Eugenia Loli Archive

Microsoft is facing an early crisis of confidence in the quality of its Windows Vista operating system as computer security researchers and hackers have begun to find potentially serious flaws in the system that was released to corporate customers late last month. On Dec. 15, a Russian programmer posted a description of a flaw that makes it possible to increase a user’s privileges on all of the company’s recent operating systems, including Vista. Update by Thom: Ars thinks the situation is hot air, mostly, something I agree with (a cracker already has to have login credentials for the flaws to be of any use).

The Asterisk dev team has released Asterisk 1.4.0, the first in the 1.4 series. The Asterisk project releases a major version about once a year. This series includes T.38 Fax over IP passthrough support, HTML manager, a new version of AEL (Asterisk Extension Language), IMAP storage of voicemail, Jabber/GoogleTalk integration, a jitterbuffer for RTP, whisper paging, and many more other new features.

The GNUstep project has recently elected a new Chief Maintainer. Gregory Casamento has taken over as the new chief of the project and has posted to his blog a set of goals which spell out the direction the project will take in the future.

Fresh from a positive experience installing Sarge on an old home server, the author of this review attempts to install a Debian Etch desktop on an old Thinkpad. How does it turn out? Surprisingly well.

More evidence: "Mac OS X Leopard (Build 9a321) features support for ZFS. The rumors were true, you can create disk images with a ZFS filesystem, well at least in theory, because Build 9a321 is far away from being stable. The DiskUtility itself crashes again and again. Trying to create an actual ZFS image produces kernel panics. There is no pool support to create stripes, mirrors or even RaidZ in DiskUtility yet. It seems that all the other rumor sites stopped right there, which is why we had to set up this website to show you how well ZFS is already implemented. We show you what works and what doesn't. After reading you will know what the deal is, with ZFS and the upcoming Mac OS."

VMware today released a beta version of the new VMware desktop product for the Mac, codenamed Fusion. It supports a wide variety of x86/x64 guests, and is cross-compatible with virtual machines created in VMware Workstation, VMware Player, VMware Server and VMware Infrastructure 3. It supports Virtual SMP, drag & drop of files between OS X and virtual machines, and supports all USB 2.0 devices. Even devices that do not have drivers for OS X will work in a virtual machine.

Lazy programming is a general concept of delaying the processing of a function or request until the results are needed. This concept has numerous applications, from the obvious to the obscure. Thinking in terms of lazy programming can help you rid your code of unneeded computation and restructure programs to be more problem-oriented.

Thanks to the efforts of Kurt Berglund, a new hire on the Windows Presentation Foundation (formerly "Avalon") team, there is now a library that allows standard WPF controls (like buttons, text boxes, lists) to be used interactively on 3D objects. This is not a native feature of the 1.0 version of the framework--such items could be displayed, but were non-interactive. See this channel9 video or this blog post for details on how this (dare I say) clever hack works. Source code is also available.

Christopher Hallinan examines the bootloader's role in a system, followed by an introduction to some common features of bootloaders. He also takes a detailed look at a popular bootloader used for embedded systems, and introduces a few of the more popular bootloaders.

"It doesn't matter what you (or tech reviewers) think of Windows Vista; sooner or later, it's what most people will have on their PCs. In that light, it's fortunate that Vista is better looking, better designed and better insulated against the annoyances of the Internet. At the very least, it's well equipped to pull the world's PCs along for the next five years - or whenever the next version of Windows drops down the chimney." More here. Free registration might be required.

"There are probably a lot of features and functions that Apple could -- and probably will -- add to OS X. But we're not pointing out missing features; we're focusing on 15 of the little things already in OS X that need refinement or rethinking based on our everyday use of Macs." More here.

"Gosh! I didn't realize how much discussion my original article would create. A lot of people seemed to accuse me of living in cloud cuckoo land, whereas a lot more agreed with me. I think those who disagreed have either never used RISC OS or just liked a good rant! In either case, I feel compelled to write a short follow up article clarifying some of the points I made in the original article - all of which were perfectly valid." Read the follow up article.

Microsoft on Wednesday took the wraps off its first commercial operating system for robots, with hopes of paving the way for a broader robotics industry and taking a central role in its development.

DesktopLinux.com's executive editor recently decided to retire Red Hat 7 after seven years of loyal service as his home LAN's firewall/router OS. This article chronicles his trials and tribulations as he presses "pure Debian" into service, first as a server and then as a Linux desktop. Read the complete tale here.