A page for randomness

In the context of digital security, a key is a piece of data which is used to encrypt or decrypt other pieces of data. The public and private key scheme is interesting because data encrypted with a public key can only be decrypted with the associated private key. You may freely distribute a public key so that others can encrypt the messages they send you. One of the reasons that public/private key schemes have revolutionized digital security is because the sender and receiver don’t have to share a common password. Among other things, public/private key cryptography has made e-commerce and other secure transactions possible. In this article, we’ll create and use public and private keys to create a highly secure distributed backup solution.

Each machine involved in the backup process must be running the OpenSSH secure shell service (sshd) with port 22 accessible through any intermediate firewall. If you access remote servers, then there is a good chance you’re already using secure shell.

Our goal will be to provide machines with secure access without requiring the need to manually provide passwords. Some people think that the easiest way to do this is to set up password-less access: do not do this. It is not secure. Instead, the approach we’ll use in this article will take perhaps an hour of your time, set up a system which gives all the convenience of “passphraseless” accounts — but is recognized as being highly secure.

Read more: Automate backups on Linux

The series “Robocars” will be premiering tonight at 9pm (Central time) on the Discovery Science Channel.  The show follows ten teams of top engineers from around the U.S. compete for a $2 million grand prize, struggling to build the first vehicle to drive itself through an urban environment and features Team CajunBot.

Here is the schedule and episode descriptions:

July 14th 9-10pm - Episode 1 - follows Stanford Racing, Tartan Racing, Team Jefferson, Team Gray and The Golem Group as they prepare for the Urban Challenge and pass through the DARPA site visits.

July 21st 9-10pm - Episode 2 - follows Highlander Racing, Team Oshkosh, Team Cajunbot, Team MIT, and Team Case as they prepare for the Urban Challenge and pass through the DARPA site visits.  The show ends with DARPA announcing the teams who made it to the semi-finals.

July 28th 9-10pm - Episode 3 - covers the semi-finals.  Stanford Racing, Tartan Racing, Team Jefferson, Team Gray, The Golem Group, Team Oshkosh, Team Cajunbot, Team MIT and Team Case are all included.  The show ends with DARPA announcing the teams who made it to the finals.

August 4th 9-10pm - Epiosde 4 - covers the finals.  Stanford Racing, Tartan Racing, Team MIT, and Team Oshkosh are all included.

August 11th  8-10pm - Episodes 5 and 6 - The first hour is a summary of the last four episodes and the second hour focuses on futuristic car technology and contains excerpt from the DARPA Urban Challenge.

Read more: Welcome to the CajunBot Lab website.

I’m sure y’all remember the expensive ice cream buckets on top of several DARPA Urban Challenge vehicles…

Radiohead, never ones to shy away from trying new things, has shot its new video for “House of Cards” without using cameras at all. Whaa? Yes, they’ve used two fancy new technologies called Geometric Informatics and Velodyne Lidar.

Read more: New Radiohead Video is Shot with Lasers, Not Cameras.

If you’re running linux on a macbook and you have fuzzy or static like sound especially out of the left channel, whether on speakers or headphones, then this tip from the Ubuntu forums will most likely help. The following was done on my Ubuntu machine, but mostly can be applied with little effort on another distribution like Fedora:

$ sudo emacs /etc/modprobe.d/options

Add the following line to the end of the file:

options snd-hda-intel model=[MODEL_BELOW] position_fix=2 probe_mask=1

Where [MODEL_BELOW] is one of the following:

intel-mac-v1   : Intel Mac Type 1
intel-mac-v2   : Intel Mac Type 2
intel-mac-v3   : Intel Mac Type 3
intel-mac-v4   : Intel Mac Type 4
intel-mac-v5   : Intel Mac Type 5
macmini        : Intel Mac Mini (equivalent with type 3)
macbook        : Intel Mac Book (eq. type 5)
macbook-pro-v1 : Intel Mac Book Pro 1st generation (eq. type 3)
macbook-pro    : Intel Mac Book Pro 2nd generation (eq. type 3)
imac-intel     : Intel iMac (eq. type 2)
imac-intel-20  : Intel iMac (newer version) (eq. type 3)

You’ll also need to update your initramfs:

$ sudo update-initramfs -u

Reboot and see if the sound works. Typically the sound will stop working altogether or work perfectly. If it doesn’t work, try changing the model. I have a 2nd or 3rd generation macbook (I can’t remember which), but I needed to use the model=intel-mac-v3 for it to work. Check out the help article for more information.

