2of1

half a nibble of another

Recently I’ve taken an interest in console-based utilities with the aim of seeing whether I can intact perhaps be even more productive than just using X-based solutions.
The best thing about this is that it would probably easily run under 100Mhz and can be accessed as-is over a terminal session.
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UPDATE: See comments

Linux purists are going to go crazy at this, but I was looking for a way to write to the kernel ring buffer (read by dmesg) from a userspace script.
I’m not going to debate the ‘whys’ – but in short I like having my sys logs for automated system actions (some which are userspace-launched) in one neat place.
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Some fantastic news to report!

Remember this issue?

Well, today I received an email from Mark Lawrence at Microsoft in regard to the issue of using the Windows SDK headers in FOSS.

Here’s an excerpt of the relevant bit:

"Creating a derivative of the d2d1.h header file would be a problem,
but merely looking at it for referential purposes in order to develop 
your own header and software for the Windows platform should be 
within the scope of the SDK license."

So it seems we have the go-ahead for ‘peeking’ in the original headers and using them as a base reference for our own!

I’ve been looking for a way to compile an app developed with Qt Creator on Linux for Windows.

I came across this but I needed to tweak it before it worked so I decided to blog my own mini-guide (tested working with with Qt 4.6.3).

This assumes that you already have the Qt SDK (for Linux) installed.

1. The first thing to do is download and install the MinGW cross compiler
2. Then download the Windows version of the Qt SDK. As it’s distributed as a Win package, you’ll need to either install it on windows and copy the necessary files across to your linux distro (what I did) or install it through Wine (not sure if this even works). You can cross-compile it as well if you’re being adventurous
3. Place the Qt Win SDK libraries in /usr/lib32/qt4win32 and headers in /usr/include/qt4win32
4. Copy /usr/share/qt4/mkspecs/win32-g++/ to /usr/share/qt4/win32-x-g++/
5. In the above directory, replace qmake.conf with the one found here
6. Make sure that the paths in qmake.conf match those of your system (see NOTE below); specifically QMAKE_CXX, QMAKE_LINK, QMAKE_INCDIR, QMAKE_INCDIR_QT, QMAKE_LIBDIR_QT
7. Run qmake adding –spec win32-x-g++ command line arg. This should cross-compile your app.

NOTE: As my linux box is a x86_64, my /usr/lib is /usr/lib32. Please adjust this accordingly for your setup.

Run through a compresses ssh tunnel, e.g.:

ssh user@dest -L 5900:localhost:5900 -C

Optimal vncviewer command line params:

vncviewer -encodings "copyrect tight hextile zlib corre rre raw"

I’ve started working on adding support for DVB-S scanning to VLC (as part of a general VLC/DVB update).

Currently, DVB-S scanning uses transponder lists and it seems to work quite well.

You can download the latest set of patches from github.

You’ll also need some transponder config files. You can use the ones that come with dvb-scan.
just put them in your vlc share directory(vlc/share or /usr/share/vlc) under dvb/dvb-s/.

To apply do the following:

cd <vlc source directory>
git apply *.patch

Now compile.

You can the run vlc with something like the following:

./vlc -vv dvb://frequency=0:satellite=hotbird13.0e

(The frequency=0 param tells the dvb module to perform a scan).

Please report back to me with any bugs – this is very experimental at the moment.

In security research, it’s sometimes necessary to mount an image with multiple partitions.

Mounting a ‘dd’ image of a single partition is trivial using mount, however mount can simply not know to deal with an image with multiple partitions, mbr, etc. (for e.g. a disk drive image).
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At first I thought this was a problem with my client (vncviewer).
Turns out it’s an issue with x11vnc instead.

x11vnc has the ‘modtweak’ option enabled by default. Simply disable it using -nomodtweak.

It’s quite easy to generate a random word to be used for anything your heart desires!

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How to mount a jffs2 image on ubuntu…
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