null blog

“Omul-mlaştină este îmbâcsit de informaţii inutile, îmi explică Geroge. Omul-mlaştină culege informaţii de peste tot, de pe stradă, din vitrine, de la televizor, de la radio, de pe telefonul mobil sau de pe Ipod-ul său, de pe computer şi de pe Internet, de pe Facebook şi din ziare… Îm fiecare secundă aproape omul-mlaştină se află în faţa unui ecran. El devine o sugativă informaţională, înghite tot, aspiră tot, se hrăneşte cu inutilitatea imaginilor şi a mesajelor primite. Creierele noastre devin nişte mlaştini, acesta este adevărul. Personal nu-mi simt creierul pe cale de-a deveni o mlaştină informaţională, dar tot ce spune George mi se pare interesant.
- Iar natura unei mlaştini în ce constă? mă întreabă Geroge.
- În faptul că stagnează.
- Ia te uită! Bravo!”

– Matei Vişniec, Dezordinea preventivă

‘”I believe that life is a mess,” he answered promptly. “It is like yeast, a ferment, a thing that moves and may move for a minute, an hour, a year, or a hundred years, but that in the end will cease to move. The big eat the little that they may continue to move, the strong eat the weak that they may retain their strength. The lucky eat the most and move the longest, that is all. What do you make of those things?”‘

– Jack London, The Sea Wolf

Wondering how to restrict your users to only see their own processes in Linux? A quick answer that comes up is the grsecurity patch, but that doesn’t cope very well with the apparmor functionality in Ubuntu’s kernel. Fortunately, not long ago Openwall developer Vasiliy Kulikov came up with this kernel patch that allows us to mount the proc filesystem with the hidepid and gid options, achieving this. All the details are supplied at the above link. The patch was imported into mainline kernel 3.3, I believe. As a side note, this has been backported to Debian Wheezy and Ubuntu Precise kernels.

Of course, FreeBSD has a similar option since 4.0, configurable via sysctl.

As a Perl user I am simply tired of this Perl is dead nonsense and the silly should we rename Perl 5 type of discussions.

By the way, with Perl being dead and all – in my small hometown we have events like this one with guest speakers from abroad.

‘“Not at all. Plain fact. Whether it’s the fragment of coding, the fragment of engineering, the fragment of gunnery-you’ll find them all predigested and regulated to a point where you’d have to search the insane asylums to find people who could muff the jobs. Remember that one point. It explains, and reconciles you to, all the Navy Regulations, and all the required reports, and all the emphasis on memory and obedience, and all the standardized ways of doing things. The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots. If you’re not an idiot, but find yourself in the Navy, you can only operate well by pretending to be one. All the shortcuts and economies and common-sense changes that your native intelligence suggests to you are mistakes. Learn to quash them. Constantly ask yourself, ‘How would I do this if I were a fool?’ Throttle down your mind to a crawl. Then you’ll never go wrong- Well, that cleans up brother Carmody’s traffic, he added, pushing aside the heap of despatches. “Want me to do yours?””

– Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny

Comisia Europeană a deschis un proces de consultare publică cu privire la riscurile asociate şi cadrul legislativ necesar exploatării combustibililor fosili neconvenţionali, cu referire explicită la gazele de şist. Cetăţenii statelor membre UE sunt invitaţi să răspundă la acest chestionar de pe site-ul CE până pe data de 23 martie 2013.

Sursa: Think Outside the Box

Hello MariaDB. Devnull.ro has switched from MySQL 5.1 to MariaDB 5.3. Screw Oracle.

I was forced to write a htpasswd utility in Perl 5 out of frustration. Neither nginx nor squid provide one and I’m not going to install Apache tools just to get such basic functionality. I was also dissatisfied with this one as it doesn’t do MD5 passwords, doesn’t handle spaces in passwords and the CLI is completely useless. You can get it here. It aims to behave as closely as possible to the original htpasswd utility in Apache. One needs to at least install Apache::Htpasswd and Term::ReadKey in order to run it. In fact the latter is only required for interactive mode. If you also want SHA1 hashes, then you need Digest::SHA and MIME::Base64 installed. SHA1 and plain text hashes are only implemented in output only mode. I should have probably used Authen::Htpasswd instead, as it supports file based operations with these hashes out of the box. This is left for a future revision or as an exercise to the user.

Update 03/03: Rewritten with Authen::Htpasswd. The script also got smaller while doing more.

Openbox. The perfect window manager for netbook screens. No panels, no icons on the desktop, no useless eyecandy, no nothing that would get in the way. Just a simple root menu, keybindings and the dock – should you want to run anything in it. Of course one could also run one of several panels or a fullblown desktop environment. Here’s a guide.

Am terminat de citit Sindromul de Panică în Oraşul Luminilor. Matei Vişniec a făcut să dispară  graniţele dintre realitate şi ficţiune în cartea asta, năucind cititorul, adică pe subsemnatul. Despre roman puteţi afla mai multe pe LiterNet, chiar de la autor. Mă bucur că mai publică încă în română. Şi eu vorbesc în limba natală când sunt ameţit sau obosit sau n-am chef de nimeni şi de nimic, chiar dacă-mi vine frecvent s-o tai afară din ţară ca să mă conving că există şi pe dincolo oameni retardaţi.

Citesc acum Ploile amare  de Alexandru Vlad, cam la un an şi ceva după lansare. Scrie foarte bine, chiar dacă ţăranii nu vorbesc elevat şi chiar dacă nu a luat premiul Augustin Frăţilă pentru romanul anului 2012. Acest premiu este votat de 20 bloggeri care ar avea un cuvânt de spus, deşi după părerea mea nu reprezintă decât trafic şi popularitate, respectiv chestii slabe. Nu îi cunosc, sunt conştient că or să se simtă jigniţi dacă descoperă blogul meu obscur şi citesc asta, însă îmi menţin părerea că nişte hipsteri sau formatori de opinie nu au ce juriza concursuri. Am să pun acum legătură la cronica lui Alex Goldiş, care a lipsit de la lansare deşi era invitat să vorbească. Sper totuşi să fi citit cartea, pentru că eu nu i-am citit cronica decât pe sărite.