STEEVdotnet Random ramblings, sometimes talk about Gentoo development

Blizzard Authenticators

As some people know, I do play World of Warcraft. Recently there have been quite a few people in our guild who have been "hacked" - as in, someone got a hold of their password some way or another, and was able to take over their account, and do naughty things like steal items from the guild's bank, sell all of that character's gear, and so forth. All well and good, Blizzard, in an attempt to allow people to be a tad bit more secure, offered up the ability to use a free authenticator, which runs on your mobile phone (iPhone, Android, and a few other misc phones as well) or you can get a hardware key, for 6.99 or 6.50 USD - somewhere there abouts.

Our guild was recently discussing them, as someone in the guild had this happen to them for a second time... And in going back and forth between myself and someone who thinks that Blizzard is making a mint off these things (hint: they don't) Someone else replied with the following in the thread, and I thought I would share it with a much more general audience.

PERSONALLY

I think the only real, permanent, and logical way for blizzard to fix this 'hacker' problem is by raising up a massive army of Undead Nazi Vampires, lead by a shirtless Gerard Butler to lead an invasion into China and Russia, overthrowing the local governments on a crusade to flush the hackers out from where they live! Blizzard would then consolidate power and turn the two largest countries in Asia into worlds first corporately owned country. With this display of power, combined with their new military might, no one would dare try to hack a blizzard game ever again!

This plan has drawbacks however, as legions of undead vampires (who happen to be nazi's) would soon grow restless, and crave human flesh. After blizzard loses its hold on such creatures, the Vampires would launch a full scale assault on Israel, instantly springing the United States, the UN, and NATO to its aid. By this time the other middle eastern countries, now coupled with their new found undead allies, would join in the onslaught and unite against the rest of the world. World War III would break out, the devestation would be horrible, and the world would cower before the unstoppable Undead Vampire Nazi's.

That is...until the Dave creates a super virus that will specifically target and destroy the 'undead' plague; Effectively crippling the Undead army, and their lust for flesh. With the them out of the way, the path would be clear for the Allied nations to finish the war in a quick manner. Millions would have died in the first global war in nearly 70 years.

The world will want someone to blame. At the UN trial, all the execs from Blizzard will be put on trial, and tried for war crimes for creating the Undead Nazi Vampires in the first place. All of their property will be seized, and all the WOW servers will be shut down, effectively ending the happiness of me, and millions of others around the world.

.....

So unless you want THAT to happen...Get an Authenticator. Its not a perfect solution, but its better than undead Nazi Vampires.

Well done.

Kismet and the Efika MX

Back in June of 2009, a bug was opened about a new Kismet release. I was extremely busy, and eventually, I had some time, so I looked in to it, but I couldn't quite get things working right, so I put it back on the back burner. Fast forward even more, and yngwin saw the bug, and asked me if I had any issues with him dropping the new Kismet (based on Kismet-newcore) in the Gentoo-x86 tree, and since I didn't respond, he went ahead and did so. And I am glad he did, because it reminded me that I wanted to get back to it. (I did actually fix a minor issue that the setuid bit was getting reset so it wasn't getting installed properly, still also need to look into the plugins)

As some people have read, I got an Efika MX OpenClient from Genesi, and I've had a chance to work with it quite a bit. One of the things that I wanted to play with was Kismet on it, as I think the Efika MX Smartbook would make an excellent platform for wardriving (amongst many other things), being compact, lightweight, and having gps and wireless built in, with a very long battery life.

So, I gave it a shot, and it most definitely works (I've keyworded Kismet ~arm for the 2010.01.1 release) using the latest kernel (2.6.31.12.3-ER1) as of this writing, as well as the latest firmware for the wireless card from Ralink ( USB Firmware 22 released 03/31/2010. This is with the mac80211-based rt2800usb driver, NOT the rt3070sta driver from staging.

There is definitely a lot of potential in these little machines, and I really wish I had the means to buy more of them, just so that I had a few around to play with different things rather than having the one and swapping out the sdcard (assuming I'm not doing it on the pata ssd drive in the device.) I am really looking forward to when the smartbook gets released.

The Efika MX has arrived!

