Introducing my new Android app. Read fun internet quotes from a variety of websites. Perfect entertaining while waiting in queues, public transport and similar.

Quote sources:
- bash.org
- qdb.us
- ibash.de
- bash.org.ru

… and other sites in English, German and Russian.

If we try to describe anything known to us with our words, there will be no word deficiency. One description will be good, another one not so – that will tell the difference in the describer’s skill. But noone will stop looking for the next needed word in a simple story.

An “idea crisis” can only happen, if the designer sets out aiming to think of something new and unusual.

Something new and unusual cannot be thought up – it can only be discovered while working on a specific, defined goal. It’s the same difference as there is between recitation of words and a story.

A writer’s block is a dead end of a senseless way.

© art.lebedev, my translation from Russian

In every folder that is managed with SVN, it creates a hidden .svn subdirectory. In it, a list of all files and subdirectories in that folder are stored, together with technical information about their history as well as every file itself. The file .svn/entries contains a list of all files and directories in the folder where .svn is located, and the directory .svn/text-base contains the recent revisions of all files, with .svn-base added as an additional extension.

project
  |- index.php
  |- config.php
  |- dir
  |    |- .svn
  |    |    |- entries
  |    |    '- text-base
  |    |         '- file.ext.svn-base
  |    '- file.ext
  |- .svn
  |    |- entries
  |    |- text-base
  |    |    |- index.php.svn-base
  |    |    '- config.php.svn-base
  |    '- ...
  '- ...

Now, normally the .svn is hidden, and doesn’t bother anyone much. However, with default settings, the webserver will treat the files inside it just like any other file – if requested directly, those files will be served. Using the entries file, a list of accessible files can be obtained – among which there might be configuration files or others containing confidential information. And since the files in the text-base directory have their extension changed they will not be processed by, for example, PHP – the sourcecode will be shown as it is.

This vulnerability was discovered some time ago by a group of Russian programmers. They did a scan of a large amount of websites, including some fairly big names in the .com, .de and .ru zones, and the results were staggering. Owners of hundreds of websites were notified of the vulnerability, and after it was closed, some details were disclosed on a large Russian IT blog Habrahabr.

There are multiple ways of securing against the vulnerability. Among the most simple and efficient are:

• Blocking web access to the .svn directory altogether using, for example, the .htaccess file for Apache.
• Using the svn export command instead of the usual svn checkout does not produce the .svn directory in the first place.

While those solutions might seem obvious (and they really are), I was very surprised when I did a simple check among a few websites from my bookmarks list. So webmasters – if you haven’t yet known about this, beware.

A good idea soon came from a friend: a client for the menu of the Mensa, university’s cafeteria of sorts. So one can look, while walking from the lectures (or sitting in them), what there is to eat today, and whether one doesn’t rather want to walk straight home. And so, a day, lots of coffee and a lot of googling later, I present you this wonderous Android app to see and download:

The app is available from the Android Market, and can be found easiest by scanning the following QR Code (if you don’t have the Barcode Scanner app, go and install it from the Market now, it’s a must on Android):

For the ones who dislike WMP and prefer the old good Winamp, there now also is a possibility to make use of these new possibilities. It is granted by a new Winamp plugin, win7shell, available here: http://code.google.com/p/win7shell/.

This plugin implements the following:

• Progress bar showing the current position of the playing track. Becomes yellow when paused and red when stoppen:
     
• Overlay mini-icons for play, pause and stop, also combined with the progress bar:
     
• Aero Peek – different options of displaying the track information, as well as album art and playback control buttons:
   
• Jumplist – a list of the recent and most played tracks as well as some frequently used Winamp options, accessed with a right click:
  

Plugin’s author is actively working on it, talking with the users on Google Code and releasing updates. I found out about this plugin yesterday and instantly recommend it to anyone using (or considering) Winamp on Windows 7.

A 42-year old driver has to pay 900 Euro for speeding on the autobahn Thursday morning. The man was going along in a rental car on the A5 near Weiterstadt. A camera has caught him going at 149 km/h in the road works area. Only 80 is allowed there, so the police. Because the driver has no residence in Germany, he has to pay the 900€ as a “security payment”.

Holy crap. I go along there every week a few times, and virtually noone is keeping inside the speed limit… a good thing I’m already out of the probation time, and have never been caught *shudder*.