I tried the latest version of Eclipse the other night. As usual, I downloaded the “Eclipse Classic” tarball for Linux. It’s an iffy release to say the least, akin to KDE 4.0. There have been major changes in the platform itself. But the most visible part is the way plugins are managed and installed. Personally I had high hopes for the new UI as the old one was a bit unwieldy to work with. Unfortunately, the new UI still needs a lot more work done. The main problem I had with the new UI is that even the plugins that already came with the package I downloaded still show up int the Available Software window. There also appears to be a bug where if you check and then uncheck a plugin, it will still install that plugin. There are also some new issues and regressions introduced by the new UI that they still have to work on.

Right now, I’m back to using Vim. Eclipse 3.4 is just too flaky for me at the moment.

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Eclipse 3.4 (Ganymede) First Impressions

Full AP Report.

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R.I.P. LeRoi Moore

In a number of ways it’s failed for me:

1. Cuil is pronounced “cool”. Okay, so how do I tell people about this new search engine? “Hey try this new search engine ‘cool dot com’.” And they go type cool.com which gives you another one of those parked domains with a “search engine”. And then people who try cool.com get search results for all sorts of malware and pr0n pushing sites. Definitely not cuil.
2. The service if flakier than twitter. That’s right. One hour after being posted on reddit, the thing goes down. So you’re going to take on Google huh? You should be on stage at your local comedy bar.
3. Cuil is not as omniscient as they claim to be. I noticed this when I typed in “vim workspace” and it had nothing. One user on Mixx has also pointed out that they don’t have anything on “iraq war”.

Three strikes and you’re out.

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Cuil Isn’t

The home page is simple, like Google’s so it should present a familiar UI to everyone who has ever used Google.

Cuil Home Page, like Google only darker.

The difference is when you send your query. Cuil presents search results in a different layout from what we are used to.

Search Results for ADHD

As you can see, the way the search results are presented can be a bit overbearing at first. That’s 3 fricken columns of information right there! You even have the option to expand it to 4. I’m trying it out by setting it as my default search engine on Firefox for the next few days.

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Cuil - A New Search Engine by Google Alumni

So they seem to have taken the usual half-broken approach: you can have read-only closures which are immune to changes to a global variable, or you can have read-write closures which remember changes, but those changes leak back into the global variable.

Oops! Closures are not supposed to do that! It sort of defeats the purpose of having closures in the first place. There is a workaround to the problem but that is one more quirk that you have to remember when working with PHP. Two steps forward, one step back.

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When is a Closure not a Closure?

Google Code has a behind the scenes look at the technology and techniques used in making this video.

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Radiohead - House of Cards Music Video

I have seen this page before. Berger had the same problem when we were moving our arsenic.ph domain to our shiny new server. Here’s what he was getting at the time:

It also appears that we were not the only ones affected by this issue. There are others who are also getting this strange page.

WTF?!?

The first time I came saw this problem was when we moved our arsenic.ph domain name to our new server. There were, admittedly, a few kinks that I had not worked out yet and DNS was among them. I was able to access our home page with no problem. But Berger complained to me about getting this “search results” page and my first suspicion was that his PC had been hijacked and that DNS queries were going somewhere else. But then he’s using a Mac. You can deny it as much as you would like, but Mac users are not immune to pwnage. I found instructions on how to reset the DNS cache for Mac OS X. We tried it to no avail. Eventually he ended up doing a wipe-n-load on his Macbook Pro.

Eventually, our new DNS settings have propagated throughout the whole DNS network. So arsenic.ph can now be accessed with no problems. I forgot about it but then it reared it’s ugly head again last night. I thought that my laptop had been hijacked so I ran HijackThis which found nothing out of the ordinary. I also downloaded and ran Spybot Search and Destroy. Nothing suspicious. Short of doing a full system scan with my AV software, I decided to take a different route.

I rebooted to Linux. Typed vim.org in Firefox and it automagically redirects to www.vim.org, Vim’s home page as it should. So what was triggering the “Search Page” on Windows?

meridiantelekoms.com is Sucks

To understand the problem, you need to understand what your OS does when you type in a bare domain name in your browser’s address bar. Typically it goes something like this:

Your OS will try to find the domain name in its local DNS cache. If this fails, it will query your first DNS server. If connecting to your first DNS server fails, it will try to connect to the second one in the list (some systems allow up to 5 backup DNS servers). If the DNS query does not return a usable IP address, your system will fall back to whatever it is you have as your “Primary Domain Suffix”. It will tack your primary domain suffix to the end of the domain name you have just supplied.

For example, you type in “nonexistentdomain.none” in your browser’s address bar. Your OS will go through with the usual query chain before giving up and using your supplied primary domain suffix. For SmartBro customers, your primary domain suffix is “meridiantelekoms.com” by default. So “nonexistentdomain.none” will be turned into “nonexistentdomain.none.meridiantelekoms.com”.