Got my Efika MX from Genesi today! I took a few pictures, although mine aren't that high quality, my roommate was out so I couldn't use his digital camera. Anyway - here we go

First up, is the FedEx box --
http://dev.gentoo.org/~steev/efika/mx/pics/12-04-09_1206.jpg

Next we see the box that it comes in:
http://dev.gentoo.org/~steev/efika/mx/pics/12-04-09_1207.jpg

And we open that box and we start to get giddy...
http://dev.gentoo.org/~steev/efika/mx/pics/12-04-09_1208.jpg

And we pull everything out, and take a picture of the contents:
http://dev.gentoo.org/~steev/efika/mx/pics/12-04-09_1210.jpg

And the back of the Efika (and I do apologize, this is very blurry for some reason):
http://dev.gentoo.org/~steev/efika/mx/pics/12-04-09_1212.jpg

And a small comparison, the Efika MX sitting on top of my Boondock Saints DVD case (awesome movie, go rent and watch it now...), also in the picture, the staple of my diet - Mt. Dew.
http://dev.gentoo.org/~steev/efika/mx/pics/12-04-09_1315.jpg

Can't wait to get started, unfortunately, I'm waiting on my Newegg shipment of http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16882021059 ( Rosewill - HDMI to DVI Cable (24+1) - 6 FEET - Retail ) to arrive so that I can have some video, since I don't have any hdmi cables lying around.

I do also have the dmesg,free, and cpuinfo posted.

It comes with Ubuntu minimal installed, however, I intend to install Gentoo on it.

I really must say, this is definitely a nice looking machine, a LOT smaller than I expected it to be - I was thinking it was a lot bigger than it actually is.

Titanium Beta Launch Party

If you’re in the San Francisco area on June 9th, check out the Titanium Beta Launch Party.
I can’t go so you should go for me!

Full details found here: http://bit.ly/5YAv

I know it’s a little redundant because most people stumbling here will already know about it but just in case you don’t, well now you do.

Running Titanium on Gentoo

(This assumes an x86 system - although ppc also works as long as you replace all the so files!)
In order to get Titanium working on Gentoo, you will need to build a few things yourself since they don't have a patch for webkit (yet - they are working on it ) and also a few other files will need to be replaced.

This is how I did it. First I checked out the titanium git repository

cd ~/sandbox
git clone git://github.com/marshall/titanium.git
git submodule update --init
cd kroll
git pull origin master
cd ~/sandbox

I read through the readme, and installed the different dependencies.
sudo apt-get install build-essential ruby rubygems libzip-ruby scons libxml2-dev libgtk2.0-dev python-dev ruby-dev libdbus-glib-1-dev libnotify-dev libgstreamer0.10-dev libxss-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev
is their suggestion, however on Gentoo, these are a lot different.

I found that libzip-ruby (rubyzip?) was not needed, and on Gentoo installing the packages themselves gives you the "dev" packages, so

emerge ruby rubygems scons libxml2 gtk+ dbus-glib libnotify gstreamer libXScrnSaver curl gperf

Once this is finished, you will have to do a little bit more work - We don't need poco installed, but we will need to compile it ourselves, along with the titanium version of webkit (they've got it "patched" to support app:// urls - no actual patch yet (but they are working on it!))

We also need to use their version of libcurl, which is also patched, however again, we don't need to install it to our system, just build it.

git clone git://github.com/mrobinson/libcurl_titanium.git
after the checkout, we just ./configure && make

Now we need to check out their copy of webkit, please note that this one WILL take a while to check out, so go grab a coffee, watch a good TV show, or perhaps hit the pub with some friends (I prefer the latter)
git clone git://github.com/marshall/webkit_titanium.git
... some random amount of time later...
git checkout --track -b titanium_pr2 origin/titanium_pr2

Now we are on the titanium_pr2 branch, which is what is currently in use, although they are migrating to ToT for WebKit which will allow us to use libsoup in the future, rather than the curl that is currently in use.

We need to link against the libcurl_titanium and not against the system libcurl, so we need to export 2 variables.

export LIBCURL_CFLAGS ="-I/home/username/sandbox/libcurl_titanium/include"
export LIBCURL_LIBS ="-L/home/username/sandbox/libcurl_titanium/lib/.libs -lcurl"
and then we just use the build.py script to build since we won't be installing this into the system either. so...
./autogen.sh
./build.py
Depending on your processor (this takes around 15 hours on my Efika which is 400mhz with 128mb of ram) go ahead and go back to the pub, go to work, cook yourself a nice meal... you get the picture.
Once it is finished, assuming the titanium checkout is in ~/sandbox/titanium and the webkit_titanium checkout is in ~/sandbox/webkit_titanium you just run ./copy-libs-to-kroll.sh

Now we need to build poco, you can either emerge it, or just fetch it via emerge, and build it in your ~/sandbox (or wherever you are doing this at) once it is built (it really doesn't take that long) you need to copy the .so files to ~/sandbox/titanium/kroll/thirdparty/linux/poco/lib/ - you can look at what is currently in there to know which files to copy. I tend to use cp -a so that the symlinks stay symlinks. You need to copy the libcurl .so files that were built in ~/sandbox/libcurl_titanium/lib/.libs into ~/sandbox/titanium/kroll/thirdparty/linux/libcurl/lib - again just the files that are needed.

