Daniel Lange's blog

Disabling a group policy'd screensaver on Windows

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 21:33:05 +0200

I guess many people know the issue of having a screen saver forced active after a some time through a group policy in a corporate environment. This is usually done to make sure systems are locked during breaks if people forget to press Win+L (or Ctrl+Alt+Del and then Enter).
While that may well help IT security, it turns problematic when giving presentations for extended periods of time. Having to move the mouse through the presentation pointer every few minutes or dash back to the PC once the screen saver has kicked in, again, is simply annoying.
On your company's systems you may be able to get the system admins to allow configuration of the interval or allow for disabling the screen saver, but on foreign systems you're often lost. But...

Continue reading "Disabling a group policy'd screensaver on Windows"

Freenode staff list

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 23:30:00 +0200

Donna "Sportchick" Crawford has put up a blog entry on the freenode staff blog listing the currently active 39 freenode staff members. Freenode is growing gradually towards 50.000 users, so we have quite a lot to do .

People readily available to help on very short notice are voiced (+v) in #freenode. Prefer to contact these whenever possible.

If none are voiced, just ask away in #freenode anyways. There are usually some staff reading and many questions can be answered by the channel regulars as well.

/who freenode/staff/*

will give you a list of currently online staff, people that have marked themselves away have a "G" (gone) in their who-line, folks that are there a "H" (here).

You can check when somebody has talked the last time by using whois with the nick appended twice, like

/whois JonathanD JonathanD

(yes, twice the nick!) and thus see who might be able to help for really private matters and who did just idle too long to be really near the keyboard.

kloeri announces Exherbo, another source based Linux distribution

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Mon, 19 May 2008 19:00:00 +0200

Bryan Østergaard (aka kloeri) announced Exherbo today. He assembled a team of (ex-)Gentoo developers including Ciaran McCreesh (ciaranm), Richard Brown (rbrown), Fernando J. Pereda (ferdy) and Alexander Færøy (eroyf) to build a new source based Linux distribution.

They would like to overcome some of the short-commings of Gentoo both from a technical as well as from a community perspective. Obviously this is easily said and hard to really achieve, so time will tell how successful that team can be. Renaming USE-Flags to OPTIONS and merging the platform KEYWORDS (like x86, ~x86) into the Options-logic is no big deal, but getting the thousands of ebuilds^Hpackages better supported and maintained than Gentoo will be the real deal{maker|breaker}.

Paludis, ciaranm's package manager, supports Gentoo ebuilds and can import them into Exherbo, so there is a potential migration path sketched out.*

They also add another init-system re-write ("Genesis") to the pool. An already quite crowded pool with rather shallow water, I may add.

Exherbo has nothing that is end-user-safe at the time of the announcement, so it's safe to assume kloeri's team wants to attract further development capacity .

Browse around the website or join folks in #exherbo if you're interested.

I asked in #exherbo what "exherbo" means ... latin for "uproot" was the answer. How fitting.

Updates

*19.04.08: Two friendly folks wrote in to clarify that Paludis currently can only import Ebuild-builds into Exherbo via importare, i.e. take a Gentoo build result and package it for importing into the Exherbo system through Paludis.
23.05.08: Ciaranm wrote a blog entry how to get build results into Exherbo/Paludis via importare.

Seredipity default event_s9ymarkup plugin breaking URLs that contain underscores

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 13:30:00 +0200

The default Serendipity mark-up plugin (event_s9ymarkup) currently breaks URLs that contain underscores.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statler_%26_Waldorf

will end up

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statler%26_Waldorf

because of a faulty regex.

Garvin Hicking does not really want to fix this. (See this s9y support forum article for arguments pro/contra fixing it). So if you encounter this problem, your options are:

replace _ in URLs with %5F (aka manually urlencode it)
remove the plugin or disable it
patch the plugin

Patching is basically changing

plugins/serendipity_event_s9ymarkup/serendipity_event_s9ymarkup.php:

$text = preg_replace('/\b_([\S ]+?)_\b/','\1',$text);

$text = preg_replace('/\ _([\S ]+?)_\ /',' \1 ',$text);

If you want to be writing things like "Haha[_lol_]" (which I have no real use for ...), extend the "\ " with whatever you'd like to be o.k. to delimit _bolded_ words beyond blanks. It should only be symbols that are not valid in URLs (so none of "$-_.+!*'()," which are all valid in URLs according to RFC 1738).

