rxvt-unicode 256 color support with vim

Following my previous post on minimizing the resources that urxvt needs on Gentoo, I tried applying some more patches to it that I found in Gentoo’s bugzilla.
Since that happened a few days ago there was no ebuild for version 9.05 yet. So I created one and applied the patch for the 256 color support.

Here’s my rxvt-unicode ebuild for version 9.05 with 256 color support: rxvt-unicode-9.05.ebuild.
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Euro 2008 open source tour

451 CAOS Theory has a mini review of what’s going on with open source among the countries that compete in Euro 2008.
It’s quite interesting.
Here’s the link about Greece. It has quite a point…Things don’t look very promising…

The quest for a better rxvt-unicode on Gentoo

Today, while studying I decided to manually run a prelink on my system. For no good reason. Just boredom I guess. The results were pretty interesting though.

Among the output there was a line that made a very big impression to me.
prelink: /usr/bin/urxvt: Cannot prelink against non-PIC shared library //usr//lib/opengl/nvidia/lib/libGL.so.1
Why oh why is libGL.so.1 inside the shared libraries of a terminal ???
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Speed up multiple ssh connections to the same destination

When you are doing multiple ssh connections to one host there’s a way to speed them up by multiplexing them. When you open the first network connection a special socket is created and then all other connections to the destination machine pass through the first network connection and don’t open any new ones. All that is done via ControlMaster and ControlPath settings for ssh_config.

Example usage:
Inside /etc/ssh/ssh_config
ControlMaster auto
ControlPath /tmp/%r@%h:%p

Firsh ssh connection:
% ssh foobar@foo.bar.gr
Password:
Linux foo.bar.gr 2.6.20.1-1-686 #1 SMP Sun Mar 4 12:44:55 UTC 2007 i686 GNU/Linux
foobar@foo:~$

Second ssh connection:
% ssh -p 22 foobar@foo.bar.gr
Linux foo.bar.gr 2.6.20.1-1-686 #1 SMP Sun Mar 4 12:44:55 UTC 2007 i686 GNU/Linux
foobar@foo:~$

No password is asked and the connection opens up immediately.

kudos to apoikos for telling me about this neat feature in fosscomm 🙂

Αναλύοντας ένα attack σε honeypot

Ο Δημήτρης έχει μια αρκετά καλή ανάλυση ενός attack σε ένα honeypot που έχει στήσει για πειραματισμούς. Αξίζει να του ρίξετε μια ματιά…

Επιτέλους μας την έπεσαν

44Mbit of multicast traffic can cause a lot more problems than you might think

I was reading my mails today and I bumped into some problems that Internet2 routers faced a couple of days ago with some multicast traffic sent from a host in France. Apparently the host was sending 44Mbit of traffic to a multicast group and that was more than enough to raise a very high load on some routers and cause problems to some firewalls too. Their solution was to either blacklist the host or to disable SAP listen on their routers.

To read more you can check the thread “Another SAP Storm?” from wg-multicast@internet2.edu All things related to multicast .

The same problem appeared on GrNET routers too, but unfortunately they don’t have any public archives of their exchanged mails on the problem. The only way to take a look at this problem from the GrNET point of view is to check on the GrNET router status page, click on the load of some routers and check the spike that appears on Wednesday night in the weekly graph.

Quite interesting…

Mobile view of the internet

This might be old news to most people but I didn’t know it…
You can use a special google url to view websites like mobiles phones do. Try this for example:
http://google.com/gwt/n?u=http://void.gr/kargig/blog/.
It’s quite useful when you want to see how your site looks like from a mobile phone or when you want to use a browser from a terminal like lynx or links (I know you don’t use these browsers but sometimes I do…)
To begin browsing in “mobile view” just go to http://www.google.com/gwt/n and all links you click afterwards will be parsed through the proxy.

And another link I liked was this: http://www.google.com/xhtml. Mobile view of google’s search.

How much does a macbook really cost ?

A friend of mine just ordered a macbook here in Greece. 2.4GHz CPU, 2Gb RAM, 160GB disk. No extras.
Looking at www.applestore.gr this macbook costs 1066E without tax. Tax here in Greece is 19% so the final price would be: 1294,72€
I decided to take a look at other applestores and compare the prices.
applestore.com lists it at 1299$. Using www.xe.com to convert that money to Euros: 843.403€ !! (there might be some kind of taxing missing from here. If you know something please correct me with a comment)
applestore.se lists it at SEK 11.795,00 with tax included. Using www.xe.com to convert that money to Euros: 1,266.38€
applestore.co.uk lists it at £829.00 with tax included. Using www.xe.com to convert that money to Euros: 1,049.31€
applestore.fr lists it at 1.199,00 € with tax included.
applestore.de lists it at 1.199,00 € with tax included.
applestore.it lists it at 1.199,00 € with tax included.
applestore.nl lists it at 1.199,00 € with tax included.
applestore.es lists is at 1.149,00 € with tax included.
applestore.pt lists it at 1.199,00 € with tax included.
applestore.no lists it at kr 10 390,00. Using www.xe.com to convert that money to Euros:1,304.20€
applestore.fi lists it at 1.199,00 € with tax included.

to summarize, from least expensive to most expensive (tax included):
US: 843€
UK:1049€
Spain: 1149€
Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal: 1199€
Sweden: 1266€
Greece: 1294€
Norway: 1304€

Now, should I be happy or sad that in my country it costs a lot more than most other European countries ? It surely costs more than any other country in the Euro zone. If someone takes into account that the minimal monthly payment here in Greece is at 600€, then this macbook here in Greece costs more than 2 months of work. Shouldn’t the price be exactly the same as all other countries in the Euro zone since we are using Euros (€)? What’s the big deal with Greece ? Even the site looks different than all others.. :S

My Desktop (mess)

Since I was tagged by comzeradd to show my Desktop..here it is.

To see what’s all that just click the image and check the notes of flickr.

I tag dstergiou, hsoc, stsimb and thatha 😀