Random Blubb

It doesn't happen very often that I see stuff which will make me speechless or just *really* give me this strong WTF feeling.

This one though which I stumbled upon did a great job.

What will be next?

The arch enemies GNU/Linux troll, MacOS imp and the ugly UNIX beast in the list? What do you think?

PS: For more happenings like this I recommend this reading literature for further study ;)

Today I encountered some serious exploits floating around in Full disclosure, Bugtraq and even Slashdot.

Better monkey patch your multiuser machines fast, before the script kiddies get a grip on this...

• LKML about this issue
• Slashdot Article
• Debian Bugtrack about this exploit
• Live Memory fix, which inserts a ret at the beginning of vmsplice()
• Full exploit POC

[0:07][br@gemini:programming/linux/exploits]% ./exploit 
-----------------------------------
 Linux vmsplice Local Root Exploit
 By qaaz
-----------------------------------
[+] mmap: 0x0 .. 0x1000
[+] page: 0x0
[+] page: 0x20
[+] mmap: 0x4000 .. 0x5000
[+] page: 0x4000
[+] page: 0x4020
[+] mmap: 0x1000 .. 0x2000
[+] page: 0x1000
[+] mmap: 0xb7f9e000 .. 0xb7fd0000
[+] root
bash: 0STY: command not found
root@gemini:~/programming/linux/exploits# whoami
root
root@gemini:~/programming/linux/exploits# 

Beware of the live memory fix as some people experienced memory faults and system breakdowns.

[0:13][br@gemini:programming/linux/exploits]% ./disable_exploit 
-----------------------------------
 Linux vmsplice Local Root Exploit
 By qaaz
-----------------------------------
[+] mmap: 0x0 .. 0x1000
[+] page: 0x0
[+] page: 0x20
[+] mmap: 0x4000 .. 0x5000
[+] page: 0x4000
[+] page: 0x4020
[+] mmap: 0x1000 .. 0x2000
[+] page: 0x1000
[+] mmap: 0xb7fa8000 .. 0xb7fda000
[+] root
Exploit gone!
[0:14][br@gemini:programming/linux/exploits]% ./exploit 
-----------------------------------
 Linux vmsplice Local Root Exploit
 By qaaz
-----------------------------------
[+] mmap: 0x0 .. 0x1000
[+] page: 0x0
[+] page: 0x20
[+] mmap: 0x4000 .. 0x5000
[+] page: 0x4000
[+] page: 0x4020
[+] mmap: 0x1000 .. 0x2000
[+] page: 0x1000
[+] mmap: 0xb7f7c000 .. 0xb7fae000
[-] vmsplice
[0:14][br@gemini:programming/linux/exploits]% whoami
br

Update:

For more indepth analysis of what has been going on why, what, etc. find a nice LWN article here.

Reading from the headline you might think what is he up to now again? Jargon? What the..?

Firing up dict from the commandline we get this explanation what the word actually means:

From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:

  Jargon \Jar"gon\, n. [F. jargon, OF. also gargon, perh. akin to
     E. garrulous, or gargle.]
     1. Confused, unintelligible language; gibberish. "A barbarous
        jargon." --Macaulay. "All jargon of the schools." --Prior.
        [1913 Webster]
  
     2. Hence: an artificial idiom or dialect; cant language;
        slang. Especially, an idiom with frequent use of informal
        technical terms, such as acronyms, used by specialists.
        "All jargon of the schools." --Prior.
        [1913 Webster]

Apart from the obvious first explanation I am actually referring to the second one and want to let you in on a quite funny trade secret. Some of you might have heared that Doctors often talk to each other in latin especially infront of patients using medical slang (e.g. Plumbum oscillans).

So what is the deal you say?

Well people in the IT world tend to have those ways too and most ,,normal'' people don't get them. Some funny expressions are e.g.

pebkac /peb´kak/	Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair	Userfriendly about it
UBD /U·B·D/, n.	User Brain Damage
Fractal Wrongness	The state of being wrong at every conceivable scale of resolution.	More info here
ID-ten-T error aka Ten-T error	Ten-T Error is a term often used by tech support operators and computer experts to describe a problem that is due to the user's ignorance instead of a software or hardware malfunction.	Another slight variation is known as a ,,Layer 8 error''

... and many more ...

Should you have encountered them then beware and maybe now you understand why your account gets mysteriously deleted sometimes ;).

So do you know any other slangs like the mentioned ones? Maybe from other majors?


