Viraptor's dev-log

… and official stats on last.fm (or lack of them) are lame. But I like stats, because stats are fun.
20 min. of mono coding and 6 hours of profiles indexing later results came. So what’s interesting in last.fm profiles? Mostly country and sex profiles. Every country has similar number of users hiding sex, but m/f ratios are very different. Mainly:

• Finland is Winland: 29.4118% M <-> 70.5882% F
• Switzerland is a don’t-go-there-man country: 92.8571% M <-> 7.14286% F
• General proportion is about 60% M <-> 40% F

Per age: (% of M) minus (% od F):

• unknown = 20.9581
• 13: -5.26316
• 14: -13.3333
• 15: -11.5385
• 16: -4.89914
• 17: -1.96937
• 18yo: 7.89981 (google spam ;)
• 19yo: 22.7621
• 20: 17.5758
• 21: 23.8994
• 22: 32.0197
• and grows… 30: ~70

Young girls like last.fm? Per number of friends:

• 00-05: 25.2016
• 05-10: 22.0175
• 10-15: 8.92857
• 15-20: 15.5963
• 20-25: 8.49673
• 25-30: -10.1449
• 30-35: 7.54717
• 35-40: 6.52174
• 40-45: 5.61798
• 45-50: 9.52381
• >50: -23.0769

Girls have more friends. Splitting friends by country gives nothing and is more useless than this whole post. More stats will follow, if there’s more stuff found.
C# library for interacting with last.fm will be published as soon, as I change separator to something other than “,” (thanks “Taiwan, Republic of China”). Currently it can poll profile details, friends lists, feeds, shouts and aggregate that in db4o.

Hello again!
Mono-1.2.2 is ready for downloading! Making packages for edgy is as easy as always, but anyway - this time instead of deleting .deb’s, I’ve uploaded them for so called “community”.

Go - get it: mono-1.2.2 deb packages for edgy. It includes newest cli-common, mono and libgdiplus from feisty, so you probably don’t need anything else. Have fun.

Post update: what’s the minimal mono toolchain? Hard question - but I’ll just list dependencies of mono-mcs and mono-gmcs. That’s all you need to create console “Hello world”. Even winforms one in 2.0, as there is mono-gmcs -> libmono-microsoft-build -> libmono-winforms dependency. Just get everything else when needed.
For those developing 1.0/1.1:

• libmono0
• libmono1.0-cil
• libmono-corlib1.0-cil
• libmono-data-tds1.0-cil
• libmono-peapi1.0-cil
• libmono-relaxng1.0-cil
• libmono-security1.0-cil
• libmono-sharpzip0.84-cil
• libmono-system1.0-cil
• libmono-system-data1.0-cil
• libmono-system-runtime1.0-cil
• libmono-system-web1.0-cil
• mono-common
• mono-gac
• mono-jit
• mono-mcs
• mono-runtime
• mono

For those developing 2.0:

• libmono0
• libmono2.0-cil
• libmono-accessibility2.0-cil
• libmono-corlib1.0-cil
• libmono-corlib2.0-cil
• libmono-data-tds2.0-cil
• libmono-microsoft-build2.0-cil
• libmono-peapi2.0-cil
• libmono-security2.0-cil
• libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
• libmono-system2.0-cil
• libmono-system-data2.0-cil
• libmono-system-web2.0-cil
• libmono-winforms2.0-cil
• mono-common
• mono-gac
• mono-gmcs
• mono-jit
• mono-runtime
• mono

And general crowd will probably just want to join both lists together. I’ll create “basic-{1|2}” folder with proper links… one day. Maybe on 1.2.3, maybe when I’m bored.

Jeroen Frijters discovered lately a bug in .NET 2.0 on Windows platforms, that allows to execute any code from a “verifiable and partially trusted C# application“. That sucks really. Now every .NET code running from browser can also exploit the system. Ok - security problem - that happens to everybody and we should’ve already learnt to forgive that.

Not this time. Bug was known already, as it was “reported by someone else in August” and “bug was subsequently fixed in September“. Patches only made it to Vista and rest will get patches through Windows Update “sometime in the next few months“. Only thing you can really say is WTF? Two guys independently reported this bug already.

