Hanno's blog - English

Breakpoint over

nospam@example.com (Hanno Böck) — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 02:00:35 +0200

Back from Breakpoint, uploaded rest of images. My submissions this year were quite limited: One Photo that didn't make it through the preselection and one effect for the Never-Demo (which made place 28 out of 29, n0y asked at a very late time "hey, can you code us some effect, the interface is really simple?", so I did some ascii-art-shading).

I didn't manage to visit all seminars I wanted to see, I hope they'll get the recordings up soon.

One I find worth mentioning:
Peci from Scoopex managed to get a dos-COM-file running windows-code without any win32/PE-headers (smaller, good for 4k intros). What he's doing is basically abusing an api for attaching drivers to the DOS-Emulation (VDD). It is able to call initialization-functions of DLLs from within DOS with invalid Opcodes. Calling it without initializing a library causes to jump to position 0. The memory from the DOS-process is mapped 1:1, so this is a valid adress, where you can put a jmp in the COM-file before calling. Very weird, but seems to work fine.
(I hope they'll put up the seminar-slides on the ftp, I'll link them when they're available)

Breakpoint: Day 1+2, Ultrasound, Welle:Erdball

nospam@example.com (Hanno Böck) — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 12:47:50 +0200

First two days at breakpoint, everything quite okay, beside the usual chaotic organization (it wouldn't be a demoparty without that). The network sucks, so I don't know when I can publish what I'm writing right now.

Yesterday evening was a live-act called Ultrasound, they played guitar-music to demos shown on the screen. The beam-team didn't manage to show second reality (probably they don't have any real DOS any more...). Quite nice.

On Saturday I missed most of the compos because I did something very unscenish and got some fresh air and light (ok, not so much light, it was cloudy), visited Bingen city, took a ship to the other side of the rhine and walked around there a bit. I like this landscape, I did some bicycle-trips here in the past.

Next was the Welle:Erdball concert. They're doing electronic music with old computer sounds like C64-SID with a (imho) great live-show.

First set of pictures are here, more to come.

Breakpoint Trip

nospam@example.com (Hanno Böck) — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 12:07:21 +0200

In a few minutes I'll head off to the Breakpoint in Bingen, one of the biggest events of the demoscene.

This year I'm especially looking forward that there are a couple of interesting seminars, I'll probably write some reports about that. And have a look at their website, I like this years design very much.

Cartoon-like filter with vlc

nospam@example.com (Hanno Böck) — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 23:53:35 +0200

If you ever asked yourself how a cartoon of your favorite movie would look like, vlc has some very nice filters to play around with (see screenshot).

You'll need latest vlc 0.8.5_beta2 (yes, it's really unstable), gentoo has masked ebuilds for it.

To enable the filter, try out:
vlc --vout-filter distort --distort-mode edge

(Pictures from the Creative Commons by-nc-nd licensed movie Teezeit)

Solar Eclipse

nospam@example.com (Hanno Böck) — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 16:48:10 +0200

From todays solar eclipse, which could be partially watched from Germany, I tried to take some pictures.

Good that I kept my special eclipse sun glasses from 1999 (when we had a total eclipse over south Germany I completely missed due to the bad weather back then). Most of the time it was cloudy, but I still managed to get some nice pics.

Playing with hardware sensors in linux

nospam@example.com (Hanno Böck) — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 15:11:44 +0100

Yesterday I played around a bit with what hardware sensors can do and how to access them in linux.

hddtemp

The first, and quite trivial tool I tried was hddtemp. You don't need to do anything further, just install it and run
hddtemp /dev/hda
(Assuming your harddisk is hda, which is usually the case)

It supports a bunch of harddisks by default and if it doesn't know your HD, it tries to access it with some default-values. Extending the hd-database seems to be trivial, I already sent a patch for my HD. Output looks like this:
/dev/hda: SAMSUNG MP0804H: 46°C

lm_sensors

lm_sensors is a bunch of drivers and tools to use hardware-sensors on motherboards. As you probably have no idea what chips your motherboard has, lm_sensors brings a tool called sensors-detect to help you. The way to go is just enabling everything (except debugging, which you usually don't need) in the kernel-sections i2c and hardware monitoring as module and let sensors-detect to the work.
Basically, pressing return all the time should be okay. At the end, it'll tell you which kernel-modules are useful for your system.

After that, running sensors shows something like this:
max6657-i2c-0-4c
Adapter: SMBus I801 adapter at 1100

M/B Temp: +40°C (low = -65°C, high = +127°C)
CPU Temp: +36.6°C (low = +35.1°C, high = +72.2°C)
M/B Crit: +110°C (hyst = +100°C)
CPU Crit: +110°C (hyst = +100°C)

Well, not that useful, but interesting to know that I have at least 3 temperature-sensors in my laptop.

