Older blog entries for ak (starting at number 15)

Day 1 and 2 on the Chaos Communication Camp:

The first day was not really interesting -- the lectures were actually pretty boring, and hardly anything was going on. Not much to tell about it.

On the contrary, the second day was quite interesting. First of all, I held my lecture on network intrusion detection with cinderella. Many people attended my lecture, and tent A was almost full, although the lecture was at "high noon". The questions from the audience were quite good, and nobody was out to flame me. Unfortunately, I rushed through the lecture too quickly, so it actually took only 40 to 45 minutes, including the Q&A with the audience.

Other lectures I went to was the one about software patents by FFII, the SIMD hacking lecture by Felix von Leitner, the Hacker Jeopardy that was organized by `Sec` and the pretty weird Nazi UFOs lecture.

After that: social events! We partyed with the quintessenz guys, and it was definitely a good party. During that, some 2600 guy told us that there was a huge orgy going on in the cypherpunks tent, so we went there. All we found were about 10 people sitting around and chatting (IRL). Then, they showed us a pretty funny website: www.haXXXor.com. There you can buy a DVD showing hot women reading manpages, configuring Apache and describing installation from source while taking off their clothes. They showed this DVD at the OpenBSD tent. After that, we went back to quintessenz, had another beer, and then I went to bed.

Day 0 on the Chaos Communication Camp:

We arrived yesterday in Berlin, and stayed at Sven Guckes' place. We showed us all the important places in Berlin, which was quite interesting.

Today, we went to the camp ground in the early afternoon. The camp ground, which is located 30 km away from Berlin, in Altlandsberg, is beginning to fill. We are staying with the guys from quintessenz. Hopefully, some other guys from at.linux and people from CNGW will arrive at midnight.

Currently, most people are still building up their tents. So, the camp will hopefully fill tomorrow.

Yesterday, I took snort's TCP state machine, translated it to Ruby, and built it into cinderella. So, finally, I've got a nice decent state machine that is quite fast (faster than my own, broken one) and work's correctly.

The slides about cinderella are already prepared, so I'm already looking forward to doing my lecture at the Chaos Communication Camp. (I'm mentioning this so often, see how excited I am? :-)

Recently, my brother gave me a nice CD, "Music Monks" by a band called Seeed. Pretty cool reggae, ragga, dancehall. I can only recommend it.

My lecture at the Chaos Communication Camp is now in the official conference schedule: http://www.ccc.de/camp/2003/conference/event/533.en.html

Sync2NAS is not really a lot of fun in unswitched 10 MBit environments. ;-( Too many collisions.

MS Office sucks. Suddently, MS Outlook wanted to install some missing components, while it was running as non-privileged user, so it couldn't, and stuck in some kind of infinite loop. On the other side, I'm so happy that I don't have to work with that crap.

On the other side, Sync2NAS looks pretty good. Sync2NAS is a free mirroring solution for Windows, and it's based on rsync. Actually, it's a frontend to rsync, written in Perl/Tk. I haven't looked at the executable file, but the developer doesn't give away the source. But I got it already. :-) (in case you have sf.net account, have a look in /home/groups/s/sy/sync2nas on shell1.sf.net).

Yesterday and today, I built a system completely based on dietlibc (mostly). It uses dietlibc as C library and several components from www.fefe.de. And: the system just rocks!

The memory usage after boot and first login is 3.7 MB of RAM, which is so awesome. These 3.7 MB include a kernel of 750 kB (that's the size of the vmlinuz image, which is actually compressed), 4 instances of fgetty, a running sshd, and properly mounted filesystems. The time it takes from the last kernel message to the login prompt is less than 1 second. That is due to the fact that the minit init system is not based on shell scripts, but only compiled code, which makes it extremely fast.

After installing a few more utilities I think I'll be able to make it completely self-hosting.

It looks like my lecture about cinderella at the CCC Camp has been taken:

https://wiki.camp.ccc.de/Camp/view/Main/CampConference

Only two more weeks 'til CCC Camp, and I'm already soooo excited! :-)

Customers suck, they only make problems. Doing support keeps one away from the actual work. What also makes problems are old houses with thick walls, since you can't use WLAN inside of them. WLAN at one of our customers (with such thick walls) is extremely flakey and unstable because of that, as I realized today. You do not even get a good, reliable connection 10 meters away from the access point!

Today, I did some work on dietlibc, I simplified the malloc/free routines, until I realized that, with my modifications, any program linked against the dietlibc and allocating small chunks of memory will be a memory-eating monster. Anyway, my patch still simplifies the malloc/free routines, so that they're much easier to understand. Currently, I don't know whether I will even publish this patch.

Today, I also got my answer regarding my patches for config.{guess,sub} so that these two well-known and often used scripts manage to detect dietlibc. When I compile and links programs with dietlibc, I want to have "i686-pc-linux-dietlibc" instead of "i686-pc-linux-gnulibc1", since programs linked against dietlibc are most likely _not_ GNU software.

I think, the libreadline problem is solved: http://sf.net/projects/libedit/.

Sven Guckes wrote a nice email about signatures and dicksize wars: https://lists.lo-res.org/pipermail/cngw/2003-July/000481.html.

I (again) found a nice little code snippet of mine:

int gcd(int a,int b){while(a>b?(a%=b):(b%=a));return(a?a:b);}

The GCD is the greatest common divisor. The code above computes it for the integers a and b.

DHCP rocks, btw. Unless DNS doesn't work on OSX, then. *argl*

I'm a Tocotronic addict.

I think so, at least. The flight to Berlin (CCC Camp) is booked, EUR 163,- from Vienna VIE to Berlin TXL including the journey from Linz to Vienna and back.

The slides for my talk at the CCC-Camp Conference (I'm not sure whether I will hold it) are ready, I could start with it now. :-)

Two ideas I was recently having was

1. rewrite parts of akpop3d using libowfat. stdio stinks, definitely. Transition to libowfat would make akpop3d way cleaner, for sure. Who wants to help out? ;-)
2. write an API-compatible wrapper around libedit to emulate libreadline. libreadline is GPL, which makes it virtually impossible to link non-GPL software against it and to ship it.

Started a little bit of playing with Minix. Minix is really nice and small, when I saw the memory allocation routine, I immediately recognized that it implements a first-fit algorithm. I also recognized that "Operating Systems - Design and Implementation" sucks in some ways, since a number of Minix details are only documented in source code. What do I need a textbook about it, then?