Cross-platform media player VLC is often referred to as the “Swiss Army knife of media applications” for good reason: Not only does VLC play nearly any file you throw at it (you even voted it the best desktop media player), but it can do so much more. From ripping DVDs to converting files to iPod-friendly formats, let’s take a look at the four coolest things you can do with VLC and start you on your way to becoming a VLC ninja.

Read more: Vlc: Master Your Digital Media with VLC

Tomorrow, Firefox 3.0 will be released, and everyone is encouraged to download it to help break a download record for one day. So tomorrow, don’t forget to download the new Firefox!

GetFirefox.com

echo -n “username: ”
read username
echo -n “Password: ”
stty -echo
read password
stty echo

source: Mind Download: prompt for password w/o echoing chars in bash

The following is a true story.

Last week I walked into a local “home style cookin’ restaurant/watering hole” to pick up a take out order. I spoke briefly to the waitress behind the counter, who told me my order would be done in a few minutes.

So, while I was busy gazing at the farm implements hanging on the walls, I was approached by two, uh, um… well, let’s call them “natives.” These guys might just be the original Texas rednecks–complete with ten-gallon hats, snakeskin boots and the pervasive odor of cheap beer and whiskey.

“Pardon us, ma’am. Mind of we ask you a question?”

Well, people keep telling me that Texans are real friendly, so I nodded.

“Are you a Satanist?”

Well, at least they didn’t ask me if I liked to party.

“Uh, no, I can’t say that I am.”

“Gee ma’am. Are you sure about that?” they asked.

I put on my biggest, brightest Dallas Cowboys cheerleader smile and said, “No, I’m positive. The closest I’ve ever come to Satanism is watching Geraldo.”

“Hmm. Interesting. See, we was just wondering why it is you have the lord of darkness on your chest there.”

I was this close to slapping one of them and causing a scene–then I stopped and noticed the T-shirt I happened to be wearing that day. Sure enough, it had a picture of a small, devilish looking creature that has for quite some time now been associated with a certain operating system. In this particular representation, the creature was wearing sneakers.

They continued: “See, ma’am, we don’t exactly appreciate it when people show off pictures of the devil. Especially when he’s lookin’ so friendly.”

These idiots sounded terrifyingly serious.

Me: “Oh, well, see, this isn’t really the devil, it’s just, well, it’s sort of a mascot.”

Native: “And what kind of football team has the devil as a mascot?”

Me: “Oh, it’s not a team. It’s an operating– uh, a kind of computer.”

I figured that an ATM machine was about as much technology as these guys could handle, and I knew that if I so much as uttered the word “unix” I would only make things worse.

Native: “Where does this satanical computer come from?”

Me: “California. And there’s nothing satanical about it really.”

Somewhere along the line here, the waitress has noticed my predicament–but these guys probably outweighed her by 600 pounds, so all she did was look at me sympathetically and run off into the kitchen.

Native: “Ma’am, I think you’re lying. And we’d appreciate it if you’d leave the premises now.”

Fortunately, the waitress returned that very instant with my order, and they agreed that it would be okay for me to actually pay for my food before I left. While I was at the cash register, they amused themselves by talking to each other.

Native #1: “Do you think the police know about these devil computers?”

Native #2: “If they come from California, then the FBI oughta know about ‘em.”

They escorted me to the door. I tried one last time: “You’re really blowing this all out of proportion. A lot of people use this `kind of computers.’ Universities, researchers, businesses. They’re actually very useful.”

