Das Buch Wer mitmacht, hat Recht!

Just don’t ever do anything from that list.

Happy New Year from nrrd.de!

The nrrd.de core team (housetier and hadez) has met in Berlin for the 25th annual chaos communication congress.

We’ve been planning on re-orienting and re-launching nrrd.de and affiliated sites for well over a year now and finally managed to allocate some time to work on this together.

Here’s a small glimpse into the future of nrrd.de:

• ‘das buch’ will be separated a bit better from the blog content
• nrrd.de will be re-purposed for blogging
• we’ll launch the nrrd affiliates network
• new design

We’re still looking for contributors!
If you think you can contribute content to our -isms (tech-ism, urban-ism, style-ism, social-ism) you’re more than welcome to help.
If you have no clue what what the -isms are, just wait for one of the next blog posts to explain it in more detail.

More information will be posted here as it becomes available.

We can be reached on irc on irc.paranode.net #breaks or mail to housetier@nrrd.de and/or hadez@nrrd.de.

I just stumbled across an awful article about weaknesses in the Gnu/Linux operating system. It doesn’t start off that bad:

Since Microsoft has a huge chunk of the operating system’s market in the world, it is the first victim of hackers.

The above statement is not entirely wrong, it merely leaves things out. But then it tells a big fat ugly LIE:

...the Linux Operating System doesn’t receive the same level of support as Windows does. That means that updates and security packages are released with each new version of the Operating System (OS), but not as periodic updates…

I mean, while I was reading that concoction my Gnu/Linux operating system informed me of updates I should install. I did not have to wait for PDAY nor check a newsletter or website.

Too bad I can’t call upon the author, because there is none given. The website is dubious at best: spelling mistakes in the footer of the pages, no real names given anywhere, and after a few clicks the site broke for me and displayed only half a page…

Now, I am not disputing the fact about vulnerabilities in Linux, am disputing all allegations in that article because it does not cite one single source! There are no references IN the article – that’s not how you properly write about what you might perceive as facts. That’s how you try to get away with the shitting bull hoping nobody will smell the dung pile.

Oh well,

after wasting several of hours, I finally found out whats wrong with my ‘code’.
Here in the office I am forced to use Notepad++, which is writing UTF-8
encoded files by default WITH a so-called BOM.

Therefore sometimes the line `I haven’t changed anything` is correct, because your editor did.

If you have a BOM in your file, it’s the first output and therefore PHP cannot
initialize the session. Which is very bad if you sticked to sessions, as I am, because
I do write an e-commerce solution again.

- twobee

(Update: Added some hyperlinks)

Some days ago I was asked by Tim Gerundt, the new project maintainer of NOCC Webmail¹, if I want to actively help out the project as new official developer.

Yay!!! I agreed. \o/

After I finally got internet via UMTS to my new apartment and I got the connection routed to my VMWARE, I am ready to start. Thanks to trash for the help with service tunneling.

Upcoming additions to NOCC¹ will be:

• LDAP contacts
• Bounce function
• Search feature

- twobee

[1] NOCC Homepage
[2] NOCC: Sourceforge

Hentaibreaks 5 is over.
We partied hard till 7am, even had one extra last-minute DJ!

The prize for most awesome outfit goes to the Japanese schoolgirl sailor dress!
Pictures will follow once we’re back from coma.

We have pictures and recordings, will upload once edited.

If you took pictures, please upload them to the usual sites (flickr, et al) and tag them with: hentaibreaks, hb5, c-base
you can also contact housetier directly using housetier@gmail.com

Hey there fellow hentai lovers!
Today’s the day we’ve been waiting for since before the first party!
Yes, it’s that awesome.

Hentaibreaks 5 is about to start, (most of) the DJs arrived alive and well and we’re ready to party like it’s 2054.
There is NO entrance fee! So just drop by and party with us, if you happen to show up in cos you can even get a free drink!

What else is there that keeps you from joining us?

Location is the crashed space station c-base below Berlin.
It can be found at the following terrestrial coordinates:

c-base e.V.
Rungestrasse 20
10179 Berlin

The party starts at Berlin Standard Time +23h

When writing programs on Windows that involve I/O operations using the serial port, one quickly ends up loving Sysinternals Portmon.

I just found myself in a situation where I needed the exact same functionality, but on Linux.
What I found was jpnevulator.
It’s plain, simple, and if you’re on Debian or Ubuntu, just apt-get install jpnevulator and you’re good to go.

If you want to know what goes in and out over your serial port (in my case ttyUSB0), just use the tool like this:
hikari:~$ jpnevulator --read --ascii --tty /dev/ttyUSB0
76 3F 0D 56 20 20 20 31 31 31 20 20 34 30 30 2E v?.V 111 400.
30 30 20 20 37 32 30 2E 30 30 20 35 31 35 39 31 00 720.00 51591
0D .

On a side note:
You can use it to write data to a serial port, too.
Or monitor/write to several ports at the same time.
Quite a nice tool!

—
Ubuntu package
Debian package
Official website

The odyssey to find a message encryption for Miranda IM finally got to an end. After we had an outdated¹ GPG message plugin for years, we now got a plugin called SecureIM² which is supporting AES192, PGP and GPG message encryption.

The most other OSS IMs already have various plugins to support message encryption, but most of them are still only for Linux or itself not that handy like Miranda IM for Windows is.

[1] GnuPG Plugin
[2] SecureIM

In Switzerlands Sun Microsytems office will be held an event on the 19th June about Web 2.0 and Open Source in Startups.

There is a very funny addition to the agenda of this event, as you all may know, there is at the moment the EURO’08 in Austria and Switzerland.

If the page is gone, I have prepared a screenshot for you. ;-)

Have fun,

twobee.