Sunday, December 28, 2008

Nicu Alifantis & Zan Concert



Alfantis is an unique blend of styles. Ranging from folk to pop-rock he has been always exploring new sounds. The verses of its music are often based on the work of Romanian and foreign poets, Alifantis beeing able to create vivid melodies that give new lights to the verses. Maybe one of the most known albums of Alifantis is - Nichita - a tribute to the Romanian poet Nichita Stanescu.
With a band of excelent players Virgil Ionescu, Relu Bitulescu, Sorin Voinea and Razvan Mirica (that was excellent tonight) they made a very enjoyable show.

It is interesting to mention that in public was another singer - Ducu Berczi.

Leapsa

Am primit o leapsa de la Adina:

"Ce tehnologie/concept/element/invenţie science fiction ai vrea să vezi prinzând viaţă?"

Adina a raspuns cu replicatorul din StarTrek. Probabil cea mai buna chestie posibila.
Am stat si am rememorat tot SF-ul citit si vazut de mine. Sunt multe chestii care mi-ar placea sa le vad realizate. De la chestii marunte si foarte marunte pana la unele de dimensiuni planetare.
In final m-am hotarat. As vrea sa vad un motor hyperluminic. Un 'warp drive'. Cred ca motorul hyperluminic e sansa noastra de a exista pe viitor ca civilizatie. Motorul hyperluminic ne-ar permite sa evadam dintr-o lume secatuita de resurse si sa ne extindem spre noi planete.

Sorin, Dorutu? Interesati?

Sunday, December 21, 2008

Sun presented the reference design for T2 workstations

The reference design datasheet was published those days.
In fact the design seems to me more like as a server not as a workstation (there are many redundant interfaces). I think that some things can be trimmed down or replaced with cheaper alternatives.
I think that my idea of a open workstation is going to happen.

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Endless meetings

I totally agree on:



In the last year I counted about 680 hours of meetings.
No major breakthrough whatsoever.
No finalized project this year - so mostly no satisfaction.

Sunday, December 14, 2008

One hit wonders

From '94 to '98 i was a MTV fan. Two samples from that period:





After 98 - MP3 changed the way I had access to music.

Geek stuff:
1. First MP3 player - Fraunhoffer's WinPlay
2. My first MP3 song - Prodigy - Out of Space
3. First Linux MP3 player - Tomislav Uzelac's - amp (the engine was used in Justin Frankel's successful Winamp)
4. My player of choice for that period - CubicPlayer
5. What changed for me - gradually dropped the MOD players

Thursday, December 11, 2008

Grumpy Swing days

Swing is nice. Swing is well designed and natural.
Other components are not!
I am fighting with some native browser code. I have to embed a web browser into a Swing application. I have tried jdic and DJ Native Swing. They work quite well in standalone apps. but, as there is always a but, my application is JNLP launched and the display is on a JInternalFrame. The first issue is solvable. The second - not so easily as JInternalFrame seems not to behave with heavyweight components.
The only solution is to use a full blown swing HTML renderer(maybe lobo)

Back to work!

Monday, December 8, 2008

Crisis arrives in Romania



The trend is clearly descending.
Hard days for outsourcing companies in Romania. No more new jobs is the result of no more new projects.
Still all the supermarkets are full in spite of all the alarming signs.

Sunday, December 7, 2008

Ubuntu polishing




I succeeded to install the bluetooth on Ubuntu.
For my Toshiba Satellite Pro U400-13k it is quite simple. I had to download the alternate modules from http://sourceforge.net/projects/omnibook/ compile the module and install it. A secondary

depmod -a
modprobe omnibook ectype=14

was needed. After this the bluetooth was accesible.

I have also installed Google Gadgets for Linux. The process is the classic configure, make, make install. They are nice, 'mac'-ish and and quite unuseful. But they seem to work better than the default Gnome screenlets.

On the other hand I wasted some time today with ANTLR.

Toplink vs. Hibernate

I have a dilemma. After a little work with both tools I am still in doubt which one suits the best my needs.
I have the following constraints:
1. DB Independent - both meet it
2. Easy persistence tools - both meet it
3. Fast operations - hard to decide - TopLink seems to perform slower on INSERTs than Hibernate. I couldn't find any reliable comparison.