You may also want to consider replacing one underscore ("_") with two or more ("__") to make the detection, that you actually wanted to write bold text, more reliable.

Updated Greasemonkey script for Xing

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 23:45:37 +0200

Xing has just updated it's image-thumbnails naming "algorithm" once again:

You'll now find thumbnails named /2f1127fe2.3144098_s2,2.jpg, so including another component like <comma><digit> added to the name. Thus the Greasemonkey script linked from my article Greasemonkey to enlarge Xing pictures needs to have it's main regex amended:

Change _s(1|2|3)?\. to read _s(1|2|3)?(,\d)?\. in three places in the script.

Or download an updated version here. I hope "louis" will update the version hosted at userscripts.org, too.

Update

02.05.2008 As Xing adds multi-digit numbers to the thumbnails now (like /7553bd445.4550412_s2,10.jpg), you need to replace \d with \d+ in the above regex. The linked Greasemonkey script is updated.

Remote keyless entry system Keeloq broken by security researchers

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:45:00 +0200

The remote keyless entry system KeeLoq is being used by Chrysler, Daewoo, Fiat, General Motors, Honda/Infiniti, Jaguar, Toyota/Lexus, Volvo and Volkswagen. A number of garage door opening systems and the like also use this technology. It is based on a secret cipher that has now been compromised by an international IT security research team. Two intercepted messages are deemed sufficient to clone a KeeLoq RFID tag as there are general keys inserted by the manufacterer and the key structure is partially determined by make and model. A stronger KeeLoq implementation (still) needs physical access to the key but only for a few minutes. It's also possible to permanently lock the legitimate owner out of his car or building and render his KeeLoq RFID useless. Details can be found at the researchers site and the folks at Wikipedia have also amended their KeeLoq article.

Greasemonkey to enlarge Xing pictures

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 23:30:00 +0100

I use Xing to manage some of my business contacts and even some friends have profiles there as well.

The default size of contact's pictures displayed on one's Xing homepage is 18x24px. On a higher dpi screens, you can thus barely recognize the person shown. As there are multiple sizes of all images available, it's pretty easy to just take (for example) http://www.xing.com/img/users/d/f/1/f34814409.5648827_s1.jpg, remove the _s1 and see a 140x185px version of the picture.

Greasemonkey, a Firefox extension to run user specified scripts on selected pages that you visit, can automate this with a nice script from user louis to download here. Or my updated version here.*

So, everytime I now hover my mouse over a tiny Xing thumbnail, it will show the "full resolution" version of the image. Simple, efficient.

Update

* Xing changed it's image naming scheme a bit, so one needs an updated Greasemonkey script for all images to work again. Link inserted into the article text ("Or my updated version here.")

Wikimedia Fundraiser 2007/2008 Report published by Wikimedia Foundation

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 07:30:22 +0100

Eric Möller has published his report on the Wikimedia 2007/2008 fundraiser. I found it because he hotlinked one of the images that I created for my detailed analysis. His report lists some interesting new information:

Wikimedia got $50,000 in Google stock from another - yet again - anonymous donor.
The Wikimedia chapters (local organisation units e.g. in Germany or France) have collected nearly $250,000 in their fundraisers (mostly in Germany). The Germans buy stuff of their own from the money. Only the Swiss donated 25% of their raised budget back to Wikimedia foundation. Eric explains: "The lack of a clear understanding between chapters and the Foundation about the role and responsibilities of the different entities in the fundraising process is an additional impediment. For example: Should chapters share fundraising revenue with the Foundation, and if so, how? [..] The German chapter has an informal agreement with the Foundation to invest half of its fundraising revenue in ways directly benefiting WMF projects."
Eric says it was not intended to raise the full $4.6m. Somehow people just mis-interpreted the fundraiser that way: "The publication of the planned spending was misunderstood by some to indicate that the fundraiser's goal was to raise 4.6 million dollars. [...] Inquiries related to the actual financial target of the fundraiser were less common, probably in large part due to the publication of the Foundation's planned spending."

