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cool places

cool places / hardware / howto / linux / software / tutorials — 67 Comments
16
May 07

Hacking Aproach: NVIDIA Driver on Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn

nvidia driver ubuntuNeeded to install Nvidia driver for my Feisty Fawn (Ubuntu 7.04) box. Googled for a "how to". Noticed that all "how to"s in www follow one of three scenarios:

"Here is a tutorial on how to install Nvidia Driver…":

  • Make sure you know whether you card belongs to "1.0-71xx series" or "1.0-96xx series"
  • Get the driver’s installer  from nvidia site
  • Run the installer
  • Change the device driver from ‘nv’ to ‘nvidia’ in xorg.conf
  • You’re good to go"

                      OR

  • # sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx nvidia-kernel-common
  • # sudo nvidia-glx-config enable
  • You’re good to go

                      OR

  • Download this envy script
  • Run it
  • You’re good to go

    As you can see, there are multiple ways in Linux to solve a single problem, and it is wonderful, besides when none of them work. Yea, none of the above worked for me. I either had "GPU version mismatch – The 1.0-9755 NVIDIA driver will ignore (WW) NVIDIA(0): this GPU." or "Failed to load nvidia kernel module" or that "envy" stuff that said "my OS is not supported", etc..

I solved the problem and just wanted to share with everybody out there who might struggle, so you don’t.

I took a very "dirty approach" and did the following:

I knew my card falls into "1.0-96xx series" list by nvidia, so I went there and downloaded that installer.

Then I did:   sudo rm -rf `locate nvidia`   to make sure I have NO traces of any kind of nvidia stuff that came (?) with a clean Feisty install. (if locatedb is not populated, you can do   sudo find / -name "*nvidia*" -exec rm -rf {} \;   this will definitely clean your system from all nvidia guests)

Make sure if you have copied your driver to the directory with (or part of a) name "nvidia" rename it before deleting all the "nvidia" pieces:   mv nvidia/ myvidia/)

And only then, after I ran the installer from "nvidia", my GeForce MX 400 smiled broadly :)

Happy hacking!

cool places / hardware / linux / me / software / tutorials — 8 Comments
14
May 07

KISS that Technology by Learning

So you need to learn (about) this technology… So you go to google… So you spent X minutes (hours? days?) to find a good candidate-article (tutorial, how to, step-by-step guide, etc.)… So you finish reading it… and most of the time you doing what? – exactly!  – going back to google and keep searching.

More often than not there are two main things that we are looking for when we need to learn something new:

  1. We want to learn it fast
  2. We want to learn it fast

See the difference? :) Here it is – the "first fast" goes for the quality of content that a source has to offer. The better the quantity, the more we learn, the faster we learn. And the "second fast" goes to the amount of time we search for that source of knowledge.

The "first fast" is going to be solved by only dealing with SIMPLE tutorials/guides/ideas about many simple and comlex topics. Simplicity is the key to solve "the quality of content" problem. Think about an IBM Redbook on something you do not know about, let’s say web services. Although it is a great book – lot’s of content – it is a very poor example of an efficient tutorial (not for all, but for most), it just has too much and will take hours to go through. Most of the time a redbook will make you quite sleepy on the page number 24 (my own observation).

And for comparison take this picture from soaspecs.com:

webservices through uddi, wsdl and soap

and spice it up with "SOAP::Lite for Perl" quick guide.

A combination of the two (pic and guide) will take you 5-10 minutes to go over and will make you understand what/how/why/etc.. about webservices. Although the guide is Perl based, it will by no means distract you from understanding the material even if you are not familiar with Perl, why? Because it is SIMPLE, that’s why.

In order to solve the "second fast", I would like to speak to everybody who is going to read this post. If you have a very cool and SIMPLE tutorial, how-to, guide, etc.., please share it with everybody by going to the comments section of this post and putting one or more links to it, or ideas where to get these very simple tutorials.

Later on I will compile this list, and either post it on a different website (if you like, I can put your name as a contributor, with a link to the tutorial/idea and your website, if you have it) or I will create a different post. This will be solving the "second fast" – decreasing the time of searching for the right source.

Apply yourself – KISS that technology! :)

 

action / cool places / software — Comments Off on jakarta.apache.org commons configuration
7
May 07

jakarta.apache.org commons configuration

Apache released version 1.4 of the Jakarta Commons configuration library!

A very useful library that unifies the way all the configuration parameters are handled and lead to much more clear layout in especially big projects with a lot of packages, components and frameworks.

Commons Configuration provides a generic configuration interface which enables an application to read configuration data from a variety of sources. Commons Configuration provides typed access to single, and multi-valued configuration parameters as demonstrated by the following code:

    Double double = config.getDouble("number");
    Integer integer = config.getInteger("number");

Configuration parameters may be loaded from the following sources:

  • Properties files
  • XML documents
  • Property list files (.plist)
  • JNDI
  • JDBC Datasource
  • System properties
  • Applet parameters
  • Servlet parameters

Different configuration sources can be mixed using a ConfigurationFactory and a CompositeConfiguration. Additional sources of configuration parameters can be created by using custom configuration objects. This customization can be achieved by extending Abstract Configuration or AbstractFileConfiguration.

The full Javadoc API documentation is available here.

action / cool places / me — 4 Comments
3
May 07

Windows XP Screensaver on Time Square, NYC

Times Square is a major intersection in Manhattan, at the junction of Broadway and Seventh Avenue and stretching from West 42nd to West 47th Streets.
    Like Red Square in Moscow, Champs-Elysées in Paris, Trafalgar Square in London, or Tiananmen Square in Beijing, Times Square has achieved the status of an iconic world landmark and has become a symbol of its home city. Times Square is principally defined by its lighted and animated advertisements. Here is one of such advertisements :) :

Windows XP Screensaver on Time Square, NYC

Windows XP Screensaver on Time Square, NYC

action / cool places — 1 Comment
21
Apr 07

Hacker Broke into a Mac

Mac SecurityA hacker managed to break into a Mac and win a $10,000 prize as part of a contest started at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver.

In winning the contest, he exposed a hole in Safari, Apple’s browser. "Currently, every copy of OS X out there now is vulnerable to this," said Sean Comeau, one of the organizers of CanSecWest.

The conference organizers decided to offer the contest in part to draw attention to possible security shortcomings in Macs. "You see a lot of people running OS X saying it’s so secure, and frankly, Microsoft is putting more work into security than Apple has," said Dragos Ruiu, the principal organizer of security conferences including CanSecWest.

Dino Di Zovie, who lives in New York, sent along a URL that exposed the hole. Because the contest was only open to attendees in Vancouver, he sent it to a friend who was at the conference and forwarded it on.

The URL opened a blank page but exposed a vulnerability in input handling in Safari, Comeau said. An attacker could use the vulnerability in a number of ways, but Di Zovie used it to open a back door that gave him access to anything on the computer, Comeau said.

The vulnerability won’t be published. 3Com’s TippingPoint division, which put up the cash prize, will handle disclosing it to Apple.

One reason Macs haven’t been much of a target for hackers is that there are fewer to attack, said Terri Forslof, manager of security response for TippingPoint. "It’s an incentive issue. The Mac is not as widely deployed of a platform as, say, Windows," she said. In this case, the cash may have provided motivation.

Was it a coincidence that on late Thursday Apple released a patch for 25 vulnerabilities in OS X?  :)

 

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