As part of building webkit (assuming you didn't have it installed on your system, you need to build icu, currently 3.8.1-r1 is the latest in portage, which is what is currently used in titanium as well.

I've submitted a few patches that have already been implemented to allow for the different paths for python and ruby that Gentoo uses, so at this point you should be able to go into ~/sandbox/titanium and run scons debug=1 dist and it should build. Once the compilation is completed, you should have a ~/sandbox/titanium/build/linux/dist directory which includes the titanium sdk as a .bin file as well as a .tgz file. Simply run either sudo sh titanium-sdk-0.4.bin or chmod +x titanium-sdk-0.4.bin && sudo ./titanium-sdk-0.4.bin in order to install it.

Please note - at the time of this writing, PR3 has been released, and the current master is what PR4 (or beta) is going to be based on. This is *very* much in flux, and it may be hit or miss on compiling and/or installing. Currently when installed (which needs to be done as root) the files do not all get the proper permissions, and you will likely need to go into /opt/titanium/modules and change all the .so files to be 755 and all the manifest files to 644. There may be others as well, but I cannot recall at the moment.

As a side note: if you want to use what is known as the PR3 release, you can (and probably should) use checkout --track -b titanium_pr3 origin/titanium_pr3 inside ~/sandbox/titanium as well as making sure to switch to the titanium_pr3 branch in kroll if you do that. (but why would we? We're Gentoo users, we like bleeding edge )

At this point you have a working Titanium Developer that you can run via the console ~/TitaniumApps/Titanium\ Developer/Titanium\ Developer

Enjoy writing webapps that don't require Adobe Air!

Also, if you find any issues with this post please leave a comment and I will try to get it corrected as soon as possible.

Efika ppc packages back in action

Just wanted to make a quick note that the Efika packages are being synced to tinderbox once again - these are *unstable* packages, as I run ~ppc on the box now. There are many instructions on how to use this, but I will add some after I have more time. For now, the url to use for getting the packages (and to see what is available!) is:

http://tinderbox.dev.gentoo.org/default-linux/ppc-efika/

Edit: Well, I will be uploading the packages, I am probably going to need to bump my kernel to git on there for some libata changes that aren't in 2.6.28, I keep getting io errors while syncing.

More HAL and ISC Licensing…

Sam Leffler, maintainer of the binary HAL that is also used in MadWifi
releases, has released the source code for his HAL variant under ISC
license. It is available through a Subversion repository [1] (web
interface at [2]), which is also be used actively for development and
further improvements.

In his announcement, Sam states:

"Coincident with the release of this code I have concluded my agreement
with Atheros whereby I had access to information about their devices.
This means that in the future all fixes, updates for new chips, etc. will
need to be a community effort. Atheros states the Linux platform will be
the reference public code base so folks wanting to add support for other
platforms will have to scrape the information from there."

"Linux platform" refers to ath5k and ath9k. Interested parties are advised
to attend the ath5k-devel [3] and ath9k-devel [4] mailing lists. These
lists may be also used to ask general questions about the chipsets
supported by the respective drivers.

[1] svn://svn.freebsd.org/base/projects/ath_hal
[2] http://svn.freebsd.org/viewvc/base/projects/ath_hal/
[3] https://lists.ath5k.org/mailman/listinfo/ath5k-devel
[4] https://lists.ath9k.org/mailman/listinfo/ath9k-devel

Computers Suck.

Efika cases?

So, I have an Efika, and I absolutely love this lil machine, but it needs a new home... no, I don't want to sell it or give it away, I want to get it an actual case so I don't have to keep putting it back in its cardboard box every time I want to take it somewhere... The only links I've found are on the Gentoo Wiki site - The blog post about a case being made and sales of it, is a 404 now, and the link to Genesi's site to buy it is also a dead end...
So, anyone out there sell them? Mine has an AGP Radeon 7000 with the VGA adapter removed, so only the DVI output remains, so the ability to swap around the back would be nice (Sometimes I like to throw an nVidia card in there ) - but not necessary. Unfortunately, I don't have many (read: any) tools anymore, so building the case myself is out of the question.