Who knows, how many know about it, but didn’t report it and how many run into it and know they can crash the system with that, but can’t make a real exploit? Once again I think POC should be released now. Seriously - one month was enough to patch it in Vista and 4 months weren’t enough for XP? MS - you don’t release patches when you like it - you release them, when they’re needed. What can change this policy? Someone owning MS developer’s machine with this bug and stealing Vista code? Owning Balmer’s desktop with 0-day and publishing his private mail?

It’s a pity that this exploit would be too valuable in real-world to waste it on “it’s a bad patching cycle” propaganda. Maybe one day…

I was just looking for stuff about Singularity, when I learned some new informations:

1. NEVER, EVER name your project .net, .com, .org or anything like this. Also applies to common words as tea, cup, cat, whatever (actually “whatever” may be a good name). Nobody will be able to find information they want. Anyone who suggested “.NET” name, should now search “.NET operating system” on google -> results entropy goes through the roof.
2. Managed OS? Java’s done it already: JX, JOS, JNode, e-leos, JSYS. I wonder which will survive to be a real system one day? JSYS for some reasons looks like it’s going to be similar to Hurd - nonexistant. e-leos is not professional. Rest is doing “something”. 5 separate projects, trying to build 5 OSes, doing the same things, but with different implementations… strange. (no - it’s not similar to distros in any way, unless they’ll agree on some common interface to kernel)
3. The only really working Managed OS right now is Inferno, which I’d really like to test some day. Limbo language and possibility to run it as guest OS under other systems make is really nice.
4. Through some links, I’ve hit a nice blog JMPinline, which is a real pleasure to read. If you want a good programmer’s blog - go there.
5. And on JMPinline I’ve read something about smartphones and CE .NET. That reminded me once more, how badly I want to own a Linux Phone. Nothing special - just phone + bt / wifi / whatever there is + Linux. Why isn’t there any of those in normal price in my part of the world? Do I really have to go back to Siemens firmware hacking to get one? :) Not, that it wasn’t interesting… but Siemens didn’t want to help anybody and we had to have fun in our own sandbox.
   We’ve already found gfx, sound, card reading, serial interface and many other modules - is it that hard to publish at least a .h file with addresses, Siemens? Even for some old phone!

That’s all for strange links from today.

PS. CommunityServer doesn’t support trackbacks… that’s all for community…

Based on “The Spinning Cube of Potential Doom” and many other similar projects - I present Spam Cloud. What’s Spam Cloud about? It’s just pretty visualisation of spamming areas of internet. It shows hosts as blinking points for each spam record in your log. Recipe to make Spam Cloud:

1. Get your /var/log/maillog.
2. grep all lines with “Rejected: you’re in (hostname) rbl list”
3. Get source ips.
4. Map a.b.c.d address into 4d space: a->x, b->y, c->z, d->time
5. Hack a short program in C / OpenGL and take screenshots:

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New project has just been launched - “GtkRegexTest“. Name is pretty much self-explanatory. It’s a program for editing and testing regular expressions (RE / regex / regexp / whatever). It’s written in C#, developed on mono, but should also work under MS.NET without any problems.

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If you’re using Ubuntu, then mono-1.2.1 is available already. How? Easy as 1-2-3 on edgy (and previous probably too). Add:

deb-src http://se.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ feisty universe multiverse main restricted

to /etc/apt/sources, run:

apt-get update
apt-get build-dep mono
apt-get source mono –build

And install all the .deb-s that were created. That’s all! Really.

So… mail stats.

I’ve been using dnsbl.sorbs.net, sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org and some less known rbls. These 2 host made it to config v.2, as they stopped 99.9% of spam. Other rbls have caught at most 20 messages since july 2005. It just doesn’t make sense to keep them and wait for their queries. Anything that can be stopped, will be stopped by sorbs and spamhaus. Another thing is that they nicely add to each other. Sorbs and spamhaus stop about 75% of spam each. Together they stop almost 100%, so it’s good to keep them both.

Now some graphs. Everyone loves them :)

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This dev-log is brought to you by letters ‘W’ and ‘P’… as in WordPress accidentally.

It should be written in CakePHP as first planned, but I didn’t have enough motivation to finish embedding FCKeditor / whatever properly, or add all those shiny features that are already present here. Maybe another time… Nevertheless Cake is a great MVC php framework and I really recommend it.

There should be a nice dev-article for a start, but I’ve found some old sendmail logs (Sep-05..now) in /tmp (broken log-rotate script) and decided to have some fun with them (mainly spam rejected by rbls stats). Results to be seen soon.