Late night with Compaq Armada 1130, episode name Resurrection.

You may have read from my previous blog posts that I can get some weird computer or electronics stuff free from the University.

It's about that again, this time an old half-portable Compaq Armada 1130.

It seems to be missing the hard drive, RAM modules, the battery and a compatible power adaptor.

Oh, and one key from the keyboard

Some photos: (phear my image effects!)




So the ambitious project is to resurrect this ancient beauty. Now if the replacement parts were anywhere available, for cheap or even better for free... If they are available anywhere at all.

If anything nice happnes with this little one, more blog entries will follow.

After discovering OC ReMix I have been a huge fan of the music compositions there. Like earlier when they released Final Fantasy VII: Voices of the Lifestream album I am now again making a post in my blog of the new album release.

OC ReMix is a site providing everyone free fan-made music based on the music tracks from various video games, from very old retro games to more modern games. Now they have released a special album consisting of remixed musics of Doom II.



If you like games, you like music, or loved the old Doom series, this is a must download. Or if you just want to support free fan-made stuff, go ahead and check the newest release at http://doom2.ocremix.org/ (warning, there is a flash player automatically starting playing a preview of the album music)

The full torrent comes with two versions of the album, one in mp3 format for compatibility and the second encoded in lossless FLAC format for those who don't want to accept but the best quality possible.

Naturally this album will be present in the Music Box along with all the other OC ReMix titles once the music box bot has been reworked. Thanks to the work on voice chat Xfire has been doing lately, many problems with the sound itself are gone, it should be possible to maintain 63 listeners simultaneously!

OC ReMix: http://www.ocremix.org/
Doom II: Delta-Q-Delta homepage: http://doom2.ocremix.org/
Doom II: Delta-Q-Delta torrent download: http://bt.ocremix.org/files/Doom_II_Delta-Q-Delta.torrent

Remember, this is free and legal quality music. If you like it, make sure to tell your friends about it too. The best way to support makers of free stuff is give them as much popularity as possible.

So I was making a system on Linux where a user could run some programs but only with certain parameters. So I couldn't let them have execute access directly as they could have used any parameters. If they could use whatever they wanted, would be too easy to fill out my hard drive space, a single run with different command line could consume a few gigabytes.

The first attempt was to create a simple bash-script and set it with SUID flag and let the other users execute that script. Well, thanks to the security implications of giving SUID flag to shell scripts, this is prevented all the way from the Linux kernel. So to make it possible to run a script with other user credentials, I would need to have a custom kernel, and that's something I wouldn't want to go.

Well, the solution is apparent: let's make it a non-shell script then. I converted the bash-script into a C program. Compiled binray executable can be flagged with SUID and surprisingly enough, it actually worked.

And now to the point about how to call the program from the C code properly when it is to have setuid mode: do not use system function. Got it?

I used execl for the task. It is prototyped as (all parameters const char *):
Code:


The last argument must be NULL, as it has variable count of the arguments. One thing I first did wrong was that the arg0 is actually the file name to be used, just like it is for the program, argv[0], so the parameters start from arg1.

Next up the next script written in C instead of bash...

Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator), the Windows API layer for Unix, has after 15 years of development finally received its first stable release, version numbered as 1.0.

Of course, people would be interested on how well Wine can run Xfire, it seems to work quite well. The long standing problem of the friends list being messed up is still there, but other than that Xfire actually works.

Here are some screenshots (click for full size):


Xfire's download options and browsing for the download folder



As there are no registry entries by the games in Wine's registry, automatic detection doesn't work.



But manual detection still works.



And the games seem to actually be detected.



However, in-game functionality seems to be quite broken...

Following the release of Opera 9.5 a while ago, today another, though more popular, "alternative" browser got their major update out as a full version.

Firefox 3 has been in development for quite a while and has seen many beta and release candidate releases before this day.


As many web developers will agree, anything that gets Internet Explorer to a smaller market share can only be good. Firefox has indeed been eating more and more IE users. Now that the new major update is released, the people at Spread Firefox want to get a new World Record of most downloads for a free software in a day.

So get yours while it is still hot (if you can access the page, it seems to be quite crowded)

EDIT: There's a very good mirror for Windows release here: http://www.xfire.com/downloads/3214

Ok so, I had a bad day.

I received a letter from SII telling me that I will not get student support money for June because I am not studying full-time. The fact is that I have been studying more this month than I did on the past few months, yet they payed me normally then.

The reasoning for that? On my request I only listed one physics course worth 5 study points as a course I will be doing this month. They say that it needs to be at least 5.5 points per month to classify me as studying.

Well, the thing is I have also been attending the practical course of Physics where one goes to the laboratory, performs an experiment and then writes a report of it at home. The course consists of 20 experiments total and is worth 10 points (too little for the amount of work you need to do for it) but it's not that easy. I started this course at the beginning of 2007, doing these tasks every now and then.