The report is extremly low on self-criticism. There is no insight visable that not giving a financial target was a major bummer or that the general intransparency, unprofessional communication and amateurish reporting on financial issues was keeping many people from donating. Nothing about missing the 100,000 donors target, either. There is not a word on the webcomics deletion issues and the subsequent call by the webcomics community to boycot the fundraiser or the scandal around hiring a convicted felon as COO because of unprofessional HR work. Not a word on the ridiculous "dinner with Jimmy Wales" for people donating $25,000. Nobody even donated $10,001.

"Also, given that most of the viewers of the planned spending distribution had no financial background, the level of explanations given was probably not sufficient." Come on, Eric, the people with financial background are not even considering the published material as "planning".

And next time, please link a blog entry and not some graphics. Criticism is healthy. Let people develop an opinion of their own. Try putting a "public criticism" section into your report. It will definitely add to the report's credibility.

Update

03.02.08: Eric has ammended information from the Italian chapter. They raised around $3,000 and forwarded it all to Wikimedia foundation.

Wikimedia Fundraiser Follow-up

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 22:30:00 +0100

The Wikimedia fundraiser has generated a few interesting posts and received further analysis today:

Erik Möller sent a wrap-up email stating that the fundraiser has also gained "a single unrestricted $500K donation by an anonymous donor". Him quoting that the Fundraiser "raised altogether more
than 2 million dollars" may also explain why the fundraiser ran two days longer. "More than two million" just sounds so much better than "nearly two million"...
He also explains "Last month, Sue & I took a first tour through the Silicon Valley, and with the help of one of Jimmy's friends [ed: Roger McNamee of Elevation Partners], we've been able to meet with a number of key people in the area who could make major contributions to the Foundation. We're planning a dinner with potential major donors and rainmakers next month, and we hope to also form some stable group or committee of influential & networked people who can help us raise major contributions.

Our general process with these individuals has been to give them a standard presentation about the past & present, and a highly tentative view of the future of the organization, to answer any questions they have, and to then follow-up and cultivate the relationships further. What we seek is preferably completely unrestricted, philanthropic seed funding as we set up headquarters in San Francisco.

In addition to these meetings, we've also had some first exploratory discussions with Sun Microsystems about developing some kind of partnership(s) - this is still very provisional, and we'll follow up in the next month." as a result to a leaked confidential Powerpoint presentation from the mentioned Sun meeting.

Continue reading "Wikimedia Fundraiser Follow-up"

Wikimedia Fundraiser Analysis III

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 18:10:00 +0100

The official Wikimedia fundraiser had been extended into January, 3rd 2008, has been kept up on the 4th and is kind of still running. The site notice has been trimmed down to a thank you message but still requests further donations, which are also continuously added to the official daily funds list and running totals as of the press time of this article.

I've presented two interim analysis

Wikimedia Fundraiser analysis I on 03.11.07, some two weeks into the fundraiser
Wikimedia Fundraiser analysis II on 23.11.07, summing up expectations and results for the initially intended duration of the fundraiser (22.11.07)

Today, let's wrap up the fundraiser until the second official close date 03.01.08:

From 22.10.07 until 03.01.08 43,837 people have contributed a total of $1,467,446 (US) according to Wikimedia's own stats (see the previous two articles mentioned above for a discussion of their reporting scheme).

Continue reading "Wikimedia Fundraiser Analysis III"

Wikimedia Fundraiser continues past extended deadline

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 19:55:31 +0100

The Wikimedia fundraiser was scheduled to end yesterday, 03.01.08, after the deadline had already been extended. The donations headers and pages are still up and people have contributed similar amounts today compared to yesterday, so Wikimedia is approaching 1.5m$ with funds coming in at 17,880$/day (last 10 day average) up from the $12,400 seen right before Christmas.

