The Niklas Lindblad Organisation

A few friends of mine running Vista have had troubles installing the NVIDIA hotfix described in KB940105. The hotfix is downloadable as Windows6.0-KB940105-x86.msu and can be installed using the following steps:

Unpack the hotfix

expand -f:* "Windows6.0-KB940105-x86.msu" %TEMP%

Apply the hotfix (you will be prompted about whether to allow or not)

pkgmgr.exe /n:%TEMP%Windows6.0-KB940105-x86.xml

If you’re anything like me, you heavily rely on splitting things up. Even the simplest application needs to be separated into individual files for functions, database calls and user interface. The files are usually named and placed so that they are easily accessible for the index file and inconvenient to find for the potential attacker.

If the attacker where to reveal their path it would not necessarily pose a serious threat to the application’s security, assuming executing the individual file on its own does not give away any useful debugging information. To avoid helping people exploit your applications you may consider to turn off the standard PHP behaviour of throwing out all possible information as soon as something goes wrong: Either set “error_reporting†to “0†in php.ini or through your .htaccess-file.

Additionally you might consider isolating your files from even executing on their own. The easy way to do this is to:

index.php

<?php function LoadedCorrectly() { return true; } ?>

database.php

<?php LoadedCorrectly() or die(); ?>

A close friend of mine recently visited Paris, France equipped with his brand new Nikon D40.

Running games such as Quake III, Enemy Territory or Return To Castle Wolfenstein on Linux will sometimes fail to initialize sound. After modifying a generic fix for this problem I wrote this:


APP="${1}.x86"
echo "${APP} 0 0 disable" > /proc/asound/card0/pcm0c/oss
echo "${APP} 0 0 direct" > /proc/asound/card0/pcm0p/oss
echo "${APP} 0 0 disable" > /proc/asound/card0/pcm1c/oss


To use it, simply run the script with the game binary’s name as an argument:

# Fix sound for RTCW single player
sh sound-fix.sh wolfsp

# Fix sound for Enemy Territory
sh sound-fix.sh et

I think I’ve finally figured what I want to do for the rest of my life. My humble dream is to get a Master of Science degree in Chemical Engineering, probably at Lund university or Chalmers (Gothenburg).

Some fields I think would be very fun to research:

Gmail said: You are currently using 666 MB (22%) of your 2902 MB.

Finally got my terminal server back!

Finally online again after more than a week without a working computer.

Home for lunch, last week on my summerjob where I’ve mostly been lawn mowing. Mowing the same spots for six weeks is sort of frustrating.

Chatting with blogosphere-king MenZa while talking with my girlfriend on the phone.

Just put together http://nlindblad.org/projects just to realise I haven’t really done anything impressive. :(

Watching a sweet demo of what we might expect in the future from *NIX desktops: http://tinyurl.com/2ypxa4

Trying to blog through twitter!

Preparing to re-install my terminal server, the file system is all cluttered and APT is broken.

Trying to solve Project Euler problem 47