Recently in Computers Category

Shock! Horror! Bug found where Windows applications will open DLLs that are in the current working directory of a process!

Except it's not a bug. It's by design, and it's existed since NT.

Microsoft is being smacked in the head by a required feature of Windows due to the initial weakness of the LoadLibrary call. If you don't specify a path to the file to load, it uses the standard library search path.

Dear god, you would think that this was news. It is not news, nor has it been since the goddamned operating system shipped. Granted, the issue is severe, but the fact of the matter is if an application is executed using a working directory that isn't under your control, then what can you do? if there are libraries in the same directory that launched the program that happen to share the name of system libraries then you're hosed.

Hey, guess what asshole, if you link a linux binary with a search path containing '.', then you get the same problem. It's just as well that nobody links their binaries with -R. .... eh?

The documentation is blatant in this regard. I've known it was a security issue since I first learned of the LoadLibrary call, as any even half decent developer should have known when they started using the damned function.

The rule is simple. Resolve the full path to a library before you load it. Validate that it 'looks right' at that point. Then load it.

BTW .init section in .so files - so totally a security hole. You can't dlopen a file to determine if it's good without executing the .init code. Game over man, game f**king over!

My .init code does a setenv("LD_LIBRARY_PATH", "." + getenv("LD_LIBRARY_PATH")) ... now piss off and write secure code for once...

This advice is for Microsoft Virtual PC. When you use software like VMWare, it automatically allows the host to connect directly to the client using the virtual interfaces that have been created.

Most of the recommendations with regard to connection to/from the Virtual PC client recommend configuring the connection to share/bridge one of the network connections.

All very good and well when you're on a network. I regularly use the system when I have no network available - i.e. I'm completely disconnected. Most of the connection sensing code for network adaptors prevent you from using it while it's not active, plus I don't like having to configure the connection manually and then reconfigure it when I've got a real network.

The simple solution is to add a Microsoft Loopback Adaptor to the host machine, then create a second network interface on the Virtual PC that uses this interface. Manually configure the IP addresses to be on the same private network, making sure that you don't accidentally configure it to use an IP address range that you may end up using for a VPN connection.

1. Add the Network Adaptor: XP, Vista, Windows 7
2. Configure the IP address manually. Use a Private Address Range. I chose an IP address of 10.125.1.1 with a netmask of 255.255.255.0 for the host, then chose 10.125.1.2 for the Virtual machine. XP, Vista, Windows 7 - Use the instructions for Vista.
3. Shutdown the Virtual Machine, Don't hibernate as you can't add the second network interface.
4. Edit the properties of the virtual machine (in the Virtual Machines folder). Either Right Click on the Virtual Machine Icon, or use the Settings Option in the menu bar.
   
5. Configure the network to have 2 interfaces, one of which is linked to the 'Microsoft Loopback Adaptor'
   
6. Boot up the virtual machine, and follow the instructions for manually configuring the IP address of this new network interface.

Direct connections to the IP address of the client virtual machine now work, and you can use it for anything you want.

Following the instructions here, even if they're confusing, once you add a dword key called '*NdisDeviceType', with a value of 1, you don't see the connection as an unknown connection; thus enabling sharing and other features in Vista, Win 7.

First I got the pid of thunderbird...

~% ps -fe | grep thunder
1000     17509     1  0 13:19 ?        00:00:00 /bin/sh /usr/bin/thunderbird
1000     17521 17509  0 13:19 ?        00:00:00 /bin/sh /usr/lib/thunderbird/run-mozilla.sh /usr/lib/thunderbird/thunderbird-bin
1000     17526 17521  0 13:19 ?        00:00:24 /usr/lib/thunderbird/thunderbird-bin
1000     19101 19006  0 14:09 pts/10   00:00:00 grep thunder

Then I got the address of the heap from the process' maps

~% grep 'heap' /proc/17526/maps
08d02000-0a9ad000 rw-p 08d02000 00:00 0          [heap]

I compiled up memory_dumper, and ran it against the process and heap addresses listed.

