zaibz

2007-06-01T00:11:00.000-07:00

DARPA Working on Cyborg Spy Moth

Fox News: “At some point in the not-too-distant future, a moth may take flight in the hills of northern Pakistan, and flap towards a suspected terrorist training camp.” This is what DARPA is trying to achieve with its new spy technology which they call “reliable tissue-machine interface”. A moth is created with a micro chip inside it, the chip was inserted when the insect was a pupa. Moths are biological creatures that need little food and can fly all kinds of places. This moth will be capable of landing and camp with out arousing suspicion, all the while beaming video and other information back to its master.

Read more

2007-05-31T01:30:00.000-07:00

The Secret of about:config: Hacking Firefox

Firefox is an enormously customizable piece of software due to its available list of add-ons and its internal settings but many of these customizations are not accessible through its Tools -> Option menu. Therefore if you wish to get the benefit of these tweaks you have to edit them manually though about:config page.

The closest analogy to how Firefox manages its internal settings is the Windows Registry. Each setting, or preference, is given a name and stored as a string (text), integer (number) or Boolean (true/false) value. However, Firefox doesn't keep its settings in the registry, but in a file called prefs.js. You can edit prefs.js directly, but it's often easier to change the settings through the browser window.

The preferred way to edit prefs.js is through browser interface. Fire up your Firefox and type about:config in the address bar and you will see all settings currently enumerated in prefs.js. To focus on the certain type of configuration options you can narrow down the displayed setting by applying a “Filter”.

Type, “network-http” without quotes in Filter bar to view the short listed configuration settings related to http connection only.

To edit any preference double click the value and you will be prompted to enter the new value. Double clicking a variable of Boolean type will toggle its value from “true” to “false” and vice versa. You might have notice while playing with about:config that certain values are not present in your browser preference. If you want to add a new preference right click anywhere in the page and select New, then select type of item to create(Integer,String or Boolean) and supply the name value.

Few things to keep in mind while playing with about:config,

i) Not everyone will get the same benefits by enabling these tweaks.

ii) What works now might not work in future, this is due to the fact that Firefox is self tuning with each successive new release.

iii) Make backup of prefs.js before making any changes so that you can revert any change if it turns out to be a bad tweak, prefs.js is located in you Firefox profile folder.

In Windows XP, the profile folder is
\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\.default\

Tweaking Firefox to Load Web Pages Faster:

Double click network.http.max-connections-per-server and change its value from default value to some higher value like 16 etc. This tweak enables Firefox to create more number of connections to the web server you want to access via Firefox hence accelerates page loading.

More tweaks: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9020880&pageNumber=2

2007-04-28T04:47:00.000-07:00

Wordpress Local Installation

Lately my boss asked to host a local blog so that daily office activity can be posted and monitored.
Google said that the best, easy to configure and free blogging software available for linux would be "WordPress".

WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a mouthful. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

To install WordPress on my Fedora Core 6 installation

1. First I need to install mysql server on my FC6
yum install mysql-server mysql
service mysqld start

2. Install php support for mysql
yum install php-mysql

3. Creating a database, mysql user and mysql password for my wordpress installation,
mysql -u root
mysql> create database wordpress;
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'wordpress'@'localhost'IDENTIFIED BY 'wordpress' WITH GRANT OPTION;

4. Downloaded the lastet package from,
http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz

Latest version at this time was "WordPress 2.1.3"

5. Extract the the latest.tar.gz file
tar -xvzf latest.tar.gz

tar program will extract the files in a folder named "wordpress". The next task is to copy the contents of "wordpress" directory to the "web root" or any other directory inside "web root" directory.
cp -aR wordpress/* /var/www/html/

6. Rename the wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php and configure mysql userid, password and database name for wordpress to use. These parameters are same as we have created in step 2.

7. Point the web browser to my Fedora Core 6 to see the first page of wordpress.

2006-03-15T05:36:00.000-08:00

"Nerd" The positive way !

