Fabrice Bellard –of QEMU fame– has implemented a PC-emulator in JavaScript. So now you can boot Linux in your browser. How geeky is that? Enjoy the show… Here are some technical details.
There is a small C-compiler available. It is ‘tcc’ (also from Bellard). You can use it to compile the sample (hello.c) 
Oh whow this is really nice… The iPhone uses its front-facing camera to track the head of the viewer. Since it knows where the head of the viewer is it can actually simulate a 3D display as can be seen in the video below… is that a cool piece of software or what?
Also on the iPad:
Helaas. Elf jaar te laat maar liever laat dan nooit zullen we maar denken. Een website als deze had nooit nodig hoeven zijn maar nu die er toch is… Ik doe dit niet vaak maar ik zou graag willen oproepen om dit prachtige initiatief van Microsoft® van harte te steunen. Microsoft® wil graag het marktaandeel van IE6 naar minder dan 1% terug brengen. Op de website IE6 countdown geven ze onomwonden toe hoe slecht IE6 eigenlijk is… Webdevelopers wisten dat al 10 jaar geleden. Een stukje zelfreflectie-gebeuren naar de webdeveloper toe… 10 jaar te laat.
Maar goed: steun dit initiatief! Sterker nog: laten we de lat nog net iets hoger leggen. Streef naar een Microsoft®-vrij internet! Op technologisch inferieure producten zit niemand te wachten. Dus als je toch van IE6 wilt afstappen: overweeg eens een echte browser! Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera of één van de andere gratis webbrowsers… Ook een raadzaam advies om op te volgen als je een nieuwere versie van IE gebruikt. Dumpen die handel!
Bedankt Microsoft®! En voortaan met je smerige poten van open standaarden afblijven. Schorem!
Microsoft is once again back at its core business: stealing from others. Here’s a remarkable writeup on a analysis of search results from Google and Bing (Microsoft search engine). Google was suspecting that Bing was somehow copying its searchresults… So they set a trap and guess what they caught (red handed)? Read it here.
My girlfriend –by accident– removed photo’s from her SD-memory-card while trying to make a backup of the photo’s. Yup, a simple case of pressing ‘Yes’ one time too much in a wizard-like windows-GUI-thingy that came along with her digital camera. Luckily she didn’t do any further tampering or run any tools to try to retrieve data from the SD-card. Now I can first put the ‘lock’ on the SD-card and dump an image of the entire card on my linux laptop. Once I had an image of the SD-card I could make copies and tamper with those all I want. If I could not restore files in one way I can just make a fresh copy and try another way… lovely.
Sure I could try to manually traverse the FAT-32 structures on the filesystem but that would take a lot of time. There must be some –free– tool out there to do this for me right? So a little googling pointed me to a tool called PhotoRec which is actually part of TestDisk. TestDisk can be used to recover lost partitions, filesystems and can even undelete files from many types of filesystems. PhotoRec can be used to scan raw data on (even) corrupt filesystems based on known fileheaders (the files should not be fragmented though). Very useful if you’ve had a disk crash and can’t recover the filesystem altogether. Now luckily the SD-card contained a consistent filesystems (although the meta-data was missing). So trying TestDisk first would definitely be the better option. And BINGO! Everything could be recovered: 1.8GB of photos and one happy girlfriend.
Of course –being the nerd I am– I also tried the PhotoRec tool to see what that would yield. In this case the same files were recovered by doing the raw scan of PhotoRec as well. So I would like to highly recommend these tools when you get into a similar situation. The tools are written by Christophe Grenier. They are available for many platforms and even a live-rescue-cd is available. My girlfriend immediately made a backup of the recovered files as she intended all along. Now we consider this as a serious warning on the importance of backups… once again… Still: it was a beautiful monday thanks to Christophe Grenier. Thank–a–you!
For all Unix-lovers out there: happy 15000th epoch day.
Now I will be the first to post hilarious screenshots of windows oddities… just because I think that windows sucks. Big time, that is. Now I encountered a funny thing on my Mac as well.. I was updating my OS and it started downloading. When almost done it showed a very funny estimated time of arrival: -2147483648 hours. So basically I got my update 244978 years ago… Now isn’t that amazing?
The words ‘hacking’ and ‘hacker’ are used in many context nowadays. I like this definition on Wikipedia:
In home computing, a hacker is a person who heavily modifies the software or hardware of their own computer system. It includes building, rebuilding, modifying, and creating software (software cracking, demo scene) or electronic hardware (hardware hacking, modding), either to make it better, faster, to give it added features or to make it do something it was never intended to do.
