In my previous entry I linked to a blog which shows how to send emails through a botnet.

Today I stumbled over a movie which shows how you can spam millions of forums from one interface. Again, I’m surprised at the professional interface and the power of the software used.

Also surprisingly this software has support for captcha’s. If you look closely in the log file shown in the movie you can see they can crack those as well.

So you can remove the captcha’s. Besides bad usability, they are useless.

The movie.

Yes, it’s a bit late to start porting an app now, but I needed a break from Mailody for a while and I need an RSIBreak app for KDE4 anyway and I’m the maintainer of that app, so I feel the need to do something with it.

Anyway, RSIBreak is highly focussed as being a tray application. That means, there is no real main window which should popup when clicking on the tray. And that’s where I’ve some problems. As soon as I open the configuration from the context menu of the tray icon and close it again, RSIBreak exit(0)’s. And it does that for all the about screens as well. I’ve no idea why.

Another problem (or the same?) is that KSystemTrayIcon is no longer a QWidget, that means I can not intercept left clicks on the Icon – or catch the hover event. The latter problem I tackled with hooking into the tooltip event, but that’s far from ideal.

When RSIBreak starts for the very first time or when RSIBreak is started while running, it shows a popup with a screenshot of the system tray with the icon in there. Up to now I used (borrowed code from Konversation though) a QMimeSourceFactory to store the image, like in:


QMimeSourceFactory::defaultFactory()->setPixmap( "systray_shot", QPixmapOfTheTrayIcon );


then i could use that in a dialog:


KMessageBox::information(this,
i18n("<p>RSIBreak is already running<p><p>It is located here:")
+ "<p><center><img source=\"systray_shot\"></center></p><p>",
i18n("Already Running"));


But there is bad news, QMimeSourceFactory is not available in Qt4. The porting document tells me to look at Qt resource system, but that’s not the use case here. So I have the pixmap and I’ve a messagebox, just need to find an easy way to show the image there. I need to peek at Konversation again to see how they solved it.

Just some random issues you run into when porting… The good news is that there will be a RSIBreak ready, probably before the final release of KDE.

Yesterday I went home half a day early to see Le Tour. It was a great race, I enjoyed it very much. There were drivers who gave everything, tactics were ok and there was a real fight between the numbers 1 to 4 in the overall standing. And the winner was… fired later that evening.

So what have I been watching? A fight between addicts? Who can I trust now? It has become a play for people who is the smartest in hiding what they use.

I’m not going to watch Le Tour anymore. It’s over. I’m not going to watch people who play the game unfair.

(Everyone charged with a criminal offence shall be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law. Deep inside me I hope Rasmussen will make a convincing statement soon.)

UPDATE: removed the “And my next bank account will not be at the Rabobank but some other bank.” sentence. Now I’ve calmed down I dont think that is a fair statement. They did nothing wrong, but I still prefer them to sponsor Sailing or something.

That’s a real chock of course. The last dutch driver (no family, in case you are wondering) left the paddock. With tears in my eyes I’m writing this. Well sort of.

The official reason they give is that one of the sponsors did not pay the team. Although in general that is a good reason to de-activate the contract, they would not have done it if Albers was competing around spot 10 on the grid.

And to be honest, if I was his sponsor I would not been to happy with the deception of two weeks ago. You are not supposed to drive with the fuel tank still attached. Although mistakes happen, this is a big one. Also because nobody told me I could sponsor the fuel hose. Having a sponsor sticker there would have given much air-time ;-)

Anyway, I can imagen that a sponsor is reluctant to transfer money to Spyker. Although I’m happy with a dutch team in the formula 1, I expected that they would grow and pick up the competion. But it is not the case, they hide behind some ‘upgrade’ of the car in Turkey. Well, that’s simply too late. It indicates you are running behind six months. Don’t forget that the other teams are developing as well, so if you bring out an update half way throgh the year that will put you in competition with the cars from the beginning of the year, you are lost.

This year a commercial broadcaster decided to air the Champcars. I must say I’m enjoying that, although it is broadcast one week after the fact. That’s like a cake after eating to much, you can’t really be excited. Doornbos is racing for the top position in the overall standing and is doing great. And he’s a nice guy. Time to go to the tracks again when the Champcars are in Zolder and Assen. Maybe it is a good reason to buy a sattelite dish to be able to see the races live. Are there opensource/linux sattelite dishes/receivers/decoder/things?

I’ve played for two days with my laptop and it’s nicely getting into shape. Of course my Vista partition was corrupt, so I could not boot into it. So I reinstalled it with a non-hp version. And to my big surprise, it is super fast again. So all slowness I blogged about originally is now gone. Amazing how a ‘distribution’ can destroy a good working operating system. Even on Windows.

So the kubuntu installation was almost smooth. The Feisty version did not boot into X, complaining about to little VideoRAM, manually adding it into xorg did not help, then I found out it is a bug in the kernel. So I took my chances and upgraded to Kubuntu Gutsy. The .22 kernel worked, and showed me kdm on 1650×1050 with the intel driver. The text is still a bit blurry and not so sharp and crisp, but I hope that can be improved by some setting somewhere.

Wifi works out of the box, and bluetooth as well, although i did not test it. Hibernate and Suspend work also out of the box, although I have to tap the fn+brighter key to get picture again after resuming. The ‘touchscreen’ controls at the top to activate wifi/bluetooth and volume control also work. The only thing not working is the fingerprint reader. It is a different chipset, currently not working with thinkfinger.

I’ve compiled KDE4 in no-time and now tweaking the things to get a good developer setup. It is so much nicer when things compile quickly.

Update: The blurry is a defect in the driver so it seems. Following the documentation from here solves the issue. Now the screen is awesome. This is the reason why I wanted open source drivers for my screen.