010011000100000#000000000##.. and so so


Note the parts that are hashes are some sort of parity error or our dumping method cannot determine either it's an 0 or 1.. So what can we do with it.. Yeah we have three choice.. ignore it and see what happens.. or switch it to 1 or switch it to

Well gonna stop now since anything i post after tis may make my post like a piracy issue. Feel free to spam my inbox in case you are interested .