Martin @ Blog

The Dutch site MacOSX.nl has a videon online which shows a MacBook (the black edition, so it is a 2,0GHz version) which is running both Mac OS X, Windows (Vista?) and Ubuntu Dapper Drake (beta) on the same time. In order to achieve this, the virtualisation software from Parallels is used. In the video also a virtual desktop application is used, in this case Virtue, so it is possible to run every os full screen on its own desktop. It looks pretty fast on the video and certainly faster than using VMware or something on a Pentium M (which I have in my laptop). Probably this is caused by the Virtualisation Technology from Intel which is build into the Core Duo processor in the MacBook. I think it would be very nice to run Mac OS X and Linux at the same time at almost native speed… The Gimp for example is on Linux a lot faster than on Mac OS X, in my experience.

Today I read about this article on Slashdot. It is written by a teacher who helped a student reporting a vulnerability on a public (commercial?) website. Because shortly after their report the website was hacked and the police investigated the case, they were almost treated like criminals. I think this is ridiculous. It is almost the same that you will get arrested when you report a suspicious bag on a railway station or warn a house owner when you see that he left his front door open. Fortunately, here in the Netherlands there is no law which enables the police to arrest people for reporting a vulnerability as far as I know (and according to a teacher at our university). Hopefully the EU will not take the US law as an example for this kind of stuff, because the people over there who created this law are obviously not aware of the daily practice regarding the discovery of flaws in software. A typical example of the ignorance of some politician.
The teacher in the article concludes that you should destroy all the evidence that you are aware of an existing vulnerability and certainly not tell the developer/site owner about the bug. While it may be the best thing to do, it is really crazy that you should do this. How the hell do politician want the get a ‘safer and better world’ when it is not allowed to report defects? On the other side, it explains the growing number of spam, the increase in identity theft, the new problems with phising and so on… if they are not going to change this laws and rules, I think we are only seeing the beginning of these things.

• People who still are not convinced to use Firefox, this page gives some good reasons.
• Microsoft introduces a Pay-as-you-go computer, which means that you can only use your (own?) computer when you have bought enough credits in advance…
• According to a US Attorney, it is not allowed for journalist to publish about leaks.
• The US State Department is affraid that Lenovo uses their computers to spy the US governement. Since Lenovo bought the computer department of IBM, there is a discussion in the US about this fear. They think that Lenovo, because it is partly owned by a deparment of the Chines government, will install espionage devices in their computers. Ironically, the Lenovo systems which are sold to the US government are manufactured in the VS, while most other US computer manufacturers such as Apple, Dell and HP manufacture their systems in Taiwan or China…

Apple today finally introduced the successor to the iBook G4: The MacBook. Not very surprising, because there were rumours about this system for weeks, and the new MacBook is exactly as it was announced by the various Apple rumour sites: a 13″ widescreen display, build-in iSight camera, Intel Core Duo processor, MagSafe powerconnector and the unit is available in both black and white – which is new, because the iBook was only available in white. The cheapest MacBook costs 1099 euro (1099 dollar also) and ships with a 60GB harddisk, 1,83GHz Core Duo processor, build in wireless network and 512MB memory. The display resolution is 1280×800 pixels and has a glossy coating which makes pictures and movies clearer according to Apple, but makes the screen also more sensitive to reflections I suppose. The most expensive MacBook contains a 80GB harddisk and a 2,0GHz Core Duo processor. This system also contains a superdrive and build-in Bluetooth, things which are missing from the cheaper models. I think it is a very nice system for its price – nice design, exelent operation system (Mac OS X) and it is even thinner than the iBook (only 1,08″). The addition of a black version makes it also intersting for people who do not like the white systems, but I think the white version is nicer than the black one. When I had to buy a new laptop now, I would take this system seriously into consideration. However, I think I would wait a few months, because then Intel will introduce the successor to the current Core Duo, the Core 2 Duo. This new processor adds 64-bit support and will probably be faster while the energy consumption will be reduced. The Core 2 Duo is based on the ‘Merom’ core for the laptop version and the ‘Conroe’ core for the desktop variant – yes, Core 2 Duo is both a laptop as a desktop processor.

Last weekend there was the FIRST LEGO League Open European Championship at the university in Eindhoven. I visited it both Saturday and Sunday where I took some pictures with my new Sigma 70-300 APO lens. I didn’t have the time yet to filter the pictures and put them on the internet, but I will do that soon. It was very nice to see how smart some children are. The idea is that the teams build a robot using Lego Mindstorm to solve some ‘problems’. The battles were intersting and it was nice to see something like this for a change.

I also finished the redesign of the website of ESBV Panache. The site is pretty simple, but has to be available in both English and Dutch.

I think electric cars are the solution to a lot of traffic problems we are currently suffering. This article gives us hope for the future. I think products which use sustainable energy are the products of the future and will generate a lot of profit. The car in that article is faster than any Ferarri and almost as fast as the fasted production car on petrol.

