Photos and a Chunk Exploit

Posted on 20 June, 2002 by steevithak

My friend, Robert, from Colorado sent me some photos of Colorado Springs showing all the smoke in the air from the Hayman fire.

And the photos from the DFW Mozilla Release party finally turned up. I’m in the group shot and there’s also a shot of me with Susan. Thanks to Bob Zoller for being the official photographer. We still need names for a couple of the individual shots and anyone in the group shot that isn’t named elsewhere. If you can identify any of the anonymous Mozilla supporters email Bob.

The only other news today is that I spent a lot of time upgrading Apache on our servers because of the chunk handling vulnerability. Working exploit code was posted on Bugtraq this morning, so I thought it might be a good idea to upgrade as soon as possible. We run Ximian Red Carpet on several of our machines and it makes installing all the latest versions of stuff really fast and painless most of the time. But when I fired up Red Carpet on the first server, it segfaulted during startup while connecting to Ximian. It did the same thing on the second server I tried it on. And on the third, fourth, fifth… Something must have been hosed up at Ximian that was causing all the Red Carpet clients to die. I filed a bug on it at Ximian (bad things happening at the server end are no excuse for the client to crash!). Looks like everyone else was busy filing the same bug and there were quite a few dupes by the end of the day. Anyway, I figured out a workaround to get Red Carpet working again and eventually got all our servers updated.

Go Go Mozilla!

Posted on 14 June, 2002 by steevithak

I’m looking forward to ArMozilla 1.0 tomorrow night; the Dallas/Ft.Worth Mozilla Release Party. I generally avoid parties whenever possible but this one sounded too unusual to miss. We’ll see. I’ve been waiting for someone to rewrite the lyrics to BOC’s Godzilla song, replacing Godzilla with Mozilla and maybe throwing in some lines about Microsoft’s army of evil monkeys or something. I haven’t seen anyone do it yet and I don’t think my song writing skills are up to the task either. Still, the original song is buzzing around in my head tonight.

With a purposeful grimace and a terrible sound
He pulls the spitting high tension wires down

Helpless people on a subway train
Scream bug-eyed as he looks in on them

He picks up a bus and he throws it back down
As he wades through the buildings toward the center of town

Oh no, they say he’s got to go
Go go Godzilla, yeah

Oh no, there goes Tokyo
Go go Godzilla, yeah

Rinji news o moshiagemasu!
Rinji news o moshiagemasu!
Godzilla ga Ginza hoomen e mukatte imasu!
Daishkyu hinan shite kudasai!
Daishkyu hinan shite kudasai!

Oh no, they say he’s got to go
Go go Godzilla, yeah

Oh no, there goes Tokyo
Go go Godzilla, yeah

History shows again and again
How nature points up the folly of men
Godzilla!

New GNOME, Slow Nautilus

Posted on 8 May, 2001 by steevithak

Time for another Mozilla upgrade – I’m posting this from Mozilla 0.9 and so far it seems to show the usual incremental improvement. There have been major performance improvements but there still need to be a few more before it’s ready for prime-time. The bookmark manager is still a bit slow and the initial start up is still slower than Netscape but there have been lots of bug fixes and the general responsiveness while browsing is greatly improved over 0.8.1.

I also upgraded GNOME on one of my boxes to Ximian GNOME v1.4. Mostly good with the exception of Nautilus which appears to be a complete waste. Nautilus sucks up huge amounts of memory but doesn’t appear to actually do anything except allow you to get a simple context menu on the desktop and a goofy folder-view of disk directories. The context menu is so slow that it’s virtually unusable (you click on it and nothing happens, you fire up an xterm and do a ps to look for the process to kill and about that time you see the menu option you clicked become hilighted, another 5 seconds or so and the menu option depresses and executes – making something that slow must have taken some work!).

The folder-view thing seems equally useless – it takes up a huge amount of real-estate and the icons are about 4 times larger than they need to be (not to mention that it took around two minutes to open and render for the root directory which has maybe a dozen files and directories to display). I killed all the processes that seemed to be Nautilus-related and GNOME has seemed pretty snappy ever since. I haven’t missed it and GNOME seems to run fine without it, so I guess it doesn’t do anything too important. Now I need to find a way to configure GNOME not to start Nautilus so I won’t have to kill it manually when I start up. Other than Nautilus, GNOME 1.4 seems to have plenty of improvements. The only other complaint I can come up with is that the panel at the top has a clock on it that isn’t removable for some reason (or at least I haven’t figured out how yet).

I was amused to see that Nautilus is so bad that it now has an entire mailing list devoted to flames about it.

robots.net got mentioned on a radio show called Computer Insider about a month ago. I wonder if anybody heard it? (I didn’t even know the radio show existed until I ran across their web site recently!)

New Mozilla Beta Release

Posted on 15 February, 2001 by steevithak

I just finished installing mozilla 0.8. Looks like we’re one version closer to a finished product. The 0.8 files just went up on mozilla.org today. They only had binaries for Linux, Windows, and Mac platforms when I was there but I’m sure the other platforms are on the way. Slashdot hasn’t even mentioned it yet so go download the new version before the rush.

B-Ark Middle Management

Posted on 19 August, 2000 by steevithak

It’s been nearly two weeks since my last news update – I think that’s the longest gap in over a year. It looks like the recent on-site work that’s been sucking up so much of my time will coming to end fairly soon, however. We’re still working on server migration issues and the client is a large company with way too much in the way of corporate politics and B-Ark middle management – so I’ll be glad to get back to work in the Open Source world where people have these wacky ideas about working together and helping each other. I will miss the IT staff I’ve been working with when the job is over though as they are a great group of people.

There’s been all sorts of good news lately. Mozilla is being GPL’ed, Sun, HP, and IBM announced that Gnome is now the standard Unix GUI, IBM has finally produce a working 5 qubit quantum computer, and there are new rumours of Microsoft porting software to Linux (not that anyone would want to use it, but it’s fun to see them running scared). There was also some bad news with the good guys losing to the MPAA (at least in the NY case). Guess that means I’ll be a wanted criminal next time I wear my DeCSS shirt.

Trying out Opera

Posted on 11 July, 2000 by steevithak

I just tried out the Opera web browser and it only took about 30 seconds to determine that it was definitely not for me. It uses some sort of weird, Windows-MDI-style interface where you can only have one Opera window open and little browser windows open inside of the Opera window for each web page. You have some limited ability to scoot the little browser windows around inside of the Opera window but you can’t move them out onto the desktop and put them anywhere you want, so it’s essentially useless for people (like me) who generally have lots of open browsers. If you only look at one web page at a time, it might not be a bad alternative to IE and Netscape but it looks like Mozilla still has the most potential.