PS: Shame on the one who thinks I only know the latin expressions from earlier practice ;P
PPS: Please do read this stuff it is funny as hell and will save your ,,life'' if you are a non tekki.
PPPS: Please don't scold me for spilling those secrets ;)

Sometimes on the way I find some funny things as here in Setagaya-Daita. Remembering a funny (,,the invasion'') picture Martin a friend of mine took, I counter with this one. Its outside a barber shop, which makes this even more interesting.

Not quite as good as his, but hey we are here not in Germany right ? ;)


(Sorry for the poor quality but its from my mobile phone).

Between the 29th december and the 3rd january even japanese people tend to have holidays. I know its incredible ;).

Anywho, in Shinjuku some construction workers had some fun with glowing pylons which are normally used to redirect traffic. Have a look what they did :


Nifty smiley ;)

Today I got something less serious for you !

My lab was in Cambodia for a 3D digitalizing project (Unesco) and they bought us this back as a okashi (present). I think I will keep it as a souvenir ;)

Do you think I should try it ?



For the knowledge hungry:

• Cambodia
• Bayon Temple

Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 passes the ACID 2 test.



Yes, you read right. I can't belive it either. All those hours and hours of monkey patching and conditional CSSing will this really be a thing of the past ? This is for me as a hobby and freelancing webdeveloper just plainly - incredible.

Finally M$ seems to have managed it back on the standards path proposed by the Webstandards advocacy group (and the rest of the world). This has to sides of a coin. It's good for webdevelopers but bad for our OSS friends on the browser front. From a quote on the webstanards.org page:

• ,,This doesn’t necessarily mean that IE8 has fixed all its float oddities, or its hasLayout hilarities. But what it does mean is that there is another browser war, and Microsoft did decide to come.''

Here are some results of other Browsers regarding this test.

Is there light at the end of the tunnel ?

In their blog post Dean Hachamovitch writes something which gives me a good and then a very bad feeling though.

• ,,Standards are a (critical!) means to this end, and we focus on the standards that will help actual, real-world interoperability the most. As a consumer and a developer, I expect stuff to just work, and I also expect backwards compatibility. When I get a new version of my current browser, I expect all the sites that worked before will still work.''

By all means how can you keep backwards compatibility to something (<= IE7 ) which is plainly just broken ? If Microsoft really takes it serious about dominating the browser market they need to break with the past sorry excuses for a browser. Hey I know I am just critical right? Please don't listen to me, even the guys who are developing this thing said the same. Quote:

• ,,We fully recognize that IE is behind the game today in CSS support.''

It's great though that there is finally something happening about this ! I really hope they can pull this stunt to stay compatible to the total crap^W^Wnice IE5/6/7 tuned pages as this will save a lot of developers more nerves. Otherwise I rather like to forget all about those ugly hacks which I learned over the time for those releases of IE.

Fellow developers beware seems we ought to take this browser ,serious' again ?

I am a fan of TED. There are often pretty interesting talks and here is another one. Its from a fellow swede, Hans Rosling, who is comparing or better debunking the us vs. them myth. Seems the third and the western world aren't so different anymore and comparsions in those terms are just senseless.

I think the data speaks for itself but then people like always to say ,,I just belive in the statistics I have forged myself''... ;)

• High Quality version of this Video (zipped)

Being an ,,addict'' to Documentaries in my free time I found something ,,interesting'' again in the web.





This time its about the American prison system and particularly with focus on north Carolina's high security detention ,,Alexander Correctional Institution''. (presented on National Geographic)

Why does this matter at all, its just a prison right?

Well American prisons are notorious as the most sophisicated ones beside the fact that Amercia is actually a very violent country. Statistically speaking over 2/3 of all serial killers come from the U.S. and hate, drug or other crimes are happening at a terrifying scale. Especially the new trend to lock up everybody in single isolation for 23 hours a day seems to be a handy but cruel method to control prisoners. Lets take a closer look:

Criticism on the Documentary

Like most TV shows its important to get a lot of viewers. In this spirit this TV documentary is glorifying this prison and their inmates in both directions - good and bad. Mostly they ,,try'' to keep a neutral documentation but often the viewer (or specifically I) got the feeling that a lot of things were emphasized or exaggerated. A good example is e.g. the pepperspray incident, or the fight which an inmate and an officer had. These events were glorified and emphasized - even reenacted for the camera.

