Securing mysql

Everyone knows, first thing you have to do after installing mysql, is setting its root password. I used to do this using the mysqladmin tool like this:

/usr/bin/mysqladmin -u root password 'new-password'

For starters, you should not forget to do the same command for your other host names (-h option), but also there are still some other tasks like disabling anonymous access and removing the test databases. Today, having another mysql install, I noticed that the install script mentions this neat tool packaged with mysql to do just all that. 🙂

Just run /usr/bin/mysql_secure_installation and you’re done!

Dual action. Literally.

If you own a dual action gamepad, i.e. one with 2 sticks, Gunroar is a game you MUST try out. If you don’t own that, you might wanna try it out anyway as there are also game modes that are well playable without a gamepad.

To me, Gunroar is a typical old-skool action “shooter” game implemented using modern techniques (others may also want to call it a geometry wars clone). In other words: success. 🙂 The wireframe and polygon style rendering is refreshing, the action is fast, the music and sound effects perfectly fit the bill, did I mention fast action? 🙂 It really blows your senses. 🙂

What really puts this game apart, is it superb dual action gameplay. The game sports several game modes:

  • Normal mode: one stick to navigate. If you start to shoot, the navigation stick becomes a strafing stick. Also “torpedos” available.
  • Twin stick mode: real dual action 🙂 Use one stick to navigate, the other to aim/shoot.
  • Double play: if you thought twin stick was the fastest action your brain can process, try double play. You have to control two gunboats simultaneously! The combined position of the 2 gunboats determines the shooting direction. Your brain might protest in the beginning, but try it and you will enjoy. 🙂
  • mouse mode: use arrows for navigation and pointer to aim and fire. Don’t think this mode would be inferior because of the focus on gamepads in the other modes!

But the best part is: all this action seems so hyperkinetic and stressing, but once you get the hold of it, it all feels quite natural and works even relaxing 😉 Also, each game mode has its own distinct gameplay. It’s amazing what you can do with so little. 🙂

A few factoids to close. Gunboat is:

  • written by some Japanese guy Kenta Cho.
  • written in D
  • uses SDL
  • uses the ant build system
  • is not open source :/

Freenode raising the bar for routers

This week I noticed a strange problem with my irc client.
First day (Tuesday), it would fail to connect. Since my login to the campus network expired, I had to relogon, so I thought the problem was simply related to that and that the irc client wouldn’t recover until an application restart.
Second day, it still didn’t connect, which I thought was strange, but I didn’t have time to chat anyway, so I neglected.
Today, I frowned and decided to take a look 🙂

First of all, I noticed it wasn’t really a connect problem, it couldn’t even resolve the hostname. Heh? When I ran “nslookup irc.freenode.org” it spit out:

;; Truncated, retrying in TCP mode.
;; Connection to 192.168.2.1#53(192.168.2.1) for irc.freenode.org failed: connection refused.

mmm..
I went to the freenode site, to see if there were any news items reporting problems or outage. There didn’t seem to be a news section. So I assumed: no news == good news. 🙂

Then, I noticed the actual hostname for irc is really chat.freenode.net instead of irc.freenode.org. “chat” or “irc” in front works both. Indeed, that did work. So why did irc.freenode.org suddenly stop working? Was it because of a recent patch (although I couldn’t remember applying any in the last week)? Was it because of my firewall? Both answers are negative.

The friendly chaps at #freenode kindly tipped me off that the dns record had probably become too large to be transmitted through UDP and that TCP dns requests seemed blocked. Servers get added to the network on a regular basis, so that would explain why it suddenly stopped working. It became obvious that my dusty old router would be the culprit (quick tip: never blame your linux kernel first 😉 ). After all, according to contemporary standards, one could declare mine “ancient”.

Quite recently I already encountered some problems with it. After an upgrade of the campus network, I kept having strange packet loss when playing multiplayer games for more than 2 minutes. I had never updated my firmware, so I thought I might try that. Although the latest firmware release dated back to 2004, it did help! mattie=1, router=0.

After I pulled the router out of the chain, the dns problem was solved indeed! Unfortunately, updating firmware is no longer an option, so I guess the router and I are even now. 😉

On #freenode, I was told I wasn’t the first one to report this problem, so I guess a lot of people will need to update their firmwares, buy new routers, or simply use a more local dns name. 😉

Europe’s most sexy vegetarian

is Belgian! Even West-Flemish, of course. 😉 An award presented by PETA.

