Dead on
Good presentation on captchas by google. See this video. The group that is headed by the prof doing the presentation should easily be able to break current current used image captchas if their statements are true...
Perhaps I like it because perfectly reflects my own opinion though ;-).
[Permalink] -- Filed under: [linux] [science] [web]
You've got mail
Since I have searched for the maildirmake command on debian now two times (using http://packages.debian.org and apt-cache) with no result, I decided to blog the answer here.
You need to apt-get install courier-base. (and then /etc/init.d/courier-authdaemon stop; update-rc.d remove courier-authdaemon. This is not logical (I do not need courier at all, only postfix and mutt), so this post will help me and probably others in the future.
[update]
After hitting save I thought of an easier solution (?),
use something like
echo 'function maildirmake { mkdir -p "$1"/{cur,new,tmp}; chmod -R 700 "$1";}' >> ~/.bashrc
[/update]
[Permalink] -- Filed under: [linux]
Away
Linux and 64 bit computers are a good combination. The first linux 64 bit support dates from 1995. To be able to compile everything from source really helps supporting a platform. Windows mostly runs 32 bit programs at this moment, because proprietary software vendors (which account for most windows software) are not really fast in releasing new versions. Not all is well for linux though. Macromedia Flash is such a proprietary program of which no 64 bit player exists. Now, I do not really like flash (see also a previous entry about this, but for some reason flash is used to display movies on the web. If you think that that is weird, I agree. What has a vector renderer to do with a movie codec? The masters from youtube.com can perhaps tell you; we just have to comply.
I like to watch movies, so now I have a problem... Or not? Fortunately the flash way of bringing movies is just an container trick around a normal mpeg movie, and my favorite audio/movieplayer mplayer can play them just fine.
So if you are on debian, add contrib to /etc/apt/sources.list and apt-get install iceweasel iceweasel-greasemonkey mozilla-mplayer (the mplayer plugin is broken for firefox in etch at this moment). Now you only need a way to let mozilla know how to feed the movies. This can be done with a simple script like Michael Sheldons's.
So finally I can be an ultrahip blagotuber and and bring you movies ;-)
Happy Christmas Everyone!
[Permalink] -- Filed under: [holiday] [linux] [web]
Kaleidoscope
During some longer than normal train travelling I had time to rework some site bits. Permalink code is rewritten, pages are now integrated into my journal and the archive navigation is date based. Tag support is added to site and feeds
Also I added photos from an autumn week in Morocco. This trip is really recommended in october.
[Permalink] -- Filed under: [personal] [holiday] [photos] [web]
Decipher
Since some time I am an user of encfs. I actually did want to encrypt my whole root filesystem (just for fun, nothing to hide ;-)), but the loopback way is a hack and the old weak initialization vectors make watermark attacks easy. The weak key management was also a showstopper. Now that luks is relatively standard I hoped that with ubuntus upcoming edgy the eft the dm crypt + luks setup would be well enough integrated.
Unfortunately this is not the case. The installer does not support this yet. There is a myriad of conflicting documentation on how to set this up properly. Most of these are misleading and outdated. There are thousand ways to do this.. but I wanted to do it in a way that will be supported properly in the future. This guide is the best there is on this topic and following it literally does work for Edgy Eft.
One thing Edgy has changed (compared to the guide, which is actually for Dapper Drake) is that the latest cryptsetup package already has encrypted root initramsfs hooks. With adding cryptopts in the kernel line (or via kopts in grub) or making a /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/cryptoroot file the system _should_ come up automatically with the passphrase question. After a lot of fiddling (every distro seems to have their on ways of specifying the parameters) I still did not get this working. If you use the kernel line options cryptsetup is not installed in the initrd and if you use the conf file option, the proper kernel modules are not loaded.
Usually I behave like a good open source citizen and file nice bug reports about this, instead of whining in a journal entry. This time the 1000 different ways of doing these + the already very confusing bug reports about this package, left me feeling disqualified to do so. In the end, just following the guide for ubuntu and writing my own initramfs non configurable hook functions (which conflict with the future cryptopts settings !!) seems the best way right now. What makes the situation even more difficult for starters is that google does not list the proper page for ubuntu but a very outdated howto, so hopefully this entry will help the proper guide bubble up.
Hopefully this is something that is going to get better in future! Distributors, please fix this and standardize! On the bright side, the debian future for this looks most promising, clean implementation and support in the beta installer..
[Permalink] -- Filed under: [linux]