Some random things

• A lot of gangs operating within (in this prison - 6 gangs)
• There is a lot of drug activity inside the prison (drug rings)
• Every ,,gangster'' is classified from 1 to 3, where 3 is the highest threat. This high threat is met by harsh restrictions like single or isolated detention (23 hours a day in a 5 by 5 (?) meter steel cage or cell)
• There is a special unit against gang activity inside the prison which tries to keep track of everything gang related.
• Very high Video surveilance
• Tatoos and all body markings/brandings are photographed catalogized
• Every gang member (especially level 3's) have to go to gang-reeducation. (Need to rennounce the gang)
• Trash is searched (90% of all infos)

Security areas

• All doors stay locked and paper numbers need to be flashed if they want in or out (to/of a cell)
• One guard manages the opening and closing of all doors for an entire block (huge board with a lot of switches plus alot of displays)
• The prisoners have the advantage in the open or day room (big place with chairs, tables etc) on the ground floor. The ratio there is 200 Inmates per 8 officers - that is 25:1
• Most dangerous for inmates is if they are rapists (especially children related). They can easily get killed because of this in prison (they are on the ,,hitlist'').
• Outside in the Yard (freeground) the officers are outnumbers 75:1, this is even more dangerous than inside




Example case:




• In the yard two inmates have sort of a bit agressive conflict (no hurting, no pushing, just pretty loud talking/agressive attitude etc.) for this they got detained in isolation for weeks. This is called the ,,no compromise rule''
• The fench outside is electronically wired, touching it will tell the guards (via an electronical system) immediatelly where this occured. Automatically cameras point to this zone so that an immediate reaction is possible.
• Signals go to PPV (Perimiter Patrol Vehicles, encircling the area 24h a day) to react (huge trucks with Officers who are heavily armed.)
• a 357 Handgun
• a small gauge shotgun 12mm
• an M-14 Assault Rife
• There is a "internal" mail system by the janitors who pickup trash and transport it to another place. This method ensures that letters can be transported from A to B inside the prison (,,trash UPS'').
• Guards actually piece together trash (ripped apart letters) to figure out what is going on behind bars.

Highest threat levels (threat level declines the lower in the list)

• Chow hall (Lunch) (Many blocks intersect during this, 300 Prisoners in one room)
• At free time at the yard
• Open Room gatherings

Lunch

• Everybody gets a designated seat
• The segreated inmates: They are still very dangerous even though they are locked up and only a small trap door is opened for the food. The officers get grabed, feces thown at them and any other imaginable thing can happen.

Gangs

• Largest gang in Alexander is the "Bloods"
• Drug related is M.O.B., Men of Business
• approx. 250 USD per 30g drugs
• oxycontin, ritalin, xanax, marujana, etc.
• Often gangs kill ex-members after they complete the gang reeducation therapy

Tactics to counteract drug and other smugling activities

• suprise searches at 4 A.M. on a huge scale (hundrets of officers) Officers call this the ,,fun part of the job''
• official term ,,shake down''
• Dogs are utilized to find drugs or more specifically ,,suspicious cells''
• Procedure:
• inmates are strip-searched
• after that they will open the door (not before)
• two officers search, a third one watches the prisoner
• inmates store
• maybe to many possetions (this is removed)
• dangerous materials

Methods of hiding things

• thin metal threads hold a small piece of glove which in turn holds contraband this is attached to the inside of the toiled and flushed down
• Drugs are (told to be/currently there suspected to be)
• sold by the Canteen (food suppliers seems to deal) (hidden in bags of chips)
• smuggled by visitors - mothers, wifes all kind of people bring drugs inside regularly
• Women put it in their bra
• tampon shaped drug strings (,,suitcasing'' - hiding in a. cavity)
• brought in by school teachers

Some methods of weapon creation

• Plastic is broken off a tablet etc. and put in a microwave, reformed, sharpend and utilized with a handle as a knife. Attacked happens by hitting the spine or throat and breaking off the plastic inside.

Psychological aspects

• Inmates are able to display cold blooded violence and are most of the time fully aware of the fact that they are killing a person

Criticism by prisoners

• Isolated detention or normal detention itself does not re-educate the prisoners. They are not getting ,,better'' but just more angrier. (,,retalliation'')
• Quote: ,,There is a whole lot more than you see'' (not only just the things currently infront of the camera)
• Working together with Officiers will get you killed.