Big, big, BIG mistake. I should have guessed at what came next.

Native: “Does the government use these devil computers?”

Me: “Yes.”

Another BIG boo-boo.

Native: “And does the government pay for ‘em? With our tax dollars?”

I decided that it was time to jump ship.

Me: “No. Nope. Not at all. You’re tax dollars never entered the picture at all. I promise. No sir, not a penny. Our good Christian congressmen would never let something like that happen. Nope. Never. Bye.”

Texas. What a country.

Source: Godless devil-worshiping evil computers [rec.humor.funny]

In my last post, sendmail was one of the services on my box that was starting when I enter runlevel 2. Maybe I don’t want sendmail to start, or rather, if it is already started, when I enter runlevel 2, I want to kill it. In other words, I don’t want it running for runlevel 2. How can I make this change?

Well, first, I could just delete the soft link from the runlevel directory /etc/rc2.d/:

aaron@kratos:~ 1355 % sudo rm /etc/rc2.d/S21sendmail
Password:

That would definitely keep it from starting when I enter runlevel 2, but what if I wanted to kill it if it was already started from a previous runlevel? Just deleting the soft link won’t do it. I need to turn it into a K-script. Further, deleting and creating soft links in my /etc/rc[0-6].d/ directories by hand is a bit of a pain. This is where the update-rc.d command comes in:

aaron@kratos:~ 1356 % sudo update-rc.d -f sendmail remove
Password:
Removing any system startup links for /etc/init.d/sendmail …
/etc/rc0.d/K19sendmail
/etc/rc1.d/K19sendmail
/etc/rc2.d/S21sendmail
/etc/rc3.d/S21sendmail
/etc/rc4.d/S21sendmail
/etc/rc5.d/S21sendmail
/etc/rc6.d/K19sendmail
aaron@kratos:~ 1357 % sudo update-rc.d sendmail stop 20 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 .
Adding system startup for /etc/init.d/sendmail …
/etc/rc0.d/K20sendmail -> ../init.d/sendmail
/etc/rc1.d/K20sendmail -> ../init.d/sendmail
/etc/rc2.d/K20sendmail -> ../init.d/sendmail
/etc/rc3.d/K20sendmail -> ../init.d/sendmail
/etc/rc4.d/K20sendmail -> ../init.d/sendmail
/etc/rc5.d/K20sendmail -> ../init.d/sendmail
/etc/rc6.d/K20sendmail -> ../init.d/sendmail

We’ll get into the syntax a bit later, but these commands, as observed, removed any existing soft links that previously existed, and created new K-scripts for all of my runlevels.

First off, why two separate commands? Well, by Debian policy, no package upgrade will ever overwrite a previous configuration. This includes updating soft links in the runlevel directories. This also ensures persistent changes and allows the system administrator to prevent daemons from launching. So, if soft links already exist, they first need to be removed, then new links created.

Source: Aaron Toponce : Managing Services in Ubuntu, Part II: Managing Runlevels

We all suspected it, but now it is confirmed: someone very, very close to the 3G iPhone launch has told me that Apple will announce their new model at the WWDC Keynote on June 9th. The second-generation iPhone will be available worldwide right after the launch, and not at year’s end, as previously thought. The new model will also herald new sales policies in some countries.

In Spain, for example, the 3G iPhone will be available for sale at the June 18th grand opening of Telefonica’s megastore—an Apple Store-like shop located in the company’s historical building in Madrid’s Gran Vía— with nationwide availability the next day or after a few hours. The other European countries with iPhone availability will have similar launch schedules.

According to another source involved in the launch, the 3G iPhone will no longer be available at a fixed price point—at least in some countries, and its launch will also bring new sales policies, although these have not been completely specified yet.

The move is a logical step, since the iPhone has clearly solidified its position as the cellphone to beat during the last 12 months, and companies in the cutthroat European cellphone market need to use it as an incentive to capture clients aggressively.