Update: As noted by Joshua Jackson in the comments, with smartctl /dev/hda (from smartmontools) you get the temperature and much more information about your HD.

Reverse engineering onlinetvrecorder

nospam@example.com (Hanno Böck) — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 21:17:37 +0100

onlinetvrecorder, a service that let's you record broadcasts from some german television stations, provides it's files in .otrkey-format, which can be decoded using their binary otrdecoder-tool, considering you have requested the recording in advance.

As there is no information how the format and authentication work, I had a deeper look at it.

Getting the key

Using some network sniffer, the authentication is very simple, it just requests them with http, the URL is
http://www.onlinetvrecorder.com/uncrypt.php?email=[email]&pass=[pass]&filename=[file]
(filename is the .wmv-name without otrkey)
Inside that file is an ascii/hex-encoded number with 128 bit. That very much looks like a key.

This already gives us the possibility to manually download the key and, if we want to re-decode some movie (because we lost the wmv or because we want to decode a file before it's completely downloaded to already start watching the recording), save the key to a local webserver as uncrypt.php, forward the hostname to 127.0.0.1 and re-start otrdecoder.

The cryptography

From what I found out yet, the file is encrypted with some sort of blowfish. The encrypted and decrypted files are exactly the same size, that means we have no IV and a variant of blowfish that does no padding.

The best I got till now was using mcrypt with ecb-mode:
mcrypt -d -a blowfish-compat -s 16 -o hex -b --noiv -m ecb --nodelete -f [keyfile] [file]

This decrypts the first 256 bytes correctly, after that it seems to mix up things (the correct decryption continues at byte 512). From what I read in Schneier[1996] (»Applied cryptography«), there is an ecb variant using ciphertex stealing that avoids padding. I found no easy-to-use implementation of that.
Having a commandline-cryptography tool that supports more options than mcrypt would be handy here.

Fosdem 2006 notes

nospam@example.com (Hanno Böck) — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 22:59:57 +0100

Gentoo at Fosdem

As there was only very limited internet access at Fosdem, I didn't find the time to blog live, so here my collected impressions.

Keynote with Richard Stallman about software patents. I already knew this talk, so it wasn't so interesting. I also think there weren't much people in the room that had to be persuaded to resist software patents, so they should have probably choosen a more »visionary« topic for RMS to talk about. After that an interesting talk about the GPL v3 (also by RMS). I asked a question about the problem that GPL v2 only code can't be mixed with GPL v3 code, he asked me to email discuss this with him, what I will do.

There were two talks about Xgl, one from Matthias Hopf telling what xgl is, what problems they face and some compiz presentation (with the always-known whooo-effect). Zack Rusin did a »Why Xgl is not the answer« talk. Was very interesting to hear the pros and cons of Xgl, I don't have a real opinion on that (I don't feel that I understand the technical details enough), but we should probably have an eye on the different futures X has (Xgl and aiglx at the moment).

Another very interesting talk in the X room: Stephane Marchesin is working on reverse-engineering nvidia chipsets and intends to write a free driver for them. It's in a very early stage (basically at the moment just finding out how the chips work), let's wish him all success (see nouveau - his not yet working first sources).

Suse gave out free (as in beer) t-shirts, so don't be amazed if you see me with a suse t-shirt running around

Some other more or less interesting talks, overall the presentations are the highlights of fosdem, you'll probably hardly find another event with so many interesting, high level talks about open source and free software.

Pictures will be here as soon as I find time to upload them.

FOSDEM trip

nospam@example.com (Hanno Böck) — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 23:16:21 +0100

FOSDEM, the Free and Open source Software Developers' European MeetingFOSDEM, the Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting, will start on saturday. The schedules sound quite interesting.
Tomorrow I'll start my trip to Brussels and hopefully will also find some time to visit the city.

Maybe I'll have a small presentation of the xgl-overlay. If you are also there, this is the chance to meet me in reality and probably exchange some pgp-keys or such.

Copyleft film about New Orleans after hurricane Katrina

nospam@example.com (Hanno Böck) — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 12:33:32 +0100

As the german newspage heise reports, there's a new copyleft film, a documentary about New Orleans half a year after hurricane Katrina.

Their website dropping knowledge seems to be down at the moment. I'll post a review as soon as I got it and found time to watch it (this may take some days, because I've got university scrutinies next week).

Update: As Netzpolitik reports, this film is not really copyleft, it's released under a cc-by-nc-nd (creative commons attribution noncommercial no derivatives) license. Beside that, the page's javascript has problems with konqueror (and I always ask myself why this obvious connection between free culture and free software seems to be so difficult).

