Luis Rei

I forgot to post this during the week before the GLP (tsk tsk):

I finally got around to (mostly skim) reading Apple’s Secure Coding Guide. It is a very good, very clear, simple introduction to secure programming with some good pointers to other resources (links also available on the web page).

Still on the subject, Tom Yager asks Is Windows inherently more vulnerable to malware attacks than OS X? Yes. However I don’t buy his conclusion that this is merely the result of Microsoft trying to not compete with 3rd Party vendors. The article suffers from a bad case of Non sequitur - I don’t see any reason why the Services, SYSTEM account and registry mess should be blamed on Microsoft trying to please 3rd party vendors instead of simple incompetence.
I think it’s funny how everyone likes comparing their OS’s security to that of Windows and how so few (none?) compare their security to that of OpenBSD (or even netBSD). Try it, you might like it.

This is my first post after the GigaLanParty 2006 and coincidentally since the start of the semester. GLP 2006: - Portugal Telecom screwed us and instead of the 1Gbps that we had last year with 100Mbps reserved for the WCG, we got 200 Mbps with the same 100Mbps reserved for the WCG. So 100Mps / 100 people… that sucked. And no point in mentioning the IP incident - that would’ve been the death of it. - FREE!!! POPCORN!!! courtesy of Sapo - that kinda makes up for the lack of bandwidth right? - 4 (I think) XBox 360 for everyone to play. - The VIP feeling of the stadium’s VIP room - much better than the basement. So was it better than last year? Well… the lack of bandwidth is a big issue but overall I’d say yes. FEUP: Moving on, the start of this semester at FEUP has been a bit of a mess thanks to the the Bologna process. Gotta love chaos. This semester I’m taking the following courses (some loosely translated): - Microprocessors and Personal Computers (mostly IA-32 assembly - using MASM) - Statistics - Databases (PL/SQL?!? plus MySQL) - Logic Programming (in prolog. I predict this one is gonna give me a lot of work) - Operating Systems (yay plus we start with the unix api :D) Microsoft’s Zune: It can be accuratelly described with 3 letters: DOA Nintendo’s Wii: I’ve been wanting to blog about this one for a while now. The wii has gotten a lot of attention around the blogosphere and in gaming sites/forums. One might mistake this hype for something more substantial and it’s not uncommon to see predictions of the Wii’s “inevitable” success. This is not unlike the attention that Mac OSX gets from the blogosphere and, in fact, from the traditional media itself. A Martian reading the blogosphere would be induced to think that the Mac actually has a significant share of the PC market. But like most of us know, the reality is quite different. The core of the problem is the simple statistical problem of a non-random sample of the population - the population of people who feel the need to be fanboys (this is of course a biased oversimplification). The point is, while the Wii may sell much better than the Gamecube (if simply due to the fact the gamecube was the late arrival in the current/past generation console war), it is unlikely to rival the Xbox 360 or the PS3. Considering the supposed hardware specs, calling the Wii a next generation console (PS3) is a bit (Xbox360) of a stretch. I’m sure that the fact that I own a PS1 and a PS2 makes me biased but if sony did such a good job with the first 2 generations of the product, why should I (or anyone else for that matter) assume that it won’t do the same again this time? And for the record, I think the Xbox 360 is going to be as big as the PS3. No Net @ My Room - Crappy Wireing: Bye Bye tvtel? Hello claranet? Filesystems: ZFS will takeover the world. The new fat - a new filesystem we can all (linux, bsds, OSX, Windows via 3rd party software, not like MS would ever do what’s right for their customers) agree to support (and hopefully use by default) - a man can dream. I’m getting tired of having to use fat on my portable HD. FAT’s limitations are well… too limiting in these days - keeping files below 4GB means I have to tar them into multiple archives or split them. But there’s simply no other filesystem that is supported across the different systems. While I wait for ZFS to conquer all, I’ll have to come up with a temporary solution - maybe HFS with a fat partition with HFS software for Windows. Next on Rei - Through The Wire: New Toys Part II & III. This past few weeks have been kinda hard and I’ve been very busy and I still have 2 tons of things to do. Hopefully I’ll get the logserver up by the end of the day and still take a look at Statistics or maybe Databases. And god I hate classes at 8am.

Once again the HP network equipment that was provided fails to perform adequately. Dantas is on his way to FEUP to get a replacement.

The IRC server is up and runing, no services though - no point for a 3 day event… dunno if it’s even going to be used.

Counter-Strike and Counter-Strike Source servers are also runing.

At the moment ethernet cables still don’t reach every table but they will soon, there are a bunch of people working on it.

Relax got the wireless network runing which is what I’m using to make this post (via my laptop). I haven’t setup my own PC… I forgot the power cable for my monitor - one of the hazards of everything being plugged into a UPS, I only took one power cable from the cable drawer. Sigh. No matter, others forgot too so Relax and Gaspar went to get some cables and there will probably be an extra one for me.
TODO:

- Setup, Configure and test the goddamn IRC server

-  Setup and test the game servers

This could’ve been done long ago if the Portugal Telecom people hadn’t been silly… a lan party (of 200+ people) behind NAT - this one is going in my LOLERSKATES.txt.

I’m a bit tired and it’s going to be a long night….