Criticism by officers

• Often some officers work together with the inmates (they "tip off" the prisoners before a search etc.)
• Officers get often life threats, this causes additional psychological pressure. Not only threats but actual assaults can cause extensive trauma beside severe injuries. Sometimes fights among prisoners are faked to attack together one or many guards.
• Officers become sometimes suspected to act as drug suppliers (,,dealers'')

Criticism by me

• Segrated prisoners often stay long (from 40 days up to many years) in isolation this can cause severe psychological damage. They hurt themselves to get out of single detention as they slowly go crazy.
• Not only inmates get psychologically damaged but particularly officers in my opinion as well. They often act and feel over-powerful, this expresses in extensive agressivness and arrogance.
• Are inmates treated as humans ? Particularly in single detention (for years ?)
• Security camera footage of the assault incident on the officers was not release to public. If there clearly would be nothing to hide, why is this not released ? Abuse (beatings) often happen in the prison which then is played down by the authorities. Often eleborate methods are used to make beatings invisible. (occluded spots on the body)




Final thoughts



Crime, especially capital crimes need to be severely punished. Though we should never forget that the people inside are still human they have to be controlled. Many academic and non-scholars argue which method is the most promising. Isolated detention is a convienient way to handle difficult people but statistics show that this is not resolving anything. Are the human rights treated fairly in such a system ? Amnesty doesn't belive so.

What do you think ?

During the last weeks I unfortunatelly glanced with absence of postings - sorry for that. Due to plenty of work to be done and deadlines to be kept, there was really no spare time for blogging anymore. So now that I have a bit more time at hand, I do what I like most.

Read, watch and ,,absorb'' information about all kind of topics.

By coincidence I stumbled across a documentary about the Yersinia pestis or better known as the ,,Great Plague'' outbreak around 1665 in London. Its a pretty serious topic actually and has even relevance up to today.


(Wikipedia)

I constantly try to refresh my knowledge or to learn something new (which doesn't always need to be around a Computer Science) and here was a good chance to learn more about the Bubonic-, pneumonic- (airborne) or septicemic (blood poisoning) plague.

Beside that fact that this gruesome sickness is a nightmare there are many facts which can at least be learned from it. The main causes for the many casualties in London were:

• As a preventive measure against a new plague outbreak the year before nearly 40.000 dogs and 80.000 cats were killed as it was believed that they were transmitting the disease. This was a deadly misassessment as the real cause were the fleas and the rats.
• As soon as somebody got sick, the whole family got locked up together with them for at least 40 days. This caused most of the healty family members to get sick too.
• Nearly no plague hospitals were created for London at that time - only 2 were built and they only had space for around 900 people. That was less than <1% of the infected population. This situation was different on the continent, which greatly helped.
• The lack of hygene and the terrible housing situations of the poor greatly contributed to the disaster. Hunger and malnurishment also greatly decreased the strength of the people to withstand sicknesses.
• All people were imprisoned in the city and could not pass outside unless they had a ,,certificate of health''. This law cost especially the lifes of poor people who could not afford such a certificate.
• Uncertainty what the actual cause for the plague was caused many weird potions and cures to emerge. This reached from opiate cocktails to drink, arsenic metals to put on the skin, burning of infected skin, smoking and chewing of tabacco up to burning of special herbs. One other craze was that other serious sicknesses can prevent infection of the plague (so many people actually tried to get seriously sick).
• ....

Throughout history there were three great plagues. The first one also known as the Black death took a toll of over one to two third of europes population around 1340 (worldwide about 85 Mio. people). The second one in the 16th and 17th century in London, Marseille, Vienna and Moscow killing again million casualties. The lastest mass plague was during the 19th and early 20th century taking 12 Million deaths.

Interestingly in the discussion what transmitted it there are quite many theories ranging from the already mentioned ,,blood clot blocked fleas'' to brown and black rats. Origins of this bactieria currently seem to be pointing towards central asia where apparently the first sicknesses occured.

Reading into the medical signs and symptoms makes me just sick. Ranging from fever, headaches, painful aches, nausea, cough, blood-tingled skin spots to much much more.

From all this history now back to a more modern viewpoint. The lastest outbreak was in 1997.. So much for you thinking I am just a history nut.

The scary fact is that since the second world war we had something to effectively fight it but now it seems that the strains out there seem to get multi-drug resistant (PDF). The one from 1997 in Madagascar showed that behavior at least to two of the five possible medications.

Here is another article about this incident.


(Wikipedia)

This quote from the above link summarizes it easily:
Human plague is considered to be a re-emerging disease. From 1980 to 1994, 18739 cases of plague occurred worldwide, and 1853 deaths were reported to the WHO by 24 countries in Africa, the Americas, and Asia.