% ./memory_dumper 08d02000 0a46a000 17526 heap

Then I ran strings on the resulting file, looking for the pattern that matched my remembered password

% strings heap | grep t%7
cheat%7Ladel
cheat%7Ladel
cheat%7Ladel
cheat%7Ladel
%

4 copies of the password in memory in the program. That is just in-freaking-sane. It should be present in the program only once, and should probably be concealed using some form of obfuscation. Mind you, it has kept the new password in my mind now, so I should be grateful.

And just in case you feel like trying the password listed, don't. It's not the real password ;)

I have been buying sound cards for a loooooong time – my first add-on card was for a 512K Amsdrad PC512 and it produced either MIDI-based sound or replicated sample audio. It was not a cheap purchase at the time – I can't remember the price any more, but it was quite a bit of savings at the time.

It came with a literal 'wodge' of 5.25" driver diskettes. you could use it to steady a table there were so many of them.

Later on, the disks changed to 3.5". This meant that they were thicker than the older disks, and amounted to a pile that simply got progressively larger. By the purchase of my last soundblaster card, I was looking at IIRC 10 disks, only a few of which were usable for drivers for DOS, the remainder were 'assistant' programs such as Dr. Sbaitso, which were to purposes useless.

I spent a long time kind-of caring about my sound card. I bought an SB live card for my main desktop and for several years things just worked. About 2 years ago got an SoundBlaster X-Fi card for notebooks for my Dell Insipron M1710. Honestly, the internal card was better than the add-on card. I didn't really care as I paid for it in Yen, so it didn't count towards cost.

In the last 6 months I bought a new rig. Reasonable price, and harkening back to my memories, I got an SB X-Fi XtremeGamer card. Not a large outlay (<€80). It no longer comes with a wodge of disks – it downloads software and updates from the internet.

The smallest update for this software seems to be 50MB. The sum total of the latest software update (to fix problems and to increase compatibility on Vista) is 235MB. I am 44MB into the update and I'm being told that there's another 2.5 hours to go. I'm not on a slow link either. It just seems to be on their side.

Just to put this into perspective - The download for my soundcard is about 1/2 the size of a reasonable Linux distro… and it's as slow as a wet weekend in June. By the time this update has downloaded I could have watched the entirety of the latest Harry Potter movie and still had time for a pint. It's damned slow.

This is a sound card. Not the World Management Software Suite®. The update for my graphics card was 90MB and that was Driver + Support Software + PhysX Drivers. And it downloaded in less than 10 minutes.

Now that I recall, all the problems I seemed to have on the older machine could always be traced to limitations or issues with my sound card. A driver that wasn't playing by the rules. Maybe it thought it was being edgy? I've seen too many BSODs to want edgy. I just want something that works…. and doesn't need a 250MB update (that's twice the size of OpenOffice)…

Oh, and Windows Live Writer — please convert euro, trademark and em-dash symbols before posting… we're not all using UCS-16 encoding here. Some of us actually try to use the web in a platform independent manner…

Nothing more than a rant....
It's not that tough - when using most english locales, we sort case insensitively. a==A, B==B and so on. Pragmatically, the only reason for picking a locale other than UTF-8.generic is because I would really, really like these rules obeyed.
I am sick to death of having to work around stupidity.
I'm just complaining as I look at the output from ls and it's pretty much a case sensitive sort. I'm sure that accents are sorted correctly in EN_ie - after all á is the same as a, but apparently it's different to A.
Sorting it difficult... the rules are so complicated... stop complaining! you're able to perform at least 600 million operations per second, and a table lookup for a case insensitive sort is probably going to cost 20.
Bear in mind that the number above was a quick back of the envelope number of an iPhone. I'm sure a real computer will be able to do something a little better...

