Yay!

Nice!

Useful!

Wait, what?

OK, so on the Google Blog (And on IOL Technology and a bunch of other places I’m sure) I noticed that Google has made a code searching site. They seemed to grab the source code from a whole bunch of open source projects (including, so far as I’ve noticed, code for FreeBSD’s ports and CPAN and and and), and you can now search through the code.

I’m honestly not sure what use this is? Other than maybe seeing how other people did something you’re wanting to do, but how do you search for that? Hope somebody else commented their code?

*shrug*

That’s all fine and well, I’m sure I’ll use it at some point in time for more than fun.

Fun? Yes! Check this out. Some guy on slashdot searched for “backdoor password” and came up with some interesting hits… I then tried to find some equally interesting tidbits, but didn’t find quite ones like that, but here are some searches I did (most end up finding some really interesting comments in code):

* fuck

* george bush

* john kerry

* i hate my job

* dumbass

* root password

You see the recurring theme here. Frustrated developers putting comments into their code, or just finding default usernames and/or password for systems.

Can you find any other interesting searches?

UPDATE: Just found this on he wordpress wp-hackers mailing list, about finding wordpress database usernames and passwords on google’s codesearch… Can’t protect stupid users from themselves…

UPDATE 2: After looking at the wordpress entry above, I did some more digging for more config file type searches, and found this search for phpMyAdmin’s config.inc.php file… Lots there too… Reminds me of that age-old normal Google Search for publicly accessible phpMyAdmin interfaces…

UPDATE 3: Just found another beauty at digg.com, about some winzip keygen found on Google codesearch. hehe.

UPDATE 4: Whoa, nice one! Quinton just sent me this beauty.

UPDATE 5: Damn, even more! Found this over at Chris Shiflett’s site, listing some rather bad security holes becoming apparent when searching…

UPDATE 6: Man oh man, this gets better. Harry Fuecks over at sitepoint.com pointed out a proof-of-concept mass-distributed-computing option… This is getting better and better. I wonder if anybody at Google actually anticipated this kind of response…?

Technorati Tags: codesearch, google, password, security

Frank Herbert’s 1963 Dune is to science fiction what The Lord of The Rings is to fantasy: the most popular, most influential and most critically-acclaimed novel in the genre.

The above quote is from jitterbug.com, listing some rather interesting similarities between the Star Wars movies, and the Dune books…

There’s a lot of reading there, but the first bit is already interesting enough, with a Jabba The Hut can Leto II cartoon too!

Tags: Dune, Star Wars

Fireworks Photo Tips [via Gizmodo]
Ed Krimen at Photobird gives us his top five tips for shooting fireworks, which might just make the difference between bringing the shot home to momma and ending up with some, uh, modern digital art.

That’s quite cool. Some nice handy tips for how to get that just-right shot of fireworks displays with your camera. Most of the tips really only apply to SLR-esque cameras, as you need to be able to tweak such settings as exposure time and shutter speed, which most point-and-shoot cameras don’t allow.

One thing I don’t have for my camera is a remote-release, maybe I should invest in one… Allthough it apparently doesn’t make *that* much of a difference, you *can* pick up some minutest amount of camera shake when pressing that shutter button, which could impact on the final shot.

Tags: Fireworks, Photo, