In order to get afacli working on Ubuntu Hardy, I did these things:

1. Get afa-apps-snmp.2807420-A04.tar.gz from Dell.

2. Get libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2 from Debian afacli depends on libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3.

Since I’m running Ubuntu x86_64, I put libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3 in /usr/lib32. Installing the rpm package under Ubuntu provides rpm2cpio which I used to extract afaapps-4.1-0.i386.rpm like this:

$ rpm2cpio afaapps-4.1-0.i386.rpm | (cd / && cpio -iudvm)

That’s it. You now have /usr/sbin/afacli.

Tags: Linux, Ubuntu, Adaptec, afacli

Last week, I wrote that Wolfram Alpha still couldn’t answer such important (ha) questions such as “How is babby formed?“

As you might expect, Wolfram Alpha’s gotten smarter already. Look:

That’s what I call awesome. Well done, guys.

Wolfram Alpha may be cool, but it can’t answer the really important questions, yet, such as “How is babby formed?” …

This morning, I got a spam email with this subject line:

We are too lazy to change subjects every day, please buy our viagra

Wow, has it really come to this? Is there anyone left on this planet who wants to buy Viagra that doesn’t know how to get it, that spam like this has a non-zero conversion rate?!

I think spammers are now just sending spam to prove they can do it these days. They’re probably distributing URLs that link to sites that serve malware that exploit browser vulnerabilities simply to grow their botnets, under the guise of Viagra spam.

I’m waiting for the day when these botnet owners start distributing code to do large-scale grid crypto cracking. Imagine what kind of crypto you can brute-force in near-realtime with a grid of a few hundred thousand modern computers? That’s a supercomputer that no single organization could probably afford to purchase and manage.

Tags: Viagra, spam, hacking, distributed computing

I make extensive use of Google throughout the day and I’ve always got “g” set up as the keyword for a Quick Search in Firefox. However, I also spend a lot of time at shell prompts, and sometimes I don’t want to bounce to a browser just to Google for something.

So, tonight, I wrote a small Tcl script that lets me “google for” at the prompt. Just save the previous link and rename it to “google” and move it somewhere in your PATH like /usr/local/bin, then make it executable with chmod 755.

The script requires Tcl with tDOM installed, as well as Tidy–both of these things are installed out-of-the-box on MacOS X 10.5 Leopard.

Once you get the script installed, you can do something like this:

If you notice, for Google search queries that have a special result like the one above, the script displays it separately before the results. The script also emits the search query URL so you can just Control-click on it in Terminal and then select “Open URL” and have it pop up in your browser, which also works for any of the search result URLs.

I don’t know if anyone else would find this script useful, but it’s already saved me a ton of time–especially when I’m on a slow 64 kb/s GPRS connection like I am this evening. Either way, I’m releasing this script into the public domain.

Tags: Google, Tcl, open source