Now we all know people who actually ‘hack’ equipment (in the definition given above) but there are also people who treat their body as a piece of equipment. They actually operate on themselves and make bionic modifications to their body. They are called ‘biohackers‘ and they are performing ‘transhumanism‘. How fascinating. Here’s a quote
She does her own surgery, with a scalpel and a spotter to catch her if she passes out, and an anatomy book to give her some confidence she isn’t going to slice through a vein or the very nerves she’s trying to enhance.
from this article. Read and think about the concept of regarding your body as a device you can tweak… fascinating… Now let your imagination run wild… What would you like to add to your body if you could? Drop a comment if you have a really cool idea. I would like a device that automatically records everything I hear or see with a recording time of around 1 hour. So 1 hour after the recording I can still back it up to some external device using bluetooth… or maybe a USB connector that I implanted behind my ear. So much cool stuff you could do…
At the Chaos Computer Club Congress Microsofts Bruce Dang shared the knowledge gained by analyzing the Stuxnet worm. Stuxnet appears to be written to specifically attack Irans nuclear centrifuges. It spreads through windows based systems and is pretty nifty… well the most shocking of all is to see the enormous amount of stupid privilege raises that happen because windows doesn’t have a very secure foundation on which it is built (“a print-spooler flaw that allowed remote guest accounts to write executable files directly to disk”… tsk tsk tsk). This is a nice read-up about the stuxnet worm.
Oh wow. You really have to see this for yourself. Is this a cool app or what? Unfortunately I don’t come across much Spanish still from a technological point of view… this is really cool. Download it for free from the AppStore.
Update 2010-12-09 16:09: Rumor goes that amazon will be attacked shortly…
How about this? First amazon kicks wikileaks from their service because “Wikileaks was spreading information that is not theirs”. But now amazon sells it as an e-book for the kindle. Yes, the exact same information wikileaks is spreading for free is now being sold by Amazon. Amazon is now trying to make money out of wikileaks. Hypocrites!
Don’t believe me eh? Check the link (also read the comments/reviews, really funny) and the screenshot below (updated to include pricetag)… bastards!
Here’s one of the great comments:
“Ik heb toch niets te verbergen?” is het meest gehoorde argument als je mensen vraagt naar wat zij vinden van de alsmaar toenemende surveillance mogelijkheden die de Nederlandse overheid in probeert te zetten om haar burgers in de gaten te houden. Natuurlijk je hebt ook niets te verbergen… voor de overheid wellicht… maar wat nu als het in handen van derden valt? Dat is het grote probleem: je verwacht dat overheden –maar ook bedrijven– zorgvuldig omgaan met persoonlijke gegevens van burgers. En juist die verwachting blijkt keer op keer niet waargemaakt te worden. Ik schrijf dit naar aanleiding van een groot lek bij NL-energie maar dat is slechts één voorbeeld van de talloze incidenten die er de laatste tijd boven water zijn gekomen… let wel: de incidenten die bekend zijn geworden. Het topje van de ijsberg dus.
Er zijn strenge regels waaraan bedrijven en overheden moeten voldoen met betrekking tot het omgaan van persoonsgegevens. Echter keer op keer komen incidenten boven water waaruit blijkt dat die regels op grote schaal geschonden worden. Dat is de reden dat ik me elke keer weer onveiliger voel op het moment dat administraties gekoppeld worden, databases worden aangelegd, dataverkeer gemonitord gaat worden en ga zo maar door. Heb ik iets te verbergen dan? Nee! Of ja, eigenlijk wel… mijn identiteit. Ik wil graag mijn eigen identiteit behouden en vooral voor mezelf houden. Ik heb er geen behoefte aan dat organisaties mijn privé-gegevens naar Jan en Alleman lekt.
Well we’ve all been in a situation where the location you work at allows restricted access to the internet. To an IT-guy restricting access to the internet is like squeezing his throat. We can’t breath without unrestricted access to the internet…
Now I do understand you don’t want to grant any employee unrestricted access to the internet from the corporate network. At least half of them will double-click (execute) files called ‘clickme.exe‘ or ‘funny-picture-of-your-mom.exe‘. So here’s a nice trick to get yourself a little more freedom (and privacy) in the office. I will not explain all details. You already need to understand how to tunnel your SSH through the corporate proxy. If you don’t: you are out of luck… and probably someone who would click on ‘unreleased-justin-bieber-song.bat‘ anyway.
Not everything at Microsoft is bad….
He he he, I don’t really need this but I think it is a nice gadget… the Table Connect for iPhone.