Posted by Tim
Filed under: RoboCup
Atlanta here we come
In a couple of ours we (AllemniACs RoboCup Team of the RWTH Aachen) will leave for Atlanta to participate in this years RoboCup 2007 world championship. I'm packing while writing this lines so I'll be brief. Stay tuned and read my RoboCup blog which I will hopefully find some time to fill it.
Posted by Tim
Filed under: Geek
Flash 9 in 64-Bit Firefox on Fedora 7
It's a shame but these days on the web without flash is kinda boring and in some situations you won't even get to the information you want...
I tried out Gnash, but it does not seem to be fit for general usage, yet. It worked for the easier eye-catchy things on some websites, but with ugly fonts and several minor issues. But when I tried it on YouTube it blew away my window manager, not a good thing...
So for now unfortunately I have to stick with the Adobe plugin. But with that one there is another problem: there is no 64 bit version. But also for this there is a workaround which works like a charm for me. I have documented this as Flash 9 in 64-Bit Firefox on Fedora 7 in my wiki.
Posted by Tim
Filed under: Geek
My work is illegal now
For our robots I have developed a new communication system that allows for inter-robot communication and for a control connection to a robot. Of course it did not work in the first run and I had to debug the code. For this I needed to know, what was going on on the network, what data was sent, to see if I sent the right data to understand if the error was made on the sender or the receiving site. It was a tool for me like a pincers to a carpenter who had to "debug" a nail that got bent.
Now today the German Bundestag voted for a law that will make this illegal. It is now illegal give someone access to a "hacker tool". Probably now Wireshark can be considered such a hacker tool. It allows me to see the data that is sent over the network. This data can be a robot communication protocol as well as passwords sent in clear text over the network.
And I didn't even mention the tools needed for security hardening...
Posted by Tim
Filed under: Geek
Fedora 7t3 with crypto root/swap and suspend2disk
For more than one week I know have a new T60. But there was so much to do lately that it was not before yesterday that I started playing with the system. It's a nice new machine with a Core 2 Duo, 2 Gigs of RAM and a big disk. Of course I installed Fedora Linux already last week to test but I didn't use the system productive, yet.
Yesterday was a holiday and thus I had plenty of time to play with it. Since more and more valuable and personal information is stored on the laptop I wanted a crypto vault. First I thought about an encrypted home partition that I could mount via pam_mount. But I want to be able to use suspend to disk over night. I used to use only suspend to RAM on my old laptop but after less than two years the batteries had lost so much capacity that I had to buy new ones to be able to work for a one hour train ride... Since then I use suspend to disk over night and suspend to RAM for short sleep periods.
The problem is now that if you suspend to disk your encryption key for the home partition is written to disk. So at that time all your encryption is useless. So I need a crypto swap partition, to be more specific: a crypto swap partition that does not have a random key but a key that allows me to recover the disk. Having this is currently equivalently difficult to setting up your machine completely encrypted with a crypto root drive.
So I took the patches available in Red Hat Bugzilla and adapted them for F7 (make them apply again and fixed a few issues). I also wrote a small document about Fedora 7 (Test 3) with Crypto Root/Swap and suspend to disk that gives a unified description of what's written in Michael Hampton's HOWTO and RH Bug 124789.
Hope you this finds its way into Fedora 8. I've heard that the Debian guys have that now in Debian 4 in the installer. Great job! Have not tried it out yet but with KVM and QEmu that should be pretty easy :-)
Posted by Tim
Filed under: Geek
Crypto Color
Automatically tranforms your text when this color is applied. No-hassle cryptography. Seen at a pharmacy in Hannover.