This article is not ment to be complete in any sense, it is just my way of writing down some insights I learned so far. Especially current occurances and multi-drug resistancy of some strains give me a cold shiver and a dreadful reminder of our more and more useless antibiotics (yes, even the new stuff, but thats another story).

Stay healty and informed !
Comments about this article and pointers to more information are highly welcome.

I am a big fan of those Web 2.0 mashups like Youtube, Veoh, Divx Stage 6 and so on.

Recently Veoh cut back the playtime of their videos down to 5 minutes if it exeeded 20 minutes in total. Their main goal here was to propagate their ,,Veoh TV Player''. Well after a quick try with my Wine (yes, there is no Linux version available) I gave that idea quickly up and continued to search a bit.

Seems as there are still means to get the video out of their cache. Originally this little hack was introduced here which gave me the incentive to write the following little script. Lets say you want to watch some CCC Videos without playing around with Google webbits. For instance here is a video about Botnet Detection and Mitigation which is quite interesting but again it's limited to 5 minutes due to its longer duration.

First, we need to extract the permalink ID which is the last part of the URL - here it would be ,,v262945dCjc4CJs''. Utilizing this we can extract the original video hash and extension via this nifty trick.

Just call this URL - http://www.veoh.com/rest/video/PERMALINKID/details with the permalink ID embedded into it to get necessary values. There we can find the necessary data to complete this URL - http://p-cache.veoh.com/cache/external/ORIGINALHASHORIGEXTENSION - which actually points to a downloadable video file. Nice !

Lets see how the final script works...

% ./Downloader.rb http://www.veoh.com/videos/v262945dCjc4CJs
--01:13:35-- http://p-cache.veoh.com/cache/external/1df8cd077cde7650567d07e11e8e3ecfba1d3327.mp4
           => `1df8cd077cde7650567d07e11e8e3ecfba1d3327.mp4'
[..]

So much for that problem :)

Here the little Ruby script:

% cat Downloader.rb 
#!/usr/bin/ruby -w
#
# (c) 2007, Bjoern Rennhak
# Ideas originally taken from http://board.alluc.org/viewtopic.php?pid=400997 .
# 
# This code is released under GNU GPL v2.
#

require 'net/http'
require 'rexml/document'

( puts "Usage: #{$PROGRAM_NAME} [Veoh Permalink ID | Full URL]" and exit ) if( ARGV.empty? )
( ARGV[0] =~ %r{^http}i ) ? ( pLinkID = ARGV[0].gsub(/.*\/(.+)$/,'\1') ) : ( pLinkID = ARGV[0] )

detailsURL    = "http://www.veoh.com/rest/video/#{pLinkID}/details"

xml = Net::HTTP.get_response( URI.parse(detailsURL) ).body
( REXML::Document.new(xml) ).elements.each('videos/video') do |e|
       @origExtension, @originalHash = e.attributes['origExtension'], e.attributes['originalHash']
end

`wget http://p-cache.veoh.com/cache/external/#{@originalHash}#{@origExtension}`

I wrote it with clarity in mind so I am sure you can golf it shorter. :)

For you people out there who are into shell oneliners, here is one...

% awk -v id=v262945dCjc4CJs -- '{ system("lynx -dump http://www.veoh.com/rest/video/"id"/details"); exit }' | egrep "origExtension|originalHash" | xargs | sed 's!.*=\(.*\) .*=\(\..*\)!wget http://p-cache.veoh.com/cache/external/\1\2!g'

In my daily work I browse a lot. Often I need the net as a big reference manual for many problems I encounter or even just for the daily news. Well, sometimes (or almost always) I end up with more tabs than I actually can manage to read a day.

Now is that not particularly bad as I always keep my workstation running anyways and as a bonus I can continue where I left off my work the following day. Oh, by the way did I mention that my workstation is a dual Xeon (HT) 3.06 Ghz machine with 2.0 GB RAM ? Well, that is one strong machine for such a puny task ! ,,What's your problem'' you probably ask ?

Funny^W thing is that the very next day my System behaves like a good old 486DX and it is utterly impossible to work on the machine. I figured after poking around a bit in the machine that something is really wrong with Firefox. This Article here explains a lot.

It's is pretty sad though if you see an entire 2.0GB of RAM used up by just a couple of browser instances. Hope they can fix it soon, but for now I am off using Opera as I have no time for something that doesn't work.

Here some data which I took at the time...

