June 2005 Archives

Greetings from Amazon.com.

Sincerely,
Amazon.com Customer Service
http://www.amazon.com/

Phishing? Not really, it's a genuine e-mail from Amazon that I've received, twice, during the past three days.

Having placed a pre-order for Dan Simmons' new book "Olympos", which has just been released on 28th, Amazon attempted to withdraw the amount from my card, which surprise, surprise, has just been rendered invalid by the country-wide transition to the heavy "leu" (aka "RON"). So no Dan Simmons for any of us, my friends.

Sure thing, the cards are expected to start working again on Monday, but by then, my order will be cancelled, meaning yet another unwanted delay in getting one of the most wanted books of the year.

PS: This post is written in Firefox, running on top of Windows - I'm starting to get annoyed by Linspire. More on that later.

This post is written in Firefox, running on top of Linspire 5.0. Thanks to my friend David Orban, I´ve got to install Linspire on my laptop and play a little bit with it (more on this later). That is the good news.

The bad news is that my newly purchased WD Scorpio 80GB laptop HDD is showing some worrying behavior.



What is not obvious from the screenshot above, is that the SMART attribute number 192 (or C0 if your prefer hex) is constantly decreasing. It has dropped about 50 units since I´ve installed the disk in my Thinkpad and it keeps doing that at a steady rate. If the trend continues, the Emergency Retract Cycle Count or the Power off Retract Count as other products call it, will reach 0 in about two weeks. Otherwise, the disk seems to be working just fine - I wonder if this is maybe the normal behavior?

The SMART parameter 192 is not very well documented. Moreover, it is only implemented by some disks manufacturers, for instance WD and Quantum. Basically, it´s a differential SMART parameter, showing the difference between normal and unexpected head retraction due to power off. Given the parameter is constantly decreasing, I take it the disk heads somehow presume the power is being cut off and they quickly run for the parking position during normal operation. One cause which comes to mind is the lack of a proper power output from the laptop. Which is not entirely impossible.

If this is really the case, then it´s obvious the little 80GB Scorpio 2.5¨ WD800VE HDD is incompatible with IBM Thinkpad T23. Yikes.

CAMBRIDGE, UK — 15 June 2005 — During its annual Open Day, Microsoft Research Cambridge today outlined the new premise for conducting personal computing research into the 21st century. During an opening address, Andrew Herbert, managing director at the lab described how the availability of faster, more powerful processors, makes obsolete much of the basis for 20th century software design.

http://research.microsoft.com/news/msrnews/21stcent.aspx

Poking a little bit into the page, we find:

<link type="text/css" rel="Stylesheet" href="/rmcstyle.css">
<link type="text/css" rel="Stylesheet" href="/groupStyle.css">
<title>XXX</title>

I've always knew it in my heart. The future of software research must be XXX - now it's confirmed.

When switching from one weblog software to another, notably from WordPress to MovableType, problems are inevitable. Besides the technical problems of exporting and importing content, which I've covered yesterday, there are at least two more problems: static URLs and RSS content.

Static URLs are links to posts from the old weblog. Because WordPress is no longer there, attempts to access pages such as this will result in a missing page error. There are way to fix this, but more about it later.

The other problem, which I will describe here is the RSS content. In the old WordPress config, XML was dynamically created by a script called "wp-rss2.php". Note the ".php" extension, meaning that was a PHP script which produced the XML content on the fly. MovableType, on the other hand, produces a static "index.rdf".

One of the most annoying things, when subscribing to the RSS feed of a weblog, is to suddenly stop working. Whatever the reason, be it an upgrade, software glitch or simply change of location, this is bothersome. So what to do in order to maintain RSS compatibility with all the subscriber base of the old weblog?

One simple solution, which I've quickly hacked for my case, is a PHP script which takes the MovableType "index.rdf" and serves it to the clients. Of course, the name of the script is the same as the WordPress RSS 2.0 genereator: "wp-rss2.php". Here's how it looks like:

wp-rss2.php:
<?