In the meanwhile I am also looking for DB4O as a possible alternative. I am still reluctant to use DB4O as it has been sold to Versant that was producing quite a crappy and expensive tool that I had to use and I think that they will do the same with DB4O.

Answer to Zeitgeist

In my internet wonderings I found maybe the most sincere and profound answer to the Zeitgeist movie.
It was simply the Credo.

This discovery reminded me of the baptism of Nicolae Steinhardt in Jilava prison and made me think about the Credo and it's message.

OpenSolaris 2008.11

http://webcast-west.sun.com/interactive/09B12437/index.html

OpenSolaris is a very interesting cocktail. It is really a Solaris kernel with all the good things it brings (ZFS, FSS, LDOM/Zones) mixed with Gnome 2.24 and lots of GNU tools (replacing the awkward Sun counterparts).
I really wish that OpenSolaris will gain momentum and raise up from a niche player to a respected alternative in the operating systems world. It offers by far more features than OS-X, Linux and Windows. It still misses the stylish Mac interface. This is too bad because lacking a unique visual style it will be always associated with Linux flavours (it was the case in the '90 when Sun was pushing CDE. In that time the look of sun was sleek and minimalist and I really loved it).

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

South African Taste

1. Bushman's Peri-Peri sauce - heat index 10 - OK.
2. Bushman's Revenge - heat index 15 - barely suportable.
3. Bushman's Dynamite - heat index 21 - I do not dare to taste it.

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Internet Banking



What to do when you are in a hurry an you do not want to sty in a line in a overcrowded branch at your bank. The reasonable olution seems to be internet banking.
WRONG!
I had the missfortune to work with BRD Societe Generale.
I made the payments yesterday at 19:00 and even in this very moment the transactions were not yet processed. It is already more tha 12 hours for my money to leave the bank. It will take maybe another 12 up to 24 to get to the destination. This is outrageous.
This is even slower than waiting 30 minutes in the branch and passing the paper to the clerk.
But I have to admit that I am stupid working with BRD. I have had already bad experiences with them. long lines in branches, idiotic credit officers and clerks(last year they refused to replace my expired card), pushing products (they send me a VIVERE card without asking for it), hidden fees.
By the way - re internet banking is crappy - you have to call the bank's hotline in order to add partner accounts. The set of operations is limited and the security is a joke - 8 digits username and 6 digits password - bruteforce will do it quite fast
I would drop them gladly if I could find a reasonable other bank.

Sunday, November 23, 2008

How I recovered the lost root password on a WD MyBook WE


I forgot the root password on my MybookWE.
After I tried several passwords on the root account I gave up and tried to figure up a hack.
The quick and dirty sollution was a modification of Martin Hinner's SSH hack.
The idea is that I would trick the MyBook to believe that there is a new firmware and send it an upgrade script that will just reset the root password. I have removed all other things from the original hack and 'ported' it to a Tomcat server as I do not have PHP installed on my computers home.
If you need the WAR archive you can takeit from: here.
DISCLAIMER: Use it on your own risk. For me it worked.

Saturday, November 22, 2008

The BigBang Theory




After seeing "Two and a half Men" I found this funny serial - another Chuck Lorre's production - about some physics geeks. I have recognized myself in some of them several times.

Hogfather



In the same line as "The Colour of Magic". Excellent cast and book has been followed as close as possible.

Color of Magic


Funny but the book was funnier. Excellent cast though! It has been a nice weekend movie.
Regarding Pratchett's work - I have read some of them and played some of the Disc World series games - my favorite was Disc World Noir. In my oppinion the movie is quite close to the book. The special effects were quite ok although some digital artifacts were visible.

Friday, November 21, 2008

New computer


Yes. I bought it just before going to Poland. The old FSC V2020 (pilgrim) is mostly unusable because one of the hinges is broken. It seems to be a common flaw for all FSCs.

