chrishowie.com

The latest release of gnome-terminal has removed the ability to disable the blinking cursor, which I had previously turned off. The only way to disable it is to disable blinking cursors in all text entry widgets. For some reason I prefer the cursor in text boxes to blink, but cannot stand a blinking terminal cursor. Every blink jars my mind and I lose focus, like someone’s looking at me waving his hands and yelling “hey!” every second.

Blink. Blink. Blink. Arrrgh.

Anyway, since the developers saw fit to remove this feature presumably under the GNOMEism of “keep things simple, users be damned,” I have coded a quick patch to permanently disable cursor blinking in gnome-terminal.

As frustrated as I am at what I think is a stupid decision, at least this is free software.

I’ve started a web-based task manager to get some experience with Prototype. It’s very fast so far and is relatively easy to build upon.

All in all this was a pretty good week. My new job has been a lot of fun and it feels good to finally have a job where my skills are being used. The team has been very welcoming and are fun to work with.

My computer is back alive too… actually it was sometime before Monday but I don’t recall exactly when. Anyway, it’s quite zippy now. I also got a new 300GB drive at Fry’s, so I now have over a half terabyte of storage.

And on that note, I’ve been thinking today about filesystems. We have some good Linux-native filesystems like ext3 and reiserfs, and Windows has NTFS, but there is only one filesystem that both Windows and Linux can reliably read and write: FAT. But FAT has some irritating limitations, such as a maximum file size of 4GB. This is not optimal for use on a dual-boot system, but it’s the best option right now.

Has anyone looked at the possibility of designing and implementing a filesystem specifically designed to be portable between operating systems? Sure we have ext3 drivers for Windows and NTFS drivers for Linux, but neither of those options are really attractive. I’d like to see someone design a filesystem that works first to the lowest common denominator: store files. After that is finished more features could be added in a multiplatform-sensitive manner. For example, allow file metadata to be stored in some sort of tree dictionary, so each operating system could have its “own” set of metadata. Linux and Windows could store permissions there without clobbering the other’s data.

Even taking an existing filesystem like ext3 and modifying it for this purpose would be really handy, especially if the existing ext3 driver could handle it without destroying the metadata for other operating systems.

Just a thought. Comments welcome as usual.

My computer should be working by the end of the week. Turns out the motherboard is dead, so I’m getting a new system: AMD 64 X2 2.8GHz. $347.24 later and let’s hope nothing else fried.

My right wrist is also not working so well. I’m taking an anti-inflammatory and have it in a brace. It feels better today than yesterday but it still hurts to move.

And finally some good news: I have a job! A real, actual, paying job. I’ll be working with Ontario Systems starting on the 13th.

Seems my computer decided I’ve hacked enough on WikiBench this week. This morning I smelled something odd, and after checking my email noticed that my CPU temperature was 84C. I usually push 80C when listening to music or watching video, but when it’s been idle 50C is more normal. So I powered down and poked around.

Best guess I can come up with is that the PSU fan died as that part was the hottest. Since that fan is also the main exhaust fan I’m not surprised the CPU was so hot.

I will try to get a new PSU and a new case ASAP since the airflow on this one is terrible. Unfortunately money is a bit short right now. (I am a student, after all…) Hopefully my box will live again soon. In the meantime at least I have my laptop.

A friend and I are starting a new blog to expose vulnerabilities in Facebook applications. Since Facebook has a reputation of being secure, people seem to trust whatever applications will integrate with it. However, careless coding by third parties can allow all kinds of attacks, some of which can result in data theft. Hopefully this blog will bring some examples to light.

To further test US copyright law, I have created more art that incorporates the released AACS processing key that the MPAA is sending DMCA takedown notices over. Due to the size of the image I am making it available exclusively at deviantART.

The image uses 24-bit sections of the key as the colors for text elements.

I wonder… can the MPAA send takedown notices against every image that contains these colors?

Many of you are aware of the publication of an AACS processing key that can be used to decrypt any HD-DVD movie currently released. The MPAA is sending DMCA takedown notices left and right.

When this happened with DeCSS, people responded by making art out of the DeCSS code. I’ve done the same with this key. Just convert it to an RGB PPM, strip the header, and look at the low-order bit of each component of each pixel.

By the way, this image is copyrighted by me. I wonder if I’ll get a DMCA takedown notice over material that I own?

US copyright law is nuts.

Update 2007-05-21: I said “low-order byte” when it’s in fact the low-order bit. This has been corrected.

Etch has finally been released. I have upgraded layla (the server running this blog) from Sarge to Etch, and the upgrade process was pretty smooth. Only a few things needed manual attention.

Quite surprisingly, there weren’t any problems upgrading the kernel to 2.6.18, even though this required replacing hotplug with udev, something I’ve experienced pain with before. One reboot is all it needed.

Tonight Anderson University SIFE Consulting held their group competition. My group was responsible for the creation of an ecommerce website for Rivers Resources, a local company that sells among other things ink and toner cartridges at rates below OEM.

I was the lead web developer for the project, and it went smoothly for the most part. The site has not been deployed yet as there is still a little work to be done before the site is ready for production, but the major pieces work. A little polish to the shopping cart and it’ll be ready.

We competed against four other groups. While we did not win, several of the judges told us that it was obvious we did the most work out of all of them, and the Rivers Resources CEO may be hiring several members of our group to expand the website to include some of their other products.

It was a fun project. I got to work with several good friends, and while I enjoyed the experience I am also glad to have one less responsibility.

Update: Our team manager just told us that we placed 2nd. Considering that the group that won used a box of candy as their handout to the judges, that’s not bad!