Real Life

Wow, I have no idea why it is so hard to write this post. This is the 4th time I've wiped everything out and started it over again. So, I have now moved - or sort of - I am still in the process of moving. I've moved in with a guy I've known for a while - 5 or 6 years, because his roommate decided to move out and since all of my bills have gotten so backed up, it seems almost impossible to dig myself out from them without having a roommate. I got my job at Centipede Networks back, and have been there 2 or 3 weeks now. It has been really nice working there again. I absolutely loved working there before, but I got side tracked by things that didn't matter, and so they let me go because they felt that I didn't want to work there any more. After that, I kind of slid downhill. I took a month "off" and after that, I started looking for a job. But not extremely hard. I've been dating Marsha for somewhere around 5-6 years, and she talked with me quite a bit during all of this time, and got me kind of pointed back online. Even going so far as to consider actually being with me - in fact, we were planning on moving in together. At that point, I knew I had to get serious about a job, because she has kids, and if I was going to be supporting them, I needed to get a job, one worth keeping, one worth going to day after day, that would make sure to pay the bills and not be one that I would want to quit after a few days of working there. I thought I had found it, working at Atlantis Plastics - it wasn't the greatest of jobs, but the pay was amazing, and the hours were good as well, except that I want to go back to college and get a degree.

Then I got laid off from there. At this point I wasn't sure what to do. Chris was moving to Oregon, and I don't really have that many friends here, so I went with him to the coffee shop we normally go to, and he and I talked for a bit, and then Ben showed up there as well. He and I talked for a bit as well, and then we stepped outside to smoke, while Chris stayed inside, since he is a non-smoker. Ben asked me about Centipede Networks, and if I had liked it, and then mentioned that he was waiting to hear back from a job in San Francisco, and if he got it, he would probably be leaving Centipede Networks for the other job. He said I should email Kirk there and possibly talk to him about coming back, the worst that could happen would be they say no. I told Ben I didn't think they would be open to it, but I would consider it.

After much deliberation, and talking to Marsha about it, I decided to go for it. So I emailed them, and we talked, and they decided to give me a shot. So I've been there for about 3 weeks now, and loving it again.

Through all of this, Marsha has been my rock, my foundation, the person who I could turn to to talk about anything. And she always has been... until now. I really don't understand what is going on, and I can't really talk to her about it, because its all on her end really. We will go back and forth about things, we will be together, and then we won't, and then we will, and then we won't. It tends to take a toll on you, it really does. There have been so many times where I have been so close to just calling it all off, not wanting to deal with everything anymore, but to this day I continue, because above all else, she is worth it to me.

Now, she is working on things that she needs to work on, doing the things that she needs to do, and even though we only live around 20 miles away from each other (at most, I am not actually sure how far we are exactly) we mainly talked online, due to various different reasons, and because of all of this, she is rarely ever online anymore. I love her, and I do support her, even if it does frustrate me because we never talk anymore.

I am not sure where I was going with this post. I guess I just wanted to tell Marsha I miss her like crazy, and let everyone else know what all has been going on with me lately, although it isn't extremely detailed.

Atheros released their HAL under an ISC license

This is NOT the same HAL that is used by madwifi-ng - just to hopefully stop some of the questions - This mail was sent to the ath5k-devel mailing list last night

As part of our commitment to help support all of our Atheros devices
under Linux we'd like to announce the release of our Atheros HAL for
our 802.11abg chipsets under the ISC license.

You can find it here:

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/mcgrof/legacy-hal.tar.bz2

This can be used as a source of documentation to help ath5k move
forward to support our 802.11abg chipsets as best as possible in
the Linux kernel. We look forward to keep working strongly with the
community on advancing support of all our Atheros chipsets under Linux.

Luis

Awesome. Simply Awesome.

Thank you!

I want to say thank you to everyone who helped me keep my apartment - the money has been collected, I just unpacked my car back into my apartment, and tomorrow morning I go to get the money order... everyone has really amazed me, and honestly, I can not thank you all enough! After I get the money order, I will take the picture, but for now, I need to scoot out of here and get to bed so I can be rested for tomorrow

Still needing a bit more help

Thank you very much to everyone who has helped thus far, I still need almost 360USD - Almost there, but not quite - I have to turn in the money tomorrow, so help is *greatly* appreciated.

It was pointed out to me by someone that it was hard to donate as well because of the lack of a clicky button and perhaps that would help... so... I am going to attempt to add a button to this post... Hopefully this works, I am not sure how wordpress handles html code in a post, so lets see how it goes...

Hopefully it helps, really do appreciate any help guys and gals from the internet!

Edited: Thank you for the donation! Down to needing 320, so almost there!