This most probably means the new 3G iPhone will be integrated in the usual marketing systems of carriers, with point-based trade-ups, discounts for carrier switchers and other service-based subvention packages.

Source: Breaking: iPhone 3G Launch Date Confirmed

Let me play devil’s advocate here. Mark Shuttleworth’s recent pledge to join a synchronised release plan for Enterprise Linux distributions is no more than a wish to benefit from a lot of work that Novell and Red Hat are already doing in the Enterprise space.

Let me explain.

Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux offering is a very important proposition to businesses, not only because Red Hat guarantees and has proven to support each RHEL version for 7 years after general availability, but mostly because each version is updated with new hardware support every 6 months.

Why is that important ?

When a version comes out all components that comprise a distribution have been frozen half a year before and have been tested very hard. But hardware does not freeze and companies buy new hardware constantly. Red Hat needs to provide support for newer selected hardware from vendors to make its solution acceptable to customers. This work is not taken lightly. Red Hat has to backport fixes and backport kernel infrastructure, update drivers, perform regression tests and provide QA together with hardware vendors.

Every 6 months a new update release is being made to ensure that newer hardware is ready to be deployed with a recent RHEL version. Red Hat guarantees that new boot media is available with newer hardware support for another 3 years. That means 2 RHEL releases at every point in time are being maintained to support new hardware.

Read more: Ubuntu’s need to catch a wave | Field Commander Wieers

“Hello World” is the first program one usually writes when learning a new programming language. The first Hello World program appeared in chapter 1.1 of the first edition of Kernighan & Ritchie’s original book about C, “The C Programming Language”, in 1978 and read like this:

main() {
printf(”hello, worldn”);
}

Since then, Hello World has been implemented in just about every programming language on the planet. This collection includes 366 Hello World programs in many more-or-less well known programming languages, plus 58 human languages.

The programs in this collection are intended to be as minimal as possible in the respective language. They are meant to demonstrate how to output Hello World as simply as possible, not to show off language features. For a collection of programs that tell more about what programming in the languages actually is like, have a look at the 99 Bottles of Beer collection.

Read more: The Hello World Collection

Dash as /bin/sh

In Ubuntu 6.10, the default system shell, /bin/sh, was changed to dash (the Debian Almquist Shell); previously it had been bash (the GNU Bourne-Again Shell). The same change will affect users of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS upgrading directly to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. This document explains this change and what you should do if you encounter problems.

Why was this change made?

The major reason to switch the default shell was efficiency. bash is an excellent full-featured shell appropriate for interactive use; indeed, it is still the default login shell. However, it is rather large and slow to start up and operate by comparison with dash. A large number of shell instances are started as part of the Ubuntu boot process. Rather than change each of them individually to run explicitly under /bin/dash, a change which would require significant ongoing maintenance and which would be liable to regress if not paid close attention, the Ubuntu core development team felt that it was best simply to change the default shell. The boot speed improvements in Ubuntu 6.10 were often incorrectly attributed to [WWW] Upstart, which is a fine platform for future development of the init system but in Ubuntu 6.10 was primarily running in System V compatibility mode with only small behavioural changes. These improvements were in fact largely due to the changed /bin/sh.

The Debian policy manual has long mandated that “shell scripts specifying ‘/bin/sh’ as interpreter must only use POSIX features”; in fact, this requirement has been in place since well before the inception of the Ubuntu project. Furthermore, any shell scripts that expected to be portable to other Unix systems, such as the BSDs or Solaris, already honoured this requirement. Thus, we felt that the compatibility impact of this change would be minimal.

Of course, there have been a certain number of shell scripts written specifically for Linux systems, some of which incorrectly stated that they could run with /bin/sh when in fact they required /bin/bash, and these scripts will have broken due to this change. We regret this breakage, but feel that the proper way to address it is to make the small changes required to those scripts, discussed later in this document. In the longer term, this will promote a cleaner and more efficient system.

