A sample program hit the Internet on Wednesday, showing by example how malicious coders could compromise Windows computers by using a flaw in the handling of a widespread graphics format by Microsoft's software. Security professionals expect the release of the program to herald a new round of attacks by viruses and Trojan horses incorporating the code to circumvent security on Windows computers that have not been updated. The flaw, in the way Microsoft''s software processes JPEG graphics, could allow a program to take control of a victim's computer when the user opens a JPEG file.




At the same time, Microsoft has decided that future IE updates, including those related to security, will only be available to customers using Windows XP. This news.com article has the complete scoop. A choice quote: 'Microsoft may be turning the lemons of its browser's security reputation into the lemonade of a powerful upgrade selling point.'.




As allways, it's mandatory for Windows users to update regularly.

The original Star Wars movies have been re-re-remastered; I'm still in doubt whether or not to buy the 3 DVD box, but at 50$ I guess it's not such an exaggerated price. TheDigitalBits has a nice overview what has been changed graphically between the 1997 Special Editions of the Star Wars films and the new 2004 DVD Editions.

Fancy a ride through the Orion nebula ? On the site of the San Diego supercomputer center you can find a 29MB big AVI file which takes you on a flight in and around the Orion nebula. It is one of the most famous objects in the winter sky, visible with the naked eye, and about 1500 light years away from us. It's a place where young stars are born.

Don't know anything about the Kaluza-Klein theory ? Never heard of Kepler''s first law ? GOES is Chinese for you ? You want more info about Omicron Ceti ? Well, take a look at the Astronomy Knowledge Base.

On October 15th, it will be 25 years ago that Radio Scorpio started broadcasting. From September 13th, Scorpio will look back on its turbulent history, with flash-backs, interviews and different events, celebrating its 25th birthday.

This is my new monitor; a 17" Philips TFT screen, running at a resolution of 1280x1024. Feels like watching a giant TV screen after the last week, looking at an old monitor at 800x600.

I attended a Solaris10 demo at Sun's headquarters in Brussels, and I must say that I was fairly impressed. I already knew that the new Solaris10 stuff was interesting, but ZFS and DTrace are really cool stuff.




So I decided to download the Solaris10 beta, available through the Solaris Express program, and see how it would react if I threw it in a VMware session. To install Solaris10 beta, you need the last VMware 4.5 workstation version, as it has experimental Solaris10 support. A lower version will bail out with a strange monitor error after the installation of the first CD (been there, done that). VMware has an interesting page about Solaris10 with installation tips to follow closely.




So now I have a Solaris10 running nicely inside VMware. Finally time to play around with DTrace. Nice to see that Sun has also included some GNU utilities like openSSH, but there are still many missing (where's my Vim ?).

Sometimes coincidence can be frightening : yesterday, I noticed that my computer screen refused to deactivate DPMS. Rebooting the computer revealed that the screen had died on me. At the same time, my laptop battery went dead. Plugging in the power cord didn't resume the laptop, and even after rebooting, the laptops screen remained black... WTF ? Only after a second reboot, the laptop showed a screen again. Spooky, isn't it ? Luckily I still had an old screen lying around, but working at 800x600 isn't much fun.

A job that our storage boys had to implement for me extended deep into the night, so while I was waiting, I decided to upgrade my sparcDebian box to 2.6.7. My first attempt for a 2.6 kernel wasn''t much of a success : no framebuffer, X refused to start up and I noticed the keyboard refused to react. By trial and error, I found out that :

• limiting the framebuffer support to Mach64 only fixed the framebuffer


• removing the files in /etc/console fixed my keyboard


• disabling preemptive support fixed some framebuffer problems

Ciaran McCreesh has some info about .config files for various Sparc machines which might be of interesest. And Google had some interesting tips about the XFree setup for kernel 2.6 too.




I have 2.6.7 up and running, but the mouse still refuses to work in X. If anyone has some tips...

An interesting signal has been discovered by SETI. No real evidence of Someone Out There, but not fully explainable either. Maybe aliens should send spacemail, not signals: Rutgers electrical engineering professor, Christopher Rose, has an article on Nature magazine's cover today describing the most efficient way for our civilization to be discovered by aliens. On this question of better to 'write or radiate', his conclusions: better not to send radio transmission, when physical media like DNA on an asteroid can declare a terrestrial presence.


Similar to what motivated Voyager scientists to attach a plaque for the outbound trip.