% vmstat 
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ----cpu----
 r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in   cs us sy id wa
  3  0 3559244  57068 113760  64044    0    1     1    10    9    4  8  4 87  0


% cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep -i "model name"
model name      : Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 3.06GHz
model name      : Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 3.06GHz
model name      : Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 3.06GHz
model name      : Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 3.06GHz

% cat /proc/meminfo| egrep -i "total|cache"
MemTotal:      2076420 kB
Cached:          65052 kB
SwapCached:     179096 kB
HighTotal:     1179092 kB
LowTotal:       897328 kB
SwapTotal:     4194296 kB
VmallocTotal:   114680 kB

% top -b | head -20
top - 15:01:30 up 11 days, 20:02, 10 users,  load average: 0.97, 1.06, 0.98
Tasks: 233 total,   2 running, 231 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  8.5%us,  3.9%sy,  0.0%ni, 87.2%id,  0.0%wa,  0.2%hi,  0.1%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   2076420k total,  2020036k used,    56384k free,   114396k buffers
Swap:  4194296k total,  3566232k used,   628064k free,    66248k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                                                                                                                                                
15956 br        16   0 3058m 1.0g 8876 R   65 52.4   3147:09 firefox-bin                                                                                                                                            
10117 root      15   0 1842m 348m 3348 S   16 17.2   2555:40 Xorg                                                                                                                                                   
    1 root      15   0  2072  612  584 S    0  0.0   0:02.04 init                                                                                                                                                   
    2 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:11.84 migration/0                                                                                                                                            
    3 root      34  19     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 ksoftirqd/0                                                                                                                                            
    4 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.44 migration/1                                                                                                                                            
    5 root      34  19     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 ksoftirqd/1                                                                                                                                            
    6 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.10 migration/2                                                                                                                                            
    7 root      34  19     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 ksoftirqd/2                                                                                                                                            
    8 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.20 migration/3                                                                                                                                            
    9 root      34  19     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 ksoftirqd/3                                                                                                                                            
   10 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:01.14 events/0                                                                                                                                               
   11 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.41 events/1

% top -b | egrep -i "firefox|%CPU"
  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                                                                                                                                                
15956 br        15   0 3058m 1.0g 8876 R   51 52.4   3147:40 firefox-bin                                                                                                                                            
  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                                                                                                                                                
15956 br        15   0 3058m 1.0g 8876 R   69 52.4   3147:42 firefox-bin                                                                                                                                            
  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                                                                                                                                                
15956 br        16   0 3058m 1.0g 8876 R   60 52.4   3147:44 firefox-bin                                                                                                                                            
  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                                                                                                                                                
15956 br        15   0 3058m 1.0g 8876 R   67 52.4   3147:46 firefox-bin                                                                                                                                            
  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                                                                                                                                                
15956 br        15   0 3058m 1.0g 8876 R   63 52.4   3147:48 firefox-bin
 

% pkill firefox-bin

% vmstat 1 
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ----cpu----
 r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in   cs us sy id wa
 1  0 397416 1610484 114976  75584    0    1     1    10    9    6  8  4 87  0

% *wow* i really need to change my browser :///

Nothing is more terrible than old news, right? Right?

Wrong ! I have been keeping an offline ,,sort of'' blog for some time now and there is quite a lot of stuff which is definetly interesting for some of you who have never experienced Japan in daily life. So keep an eye out for older posts as I wrote down the date most of the time when things happend to me.

Everything should work normally but keep in mind that the posts will be dated back which could/will influence your rss feedreader.

... the weblog :)

I always wanted to have my own blog but thanks to project-overflow I never really had the time for it. Currently being (again) in Japan I encounter daily things which are probably a little bit out of the ordinary or to put it in simple English - quite crazy ;).

Realizing that I will probably never have real spare time for something like this and thanks to Martin I managed to overcome my initial lazyness and here you see the result !

Well, stay tuned for more interesting stories and random things around my life, IT and everything else.

On non critical systems back here some Linux Kernels may run for a longer time. Particularly one long running machine had to be taken down because of Hardware maintenance and needed VServer and Xen Kernel extensions.

[06:48][root@zeus:/]# uname -a
Linux zeus 2.6.8-2-386-br #1 Thu May 19 17:40:50 JST 2005 i686 GNU/Linux
[06:48][root@zeus:/]# uptime
 06:49:00 up 677 days,  9:46,  1 user,  load average: 0.28, 0.29, 0.29

Bye bye and thank you very much !