(This applies the same philosophy as in C and C . Programs should be written to the standard, and if they use extensions they should declare them; that way it is clear what extensions are in use and they will at least fail with a much better error message if those extensions are not available.)

Read more: DashAsBinSh - Ubuntu Wiki

While Intel’s Nehalem demo had 50,000-60,000 particles and ran at 15-20 fps (without a GPU), the particle demo on a GeForce 9800 card resulted in 300 fps. If the very likely event that Nvidia’s next-gen parts (G100: GT100/200) will double their shader units, this number could top 600 fps, meaning that Nehalem at 2.53 GHz is lagging 20-40x behind 2006/2007/2008 high-end GPU hardware. However, you can’t ignore the fact that Nehalem in fact can run physics.

There was also a demonstration of cloth: A quad-core Intel Core 2 Extreme processor was working in 12 fps, while a GeForce 8800 GTS board resulted came in at 200 fps. Former Ageia employees did not compare it to Ageia’s own PhysX card, but if we remember correctly, that demo ran at 150-180 fps on an Ageia card.

Read more: Nvidia GPU Physics Engine Up And Running, Almost | Tom’s Hardware

A note regarding our findings: Further experiments have led us to believe that our initial conclusions that indicated Comcasts responsibility for dropping TCP SYN packets and forging TCP SYN, ACK and RST reset packets was incorrect. Our experiments were conducted from behind a network address translator NAT. The anomalous packets were generated when the outbound TCP SYN packets exceeded the NATs resources available in its state table. In this case, TCP SYN, ACK and RST packets were sent. We would like to thank Don Bowman, Robb Topolski, Neal Krawetz, and Comcast engineers for bringing this to our attention. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience that this posting may have caused.

Source: Broadband Network Management - CUSystems

element_G: I was having a similar problem. Amarok lost mp3 playback for me. It was because of the xine backend. I first actually noticed it when I was trying to watch an .avi in xine, which didn’t work, then neither did .mp3s. Running xine as root allowed me to play stuff, and I could play .mp3s and .avis with other non-xine backed players like mplayer and xmms. Here’s how I fixed mine:

Quote:
$mkdir ~/.xine/plugins/
$cp -r /usr/lib/xine/plugins/1.1.4/ ~/.xine/plugins/
Just copy all of the xine codec things into the plugins directory (which you may have to make) in the .xine directory in your home directory and everything should work out. It did for me.

Read more: amarok mp3 support - Page 3 - Ubuntu Forums

A simpler way to do this would be to just type:

$ln -s /usb/lib/xine/plugins ~/.xine/plugins

Since the dawn of time, geeks have been playing harmless pranks on their beloved (but unsuspecting) associates, and it’s up to all of us to carry the torch forward. On the eve of April Fools’ Day, when you’ve got local network access to your coworkers’ and family systems, cubicles just crying out to be filled with packing peanuts, and webapps that can do all sorts of things automatically, there’s no better time to baffle, confuse, perplex, and just plain mess with your loved ones and associates. Hit the jump for our top 10 favorite harmless geek pranks, just in time to get your prankster pistons firing for today.

Read more: Lifehacker Top 10: Top 10 Harmless Geek Pranks

Source: Digg 2028 - Sharenator.com

If you were an early adopter of Windows Vista, there’s a pretty good chance you became familiar with one of Vista’s coolest new features: an automatic crash reporting utility that will recommend solutions if and when they become available. Or to put it another way, if you tried running Windows Vista on many machines, there was a good chance your computer crashed. A lot. Even if the manufacturer had slapped a shiny new label proclaiming the computer to be “Vista Capable.”

There’s a class action suit working its way through the courts to determine whether Microsoft changed the definition of “capable” to help Intel sell computers chips. But some of the documents released in the case (PDF link) are interesting in their own right. For example, Microsoft has a chart that lists identified causes of Windows Vista crashes during an unspecified period in 2007.