Rant: Printing with cups

nospam@example.com (Hanno Böck) — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 22:19:39 +0100

Okay: If you regularly read my blog, you know that I'm a linux addict and free software fan. I really like my linux, I'm much more comfortable with it than the bad old days when I used this other system from this redmond company. I have the strong belief that free software is the better concept and will succeed on the long run. Just to make clear that this is a very rare situation when I rant about linux.

So let's start: Today I wanted to print some slides from a university lecture. They were landscape format and to save paper (52 pages), I wanted to print four of them on one page. A simple task one should think.

Started kpdf, clicked on print. As my cups was configured, I could select my printer, go to it's options and found a 4 pages on 1 option, so it seemed fine. Clicked on Print. Waited. Waited. Nothing happened.
Webbrowser, localhost:631, no printing jobs. No errors. Nothing.

Looked at the logfile (this is at least the point where every common user wouldn't come further). Nothing that helped, just a note to change loglevel to debug. Did that. Restarted cups. Re-sent page. Logfile showed up some segfault in a gs-command. Damn, why can't just the interface tell me that?
From the small knowledge I have about linux-printing, I knew that there are various implementations of ghostscript. Looked into portage, found three, replaced ghostscript-esp with ghostscript-afpl. Restarted cups.

Tried to print, my printer actually did something. Well, it looked interesting. I had the third page in the upper left corner and about a third of the fourth page beside it. Beside that, far smaller than it should be, nearly unreadable.

Ok, there are some other pdf-viewers out there. Tried kghostview. Print, select 4 pages option, etc. Printer started doing something.
The result was really interesting: The pages were printed white on white.

Next try, evince. As evince is a pretty new gnome-tool, it sticks to the gnome guidelines: Less config-dialogs, less features. It just had no possibility to print four pages on one. Oh, should I mention that evince crashed when I wanted to close the printing dialog?
Gave up. Will read it on the screen.

Conclusion: Free software had some great success in the last years. Today we have systems that can compete to commercial ones in many areas for common usage. Some areas on the other side are really horrible. Printing is one of them.
If we really want to compete on the desktop, we need to get such basic tasks to »just work«.

amaroK 1.4 with moodbar

nospam@example.com (Hanno Böck) — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 20:51:56 +0100

The greatest music player of all time, called amaroK, just had the first beta release of the upcoming version 1.4.
The most visible new feature is the so-called moodbar that tries to color the »mood« of a track. Okay, it does a hell of cpu-usage and I doubt it's very useful, but it looks really funky.

Gentooers: emerge sync, add media-sound/amarok to your package.unmask, add use-flag exscalibar, enjoy!

More free music

nospam@example.com (Hanno Böck) — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 02:23:05 +0100

The AStA of the University of Marburg starts it's second Open Music Contest.

Like last year, they'll collection submissions from music artists released under a creatice commons license and will choose the best to be presented on a concert and released on a sampler. Last years sampler is available for download in ogg vorbis format.

Nice project for more free music and open standards.

I'm so famous ;-)

nospam@example.com (Hanno Böck) — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 23:14:11 +0100

Since my xgl-overlay, this happens all the time (from #xorg on freenode):

<...> OMG IT'S HANNO!!!! *BOW DOWN
<...> hello! i read your blog!
<...> hahaha i'm a big fan
<...> ok!

Xgl and compiz overlay update

nospam@example.com (Hanno Böck) — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 16:55:06 +0100

This blog got lot's of visits recently, probably because of the interest in my xgl overlay.

I've now created a new one based on the latest code changes in mesa and xgl, together with the new opengl window- and compositemanager compiz.

I'm releasing it although it's not really working for me at the moment.
I can run Xgl with compiz on my Radeon 9200 card with the free xorg driver, but have redraw-problems, so I don't know if the effects work at the moment. If you made better experiences, please post them here (I'm especially interested if it works better with other cards, e. g. nvidia ones).

Short Howto:

Download latest xgl-overlay-xxxx.tar.bz2, unpack it, point PORTDIR_OVERLAY to it
emerge mesa glitz xgl compiz
Run Xgl :1 -ac -accel glx:pbuffer -accel xv:pbuffer (ati) or Xgl :1 -ac -accel glx:pbuffer -accel xv (nvidia)
Run DISPLAY=:1 compiz decoration, DISPLAY=:1 gnome-window-decorator and DISPLAY=:1 xterm (or something else)

There are some infos on the openSUSE webpage, especially about various driver problems, I assume I'm one of the »With some drivers screen refreshs do not work properly«.

If you just wanna see how it looks, here is the Novell announcement with some videos.