erroneous thoughts

my contribution to that global pool of memes, otherwise known as Internet

Archive for February 2008

Cold boot attacks

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I guess computer security is really in the eye of the beholder. This video shows a demo of a successful attack against laptops with disk encryption, even when the attacker only gets the laptop after it’s turned off.

Written by gauthma

February 27, 2008 at 3:37 PM

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And now for something completely …

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… irrelevant? Maybe not, but still, how do pronounce Xine? Not how I used to say it, apparently. Well, regardless of however you should say the name, I still think X-ine is a great player :P

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February 26, 2008 at 6:48 PM

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Um eterno distraído

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Ora este fim de semana lá voltei eu a Coimbra. Rever os amigos e tal, enfim como tudo o que é bom, passou depressa. Tão depressa, tão depressa, que me esqueci no Domingo à tarde é quando toda a gente vai para Lisboa… Então chega aqui o je à estação de Coimbra-b, lá para as seis da tarde, e na bilheteira, pergunto “qual é o próximo comboio para Lisboa?” (tinha chegado um pouco em cima da hora por isso não sabia se o que queria apanhar já não tinha saído) Responde-me o tipo da bilheteira: “suponho que queira um comboio com lugares” … “Wtf?!” Após pesquisar durante um bom bocado, diz-me que o próximo comboio é daqui a 45 minutos, no alfa em primeira classe. “?!?!”

A única outra opção era duas horas depois no intercidades… que já não dava porque chegava a Lx muito tarde… E pronto, assim paguei eu o dobro do que pago normalmente para ter uma poltrona mais espaçosa, phones pa ligar ao assento e ouvir o sporting levar na tromba… o que vale é que ao menos ia bem confortável e com boa luz para ler confortavelmente :-)

Mas o melhor estava para vir. Quando o revisor me pediu o bilhete, eu entreguei-lho, e, com o ar mais natural deste mundo, perguntei-lhe: “desculpe, podia dizer-me a que horas está previsto chegarmos a Coimbra?”. O mais incrível é que mesmo depois de ele, com ar muito preocupado, olhar para mim e dizer “Desculpe?!” eu ainda fiquei uns bons segundos a pensar no porquê daquela atrapalhação toda…

Velhos hábitos custam a morrer… o_O

Written by gauthma

February 26, 2008 at 6:28 PM

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Hard links

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A curiosity about hardlinks (on Unix like filesystems)

Written by gauthma

February 17, 2008 at 11:38 PM

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Far Cry the movie

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Following suit to the previous post, also this was not looking for…

Hum, might replay the game, just to see if this time I get to finish it…

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February 16, 2008 at 12:01 AM

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The things you find when you’re *not* looking

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For instance, do you know what’s the difference between Shockwave and Flash? But they both still suck, of course :-)

Written by gauthma

February 15, 2008 at 11:42 PM

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nanon

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That’s the name of a little great piece of software that my former adviser from college came up with. It’s exactly the thing I needed to solve a problem with my other page: basically I avoided frames, so to deal with the code for common menus and stuff (that had to be included multiple times in different places), I used PHP. Yes, just for those includes. Yes, it *is* ugly, but back then I knew of no other choices. Eventually I came across server side includes, but those didn’t work (weren’t configured) in the server machine. So I dumped all the code from the menus into Javascript print statements (servlets anyone?). That was even uglier, but at least it didn’t render the whole site into oblivion each time someone borked the PHP install (which happened all too often….)

Until nanon came along: it gives you “server side includes”, but without actually needing to touch the server to do so! :-) And it’s almost unbelievably simple to use. Highly recommended if you need to quickly build a “static” HTML+CSS site. My thanks to the author! ;-)

Written by gauthma

February 6, 2008 at 1:18 AM

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