Read more: 29% of Windows Vista crashes caused by NVIDIA drivers - Download Squad

“In July 2007, Richard Doherty of the Envisioneering Group (BD Standards Board) declared: ‘BD , unlike AACS which suffered a partial hack last year, won’t likely be breached for 10 years.’ Only eight months have passed since that bold statement, and Slysoft has done it again. According to the press release, the latest version of their flagship product AnyDVD HD can automatically remove BD protection and allows you to back-up any Blu-ray title on the market.”

Source: Slashdot | Blu-ray BD+ Cracked

LOL.

It’s fairly easy to crack a WEP encrypted wireless network. Infact the WEP encryption has some serious flaws in its design, flaws that make it easy and fast to crack or hack.Install aircrack-ng - on Debian Etch by:

• sudo apt-get install aircrack-ng

Then start aircrack-ng to look for wireless networks:

• sudo airodump-ng eth1

Then notice the channel number of the wireless network you want to crack.

Quit aircrack-ng and start it again with med specific channel number to collect packages faster:

• sudo airodump-ng -c 4 -w dump eth1

Then wait and let it collect about 500K IVS and the try the do the actual crack:

• sudo aircrack-ng -b 0a:0b:0c:0d:0e:0f dump-01.cap

The MAC after the -b option is the BSSID of the target and dump-01.cap the file containing the captured packets.

Source: Hack Wireless WEP Network

See also: Tom’s Guide to cracking WEP

The IV count is the important number to watch for since you will need to capture around 50,000 to 200,000 IVs in order to crack a 64 bit WEP key and for a 128 bit key, you will need around 200,000 to 700,000 IVs!

Lucas offered a glimpse into the latest creation in his sci-fi universe at the theater-owners convention ShoWest on Thursday, showing a sequence from “Star Wars: The Clone Wars,” a computer-animated movie due in theaters August 15. It will be followed by a TV series of the same name, to air on the Cartoon Network and TNT this fall.

The movie came about as an afterthought while Lucas was developing an animated TV show of the same name. That show debuts this fall, but Lucas figured it was ripe for big-screen treatment, too.

“You’ve got the whole assembly line built, and then you say, ‘Hey, we can make up something,”‘ Lucas said in an interview. “It was like old-time movie making. What I love about television, it’s like Monogram Pictures or the old studio system, where a couple guys come to work and they sit and have some coffee and go, ‘Why don’t we make a movie about such and such? OK, fine.’ And at the end of the day, it’s pretty much on its way.”

Set in the years between episodes II and III — “Attack of the Clones” and “Revenge of the Sith” — of the big-screen “Star Wars” chronicle, the movie and series present fresh adventures of Jedi warrior Anakin Skywalker, his mentor, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and other colleagues.

The movie introduces a female Jedi, Ahsoki, who is Anakin’s young apprentice.

“It’s like ‘Band of Brothers’ in space, with Jedi,” Lucas, 63, said. “You can tell lots of stories. They come up all the time.”

Lucas said he plans to produce at least 100 hours worth of TV episodes of “Clone Wars.”

He also is moving forward with a live-action “Star Wars” TV show focusing largely on new characters removed from the Skywalker family. That show will be set in the decades between “Revenge of the Sith” and the period when the original film, 1977’s “Star Wars,” takes place.

So can fans ever get enough of “Star Wars”?

“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “I’m thankful every year that it keeps going.”

Source: Fans await return of Star Wars - CNN.com

Woke up this morning and of course, the laptop had disconnected from the wireless network. I did the usual suspend->wake maneuver and did a browse on the available wireless networks. To my surprise was a new one, “Motorola”. Fresh meat. I go to the router’s login page, and try the standard “admin”/”admin” combo, and other variants. After a little searching around I manage to log in with “admin”/”motorola”….big surprise there. Reminds me of good ol “Athrey” before it was WEP-ed. I changed the default login password to “apple” out of not knowing what else to put. Maybe I can use this network to get some seeding of torrents done.

Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, has, along with others like Richard Stallman, literally changed the world of software forever.