Just a few days ago, I went to an info evening about the environmental impact of meat production (they showed the documentary “meat the truth”) and guess what, they invited Fiona Dewaele to give a short testimony of how she became a vegetarian. The final outcome of the contest wasn’t known yet, but I really granted her the victory as she seemed a nice girl. I guess it was a small effort for her to join the info evening since she still studies literature and philosophy here at the university.

Now afterwards, it’s funny to see all the “media/model” glamour pictures spread over the internet but still recognize the “real girl” behind the pictures. I could post one from the pictures from the event, but I’m not sure whether she’d like that. 🙂 (although she probably wouldn’t mind) Anyway, here are some “media pics” instead. 😉


Fiona Fiona Fiona

Congratulations, Fiona!

Van Dale dictionaries on linux

After several rant mails to the Vandale publishers house, I finally gave in/up. About a year ago, I complained that I couldn’t buy a linux version of my favorite Dutch dictionaries (not that there is a choice when it comes to digital Dutch dictionaries). Online dictionaries don’t cut it for me, I always need the words (or expressions) that free online ones don’t provide. 😉 The answer was that there does not exist a linux version. So I asked when the linux version would be released. The communication stalled but apparently it got escalated and I got an answer by another person telling me there was no linux version planned, however he was delighted to announce the availability of a Mac version within only 3 months!

You know this smiley banging its head against the wall? That’s me, banging my head… How can they be so stupid to port to another platform and not take cross-platform toolkits into account?? I couldn’t help myself, so I started to lecture “cross-platform 101”. 😉 I am not sure if I was able to get through to him, but I hope at least a few fragments stuck in his mind. 🙂

In the meantime, they do have a mac version. I never received a reply to my plea. So I decided to give it a try under wine. Surprise, surprise (not), it works! (using the win2k installer patch). Sometimes, wine can really be a godsend. For the occasion, I created a few desktop icons since the original ones suck badly.

I created them by drawing bezier curves with the original icon from the website in overlay. It actually sounds easier as it sounds. 🙂 I had to tweak my beziers quite a bit to have a somewhat appealing result. Since this will probably be the last time I will take a KDE3 screenshot (still on my suse 10.3), I decided to post a screenshot of the icons with my desktop in full glory 😉

Vandale icons

Also spot the home-made icon for Cave Story, but that’s merely a rip from the game resources 😉
Here are the icons in case you want them too:
vandale icon Englishvandale icon French

FTP: copying outside chroot jail

Your typical ftp setup will allow your users to only copy/modify stuff in their own home dir (=chroot jail). Which makes sense. However, from time to time, you’ll want to access directories outside your home dir and then the following workaround can come in handy. Concretely, I have a few hard disks in my box, so, from time to time, I want to write directly to another partition than my home partition because of space constraints.

Obviously, you can allow root to access ftp, but we’d like to avoid that if possible, right? Simply making a symbolic link in our home dir also doesn’t work because of the chroot jail.

What you can do however, is mount a directory in another place. Suppose I have a /dev/sdb1 which is mounted to /mnt/data. I want to have access to the download dir on that drive. Then I can do:

mount --bind /mnt/data/download /home/mattie/download

to access this from my home dir. you can use the -r option to make it read-only if you wish (though doesn’t make much sense in my scenario). I suppose it might also work using hard links but I didn’t try that as I didn’t need a permanent link. Using mount, the link simply disappears on the next reboot.

Controlling XMMS using a gamepad

On windows I used to control winamp using global shortcuts. Since I didn’t immediately find this plugin on linux (although google seems to suggest it exists), I tried the joystick control plugin. But I never used a joystick before on linux.. 🙂

I plugged in my Logitech Dual Action Gamepad and a cpu spike indicated something got detected. 😉 I didn’t have high hopes it would work in XMMS though, since that’s about as archaic as one can get with a gui app. 😉 I enabled the libjoy.so plugin and set the path right to /dev/input/js0 instead of the default /dev/js0. I tried some button and some joystick. It didn’t do anything.

Let’s have a look at Yast. Yes, it has a joystick module, but it didn’t seem to list my gamepad. But then I read in the side column that you don’t have to configure anything if you use an USB gamepad. So next thing was to try KDE’s control center which turns out to also have joystick module. Indeed, the gamepad with all its axes and buttons was properly detected! While I was there, I also did a calibration, mostly for fun, as it didn’t seem necessary. So why didn’t it work with XMMS, because it was just too old?

In a final attempt, I tried testing a “general analog joystick” in yast, which triggered a package install (don’t remember which one). I don’t know if it was the package that did the trick, but after that, it worked in XMMS! It was just a matter of finding out the right buttons by trial and error (the mapping didn’t correspond to KDE’s mapping).