There is no communication from Wikimedia when the fundraiser will be ending now. The FAQ still says yesterday and questions on the talk pages are currently unanswered.

Wikimedia Fundraiser Analysis II

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 21:15:00 +0100

Yesterday, 22.12.2007, the initial deadline for the Wikimedia fundraiser ran out.

It has been extended to 03.01.2008 but it's a good time to assess the results so far as
yesterday ends the initially planned duration of the fundraiser.
As I documented in the original Wikimedia Fundraiser Analysis article, the
Wikimedia Foundation hoped to raise up to $4.611m. Measuring the success of the fundraiser
was conducted through a meter showing the number of people that donated rather than
the accumulated total donations, like in previous years. The target seemed to be set at 100,000
people donating. That was later confirmed.
The estimations from the first two weeks of fundraising up to 03.11.07 were: $1.68m to be raised from 60,500 people.
That was well below the (unofficial) target of $4.611m and the (official) 100,000 donors goal.

So, where are we after the initially planned two months of fundraising have been completed?

Continue reading "Wikimedia Fundraiser Analysis II"

Wikimedia Fundraiser extended to 03. January 2008

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 22:56:04 +0100

I have just noted that the Wikimedia Foundation has extended the deadline for the fundraiser from 22. December 2007 to 03. January 2008. Here's the diff from the Fundraising FAQ.

The funds are currently coming in at just above 12,000$ a day and have so far reached 1.24m$, a huge sum sufficient to cover half of the technology budget Wikimedia proposed for it's fiscal year 2007/2008. That includes unspecified salaries, so may be the funds will be sufficient to operate Wikipedia a year. But obviously the total grants fall expectedly short of the total 4.61m$ planned for spending.

SSHd chroot and PAM

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 19:09:14 +0100

SSH with chroot patch has been working fine for a number of years. Since PAM v0.99 things have broken though, if users are chrooted with the "/home/username/./" syntax as their homedir.

SSH sessions will just terminate immediately after successful logon. Doh.

Two solutions exist:

Put UsePAM no into /etc/ssh/sshd_config and use the chroot patch and /./ in users homedirs
Keep UsePAM yes. Emerge sys-auth/pam_chroot and add session required pam_chroot.so to /etc/pamd.d/sshd setup /etc/security/chroot.conf or add a chroot_dir=/home/username/ to the pam_chroot.so line.
This will currently not work for amd64 though as the Gentoo bug regarding pam_chroot has not cought any attention from the arch testers. Since July...

Bugging the arch testers in #Gentoo-amd64 didn't help either:

Continue reading "SSHd chroot and PAM"

Wikimedia Fundraiser Webpage now cuts off at the last 10.000 donations

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 17:00:00 +0100

The Wikimedia Foundation has changed their donation web pages again. Now they cut off the "Recent contributions" at 400 pages of (max.) 25 donors each. Thus the commands I gave in the Wikimedia Fundraiser analysis article can't be repeated to give the full picture anymore. You can now only get a view of the last 9-10 days.

The implementation has obviously been done quite hastily. If you select the "Filter" to show only one page of results, you'll still get the (now hard-coded) 0 .. 400 pages selector at the bottom.

I've been pointed at two other resources on the recent fund raiser for information:

There is an IRC Channel that lists donations (irc://irc.freenode.net/#wikimedia-donations). Running it a few minutes, it showed far fewer donations coming in than the better known web page though.
There are a few threads in the Wikipedia Review Forum that deal with the fund raiser. The discussions there are very Statler and Waldorf style but these folks also did the math.

Updates

09.11.07: Casey Abell has added http://donate.wikimedia.org/en/node/22 to the comments which lists a daily report of the funds collected. Thanks Casey! The numbers match very well with my analysis. Wikimedia currently reports $27,97 average donation. I measured $27,85 six days ago. That seems stable. Interim conclusion:There are still major individual donations required to get anywhere above $2m.

10.11.07: Casey generates a nice graph of the daily funds collected here.