I acted in a rush and I have started a quick selection for a replacement. The candidates were:
1. Lenovo SL300

2. Lenovo T400

3. Toshiba U400-13k

4. Dell Vostro 1310

The criteria I have chosen were:
1. Size - ideally 13.3" but 14.1" ok
2. Weight - maximum 2.2 kg
3. Performance - the best possible processor (2GHz or better) and a fair amount of memory(over 2 GB)
4. Features (webcam, card reader, modem, PCMCIA, eSATA, fingerprint reader, etc.)
5. Warranty - 2 years at least. Last one had one year but resisted for four.
6. Look - moder but not bling-bling.

As I am not a big fan of games an onboard video was enough in all cases.
Although I like Lenovo, I have chosen Toshiba because was the one that scored highest in all the
criteria. For sure there were also some other candidates as MacBook and Dell XPS that were very appealing. The idea was to keep the budget in a reasonably range. Mr. Kadas told me once that the technology would already surpass you in the very moment you have payed for it. Therefore Why invest in such a perishable thing as technology? I would have really liked an Apple for the fact that they are doing great hardware but I will wait for the new shiny aluminum cased mac - maybe somewhere next year. IBM are renown for their quality finish and good magnesium cases and hinges but it seems that the newer T and SE series are really just plastic.

The fun came when I tried to install Ubuntu 8.10. The installation went okay - the guts from Canonical really improved the installer a lot.
Still I had problems with the Intel 5100ABGN wireless card. I have solved them by installing compat-wireless package.

I will start loading the new toy (its name is marauder) with all the things I have been using on the other (eclipse, Geronimo, Glassfish, Yate, Asterisk) and lots of others as I am very anxious to see how are they behaving on a 64bits system.

Sunday, November 16, 2008

On Vodafone again

Compare those two 3G coverage maps:

http://www.vodafone.ro/acoperire/acoperire-internet-si-date/

and

http://www.orange.ro/coverage-new-ro.html

Orange has at least triple 3G coverage and prices in the same range as Vodafone.
I really do not know why I am such a loyal customer to them as they offer me almost no advantage for the quite expensive subscription I have. I guess hat their strategy is to attract new customers on 1 year subscriptions instead of taking real care of the loyal ones. As I said in a previous post 80% of income is done by 20% of the customers. I wish that Vodafone will not stay only with the 80% of the customers for their own sake.

Kia Rio


I have been driving a Kia Rio 1.5L CRTD and I must say WOW. I had a good time while driving this 109hp car. I was not quite used to drive diesels (although I have driven some including Renault Laguna, Fiat Grande Punto, Opel Corsa, ...) but this one felt the most close to the gasoline engines as the acceleration was going linear. The acceleration curve is quite problematic for me as I had some hard times with a Corsa that had some power kick-ups. I really prefer gasoline for the moment.
I was impressed by the agility of the engine and by the very nice and precise gearbox.
Still the interior finish and the ergonomics can be improved. One more issue I had was the heating. It is very slow and it was an issue here in Poland as there were -2 degrees.
I will consider Kia as a valid option from now on (maybe a c'eed)

Saturday, November 15, 2008

Vodafone

I was contacted yesterday by a Vodafone telesales guy.
It came to me with an offer that he considered to be 'irresistible'.
He basically was offering me 1 GB of traffic at 9 EUR or 8 GB at 27 EUR (VAT not included).
I told him to get lost. That was incredibly expensive for a service that:
- was available maybe in 10% of Romania
- the bandwidth of the HSDPA would decrease to 128 kbps after the included traffic
- the roaming with it was HUGELY expensive.

Today I am in Poland and I am using a local SIM - even this way I have better data rates that I would have with Vodafone home.

Wake up folks! It is a crisis ongoing - drop the prices if you still want customers!

Friday, November 14, 2008

Sun...



Sun is cutting 6000 jobs.
I am sad. Sun was one of those companies t that I looked with tremendous respect.
I heard that piece of news just after I was informed of Solaris 10/08.
Maybe some of world finest engineers are at Sun.
I wish that more light would shine on them.

Job offer




I have received today an email with a job offer.
I was quite amazed as it came from a company I'd like to work for.
The surprise came when I learnt about the position.
No need to get into details - I was, without false modesty, OVERQUALIFIED.
The idea is that their HR selected my resume based on some keywords.
The keywords matched and the recruiter blindly sent the email without even bothering to read the CV.
I guess that all companies have at least dumb HR.
Catbert character is too fictional - as it is too smart for HR.

