So, being in the military, I get one of these nifty little dealies. I never bothered to look into them, but I saw a USB reader for $25 when they shipped us out for training, so I figured, what the hell.
I haven’t bothered to get really into smartcard hacking (yet?), but I have got it locking and unlocking my screen (and other assorted fun things when my friends plug their cards in).
Source - requires Chipcard::PCSC
Popularity: 2% [?]
Okay, I finally found a decent picture of me in that parade. Yay.
(That’s me in the back.)
Twitter’s fucking down again, which is too bad, because I just wrote a mail handler to tell me who’s following me. Woot, looks like it just came back up.
And, finally, I need reports on the new version of the RTL8187B driver that Mister Adams sent me, please. Does it compile? Does it work? Does it turn your computer into Oprah?
Popularity: 9% [?]
I’ve put up the contributed version of the RTL8187B driver I received from a Mister Adams that supposedly works with the 2.6.24 kernel. Note I haven’t tried it yet (I’m not in a hurry to upgrade from 2.6.22, even with that local exploit going around), and the only other person I sent it to reported a kernel panic. Use at your own risk.
Also, I was lucky enough to get called up to be in the Holiday Bowl Parade in San Diego in 2007. This was pretty much the only picture I could find (that’s me in the back):
If anyone else happened to be there and snap a couple, think you could send ‘em my way?
Popularity: 8% [?]
[UPDATE] I cleaned up the source a bit, so it’s suitable for human consumption.
I was adding more bells and whistles to my mail system — this time, a command-line program to parse through SpamAssassin’s configs and tell you about rules, and one to add headers as such — when I realized that all that data I was basing the pointless little graphs in my earlier post on was a little rough, and SpamAssassin already has the data on what I consider ham and spam. D’oh!
So, here’s another one, based on sa-learn --dump magic. (Here’s source.)
Popularity: 5% [?]
I was tweaking my email system when I started wondering: what are the most popular hits against SpamAssassin?
So, I wrote a program to find out. :-)
Popularity: 4% [?]
I’ve increased the nift factor of the cam system: I can post with my phone once again.
Popularity: 5% [?]
One of the recent improvements to my little blog has been moving Google ads from the sidebar to every third post on the main page. In attempting to detect whether a full-size leaderboard ad would fit, versus a banner ad, I’ve found that loading a responseText object from createXMLHttpRequest doesn’t parse Javascript.
Since there really isn’t any good way to get window resolution from PHP, I hacked around it a bit. See, I have one adsense.php that serves up all the ads. I just do a global $adtheme; ‘checkres’ is a special case that includes some Javascript to detect the window’s internal area.
It basically works like this.
if (window.innerWidth >= 980)
{
google_ad_width = '728';
google_ad_height = '90';
google_ad_format = '728x90_as';
}
else
{
google_ad_width = '468';
google_ad_height = '60';
google_ad_format = '468x60_as';
}
And then the rest of the Google adsense variables.
Popularity: 5% [?]
Irony is screwing with udev for a while, finding it’s too much of a pain in the ass, and writing a Perl program to interface with HAL instead.
Anyway, I wrote a program to run commands whenever anything (USB drive, SD card, joystick, whatever) is inserted or removed a while back, and I spiffed it up a bit so anyone can use it. I’m still making it pretty, but I’ll post source in a bit.
Oh, yeah. In my hacking, I noticed that ssh-agent is incapable of deleting an identity when the (public?) key file is no longer accessible — e.g., mount removable media with ssh key, load ssh key, unmount media, and you can’t delete it. Bug in ssh-agent?
[UPDATE] Source is here.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Yes, I finally broke down and bought a new laptop, with my <in-joke>fat Marine Corps paycheck</in-joke>.
It’s running Ubuntu Edgy, after a seemingly endless series of forced dist-upgrades from Feisty. I’ll be posting my experiences with it in a seperate section, since I seem to be the first Linux user to have bought the damned thing.
So far: ethernet works out of the box. The wireless card, a Realtek 8187B, needs a quick hack to the driver source, which I’ve detailed here. Sound and the modem are big question marks. I get 1280×800 with Xorg and the fglrx module. Synaptics touchpad works as expected.
More to come.
Popularity: 4% [?]
I got the drivers for the RTL8187B straight from Realtek, who was nice enough to respond to my email. However, when I compiled it and insmodded it under the Ubuntu live CD, it barfed out with an “Unknown RF chip” error.
After a bit of trial and error, I figured out how to get it to work: my card’s USB product ID is 0×8197, and it’s functionally identical to product ID 0×8189. All you have to do is go into rtl8187/r8187_core.c, and around line 2837, change
case 0x8189: to
case 0x8197:
case 0×8189:Works like a champ.
That said, why, WHY would you make the onboard NIC in a laptop a USB device? Why?
[EDIT] Drivers are at http://www.datanorth.net/~cuervo/rtl8187b/. Please read the README there, since I’ve made further changes since writing this post.
Popularity: 35% [?]
