StvOR!

Quake4FrontPage - Quake IV GNU/Linux FAQ Enough said.

I don’t play much games on a computer nowday’s, and when i do i play them on ps2. I do hoever ocasionaly play UT, and Enemy Territory.

I also respect developers who support Linux platform, and buy their games, even though I’ll probably play it for only about a week and then put it on a shelf.

Haven’t read any review’s jet, but knowing past ID games, It probably rocks.

It’s old news that nessus is going cloesd source for two reasons

• Virtually nobody has ever contributed anything to improve the scanning _engine_ over the last 6 years. I’m not talking about shoe-horning DB support in nessusd, but really to contribute things which make the scans faster, or Nessus more powerful.

• A number of companies are _using_ the source code against us, by selling or renting appliances, thus exploiting a loophole in the GPL. So in that regard, we have been fueling our own competition and we want to put an end to that.

The nessus will (or so they say) continue to bee free as in “free beer”. I have somewhat mixed feelings about that. I can understand why they dont want to support opensource nessus, but i am afraid that more and more additions will not be free. Not to mention that its harder to trust closed source security tool. So I guess I am not the only one thinking that since, there are two (active) projects, GNessus and Porz-Wahen that will pick up the existing GPL code and develop it further. I am not sure, wheather authors, intend to join forces or not, or even if they are aware of eachother. Aditional takes on this:

• Fyodor of nmap fame
• Single-company free software
• Is Open Source Nessus Closing Its Source?
• Nessus security tool closes its source
• Nessus3 Will Not be Released Under the GPL
• Nessus creator challenging the community
• Nessus 3.0 to abandon GPL licensing

PS: There are some other projects, but it seems thees two are most pupular. (Segusius, gpl nessus plugins .)

Chris Prillo has some interesting ideas on how to stop spam on blogs.

I especially like:

Employ a blog spammer. Beat them shitless once they’ve been hired (hazing spammers isn’t illegal), but then employ them to help you figure out what all those asshats are doing. After they’ve told you the secrets, beat them shitless again.

< Joke > Can I just beat them ? I mean at least here (Slovenia) hiring a person is nontrivial bureaucratic task (hmm, can we beat bureaucrats as-well?) </Joke >

Problem is that the cat is now out of the bag. I mean look at email spam, its more or less nonissue anymore thanks to different spammfilters (SpammAssassin, Spambayes, etc), but looking through my mail logs, amount of spam hasnt droped, I just don’t see it anymore.

My guess is that tools for blocking spamm will get better on server and client(aggregators) side, search engines will get better at recognizing and defeating splogs, but their amount will not drop.

New desktop usability project springing up.

Beter desktop a Nowel sponsored usability testing site/blog. What is interesting are videos of people using desktop and linux apps. Tango project aim’s to provide comon icon theme for different desktops. Normaly I wouln’t care (there are some some shared themes allready) but this project seems to have support from some wery well known linux people.

I wonder why stop at icon theme and not support projects like qtgtk wich integrates parts of kde into gtk apps, or qtk-qtk themer, whitch makes gtk apps use kde themes.

Why not build single basic theme engine (or engince spec) for use by all desktop’s ? It worked for menus, taskbars and others.

google hits - Do it yourself trend analyser

google hits From the site: Track the amount of google search results for keywords you define.

This is a nifty python utility by Ricardo Niederberger Cabral that tracks number of hits (or estimated hits) google returns for your keywords.

It makes it easy to make trend analyses of keywords (tags) you are interested in.

It would be even better if we know how google estimates number of results since as Kevin Dangoor points out that doesn’t necessary show number of actually results.

It would be interesting to see weather we could plug in other search engines or blog searches.

Did riaa dig it’s own hole ? These article seem to indicate that.
Not that i trust Apple to be any batter than recording industry, if and when it will suit them

MobHappy: Tide Turning Against Copy Protection?

How The Recording Industry’s Obsession On DRM Made Apple So Powerful

The recording industry’s new clothes

Personaly i am not so sure about Aplle beeing big enough, it might have by far the biggest online market, but market itself still isn’t that big (or yes its big, but potential of growth is ewen bigger).

I guess we will have to wait and see.

Star Wreck: In the PirkinningWell its all over the internet allready, but i have point it out myself aswell.

One big congratulation to the team, I hope others geeks will follow now that we see that it can be done

I have been running my own linux email server for a couple of years now, but i am seriously thinking about switching to online email provider such as gmail.

Reasons why I have been running my own server till now was:

• Control: I can control everything, from spam blocking to number of aliases to web frontends or size of mailbox (only limited by hd space)
• Backup: I can be sure that none of my email gets lost by making regular backups. You would be surprised how many ISP’s that offer email in a package, don’t backup mail.
• Its on my own domain name. This has little practical use but it has some cool factor.
• IMAP, so your server does the hardwork, and you have all your mail accessible from multiple pc’s

Of course there are downsides like , hardware failures, making backups, verifying backups, keeping up with security alerts of server software you are running.

Setting up mail server and everything that goes whit it (postfix, cyrus, dns, firewalls, spammasassin, clamav), is not simple either, but then again it is very educational experience and something I don’t/didn’t mind doing.

I started thinking about switching after reading Jeremy Zawodny’s 30 day Gmail and Yahoo! chalange

Reason’s to switch:

• They offer enough storage space to last me a while (its not 160 gb though ;))
• Good searching, but i will miss grep
• tagging == better folders
• Decent spam control
• google itself proved to be reliable host, despite some problem recently
• Interface is finally responsive thanks to AJAX

Perhaps the most important thing is availability of broadband internet. If you see computer somewhere, there are good chances that its connected to the Internet. I can’t remember last place i couldn’t connect to the internet, but it was few years ago.

Important for me is that that there are libraries like libgmail , gmail.py and gmail file system whit which i can access my mail if i ever need to.

For starters i will switch my mailing list subscriptions and I will see how it goes from there.

Well i finaly have some free time, so i created this new blog. I do hope I will use it more often than the old one.

There are two reasons why i have started this blog

• I suck at writing:I hope that writing this blog will help me improve, so i can document my code better. Or maybe even write articles that people can understand. Hopefully
• Organizing contentI often stumble upons some interesting topic (like audi codecs etc.) and bookmark interesting links to read later. But problem is that now i have ower 4000 uncategorized bookmarks, that i know i will never go through.

So this is the first post, now its time to custumize this blog a bit.