Monday, October 20, 2008

Ouroborus



Trade depends on money that depends on trade that depends on money...
It is an infinite loop on that nothing is certain and there are no fixed values.
Neither the value of money nor the stocks are measured on a fixed scale but relative to artificial metrics. Therefore is easy to manipulate the metrics and this is why the actual crash happened.

I really think that the first step towards a serious economy would be the stabilization of money. I mean that the Bretton Woods treaty should be revised in the actual context of the economy. If the money is stable over long periods of time then the fluctuations of stock exchange indexes would be based on a more realistic metrics.

I do not know how to revise the treaty - but at least it should be somehow modified in order to add some referential for money exchange - that would reduce the panic on markets during recession periods. It would also help various economies to keep their position in situations of crisis, and give to the government a clear picture about national reserves and the real depreciation of money.

Friday, October 17, 2008

The end of bandwidth

I have seen an announcement from Joost that made me think.
Joost is a P2P television system (as Azureus Vuze and others) created by the same guys that built Skype and Kazaa.
The newst trick is that they dropped(?) their desktop client and created an online one (probably an ActionScript BitTorrent client) that can be used on virtually any PC with 0 installation effort.
In this case many more computers will use Joost overloading any kind of available bandwidth.
After the financial crisis there will be a bandwidth one :)

Monday, October 13, 2008

Images of Romania

Romania is seen abroad as a paradox country.
There are no gray shades but black and white (with larger black stripes).

We are known for our appetite for theft and sometime murder (see the cases in Italy and other countries in EU), for all the corruption on the country, for being dirty and lazy, for the high number of gypsies, bad roads, fierce maladies (Depardieu case), prostitutes.

Still there are some Places and people that might wash away partially the bad image we have.
As Anthony Bourdain noticed in his show "No Reservation" there are some unpolluted areas where people still live by the ancient traditions.

Why this big difference? One explanation was given by Dan Puric - a very gifted actor and lately one of the voices that are alerting us about our decline as a people - he explained that the communism in Romania produced an artificial selection in the fifties. The communists have eradicated most of the intellectuals of the epoch either by imprisoning them or sending them directly to death. They killed priests, officers, doctors, teachers... and replaced them with mediocrities that were governed only by fear, treason and servility. This new "elite" generated the actual monstrous society, the remains of this would be carried on for at list a half of century.

The simple men - the uncorrupted ones that somehow survived - are hardly visible. For them living in Romania is still a continuous struggle. After the losses they had during the communist era when they were expropriated and humiliated for their dignity, in those days they have been again transformed in victims as there is no clear action plan from the government to propose a long term development plan - therefore they have no certitude that their work would ever matter.
Having no certitudes they started to loose their motivation, sell the land and then leave or die... An along with them die the traditions and the rest of our individuality as a people.

Another one who pointed out the slow death of the Romanian culture is Grigore Lese. He has recently gave an interview for Radio Romania Cultural in that he described the alienation of our cultural heritage, the death of traditional music and the contamination of Romanian folklore.
He pointed out that the avalanche of "manele" music that were replacing the traditional songs is due also to the fact that the Romanians were alienated during the last 50 years.

Those two men - Grigore Lese and Dan Puric - although different in their speech are fighting for a common cause - the national cause of Romania. They are trying to create a dissociated image of what real Romanians are and how they live from the amorphous crowd of burglars and crooks that are making the nation ashamed.

Thursday, October 9, 2008

GWT in enterprise




I have been working lately into integrating GWT in our products.
The rationale behind this is that GWT is offering me the same work style on web applications as Swing for rich clients and it cleanly separates the views from the actual processing tasks using JSON RPC. I have considered also Tapestry, Wicket and JSF for the same task - but all those frameworks - although sound and very mature were forcing me to use a Java server side framework.
In my case this was sometimes a little bit of overhead. GWT on the other hand is very server agnostic and I have successfuly integrated it both with Java servers side as well as with Python/modPython. I know that JSF has more features when it comes to be compared side by side with GWT, but the latter one scores better in terms of application responsiveness and it is starting toa have a complete ecosystem around it (gwt-ext for example).