Let's compare the situation to last summer. Back then I did nothing else but this practical course. Guess what, they did pay me student aid money for two months, June and August, without completing any course that time.

You think it would have been enough that I had told again that I would be only attending this course which will not be finished anyway during the summer time instead of stating that I will actually complete something? Maybe so. I'm not sure if I want to write a long complaint letter to send them about this, that sounds like work and is not even part of any University course...


Could that alone make a bad day? Knowing me, nope, it can't. Other things include bad weather (the same cloudy/rainy it has been the whole week) and no good food at University restaurant. Actually I didn't even leave my apartment at all today.

Well, that's a minor thing. The most annoying thing that went on was seeing how those spammers on forums are rampant making it absolute pain for nerves to actually be there. Try to see some topic, either helltemplar or starburst119 starts replying with something completely...

The Release Candidate of Opera 9.5 was not long available until the new version was made the latest full version.

The changelog of Opera 9.5: http://www.opera.com/docs/changelogs/windows/950/

Quick tour to the new features of Opera 9.5: http://www.opera.com/products/desktop/

And to get the actual software: http://www.opera.com/download/

After getting a whole new graphical user interface in a development snapshot build last week, Opera 9.5 (codenamed Kestrel) is now closing on official release.

Jon von Tetzchner from Opera ASA wants to say something about this new milestone in Opera's history, read about it from his blog: http://my.opera.com/community/blog/2008/06/10/dear-opera-community

To check out the changes made to this Release Candidate version from earlier snapshots and to download it, see Opera Desktop Team blog

One of the worse sides of having younger siblings is that they can't handle delicate media such as compact discs.

The game Need for Speed: Porsche 2000 (known as Porsche Unleashed in Xfire) had been played quite a bit at home and the CD had become quite scratched over the years, so much that you couldn't even install the game from it anymore. Fortunately at least the CD check worked, the already installed game still recognized the CD being real one so no no-cd cracks were needed.

However, as the disc was already in such bad condition, I decided to try to make it better. The files on the CD were as is and just copied to the install location upon installing, no extraction or anything special needed. This made it possible to make a fixed CD using the files from full installations replacing the files on broken areas of the CD.


Last night I made Alcohol 120% to rip the CD-ROM as an image file to a hard drive of my computer. It took hours, it took just one hour for the program to get from 27.5% to 27.6% in the progress, so I left my computer doing the job over night.

When I woke up the image file was there. However I had no means to actually fix the image file since I made it in Media Description Format. Also the image file could not be completely read when mounted on virtual CD-drive, so I tried making a new image off the original CD, this time in CloneCD format, as that's what CDmage could read at least.

Surprisingly this time the image creation did not hang so much on that 27% area and was considerably faster. I don't know, but I tried to clean the surface a bit, maybe that helped make the difference.

With CDmage I could mostly repair the disc automatically thanks to the CRC sections at the end of each sector, but there were still almost 1000 corrupted sectors left. When I asked the program to compare all the files on the image to those on the game installation, it ended up having difference only in five files!

Those files were movies and a big file with all the game's music in it. Luckily all the bad...

Instead of having a list of blocked IP addresses and allowing others by default, have a list of allowed IP addresses and block others by default.

Sounds like a great idea, doesn't it?

That's exactly what some of the new free MMORPG's seem to do, unfortunately.

One day I saw an advertisement for Mabinogi on Xfire. As I hadn't played any MMO game for a long time, I decided to go with the ad and give it a try, to see what kind of games the free MMORPG's are.

So I downloaded the game client and registered an account as the instructions on the site said. When the download was complete, I was going to start it up right away. First did some shady looking nProtect service pop up and update itself, then the game itself tried to start up but ended with some bizarre error message.

I tried again and got the same non-descriptive error every time. So I went to search about the error from the forums. After reading a few topics I found out that since I am not located in North America, I am not allowed to play this game. I was a bit stumped there, I saw many people discussing about various proxy-like services that would fake their IP addresses and enable them play the game again.

Well, the game was uninstalled from my computer on the same day, I didn't get even a chance to try it as I knew that even if I did get past the crashing part somehow, the game would not let me play anyway after checking that I do not have one of the valid IP addresses that locate to the US or Canada.


Last night I was invited to 2Moons live chat. Being always interested in Xfire's live chats I then participated in it after seeing a few questions to see where we were going in. At the end of the chat, for my surprise, I was selected as one of the winners of the in-game stuff.

That meant that I should download the game client and start playing it a bit to claim my prize. I downloaded the 1 GB installer through Xfire downloads. Since the download page did not have much information and not even a link to the game website, I used Google to find the...