Linux-based distributions seem to pop up every day, while more and more devices now run Linux at their core, from mobile phones to inflight entertainment systems, to the world’s mission critical server infrastructures.

The development of the kernel has changed, and Linux is just getting better and better. However, with a community as large and fractured as the Linux community, it can sometimes be hard to get a big picture overview of where Linux is going: what’s happening with kernel version 2.6? Will there be a version 3.0? What has Linus been up to lately? What does he get up to in his spare time?

Read more: Linus Torvalds talks future of Linux | APC Magazine

1. Do you use source control?
2. Can you make a build in one step?
3. Do you make daily builds?
4. Do you have a bug database?
5. Do you fix bugs before writing new code?
6. Do you have an up-to-date schedule?
7. Do you have a spec?
8. Do programmers have quiet working conditions?
9. Do you use the best tools money can buy?
10. Do you have testers?
11. Do new candidates write code during their interview?
12. Do you do hallway usability testing?

Read more: The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code - Joel on Software

My employer specializes in creating websites for middle-sized businesses. We rarely create “Mom’n'Pops” websites and generally don’t pursue contracts with major corporations. Working with mid-size business has given me the opportunity to speak with executives and “decision-makers” within each business. Our discussions eventually end up with the other person telling me about their previous web developers and how their currently site is ineffective as a sales to or representation of the business. There are some definitive characteristics about my customers’ previous web persons and without further adieu, I give you 9 signs you shouldn’t hire THAT web guy.

Read more: 9 Signs You Shouldn’t Hire THAT Web Guy | CSS Zone

With the news that Windows 2008 (recently discussed on Slashdot) will have GUI-less installs and be fully scriptable, that they’ve opened up their communication protocols for non-commercial usage and are providing a patent covenant (Redhat Responds), and now finally an interesting rumor floating around that Microsoft will be taking on GNU directly. Has Microsoft totally switched gears in how it is approaching the Unix and FOSS sector for direct competition? According to an anonymous email leaked from a Microsoft employee, it seems Microsoft will be developing a framework that will be completely GNU compatible. Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, said on Friday(23 February) that they are aiming to restore a Unix-like environment to its former propriety glory, at the same time, proving that Microsoft is committed to interoperability. Ballmer emphasized that Microsoft’s new strategy is to provide users with a complete package, and this includes users who like Unix environments. According to the supposedly leaked email, UNG, which stands for UNG’s not GNU is set to be released late 2009.

Source: Slashdot | Microsoft Trying to Appeal to the Unix Crowd?

I recently got a wild hair and was wondering if I could compile java to native code. I stumbled across an article about a GNU project called GCJ. I downloaded the compiler and did a “Hello World” for java native code. It worked! Then I set out to make a makefile for compiling java to native code.

The following screenshot shows the results:

(click to enlarge)

And here is the makefile to compile to native code:

# Created by Mark McKelvy (2008)

# Makefile for .java sources, will compile to native code, creating
# intermediate .o files. Will automatically search which source files
# have main() and link the objects into the appropriate binary.

CC=gcj
CFLAGS=-c -g
CHMOD=chmod 755
SOURCES = $(wildcard *.java)
OBJECTS = $(SOURCES:.java=.o)
BINS = $(shell grep -r “public static void main” $(SOURCES) | awk ‘BEGIN{FS=”.java”;ORS=” “}{print $$1}’)

.SUFFIXES: .java .o
default: objects binaries

binaries:
	@for bin in $(BINS); do \
		echo Linking $$bin ; \
		$(CC) –main=$$bin -o $$bin $(OBJECTS) ; \
	done

objects: $(OBJECTS)

.java.o:
	@echo Compiling $*.java ; \
	$(CC) $(CFLAGS) -O $*.java

RMFILES	+=$(wildcard *~)
RMFILES	+=$(wildcard *.o)
RMFILES +=$(BINS)

clean:
	@$(RM) $(RMFILES) ; \
	if [ "$(RMFILES)" != " " ] ; then \
		echo $(RM) $(RMFILES) ; \
	fi

 

The make utility shall maintain five internal macros that can be used in target and inference rules. In order to clearly define the meaning of these macros, some clarification of the terms target rule, inference rule, target, and prerequisite is necessary.