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Linked into http: http://maramureseni.ro/

I found that somebody in Maramures - Cristian China-Birta - is reading my worthless blog and linked it into a group.

Thank you, distant friend!

Is there any realation between LHC and the finaces crash?

Probably not...

Saturday, October 4, 2008

Interesting suprise

http://www.cwu.edu/~andonie/

When I have been in highschool I have received his book from my former Romanian teacher - Maria Muresan - who still believes that I would have been a better teacher than an enginer and si might be probably right.

It was an wonderful book as it presented a new approach on the aklgorithms and data structures. The book was the first one that presented STL. I In that era it was trendy for us the teenagers to implement our own data structures and to be proud that they work flawlessly. It was the trend imposed by the so called "Olyimpiads". This book was a radical shift for me. All the data structures were already implemented. No need to reinvent the wheel again - but the only thing a programmer should do was to concentrate on the real problems.



I stumbled upon this page today while browsing the internet searching for "Dynamic Programming" resources. I recommend it to all Romanian readers. It is a shame that this book was never reprinted and that is not really known to many readers. The content is available online at author's page. Happy reading.

Friday, October 3, 2008

Is Romania going down?

My personal opinion is yes.
I have reached those arguments after some long deliberation

1. The country seems not able to absorb structural founds from UE. Therefore no major investments can be done there.
Causes: Extreme fiscality, bureaucracy and CORRUPTION.
Consequences: No room for growth - therefore no real life standard increase.

2. No viable internal economy. Most of the goods are imported.
Causes: Ill fated privatizations and headless
Consequences: Unstable national money and growing inflation.

3. No longer viable education system.
Causes: Lack of money in education made the young capable people to avoid education.
Consequences: Mediocre generations to come

4. Massive emigration
Causes: Low life standard
Consequences: No more internal workforce for undertaking businesses

5. 4 milions active people vs. 6 milions retired. Apart from the army, justice, health, education and other kind of clerks.
Causes: all above are viable
Consequences: The state has to direct the funds that could support economic growth into social security.

All this sumber facts were triggered by the fact that the actual government decided to increase the teachers' wages with 50%. From where do this money come? I am not against it - it is mandatory to have good education in a country in order to be competitive, but Romania has really no financial resources to do it? I really guess that this is a pure electoral maneuver. The result of this BAD decision is a depreciation of RON with a couple of percent.
On long term it will generate inflation. I do not really believe that this depreciation will increase the exports because basically Romania sells nothing but workforce abroad. Romania is a country for lohn and outsourcing, there are almost no national brands and the existing are not well perceived.

The National Bank is already incapable to stop the inflation - thy have imposed stricter credit policies - but they are not synergistic with the demagogic governments.

I might be wrong, please contradict me, but I thing thar Romania will be in a crisis in no more than two years from now on. This is my most optimistic estimation. All those can happen sooner because of the global economic instability.

Saturday, September 27, 2008

MyBook World edition


It was a bad idea. I needed it for home storage - I was sick and tired of the tons of DVDs that I wrote with backups of the documents, DVDs that I have never been able to find afterwards without a massive deejay work. So I said "What the heck, it is cheap, it is roomy - I'll have it".
As I said - bad idea. I discovered soon that it works extremely low (a maximum of 2 MBps in my wireless lan), it gets extremely hot and in that point it hangs up (temperature was sometimes over 70 degrrees C).
I am not complaining about RAID or SNMP - I wanted something cheap - but still...
I wanted to expose some data through an ftp - for my family - but for this I had to hack the box. I followed the tutorial - so I had SSH access to the box, I installed Optware and VSFTPD. But the systems was already overloaded. So I had a look on the installed distribution. It was the ugliest ever. No package management system (Optware was installed by me), the init scripts are chaotic, the software is unbalanced (Samba 3 on 32 megabytes? and busybox).
Finally I have bricked it up with some experiments I made.
It took me about one week to recover.
The only good point in all this is that I have learnt a lot about buildroot and embedded development. I was forced to as I wanted to debrick it. So I have learnt how wonderful JeOS and RPath are. I will dream a long time to something as freeNAS for WD or why not a clean port of OpenWRT on myBook.
As for the time being I will deposit the myBook somewhere and gradualy search for a more reliable
solution.

