A few minutes ago the new FireFox was released. No major GUI changes to notice, except the rearrangement of the Preferences dialog, the ability to edit the toolbar and to rearrange the tabs. Page rendering is faster ( because of the new gecko engine ) and at last there is an option to disable opening of new windows and force tabs only - a long waited option by me. As for the new technologies - CSS2, CSS3 and JavaScript 1.6.
Yesterday I made the switch to GNOME after using KDE since version 3.0. KDE is really a good desktop environment for Linux, but I find GNOME simplier and faster. If I compare the amount of used RAM now it is 5 times less than if I use KDE. Also I know C and a little bit of GTK+ and will be able to contribute this and that to GNOME and the programs I use (eg bugfixes and small patches) compared to KDE where I have no idea of C++ and QT. Also I don’t really like that QT has this dual licensing. Also I am targeting on development based on MONO and GTK#, so GNOME is the proper desktop environment for me. I really like GNOME much more than KDE for the 2 days I’ve been using it.
Yesterday I presented my Programming 1 Coursework and got … 100% mark. The lectureres were very suprised from what I’ve done and sayed that “it is a superb project” :). I am very happy, because I didn’t follow the specifications exactly. I used Mono instead of MS .Net and developed the whole project on Linux (obviously instead of Windows) using MonoDevelop from SVN instead of Microsoft Visual Studio .Net 2003. This was possible with GTK# (the C# wrapper for Mono). The project was to develop a MasterMind game. I’ve published the sources under GPL on my svn - http://websvn.i-nz.net .
And that’s not all - I’ve got 100% for my IT and Professional Coursework too. Now I am waiting for the 100% for the Quantitive Methods for Computing Courework.
I was really amazed after reading this. World Of Warcarft and spyware, Sony and rootkit… yet another reason to use an alternative operation system (eg Linux). I am thinking on using my reverse engineering skills and starting a hunt trough all my software installed on my Windows machine…
http://www.rootkit.com/blog.php?newsid=358
http://www.rootkit.com/newsread_print.php?newsid=371
Mono Status Report:
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2005/Nov-17.html
“Why Mono Is Currently An Unacceptable Risk” from the Gnome guys:
http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/mono
Another sleepless night, so I decided to check sup with my bloggy ;). Exams are coming for me, but you know I am always up for some coding. In the uni we are going to start a development project for linux tablet pc software. We are going to use Mono and GTK#, so basically it won’t be only for Linux, but I personally am targeting at linux. It is a pitty, because I find GTK+ to look bad. Anyway we will see what will happen with the project, since we are are going to have exams and Christmas is coming too. At the moment I am waiting for the project to be accepted on berlios.de (I’ve chosen it and not sourceforge.net, because of the SVN repository). That’s all. Bye!
Recentry I’ve started work on a cross platform x86 emulator in C for the open source anti-virus program ClamAV. Actually it is not a fully functional emulator, but a emulator for viruses. I am targeting the polymorphic and metamorphic viruses, as well as a generic unpacker for exe packers like UPX, FSG, MEW, AsPack, etc. I hope one day it will be able to emulate protectors too, but I might have a *little* problem with emulating threads and all these protectors which do self-debugging :(. Anyway I managed to finalize in some way the Intel instruction decoder ( it decodes the ModRM and SiB even 
) and the memory manager. I also have a basic PE file loader, but it is really just for testing purposes. For example it is assuming the ImageBase is always 0×00400000 and some more little things must be fixed too. I call this the “kernel”, because I am trying to make the emulator layer based and each part should be separated from the others. I’ve put it on my svn - http://www.wush.net/trac/i-nZ/browser/i-Emulator/ . The problem is that if don’t have time to work on it, because I’ve got some courseworks to do :). I hope I won’t get raped for using GTK# and Mono;s C# compiler for my ACW in Programming :P. I will write a small article soon on how to write a MasterMind game using GTK#.
