<$BlogRSDURL$>

Random notes from yet another Finnish nerd. This blog reflects mostly my life with computers and stuff, rather than my real life.

May 29, 2004

Did a bit of Perl hacking today. Encrypting/decrypting a file with Blowfish cipher goes like this:

use Crypt::CBC;
use Crypt::Blowfish;
open(IN, "secret.txt") or die "Unable to open for reading, $!\n";
open(OUT, ">message.txt") or die "Unable to open for writing, $!\n";
binmode IN; # for win32
binmode OUT;
my $cipher = Crypt::CBC->new($key, 'Blowfish');
$cipher->start('decrypting');
my $buff;
while (read(IN, $buff, 1024)) {
my $block = $cipher->crypt($buff);
print OUT $block;
}
close IN;
close OUT;
$cipher->finish();

May 25, 2004

gtk2-perl for win32


Decided to try gtk2-perl on win32 today. There were some rough edges but it went something like this:



Blogger software on Slashdot


There was another story on on MovableType 3 licensing changes. Seems like a lot of the open source folk are gonna move on to open source blogger software, such as WordPress, Blosxom, Drupal and LiveJournal.

May 18, 2004

Today I checked GhostScript out of CVS and compiled from source on win32, using Visual Studio .Net 2003. It went like this:

May 14, 2004

In seek of the ultimate archiving system for my digital photos I went through a bunch of image viewer/archiving software.
Many of these applications provided support for email and online printing / album hosting services, such as ShutterFly. While I don't find these features interesting, they might be of great value for some users.

May 13, 2004

Did some more fooling around with Suse 9.1 and my K7N420 nforce based mother board. The network interface aws automagically detected and configured using the forcedeth driver. However, there was no way I could make the onboard sound work with ALSA drivers (snd_intel8x0). NForce audio was properly detected, modules loaded and mixer set up, but there was simply no sound from the speakers (and no, the mixer wasn't muted). This seems to be a known problem with Suse 9.1.

May 10, 2004

Today I dowloaded and tried Suse 9.1 Live CD. Some highlights of its contents are kernel 2.6.4, KDE 3.2.1, OpenOffice.org 1.1.1, Gimp 2.0, Java 1.4.2_03, Acrobat Reader 5.0, xmms, Kaffeine (Xine based player). All and all, it really feels the most polished and consistent KDE Linux setup I've tied (at least when comparing to Knoppix 3.4).

When testing on VMWAre 4.5, the system hung during boot (something PCMCIA related) unless I selected verbose mode from the boot options. Go figure....

May 06, 2004

I just went through configuring Mozilla on Debian to use MS Arial Unicode (included in e.g. Office) as font for UTF-8 encoded web pages. What I did was something like this:
Today I did a bit of browsing for desktop blog clients and ended up trying w.bloggar. It's win32 freeware and seems quite sweet so far.

May 01, 2004

After reading an article on mobile phone blogging I finally decided to roll my own blog. Expect to find more or less useless thoughts on computers, photography etc. here.

Microsoft Dev Days took place last thursday. The emphasis was on programming secure code. Some hands-on examples were actually quite good stuff. The coverage however could've been more thorough. Examples included standard exploits such as SQL injection (e.g. text ''; drop table address --' typed into a web app's search input field) and cross site scripting (e.g. text <script>location.href='spammer.com'</script> typed when creating a new record in some web app. This gets run by some one else's browser unless the output was properly HTML encoded).

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?