Patience

I had reached the conclusion that the most important quality in a software developer is patience.
It does not matter that you are smarter than other - Software is for smart masses - but to make a difference patience is what it counts.
It takes sometimes an eternity to trace bugs, to assemble software, to get rid of nasty compiler tricks... An I have seen that there are quite a few people (I am not included) that are patient enough to resist this.

Because of those we have working software.

Sunday, September 21, 2008

Loosing friends


Is hard to loose friends. Especially if you know them for long.
But sometimes this is the only way to go forward.
I is not like dropping some excess luggage but like cutting your own roots.
And it truly hurts.
I am in a continuous friend loosing spree. I have tried a lot to keep friendship ongoing but it came a moment then there I could do no more. The glass was full. And then, as I usually do, after a lot of inner struggle I cut all the possible links with them.
I am sometimes wondering... Were they really my friends? Or it was me the excess luggage they dropped?
I am really afraid to count... They might disappear also.

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Girl Power Year

Kate Nash


Amy McDonald


Duffy


Gabriella Cilmi


Kathy Perry


I am surprised of this abbundanceof very young singers.
Inspite their age the sound is nice and well arranged.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

A well deserved hollyday

After almost three years without vacation I finally went in hollydays in Montenegro.

From 2008 August - Muntenegru


From 2008 August - Muntenegru


From 2008 August - Muntenegru

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

The Eternal and Fascinating Romania

Facts:

1. Innundations in Romania - hundreds of villages under water. The government offers a minimum 300 RON(80 EUR) compensations for victims (in case that nobody died in the family).

From 2008 Iulie - Inundatii


From 2008 Iulie - Inundatii


From 2008 Iulie - Inundatii


2. Sighetu Marmatiei is out of water. There will be no water in the town's pipes for at least three weeks because the pumps were destroyed by the floods. This means that 30000 people will not have the slightest hygene conditions in their homes.
The fact that the pumps were in danger was known since 2001 but nobody bothered todo any preventive action.

3. There are institutions in Romania that are taking money for nothing. I had to play 87 RON() for the so called identification of a car. This means that they have just to see that the car I shown them is the one from papers. They took my money and postponed me for another 24 hours as they were beeing busy.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Huawei



I started to admire Huawei.

Because they start to have real products taht can fulfill even very exigent needs. Mine in this case. I have recently bought an Huawei E220 HSDPA modem for my roamings. I was skeptical fisrt as this Chinese manufacturer was not among my favourites. Soon I realized that I was very wrong. It is a perfect geek toy.

First - it is open: It is very easy to use both from windows and from Linux (I haven't tried yet on my Solaris box but I Think that it works)

Second - it has some style: It really looks good.

Third - it is useful. I was always angry on the costs of the hotel's WiFi. With this small device I was able to have decent speeds at lower costs than with 802.11b that the hotel was offering.

It did not work in Romania because it was SIM locked for A1. I solved it using the KulaKendi unlocker.
Now it works even in Romania with 7.2Mbps and this is great.



I think they are heading to build some nice products as Linksys did with their OpenSource rourters (e.g. WRT54GL) that are addressing also the hobbyists and for end users.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Daily Judas...

I feel that we are like Judas every day...
We lie with no remorse then we kiss with no resentment or shame.
We are beings born for treason.

Facts:
Bishops betray their fate.

Politicians betray their parties.

Statesmen betray their people.

Monday, March 10, 2008

Fuel for imagination

I have stumbled upon "Atomic Playboy" tune from Second Reality demo.
Suddenly lots of memories came back to my mind about the golden ages when I was trying to imitate the creations of the demogroups. Together with Vale, Raul, Adi and the younger Radu wwe were able to do almost all the magic from the demos. I have learnt assembly language, tricks to use it in 32bits mode (db 66), flat real memory and protected mode. The machine used was a 386sx with two megabytes of RAM and no SB. I have tried to emulate the SB using the PC speaker but the result were mediocre and full of clicks clacks.
In the meantime I got fascinated by the Dune II game and I started to write a game in Pascal and Assembler that I have proudly called "Mud Wars". Never finished. No sound, idiotic AI, barbare graphics...
Then a couple of months later I have bought my first PC and I bought also a ISA soundcard with Analog Devices chipset (although I wished for SB Vivra 16 or Gravis Ultrasound).
I was amazed then by the sound richness of tracked music...
Since then... No more multimedia programming - but I really wish I will have the time to do it again.
I still want to thank to those that fueled my imagination and made me learn more about computers:
Future Crew, Valhalla, Black Lotus and all other demo scene groups.

