MX 2005

It was weeks ago. Attended the MX 2005 conference held here to launch the V8 of Macromedia products including Flash and Studio. I find that the programming part, used to be called ActionScript 2 (now ActionScript 3) is getting more and more like Microsoft IDE. In fact, many of the top designer and man in chargeof the systems are ex-Microsoft guys. :) So we can expect MS people to pick up quickly on this.

During the QA, top question came up to be "What is PHP?" I wanted to slap my forehead, then I suddenly remembered. We all know what that is (maybe some of us don't) but what does it stands for? PHP stands for "PHP:Hypertext Preprocessor". Yes its a recursive shortform. :) OF course many other questions came up and it seems pretty normal to most people. Not to the programmers of course. One of the audience (The same one that asked the PHP question I think) pointed out that "i++" in a for loop is wrong. I almost died laughing. But come on, from a non programmer, that certainly looks BS to me.

Anyway, I do wish to get some time to try out Macromedia products, but unfortunately they did not give out any demo.

Of birds and snakes

There were a group of birds who live in a wooden box in the garden. The box are opened one way and they hide from their enemy, the snake, who wanted to eat them.

One day, Bird A discovered a hole on the box and informed the Elder bird about it. The Elder, instead of being thankful, accused Bird A of making the hole in the first place. Bird A was quickly punished and banished to silent the whole issue.

Bird B is a good friend of Bird A, but is not brave enough to voice out the truth. But knowing the danger, he fled from the box in fear that the Elder will punish him if he knows that he knows about the hole.

In the meantime, everyone believed the Elder and he said it is perfectly safe in their box. However the snake soon found out about the box and started eating up the birds one by one.

A few months passed and Bird B came back to the box. There is no one left. Bird B took a stone and stuff it into the hole covering it and lived happily everafter. Nobody heard of Bird A, some said he was eaten by the snake, others said he founded his own box somewhere else.

Sony XCP DRM Rootkit Remover V1.2

Made some changes about rebooting... Apparently, its better to reboot and then delete the aries.sys. Anyway, if anyone who has tried this, please leave me a comment.

V1.2
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=9GE654PS
http://rapidshare.de/files/7806904/Sony_XCP_Rootkit_Remover.exe.html

Sony XCP DRM Rootkit Remover

Based on Mark Russinovish of Sysinternals finding and methods :
http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/10/sony-rootkits-and-digital-rights.html

Affecting the following CD (not exhaustive) :
http://sunbeltblog.blogspot.com/2005/11/list-of-cds-that-have-drm_09.html

And here is the Sony XCP Rootkit Remover:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=DYC609KS
http://rapidshare.de/files/7704839/Sony_XCP_Rootkit_Remover.exe.html

It works in Win NT/95/98/ME/XP/2003. Please leave any comments here.

Sony DRM

I am totally disappointed at the way Sony handles the DRM issue : By Installing a Rootkit! Well if you are going to ask what the hell is a rootkit? Its something that injects inside into your computer, then stealth itself so that even the process list cannot find it. Basically, it took over your computer. Well, back to Sony DRM. As usualy, this ends up hurting the people who bought ORIGINAL and support the music industry (well, at least Sony's industrial). Well done. The pirates never had a problem and its is highly unlikely you will find the DRM rootkit in those pirated CD.

OK, now comes the interestign part. Sony says it cant be harmful. Totally wrong. So far, 2 variants of trojans and several MMORPG trainers had made use of this. All backed by Sony's Technology. Now, when the DRM rootkit is in anyfiles named $sys$*.* will not be detetable. Don't laugh, I know what you are thinking. ANY process you can just rename it such and you have a stealthware protected by Sony's Technology. I can only imagine what else can people make from this? Perhaps a random file deleter? Emm... IF you own a Sony CD in the past year, its time to sweat, because as of now, there is no way to remove it without crippling your Windows. I am researching a bit on this. Hopefully, can fidn a way to undo the damage.

KDE on Gentoo

Well, I finally got some time to work back on the Gentoo Project. After a sucessful reboot with al lthe building of kernels and stuff, I am still basically in a shell with nothing there. Ok, almost nothing. So, I figure I need KDE since I already had Gnome on most of my other system... So why not? And I probably wnat ALL the KDE package for that matters... So here goes...

emerge kde

That was 4:00pm today.. Its still compiling. KDE and Gentoo is definitely not for the fast and furious.

Upgrading Ubuntu

V5.10 Breezy has been out for a while. I guess many people are probably still unsure what needs to be done to upgrade from 5.04 Hoary... Well, I learn it the hard way.

Let me tell you the wrong way to do it first. Download the CD. Not the LiveCD but the installation. Either its cache or the Internet is really fast. Then pop it in and install it. Wait, it stopped somewhere saying it found the old version and cacenl itself. Well, I should had thought why did it do that, but I was just rushing and I went back to the menu and force it to install anyway... After some more wasted time anda reboot. My Ubuntu is pretty dead. Another one bites the dust.

OK, let try another approach. On another Ubuntu. I installed Synaptic. Its cool and I am going to tell you why. First you open up /etc/apt/sources.list. Backup this file is you want to. Simply replace blindly "hoary" to "breezy". This is where I miss my [Ctrl][H]. Anyway, just get it done using emac, vi, or whatever.

Then fire up Synaptic. Go to Sources and you probably still see your old CD source there. I don't know why I didn't removed it in the sources.list. Anyway, its a good check. If its there delete it. If not, no harm done. Next insert the 5.10 CD if you have it.

Edited : You will have to remove the first line usually with the "cdrom" label in the source.

Run "apt-cdrom add" and it will add your CD as the new source. Unless your CD is damaged, it should be recognized as the Brezzy CD.

Run "apt-get update" and it should update your source list to point to the new breezy repositories. IF this part fail due to network, please try until it works.

Now, this is the longest part. Run "apt-get dist-upgrade" and yes, you may need to download some package since Breezy has been out for a while and newer package may had been out. Mine was about 450MB anyway, but I didn't really care. Time to grab my cereals and skim milk and take my breakfast.

After the reboot, you should have a working Ubuntu breezy now. I did. Just don't do what I did in the first place of this article. Now, I have time to tacklethe Gentoo...

Scarborough Fair

I remember Sarah Brightman's version of this song... But thats about all I know of this song.
I happened to hear it again a few days ago while watching Futurama S3 and even in the 30th century, the hibbies still are singing it, well, with some robotics remix in it, but still the same song.

It has brought up enough interest in me to dig up my DVDs of both Sarah's concert and listen to the wonderful song again. Then after a few repitition... I started to surf for information on the song because honestly, I really did not understand much about why the singer is asking the man she love to do all these impossible tasks.

Then to my realization, this song was not written by modern days writers... Its date back all the way to Dark Age... And because it was carried by the bards of those days from town to town, there are many version of it around. Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme turns out to be flowers which carries a different meanings then. The meaning of the songs are clearer, especially after some explaination from these sites :

http://www.geocities.com/paris/villa/3895/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarborough_Fair

Its a great song to enjoy under the pale moonlight in solitude.