Target rules are specified by the user in a makefile for a particular target. Inference rules are user-specified or make-specified rules for a particular class of target name. Explicit prerequisites are those prerequisites specified in a makefile on target lines. Implicit prerequisites are those prerequisites that are generated when inference rules are used. Inference rules are applied to implicit prerequisites or to explicit prerequisites that do not have target rules defined for them in the makefile. Target rules are applied to targets specified in the makefile.

Before any target in the makefile is updated, each of its prerequisites (both explicit and implicit) shall be updated. This shall be accomplished by recursively processing each prerequisite. Upon recursion, each prerequisite shall become a target itself. Its prerequisites in turn shall be processed recursively until a target is found that has no prerequisites, at which point the recursion stops. The recursion shall then back up, updating each target as it goes.

The make utility shall maintain five internal macros that can be used in target and inference rules. In order to clearly define the meaning of these macros, some clarification of the terms target rule, inference rule, target, and prerequisite is necessary.

Target rules are specified by the user in a makefile for a particular target. Inference rules are user-specified or make-specified rules for a particular class of target name. Explicit prerequisites are those prerequisites specified in a makefile on target lines. Implicit prerequisites are those prerequisites that are generated when inference rules are used. Inference rules are applied to implicit prerequisites or to explicit prerequisites that do not have target rules defined for them in the makefile. Target rules are applied to targets specified in the makefile.

Before any target in the makefile is updated, each of its prerequisites (both explicit and implicit) shall be updated. This shall be accomplished by recursively processing each prerequisite. Upon recursion, each prerequisite shall become a target itself. Its prerequisites in turn shall be processed recursively until a target is found that has no prerequisites, at which point the recursion stops. The recursion shall then back up, updating each target as it goes.

In the definitions that follow, the word target refers to one of:

• A target specified in the makefile
• An explicit prerequisite specified in the makefile that becomes the target when make processes it during recursion
• An implicit prerequisite that becomes a target when make processes it during recursion

In the definitions that follow, the word prerequisite refers to one of the following:

• An explicit prerequisite specified in the makefile for a particular target
• An implicit prerequisite generated as a result of locating an appropriate inference rule and corresponding file that matches the suffix of the target

The five internal macros are:

$@

The $@ shall evaluate to the full target name of the current target, or the archive filename part of a library archive target. It shall be evaluated for both target and inference rules.For example, in the .c.a inference rule, $@ represents the out-of-date .a file to be built. Similarly, in a makefile target rule to build lib.a from file.c, $@ represents the out-of-date lib.a.

$%

The $% macro shall be evaluated only when the current target is an archive library member of the form libname( member .o). In these cases, $@ shall evaluate to libname and $% shall evaluate to member .o. The $% macro shall be evaluated for both target and inference rules.For example, in a makefile target rule to build lib.a( file.o), $% represents file.o, as opposed to $@, which represents lib.a.

$?

The $? macro shall evaluate to the list of prerequisites that are newer than the current target. It shall be evaluated for both target and inference rules.For example, in a makefile target rule to build prog from file1.o, file2.o, and file3.o, and where prog is not out-of-date with respect to file1.o, but is out-of-date with respect to file2.o and file3.o, $? represents file2.o and file3.o.

$<

In an inference rule, the $< macro shall evaluate to the filename whose existence allowed the inference rule to be chosen for the target. In the .DEFAULT rule, the $< macro shall evaluate to the current target name. The meaning of the $< macro shall be otherwise unspecified.For example, in the .c.a inference rule, $< represents the prerequisite .c file.

$*

The $* macro shall evaluate to the current target name with its suffix deleted. It shall be evaluated at least for inference rules.For example, in the .c.a inference rule, $*.o represents the out-of-date .o file that corresponds to the prerequisite .c file.

Source: make