Tripwire and FAM

I have deeply dig into the corners of my memory and I remembered my good ol' daze at Raiffeisen when I used to monitor fs changes with Tripwire (an open source product in that period).
I was quite happy with what I obtained from Tripwire, but in time I moved to another company, another Linux distro and therefore I started to use FAM.
It came to my mind that those tools might be well used to implement the file audit fuzz for Annlab.
Maybe somebody out there (you know who) will hear me...

Check those:
Tripwire for Solaris
Fam@SGI

Monday, March 3, 2008

Facts

I had sometimes to do things that I am not proud of.
I do not look for justifications or excuses. They were bad although meant for a greater good.
Still doing them do not make me nobler of absolve me of the responsibility.

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Rsync instead of AnnLab :)

BT? Proximus? Verizon?

Check this out:

On all client machines put this in crontab


rsync -arvv --delete psmf::sounds .


On the PSMF machine put this into /etc/rsyncd.conf


uid=linus
gid=in
pid file=/tmp/rsync.pid

[sounds]
comment=SRP Vocal Announcements
path=/media/foobar



Therefore Samuel - I was right again... As I said in my previous posts - there is no need to reinvent the wheel. It works BETTER than AnnLab.
If you've listened to me you wouldn't be in the shit you're in now.

Saturday, February 9, 2008

Sexy babes

Cocktail (Cisco switches, HP DL380G4, Sun Fire T2000, Sun Fire V240)


The classy ones(Sun fire V240)


The old school (Netra 1125)


The new generation (Netra T2000):

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Cross compiling

After a couple of days of hard work I was able to build one cross compiler hosted on i686 Linux and targetted for Sparc Solaris.
Although it was quite straightforward in principle it required some Solaris packages to be unpacked in order to obtain all the headers and libraries I needed for compilation

The packages I used were SUNWhea, SUNWlibC, SUNWlibm.
I needed also the PThread library in order to build libgomp.
In order to get their content unpack the none.bz2 from each one with the command
$ bzcat none.bz2  cpio -C 512 -idu

I have then downloaded gcc-4.2.2 and binutils-2.17.
In order to build it I have used this script:

#!/bin/bash

export TARGET=sparc-sun-solaris2.10
export BUILD=x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu

export PREFIX=`pwd`/$TARGET
export SRC=`pwd`/src
export BINUTILS=binutils-2.17
export GCC=gcc-4.2.0

export PATH=$PREFIX/bin:$PATH

INCLUDE=`pwd`/src/$TARGET/include
LIBS=`pwd`/src/$TARGET/lib

init ()
{
mkdir -p $PREFIX
mkdir -p build
}

binutils ()
{
mkdir build/$BINUTILS
cd build/$BINUTILS
$SRC/$BINUTILS/configure \
--prefix=$PREFIX \
--target=$TARGET \
--with-gnu-as \
--with-gnu-ld \
--disable-nls \
--with-headers=$INCLUDE \
--with-libs=$LIBS
make all install
cd ..
}

gcc ()
{
#export CC=$TARGET-gcc
#export PATH=$PREFIX/$TARGET/bin:$PATH
#export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$PREFIX/$TARGET/lib
mkdir build/$GCC
cd build/$GCC
$SRC/$GCC/configure \
--prefix=$PREFIX \
--target=$TARGET \
--enable-languages=c,c++ \
--disable-nls \
--with-gnu-as \
--with-gnu-ld \
--with-headers=$INCLUDE \
--with-libs=$LIBS
make all install
cd ..
}

init
binutils
gcc

Afterwards I was able to compile a simple hello world with the newly generated compiler. It felt good... Mission accomplished...

Still I am not quite okay with the size of the includes and libraries used - I had to do some tricks in order to build them. The cleanest solution would be to install a fresh system and take the files directly from there.