Update:

Looks like it's not Linux, it's only Leopard that doesn't understand EN_ie collation. Oh well, that's life I suppose…

# send text messages
:0 W
* ^subject: IM:
| $HOME/bin/sendim

signal(int signum, void (*handler)(int))

signal

sigaction(int sig, const struct sigaction *restrict act, struct sigaction *restrict oact)

#!/bin/bash -p

if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
    echo "Usage: $(basename $0) " 1>&2
    exit 1
fi

while [ -d /proc/$1 ]; do sleep 0.5; done

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my $buffer;
my $nread;
$nread = sysread(STDIN, $buffer, 8192);
my $nchars = 0;
my $nbinchars = 0;

foreach (split(/ */, $buffer)) {
        my $value = ord;
        if ($value < 32 || $value >= 127) {
                $nbinchars++;
        } else {
                $nchars++;
        }
}

exit ($nbinchars * 2 > $nchars);

struct unrolled_listitem {
    int num_elements;
    struct unrolled_listitem *next;
    void *pointers[0];
}

Devil May Cry 4 also has a part where these evil naked snow chicks make out with each other and kiss each other all over. Okay, okay, that was kind of awesome. But I also sternly raised my eyebrows! I did!

You have: tempF(41)
You want: tempC
        5

#!/bin/bash -p

package=$1
destdir=${2:-/usr/local}
me=${0##*/}

[[ -z $package ]] && {
        echo "Usage: $me <package> [destination = /usr/local]"
        exit 2
}

cd $destdir/$package || {
        echo "$me: package $package does not seem to be installed"
        exit 1
}

# build the directory structure - this is a weakness
find . -type d | cpio -o | (cd $destdir; cpio -id)

find . -type f -exec $echo ln -s $destdir/$package/{} ../{} \;

05/05/2006  13:39    <DIR>          ACT Projects
05/05/2006  13:40    <DIR>          AdobeStockPhotos
24/11/2006  19:30    <DIR>          Bluetooth Exchange Folder
04/12/2006  22:29    <DIR>          Borland Studio Projects
23/08/2006  17:15    <DIR>          History
04/05/2006  14:02    <DIR>          InterVideo
06/12/2006  22:01    <DIR>          Java Development
12/10/2006  13:07    <DIR>          My Albums
05/05/2006  13:49    <DIR>          My Data Sources
01/11/2006  15:29    <DIR>          My Digital Editions
29/12/2006  03:06    <DIR>          My Downloads
05/08/2006  16:19    <DIR>          My DVDs
08/08/2006  18:26    <DIR>          My Games
05/05/2006  13:53    <DIR>          My MMS
25/12/2006  21:04    <DIR>          My Music
28/12/2006  11:42    <DIR>          My Pictures
11/05/2006  10:19    <DIR>          My Received Files
05/05/2006  13:53    <DIR>          My Shapes
05/05/2006  13:53    <DIR>          My Skype Content
11/05/2006  10:19    <DIR>          My Skype Pictures
27/12/2006  22:10    <DIR>          My Videos
07/12/2006  14:43    <DIR>          My Virtual Machines
21/12/2006  09:34    <DIR>          My Widgets
12/12/2006  10:11    <DIR>          Nero Recode
05/05/2006  13:53    <DIR>          NeroVision
27/11/2006  14:40    <DIR>          PSP Games
27/11/2006  14:56    <DIR>          PSP Sync
06/10/2006  17:18    <DIR>          Rogue Trooper
05/05/2006  18:23    <DIR>          SimCity 4
15/10/2006  23:57    <DIR>          Source Insight
05/10/2006  20:16    <DIR>          Tomb Raider - Legend
05/05/2006  13:59    <DIR>          TT Installer Logs
14/11/2006  12:14    <DIR>          Updater
05/05/2006  13:37    <DIR>          Visual FoxPro Projects
17/11/2006  22:39    <DIR>          Visual Studio 2005
25/09/2006  18:02    <DIR>          Visual Studio Projects

Ocks then detailed testing which showed this behaviour where a system thread — in this case one cleaning out blocks of disk cache memory — is running at the same time as worker threads. "With Intel HT technology, logical processors share L1 & L2 caches. As you would guess [this] behaviour can potentially trash L1 & L2 caches," he said.

aRstpuucpuucpur	db 90h			; DATA XREF: start+Ao start+101o ...
		db  98h	; 
		db  92h	; 
		db  8Fh	; 
		db  93h	; 
		db  93h	; 
		db  96h	; 
		db  8Fh	; 
		db  93h	; 
		db  93h	; 
		db  96h	; 
		db  8Fh	; 
		db  93h	; 
		db  90h	; 
		db  99h	; 
		db    0	;  

sub_0_40107E	proc near		; CODE XREF: start+Fp

arg_0		= dword	ptr  4

		mov	eax, [esp+arg_0]
		mov	ecx, eax
		mov	dl, [eax]

loc_0_401086:				; CODE XREF: sub_0_40107E+15j
		test	dl, dl
		jz	short locret_0_401095
		xor	dl, 0A1h
		mov	[ecx], dl
		mov	dl, [ecx+1]
		inc	ecx
		jmp	short loc_0_401086