For a course at the university, I needed an installation of an older Linux-distribution. The course, hackers hut, is about the basics of hacking and security of Linux systems. In order to complete the course, one has to do some excercises, like exploiting a buffer overflow or a format vulnerability. On most modern Linux distributions, there are a number of improvements, which makes it difficult to complete these excercises. Some of these improvements are a randomized stack pointer, non-executable stack or SELinux. So in order to be able to test your knowledge, it is nice to have an older Linux distribution to hack on.

So, I decided to look more into the virtual machines which are currently available. Because Xen is not very convenient for my purposes, I decided to give the free tools of VMware a try. First, I downloaded VMware Player and using this site I was able to install Red Hat Linux 7.3 on it. However, it not very convenient to install an operating system on a VMware Player instance, because it is not possible to umount a cd-rom image (the only way I could resolve this problem was by using a hard link to the iso I wanted to use, and change this link when I had to change the cd-rom). Also there were some stability problems during the installation. In the end, however, I was able to get it working as it should.

Because I was not satisfied with the experience with VMware Player, I decided to give the other free product of VMware a try, VMware Server. To my surprise this product is very similar to VMware Workstation (which I used before) and also has a lot more options than VMware Player. The installation of VMware Server on Ubuntu Linux 5.10 (Breezy Badger) was a lot more difficult than the installation of VMware Player, because it required me to compile a kernel module, which on its turn required me to install the kernel headers (linux-headers) and compile tools (build-essential and gcc-3.4). After a number of installations and trying, I was able to get it working in the end. The nice thing is that it is possible to load the image created with VMware Player without any hassle. VMware Server has some additional stuff which is useful, like the ability to install the vmware-tools in the distribution and to resize the partitions on the fly. Next time, when I want to do something with virtual machines, I will try VMware Server first instead of VMware Player. Obviously, there is still a big drawback of the VMware products, and that is the fact that they are not open source and VMware Server requires registration before one can use it. Maybe I have to look also at the open source alternatives someday.

I did not updated this blog very often. I have the intention to change this, because there are some topics I want to write about.. Although nobody reads here, but well, that doesn’t really matter… I am playing nice and not disturbing anyone 🙂

Last week Sun’s co-founder and CEO Scott McNealy decided to drop its function as CEO. He will remain chairman of the board and keep working for Sun, but he will not be the CEO anymore. The new CEO of Sun is Jonathan Schwartz, who was already Chief Operating Officer (COO) at the company. Now the CEO has changed at Sun, people start speculating that the company will ‘open source’ Java. However, it seems that this is based on the press release in which the new function of Schwartz is announced.. and the statement about Java is relatively vague in my opinion, so one should not expect to much of it. However, it would be interesting when Sun decided to make Java free, mainly for the open source desktop and community. But I don’t think this will happen anytime soon.

The first home-made video’s for the contest of the Mozilla Foundation for an advertisement for tv have appeared on the internet. While most of them are just ‘nice’, one is actually very funny. Unfortunately the video is in Quicktime format, so most people are not able to watch the video.

Sinds gisteren ben ik twee weken in Leeds voor mijn afstudeerproject. Het afstudeerproject wat ik doe vindt plaats binnen een samenwerkingsverband tussen de Technische Universiteit Eindhoven en de University of Leeds. Daarom leek het mijn afstudeerdocente wel leuk als ik twee weken naar Leeds zou gaan. Zo geschiedde, en gisteren zat ik daarom om 9:45 Nederlandse tijd in het vliegtuig, om 15 minuten later Engelse tijd weer voet aan de grond te zetten op het vliegveld van Leeds. Ik verblijf in een studentencomplex van de universiteit, waar ik helaas geen internet heb en ook geen tv is, dus echt veel te beleven is daar niet. Gelukkig kan ik wel 24 uur per dag terecht op de universiteit waar ik een eigen werkplek heb.

Leeds is best een aardige stad wat ik er tot nu toe van heb gezien. Het is een vrij grote stad, volgens de vrouw die me in Leeds begeleid de vijfde grootste stad van Engeland, al vraag ik me af of dat daadwerkelijk zo is. De universiteit is in ieder geval een aanzienlijk stuk groter dan de TU/e en heeft ook veel meer voorzieningen. Zo zijn er allerlei eetgelegenheden op de campus en zijn er zelfs bars en discotheken op de campus; iets wat volgens mij in Nederland nergens is. Sowieso is heel de sfeer hier anders dan in Nederland. Er lopen veel meer mensen over straat en er zijn allerlei mensen bezig met fotografie, filmen en overleggen verspreid over het universiteitsterrein. Ik heb nog geen moment meegemaakt dat er niemand liep hier op de universiteit, zelfs niet toen ik gisteren om 21:00 naar huis ging.