Tuesday, October 31, 2006

MS Firefox 2007

I find this funny, click here.

Halloween

It is a season when children enjoy collecting candles, jumping around sarcophagi, wearing dirty masks, and scaring other children(smaller/younger). TV shows are fun to watch. In the United States, children usually play snowballs during winter. Well, it is totally a different story here since children play waxballs during Halloween. Not forgetting adults, it is a season for filling stomachs with barrels of beer, bottles of wine, and gallons of coconut-fermented drinks otherwise known as tuba.


I really do not enjoy roaming around burial grounds especially during Halloween for the reasons that, you will see people shouting at each other, throwing punches, showing knives, and trying to boast their clan’s supremacy among others. The fear of ghosts is not a thing to consider here, it is the fear of being unable to withstand adults looking for troubles no matter how hard you try ignoring their fun. This is true to cheap cemeteries that are maintained by the local government unit. Company-owned cemeteries are at least safe.


It would be wise for me to stay at home and offer a prayer for my departed friends and relatives. I do not see myself behind bars in the future. Prevention is better.


Happy Halloween!

Sunday, October 29, 2006

Some updates on my Gentoo box

Get in position and wait for my go. I recompiled the kernel applying Con Kolivas‘ kernel patchset for linux-2.6.18. Accordingly, his patchsets are designed to improve system responsiveness with specific emphasis on the desktop, but suitable to any workload. Feedbacks show that it scales well for a typical desktop use. If you want to try this out, here is a comprehensive walkthrough that will get you on your feet along the way.


I also felt the need of updating my Xorg. I had a smooth shift from Xorg 6.9 to Xorg 7.1. So far so good.


Firefox 2.0 rocks as well! There are obvious improvements so grab yourself one. Currently, it is masked by x86 keyword in the Gentoo Official Portage so just deal with it.

Friday, October 27, 2006

Crackmes: cyrex’s Linux CrackMe

Find the correct password to get the good boy message :) it would be great for an solution how you solve this , and with what i solve this
with the standard GNU Debugger (gdb)


Difficulty: 1 - Very easy, for newbies
Platform: Unix/Linux, etc.
Language: C/C++


[Solving the Crackme]


Solving crackmes is fun but if you screwed up, it sucks big time. Thank goodness, heavy tasks are over. Anyway, let us see what we can do with this.



joset@kee:~/src/crackmes/crackme_01$ ./crackme
-[ Linux CrackMe (Level:2) by cyrex ]-
-[ TODO: You have to get the valid Password ]-
Enter Password: 0x7d7
-[ Ohhhh, your skills are bad try again later ]-
joset@kee:~/src/crackmes/crackme_01$

Do we have to use the debugger first? How about this?



joset@kee:~/src/crackmes/crackme_01$ strings crackme
/lib/ld-linux.so.2
libc.so.6
printf
__deregister_frame_info
strcmp
scanf
_IO_stdin_used
__libc_start_main
__register_frame_info
__gmon_start__
GLIBC_2.0
PTRhP
QVhP
[^_]
-[ Linux CrackMe (Level:2) by cyrex ]-
-[ TODO: You have to get the valid Password ]-
Enter Password:
47ghf6fh37fbgbgj
-[ Good, You’re ready to begin linux reversing ]-
-[ Ohhhh, your skills are bad try again later ]-
joset@kee:~/src/crackmes/crackme_01$

Do you see what I see? What if we will try using that as the password?



joset@kee:~/src/crackmes/crackme_01$ ./crackme
-[ Linux CrackMe (Level:2) by cyrex ]-
-[ TODO: You have to get the valid Password ]-
Enter Password: 47ghf6fh37fbgbgj
-[ Good, You're ready to begin linux reversing ]-
joset@kee:~/src/crackmes/crackme_01$

There’s no protection at all just use the strings command. Trivial.

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

ISP lock-ins

Globe Broadband and Bayantel please invest here as soon as possible. We need the quality of services that you offer. Majority of the broadband subscribers here are not that satisfied. One year contract is not worth it. I have received the first bill already. Does it mean that I will be suffering 11 months more? Geez!


pldc ka kasi tol! ang hina ng broadband mo! ano yan pentium poor? sm*rt broken ata yan eh! [bayantel only] join now! tol, ipconfig /release tapos ipconfig /renew lol!


I can’t even access the website of Mindanao Open Source Society. Damn it.


Hoping for better days.

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Bad luck

This is a program that simply extracts numbers from buffered input. I do not have any idea why this didn’t work. I got a zero.



input:
mov ah, 0ah ; buffered input sys call
lea dx, strptr ; load effective address
int 21h ; call kernel

mov ah, 02h ; write character to stdout sys call
mov dl, 0ah ; issue carriage-return
int 21h ; call kernel

lea si, string ; set source index to start of string
mov cl, [strlen] ; set loop counter

here:
mov dl, [si] ; place current character in dl
cmp dl, '0' ; compare if below '0'
jb traverse
cmp dl, '9' ; compare if above '9'
ja traverse

mov ah, 02h ; write character to stdout sys call
int 21h ; call kernel
cmp dl, '$' ; check end-of-string sentinel
je exit

traverse:
inc si ; increment source index pointer

loop here

exit:
int 20h ; terminate

strptr label byte
maxlen db 49
strlen db ?
string db 50 dup ('$')

It runs smoothly on my machine. Damn it.