?>

This way, whenever some(thing/body) tries to fetch the old "wp-rss2.php" to get an XML version of the weblog, they'll get the right content, without too much hassle. Except in the beginning, when a couple of duplicate entries will appear the in RSS client, the transition will be sweet and smooth.

Apparently, there is a WordPress exploit at wild on the net. Some people have already started reporting missing databases and problems with their WP-weblogs. Coupled with the fact that you need a day to update a WordPress installation, I'm finally dropping it for good and moving on.

The replacement, as you may have noticed, is Movable Type. I've been playing with MT for about two months at www.fotomagazin.ro, and I like it. It's CGI, so no more unsafe PHP scripting inside, it is flexible and easy to maintain.

Moving from WordPress to MovableType is not straightforward - just search on Google for "moving from WordPress to MovableType". You'll get several hundred links, but on how to move from MovableType to WordPress.

The solution is a script which exports the WordPress database in a MT-readble format. Then, you can use MT's import function to populate the weblog. Apparently, this worked well, but please excuse any glitches during the transition period.

There are some things about MovableType which could be improved, such as the afore-mentioned import function. A links section would also be nice. However, these missing features are a small price you pay for peace of mind and better security.

Somebody has been trying to break into my Blogger account. No luck so far, but I've got three of these already:

This email is a response to your request for information about your Blogger account. To regain access to your account, please click on the following link:

The Blogger Team

Not sure why anybody would like to 0wn by Blogger account, because there is nothing in there. Really. Well, to be more precise - there "was" nothing there. Now there is. :)

A new version of VGrep, "050615grdo" is now available from Dmitry Gryaznov's website and of course, from the Virus Bulletin VGrep page . For those of you who do not know, VGrep is a wonderful tool for cross-referencing virus names. VGrep was originally created by Ian Whalley.

In the meantime, I've also received a confirmation from Jamie Zawinski regarding the secret from his web page. Apparently, my solution was right. :) More on this later.

An interesting story caught my attention earlier today. Apparently, some guy claims he found a hardware keylogger into his Dell laptop while opening the computer to replace a broken PCMCIA slot raiser on the motherboard.

As far as I can see, the story could be just an ellaborate hoax. Imagine the panic spreading between Dell owners and everybody starting to dismantle their laptops! Even if 99% of them don't find anything, it's enough even if there is just a single report confirming the find. I can already imagine the chaos. Or the speculations. And that 1% could even be the original author of the article, further contributing to the hoax.

Alternatively, Dell and DHS could really be up to something. Or, the poor guy is the victim of some form of espionage, by a suspicious wife or business competitor.

In all cases, one thing is for sure. I'm glad my laptop is a Thinkpad.

[update] Snopes is now listing the story about Dell keyloggers as a hoax, providing explanations on the origin of the various pictures and snapshots from the original story. Fair enough.

I you were wondering what "The best justice money can buy" means, here's a good practical example:

SANTA MARIA, California (CNN) -- A stoic Michael Jackson walked out of court acquitted by jurors who said they didn't have enough evidence to convict him of molestation charges that could have sent him to prison for years.

I've just returned from Portugal to find out that my friend Sorin Mustaca - Chief Software Architect at Avira Gmbh has just finished revamping his website. Between the newly added sections, he's now maintaining a blog. Cheers!

In the meantime, Kaspersky has released the first public pre-beta of KAV 6.0 and KIS (Kaspersky Internet Security) 6.0. Get them here and here. The beta is not yet linked from the corporate website nor has it been announced yet, so you have the chance to get it before the crowd rolls in.

Pictures from Portugal to be published (ahem) soon - two rolls will be ready Wednesday, the remaining ones on Saturday.

Finally, I've just created a Technorati profile. Thanks go to my good friend David Orban for mentioning this during one of our many conversations last week.