Tracing route to 193.227.227.218 over a maximum of 30 hops

  1     1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  10.0.0.71 
  2    57 ms    21 ms    23 ms  b-ras1.lmk.limerick.eircom.net [159.134.155.24] 
  3    21 ms    22 ms    20 ms  ge15-2.corea.lmk.limerick.eircom.net [83.71.114.97] 
  4    36 ms    36 ms    35 ms  83.71.112.94 
  5    36 ms    40 ms    39 ms  london1-br2-fe0-0.rdsnet.ro [195.66.226.46] 
  6    54 ms    53 ms    52 ms  fra2-cr1-ge5-0.539.rdsnet.ro [62.231.127.89] 
  7     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  8    89 ms    90 ms    87 ms  constanta1-cr1-vlan25.rdsct.ro [212.93.137.51] 
  9    94 ms    88 ms    96 ms  constanta1-fo-vlan10.rdsct.ro [212.93.137.10] 
 10    89 ms   101 ms    90 ms  81.196.163.89 
 11    95 ms    95 ms   101 ms  cr1.micos.ro [193.227.226.254] 
 12    91 ms    96 ms    97 ms  193.227.227.218 

The short answer is never run code that you're uncertain of the origin of, and 2. never run code that you're uncertain of the origin of.

Quick XOR tutorial. Exclusive OR. Either A is true or B is true but not both. so 0 xor 0 = 0, 0 xor 1 = 1, 1 xor 0 = 1, 1 xor 1 = 0. Each hex digit is a run of 4 binary numbers. 0 = 0000, 9 = 1001, A = 1010, F = 1111.
90h xor 0A1h == 1001 0000 xor 1010 0001 = 0011 0001 = 31
Conveniently, 30h = '0', 39h = '9' and 2eh = '.', so it's easy to translate them.

*** ContextHandlers.pm  2005-09-20 22:34:21.000000000 +0100
--- /home/petesh/.backup/ContextHandlers.pm~    2005-09-20 22:32:47.000000000 +0100
***************
*** 2162,2171 ****
              my ($next_cnt, @next_grp) = $group_iter->();
            while ((($cnt, @grp) = ($next_cnt, @next_grp)) && defined($cnt)) {
                my($start, $end) = $sec_ts->($ctx, \@grp);
-               # Changed by Pete Shanahan - too many i++'s
                  $i++;
                  ($next_cnt, @next_grp) = $group_iter->();
!                 $last = 1 if $n && $i >= $n-1;
                  $last = 1 unless $next_cnt;
                local $ctx->{current_timestamp} = $start;
                local $ctx->{current_timestamp_end} = $end;
--- 2162,2170 ----
              my ($next_cnt, @next_grp) = $group_iter->();
            while ((($cnt, @grp) = ($next_cnt, @next_grp)) && defined($cnt)) {
                my($start, $end) = $sec_ts->($ctx, \@grp);
                  $i++;
                  ($next_cnt, @next_grp) = $group_iter->();
!                 $last = 1 if $n && $i++ >= $n-1;
                  $last = 1 unless $next_cnt;
                local $ctx->{current_timestamp} = $start;
                local $ctx->{current_timestamp_end} = $end;
***************
*** 2182,2188 ****
                    return $ctx->error( $builder->errstr );
                $res .= $out;
                  $first = 0;
!               last if $n && $i >= $n-1;
            }
        } else {
            my $iter = MT::Entry->load_iter({ blog_id => $blog->id,
--- 2181,2187 ----
                    return $ctx->error( $builder->errstr );
                $res .= $out;
                  $first = 0;
!               last if $n && $i++ >= $n-1;
            }
        } else {
            my $iter = MT::Entry->load_iter({ blog_id => $blog->id,