Let’s take a look at what “meridiantelekoms.com” looks like:

Look familiar? It appears that some uberleethax0r has taken over the meridiantelekoms.com website. Here is the whois data for meridiantelekoms.com as domaintools sees it.

Here is the relevant part of the whois data as reported by the command line whois tool that I have installed on Linux:

Registrant:
Maagdenberg, Ubbo
   Wilhelimanstraat 9
   Haarlem 2011vh
   NL

   Domain Name: MERIDIANTELEKOMS.COM

   Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
      Maagdenberg, Ubbo                
      Wilhelimanstraat 9
      Haarlem 2011vh
      NL
      +31.003123 fax: +31.003123

   Record expires on 07-Oct-2008.
   Record created on 07-Oct-1999.
   Database last updated on 14-Jul-2008 12:30:54 EDT.

   Domain servers in listed order:

   NS5.WORLDNIC.COM             205.178.190.3
   NS6.WORLDNIC.COM             205.178.144.3

This “Ubbo Maagdenberg” person probably bought the expired meridiantelekoms.com domain and configured it to point to this “Relevancy Searcher” page that you keep getting if you try to enter a non-existent domain name. At the moment, this is slightly annoying when you get this “Relevancy Searcher” page. But this can turn dangerous if the server running at the IP address 69.64.58.30 was hax0red and began serving malware to unsuspecting passersby on the Smart Broadband network. It can also be turned into a staging area for man-in-the-middle attacks.

How Do You Fix This?

The fix is pretty simple if you’re behind a router. Just set your router up so that it supplies “.” (dot/period) as the Primary Domain Suffix to DHCP clients. On my WRT54G router, this can be set up under the “Basic Setup” page of the “Setup” tab on the router’s web-based admin interface. Simply change the “Domain Name” field to say “.” (without quotes).

It’s a bit more involved if you’re directly connecting your PC to your SmartBro. It depends on what OS you’re running. If you’re running Windows, the instructions found here may help. It’s for Windows 2000 but it’s still usable under Windows XP.

If you’re running Linux and your distribution is using NetworkManager or some weird automatic network configuration daemon, then you need to go to your Linux distribution’s forum and try searching for “networkmanager resolv.conf”.

For Mac OS X, you’re on your own for now, at least until September of this year.

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The Mysterious “Search Page”

encfs: error while loading shared libraries: librlog.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

It turns out that there has been a recent update to rlog and the encfs package was somehow left out of the rebuild. It also appears that the encfs package has disappeared from the Arch Linux Community Repository.

I have been rolling my own Arch Linux packages for quite a while now. I have been using a few locally built packages on my system. Since I already have two custom packages that I wrote myself, I figured it would be a good idea to share them. I’m too lazy to register with AUR and upload these packages and it would be likely that I would forget about updating them as well. So I am posting them here for consumption by the general public.

Download the Arch Linux source package for encfs here. To build this:

1. Make a directory to hold the files contained in the encfs source package.
2. Unpack the tarballed source package into the directory you created.
3. Install boost. Boost is a C++ library that is used by recent versions of encfs. You will also need to install fuse in case you don’t have it yet.
4. Change into the encfs source package directory you made and run makepkg -c. This will download the source for the current version of encfs. When makepkg finishes you will end up with an installable package in your current directory.
5. Install the package using pacman encfs-1.4.2-1-i686.pkg.tar.gz (replace encfs-1.4.2-1-i686.pkg.tar.gz with the correct filename for your custom-built package.)

There you go. You should have encfs working now.

You can also find pyme in my AUR directory.

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Updated encfs Source Packages for Arch Linux

From the REG article:

Many Reg readers have asked why LinkScanner doesn’t scans links after you click on them. But it does. It scans both before and after. AVG chief of research Roger Thompson argues that this two-layer approach guards against so-called zero-day exploits. If a site is infected with one piece of malware, there’s a good chance it’s infected with a second, he says, and if you prevent users from even clicking on a site, you protect them from exploits you see as well as those you don’t.

Er, that’s great except that this approach is costing us webmasters money. Let me repeat myself: AVG/Grisoft FOADIAF!

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AVG Antivirus 8 is A Bloated Piece of Crap

Granted that this crapware is pretty popular in the Philippines and my site gets 90% of its traffic from Philippine IP address ranges, I decided to check out my logs and see what was happening.

# cat abing.gotdns.com-access.log* |\
grep -E ‘MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;( SV1|1813))’ |\
grep -F ‘”-”‘|wc -l
1219

That’s about 4% of the total lines of my recent log files.

Following a discussion thread on proggit I found a quick and nasty solution for the nasty LinkScanner crap.

To the brilliant “software engineer” who is behind this LinkScanner crap, this is all I can say to you: FOADIAF!!!

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AVG LinkScanner IS SUCKS!