Jedi/Sector One's random thoughts

Google has published info about how their data centers work.

The part about evaporative cooling is really cool.

Here is an old, but still relevant trick for PHP coders: Closing the users browser connection whilst keeping your php script running.

Finally! A new release of the excellent Prototype library has seen the light.

It fixes all known bugs, it is now Google Caja-compliant, it uses the W3C selectors API if available, and overall performance has improved.

Download Prototype 1.6.0.3 while it's hot!

Here's a nice site with some extensions for the Prototype javascript library

It cries for more contributions. But I think the main reason is that not a lot of people know that such a site exists.

So here's the link, and enjoy the Prototype library.

And by the way, here's a cool extension for Prototype developpers : Prototype Xtensions.

And some other cool articles/links about Prototype are available on Ajaxian.

I just discovered an article by a cool guy called Bapt, explaining How to find the cue point of a video with libpuzzle (french).

Good trick, thank you Bapt!

Have a look at his blog, it's excellent.

Maksymilian Arciemowicz published a cross-site request forgery vulnerability, affecting BSD FTP servers, ProFTPd and maybe others.

If you're running Pure-FTPd, even a very old version, keep cool, your server is not vulnerable. The Pure-FTPd command parser is a bit aggressive (it drops the connection if very large requests are received) but it avoids this flaw.

Stefan Esser published his Slide from the Zend Conference 2008 covering various common vulnerabilities in PHP applications and in PHP itself.

It's definitely worth a read.

It's as old as the internet, but it can still be interesting and it's still kept up-to-date: IANA's IPv4 Global Unicast Address Assignements

Want to see every /8 managed by the RIPE? Try:

wget -o /dev/null -O - http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ | fgrep whois.ripe.net

This map also shows how many IPv4 /8 addresses blocks are still unallocated.

Neat !

Javascript Pacman

My very first code on PC... GEMA... It was 14 years ago...

Click here to download GEMA or rather to have a look at what it was.

A gate to hell. An helper to blindly move from the wonderful Atari / Amiga scene to the boring world of PC.

Oh shit, computing was so fun, and it's now so boring.

Could JavaScript Power A Significant Future Ruby Implementation or VM?

Everybody focuses on Javascript these days. So why not implement a virtual machine in Javascript?

Login: reiser
Password:

$ touch wife
touch: access denied

$ sudo touch wife
password:
touch: access denied

$ echo "wtf?"
wtf?

$ pgrep wife
14589

$ sudo kill -9 14589

$ mv body /dev/hills/body

Some time later:

Login: cops
Password:

$ locate body
body not found

$ sudo usermod -g felon reiser

$ sudo updatedb

$ locate body
/dev/hills/body

The first real security flaw in Google Chrome has been disclosed by vietnamese researcher Le Duc Anh – SVRT member of the BKIS group.

This is a critical vulnerability.

OSBF-Lua won yet another spam filter challenge.

The CEAS 2008 Spam Filter Live Challenge results have just been published and OSBF-Lua was number one by both criteria : LAM% and 1-AUC%.

OSBF-Lua is also extremely fast. And the Fidelis Assis OSB algorithm is now the default classifier for CRM114.

If you ever want to test DragonflyBSD without any installation, download the first version of the DragonflyBSD live DVD made by Louisa Luciani.

The documentation can be found here: documentation of DragonflyBSD live DVD.