Micropost

Since 2004, I’ve owned a ThinkPad A22m - a laptop that came out in 2001. Much to the dismay of certain friends, I still feel no need to purchase a newer computer. I’ve often said that this old hardware can do everything I need while still letting me run modern software. However, it now seems like I will have to take some responsibility for the code if I want that to still be true in the future. Specifically, I am talking about open source ATI drivers on GNU / Linux. The four main video card lines released by ATI (now owned by AMD) have been Wonder, Mach, Rage and Radeon. I don’t think Wonder cards have any features that would warrant the development of a dedicated driver but Linux drivers for the other three have been written. The Radeon driver is actively maintained by software engineers at AMD and some people who work for other software companies. The other two? Not so much. The Rage 128 driver was especially in need of a major update recently. And since my computer has a Rage Mobility graphics card, I felt motivated to start working on the code even though I had never hacked such a low-level piece of software before. Since the effort has largely succeeded, I would like to share my experiences with editing an open source video driver. The learning curve was quite steep and when I first started reading documentation, it seemed like it was written for a different audience. This post is going to be an unadultered attempt to get a completely new reader to catch on to what I did. I’m sure I will later find out that many things written in this post are technically incorrect, but I will not edit them. I want the only knowledge communicated in this piece to be the knowledge that one might reasonably be expected to have after jumping into driver development for the first time. ...

Debian is the most influential Linux distribution ever. Of the 305 active distributions listed on Distrowatch, 147 are derived from Debian, and 87 from Ubuntu, Debian’s most famous off-shoot. In other words, 77% of the distributions being used today wouldn’t exist without Debian. That makes Debian’s nineteenth anniversary on August 16 worth a moment’s reflection, not just technologically, but socially as well. For me, Debian and free software are hopelessly intertwined. While I had played about with Linux before, I only went hardcore when I started work on 5 July, 1999 at Stormix Technologies, an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to commercialize Debian. From there, I jumped ship to work at Progeny Linux System, which was founded by Ian Murdock and funded by Bruce Perens’ short-lived Linux Capital Group, and very much traded on the reputation of the two Debian leaders behind it. In those few years, I worked with some of Debian’s leading developers, including Branden Robinson, John Goerzen, and Jeff Licquia, and at conferences stumbled across most of the mover and shakers in free and open source software as well. In short, my introduction to free software was also my introduction to Debian. ...

Desde el punto de vista del usuario ¿Se puede tener una plataforma Android basada exclusivamente en Software Libre? Este es mi análisis tras una experiencia de seis meses de uso. » Pablo Hinojosa | osl.ugr.es

Our investigation focuses on Microsoft proprietary protocols with the help of a network trace and references. The steps that will be covered are specific to authentication view (MS-Chapv2), key derivation for encryption and the algorithm of the compression feature (MPPE/MPPC). Finally, to complete our approach, we will illustrate weaknesses through a new forensic tool dedicated to these protocols. Mainline : Details on MSChap-v2 : The first chapter aims to understand how the authentication protocol works ; Overview of MPPE protocol : We explain briefly the encryption protocol ; Overview of MPPC protocol : Here, we take a look at the compression feature ; Decipher MPPE by breaking MSCHAP-v2 : We decipher MPPE protocol with the help of MSChap-v2; ...

This is an animated, color, ANSI-text telnet server that renders a loop of the classic Nyan Cat animation. Open up a supported terminal and run: telnet miku.acm.uiuc.edu » Kevin Lange | miku.acm.uiuc.edu

If you want to learn a thing or two about color, why not look to the true masters whose artistic work has stood the test of time? Great painters almost always possess a keen understanding of color that is truly impressive when you stop to appreciate it. » Joshua Johnson | designshack.net

The world of game theory is currently on fire. In May, Freeman Dyson at Princeton University and William Press at the University of Texas announced that they had discovered a previously unknown strategy for the game of prisoner’s dilemma which guarantees one player a better outcome than the other. That’s a monumental surprise. Theorists have studied Prisoner’s Dilemma for decades, using it as a model for the emergence of co-operation in nature. This work has had a profound impact on disciplines such as economics, evolutionary biology and, of course, game theory itself. The new result will have impact in all these areas and more. The game is this: imagine Alice and Bob have committed a crime and are arrested. The police offer each one a deal–snitch and you go free while your friend does 6 months in jail. If both Alice and Bob snitch, they both get 3 months in jail. If they both remain silent, they both get one month in jail for a lesser offence. What should Alice and Bob do? ...

El pasado martes, Mercadona retiró 11 productos cosméticos después de una evaluación realizada por la Agencia Española de Medicamentos y Productos Sanitarios. Ayer, esa misma agencia publicó un comunicado explicando que el problema era de orden administrativo y no existía ningún peligro para la salud de los consumidores. Me parece un buen momento para que hablemos del verdadero problema de fondo. La industria cosmética se sostiene sobre una mentira: hacer creer a sus clientes que la eficacia de sus productos tiene una base científica. ...

Fellow Linuxers, This is just to announce the imminent completion of a brand-new Linux release, which I’m calling the Debian Linux Release. This is a release that I have put together basically from scratch; in other words, I didn’t simply make some changes to SLS and call it a new release. I was inspired to put together this release after running SLS and generally being dissatisfied with much of it, and after much altering of SLS I decided that it would be easier to start from scratch. The base system is now virtually complete (though I’m still looking around to make sure that I grabbed the most recent sources for everything), and I’d like to get some feedback before I add the ”fancy” stuff. ...

I run FreeBSD on my computers. A lot of my friends run Linux, or at least one of the distributions of it. Naturally, then, we agree that a Unix-style operating system is the right choice, but we disagree on which to use. It’s been my impression that the BSD communit{y,ies}, in general, understand Linux far better than the Linux communit{y,ies} understand BSD. I have a few theories on why that is, but that’s not really relevant. I think a lot of Linux people get turned off BSD because they don’t really understand how and why it’s put together. Thus, this rant; as a BSD person, I want to try to explain how BSD works in a way that Linux people can absorb. While there’s overwhelming similarity between the operating systems in most cases, there are also a lot of differences. As you probe more into the differences, you find that they emerge from deep-seated disagreements. Some are disagreements over development methodology, some over deployment and usage, some about what’s important, some about who’s important, and some about which flavor of ice cream is superior. Just comparing the surface differences doesn’t tell you anything; it’s the deeper differences that both explain and justify why each group does things the way they do. ...