Thursday, October 12, 2006

Happy Fiesta Zamboanga!

Viva! Nuestra Senora del Pilar. Today is the feast of Our Lady of the Pilar, our city’s patron saint.


Here is a description of the city where I live in. A very peaceful place that is.


I guess I won’t be enjoying the feast today since I’ll be finishing our OpenGL project. In my list, it also says that I’ll be writing a simple C program today incorporating Balanced Trees. Well, it’s my own approach to file system writing.

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Joke?

Now tell me is there something really funny about this?


I did not find a single bit of humor in this video. This man is with his glasses for Pete’s sake!

RX Band Breakout conquered!

We did our best! We burned the stage! A video of our performance will be uploaded in youtube soon. I will post the notification here.


We got the most awards. It was indeed a blessing!


1) Best Bassist - Joset Zamora
2) Best Vocalist/s - Bon Padayhag, Macky Alger
3) Best Drummer - Daryll De Leon
4) 2nd Place - Junkyard


Congratulations to the winners as well. You did great! Thank you Dream Radio RX 93.1!


[Resolution]


No gigs before graduation day. Now it’s time to get the Reiser4 File System Driver for Windoze XP done. Yeah, that’s our thesis. God bless us all.

Saturday, October 07, 2006

Binary Trees

A tree has a finite set of elements called nodes. It has a unique node called the root node, where the remaining nodes are a disjoint collection of subtrees. A binary tree is a tree whose elements have two children at maximum. It is considered as a data structure composed of elements that are characterized by two link fields, left and right children. A leaf node contains 0 children meaning both children point to a NULL value.


A binary search tree is a special type of a binary tree. These terms are sometimes used interchangeably in some articles, so do not be confused. For this purpose, I’ll limit my article to binary trees in general.


First let’s define the structure to be used.



#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

typedef char DATA;

struct node {
DATA d;
struct node *left;
struct node *right;
};

typedef struct node NODE;
typedef struct NODE *BINTREE;

[Creating a Binary Tree]


Dynamic allocation.



BINTREE new_node()
{
return (malloc(sizeof(NODE)));
}

Of course we have to initialize the node.



BINTREE init_node(DATA d1, BINTREE p1, BINTREE p2)
{
BINTREE t;

t = new_node();
t -> d = d1;
t -> left = p1;
t -> right = p2;
return t;
}

We will generate a tree from an array recursively.



BINTREE create_tree(DATA a[], int i, int size)
{
if (i >= size)
return NULL;
else
return (init_node(a[i],
create_tree(a, 2 * i + 1, size),
create_tree(a, 2 * i + 2, size)));
}

[Binary Tree Traversals]


There are several ways to traverse in a binary tree. Luckily, I have leared something during our CS 213 Data Structures class. Thanks to Sir Greg. Here are three ways presented:


Inorder Traversal: Left Node Right (LNR)
Preorder Traversal: Node Left Right (NLR)
Postorder Traversal: Left Right Node (LRN)


The standard way of implementing this of course is again by recursion.


Inorder Traversal



void inorder(BINTREE root)
{
if (root != NULL) {
inorder(root -> left);
printf("%c ", root -> d);
inorder(root -> right);
}
}

Preorder Traversal



void preorder(BINTREE root)
{
if (root != NULL) {
printf("%c ", root -> d);
preorder(root -> left);
preorder(root -> right);
}
}

Postorder Traversal



void postorder(BINTREE root)
{
if (root != NULL) {
postorder(root -> left);
postorder(root -> right);
printf("%c ", root -> d);
}
}

Hope this article will be useful to students taking up Data Structures and Algorithms.

Thursday, October 05, 2006

RX Band Breakout

RX Band Breakout will be on October 9, 2006. It is going to be a tough competition though. Most competing bands are extremely good! So acting like a duck on stage would surely drive you down. We want to burn on stage and fire them up with our solos.


Sad thing is that, I do not have enough time for practice so I searched for bass solo stuffs. I found a lot of cool Brazilian scales incorporated in a bass solo and all that. Which also lead me to rank bassists who happened to be my influences. I wish could play well like them. Here’s my ranking.


1) Victor Wooten - Versatile
2) Bill Dickens - Versatile
3) John Myung (Dream Theatre) - Progressive Rock
4) Romel (Barbie’s Cradle, Freestyle) - Progressive Folk
5) - name - (P.O.T.) - Funk Rock
6) Flea (Red Hot Chili Peppers) - Funk Rock
7) Nathan (Rivermaya, Kapatid, Bamboo) - Rock
8) - name - (Wolfgang) - Rock
9) - name - (Razorback) - Rock
10) Stuart Ham - Jazz


For as long as we’ll be able to burn the stage, it doesn’t really matter whether we’ll bring home the trophy or not.


By the way, thanks to Kamikazee and APO Hiking Society! We’ll be playing one of your songs, Doobidoo. I’m really excited about this!


I hope the weather as well as the power lines would cooperate on that day.


Cheers.