Geek with an attitude

I've been a kde user for very long time, since from before version 3.0. I vaguely remember being excited with version 3.0 to the point I was using the beta releases on a daily basis. Similarly I have been anticipating kde 4.0, the next major release since 3.0 I suppose. But it seems that is just its problem! Its too much of a major release to be pushing out in such a hurry. I have been following kde 4 from time to time by reading some of the discussions on the panel-devel list, trying out the alpha releases via the SUSE live cd and of course discussing with Siraj , our local kde developer, on the internals (technology and community wise). While things have improved a bit, with each release of kde 4, its far from ready. We are now at RC1 and the announcement says its ready for prime time testing. Building on this, the majority of applications included in KDE 4.0 are now usable for day to day use. The KDE Release Team has recently underlined this by calling on the community to par...

Previously on Part 1 ... Just kidding! Scroll down and read it your self. Its been a while, and I think I'm falling into the "Oh twittering is so much more easier than blogging" trap. So if you've been following my twitter , then you'd know that I've been discovering quite a few uses for the iTouch.Unfortunately its late and I think you'll have to wait for another post before I get into all that :( So instead, lets first cover some of the basics. Freeing up some space for 3 rd party Apps I'm assuming you have already setup the openssh package as well as the BSD Subsystem, there by enabling you to remotely login or copy files (scp). If not, use the Installer app to install those two packages. One of the problems you'll quickly realize as you begin to install more and more apps, is a pop up message notifying you that your running out of disk space! This is due to the root partition (/) which also happens to hold /Applications, being only 300MB. Most...

So now that I had a little time to play around with this cool gadget, I think its time that I shared some of fun in hacking the iPod Touch. But first a friendly government warning : <disclaimer> WARNING: Hacking gadgets is known to cause bricking and in some instances may even void your warranty. As a general rule assume you won't be able to upgrade your firmware in the future. If your doing this, do it AT YOUR OWN RISK! </disclaimer> Don't worry in reality its almost impossible to brick the device since you can restore it using iTunes. So if you're still with me then "welcome to a brave new world of hacking!". First let me explain how the iphone/ipod touch hack works in layman's terms. TIFF Exploit The key ingredient for performing the hack is around a bug discovered in libtiff , a library used widely to provide tiff image handling capabilities. This bug can be used to cause a buffer overflow , allowing arbitrary code to be executed. Such exploi...