For quite some time in the latter 20th Century, the term "nerd" was generally considered derogatory, and was a common insult, especially among school-age boys. However, beginning in the late 1990s, many nerds on the Internet reclaimed the word nerd as a badge of pride and began using it as a positive description of a technically-competent person. Although traditionally used to describe men and boys, the terms "nerd" and "geek" have been adopted by many women interested in technology, science, mathematics and other typically male-dominated intellectual fields as badges of their accomplishments in these areas.
The term "nerd", meaning "square" goes back at least to 1951, when Newsweek reported the usage as relatively new in Detroit
Dramatic depictions of good nerds typically reveal them to be good-hearted people who wish harm on no one, but are bullied by their obvious intellectual inferiors. Many nerds in fiction play roles as supporting characters who provide valuable sources of information or useful skills for the heroes. Nerds as lead characters often have a secret identity as a superhero; in these cases, a put-upon person has a wonderful secret (examples include Peter Parker/Spider-Man and Clark Kent/Superman). Nerds in supporting roles often feature as technological geniuses who invent or repair plot devices that enable the main characters to move towards a goal.
Non-nerds often think of nerds as intelligent, yet socially awkward, people. Stereotypically, in high school, the more "popular" or more socially adept teens often ridicule and bully those labeled as nerds, who have a reputation of engaging deeply in academic areas. Nerds generally express an above-normal interest in complex subjects and often function as polymaths. Topics dealing with science, computer, technology, comic books, board games of types that take hours to play and have complicated rules (particularly role playing games), classical music, and paradoxically, music at the other extreme, heavy metal and punk (due to the current crop of nerds having grown up in the 90's when anti-social music became popular), artificial intelligence, cartoons (both classic ones, particularly Warner Bros, and modern ones such as South Park), anime, manga, video games, and science fiction, horror and fantasy literature books, TV shows and movies have all become heavily associated with nerds, as have conventions relating to these various topics

Nerds and personality theory

Geeks and nerds are Myers-Briggs Type Indicator INTP, or to a lesser extent INTJ. (It should be noted that nerds are also known to exist in much smaller numbers within the INFP type.)
INTP is the classic programmer type, INTJ the classic scientist type. These two types are the Introverted iNtuitive Thinkers. As Introverts they are stimulated by thoughts and ideas rather than people and things. They are often quite happy spending hours absorbed in solitary activities. As iNtuitives they are more inclined towards abstract concepts and subtle connections than in concrete examples or direct experience. As Thinkers they are more adept in logic and reason than feelings or emotions. This combination makes INT's masters of mathematics, logic, and science, but rather oblivious to social graces. INTJs tend to follow social norms, at least to the extent they notice them, while INTPs tend to be nerdier and actively rebel against social rules they view as irrational and meaningless. For example long hair is surprisingly common on INTP men.

2006-02-26T01:13:00.000-08:00

On friday night i ws sitting infront of my system and suddenly an idea came into my mind to play wid snort !
i start exploiting it ...downloaded the latest version ! configured it and start it wid -dev switches .. but that ws not a good implementation so i learnd to start it in demon mode wid full packet logging capability ! it is slow but its complete !
snortalog is a good tool to generate snort reports from /var/log/snort/alerts
it gives statistics of attacks from different angles and in very comprehensive manner !
it can also generate graphs in gif . jpg format wid the help of GDgraph and GDTextUtils .

2006-01-22T16:50:00.001-08:00

Finding the highest UID in /etc/passwd

If I wanted to find the highest user ID in the password file (ignoring the nobody user), I could manually scan /etc/passwd, but that could be tricky if I have 35000 users and the UIDs are jumbled.
Here is a simple solution using four standard Unix tools:

grep -v nobody /etc/passwd awk -F: '{print $3}' sort -n tail -1

(Have a look at the man pages for grep, awk, sort and tail to see how this works).

2006-01-22T16:50:00.000-08:00

Some programs will leave MS-DOS files on a Unix filesystem with uppercase names, which sits awkwardly with perfectionists who dwell in the lowercase... This utility uses tr to shift the file names downcase, with help from echo and mv.#!/bin/sh
# lowerit
# convert all file names in the current directory to lower case
# only operates on plain files--does not change the name of directories
# will ask for verification before overwriting an existing file
# (Not sure who wrote this!)

for x in `ls`
do
if [ ! -f $x ]; then
continue
fi

lc=`echo $x tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'`
if [ $lc != $x ]; then
mv -i $x $lc
fi
done

2006-01-19T06:36:00.000-08:00

Lets solve a puzzel today !

"In an isolated village there is a Barber and only One Barber(male) ! The Barber can and must shave all those men who can't shave themself .Now the question is WHOZ GONA SHAVE THE BARBER ?"

think think and think and when u got tired just pull ur head off !
and if u got the answer i m at zaib[at]pakcon.com.

2006-01-18T07:23:00.000-08:00

Mid term exams are going well ....... i didnt sleep last night becoz of my exams preparation .. cudnt just study becoz the of a reply that i hv to give to one of my mate .. he had asked a question .. so i decided to go online and hv talk wid him ... and i did so ... after talking to him i got relaxed and then strarted study further . I slept after comming back to home at 12 pm noon and just waken up ... long sleep ... ;) .

2006-01-06T05:32:00.000-08:00

Just returned home after my exam for DLD (Digital logic design)
papper went good but not as expected by me .. i ws trying to do 100% but unfortunatly becoz of mismanagement of time i cudnt solve the last question .
neways ....
its a part of the game .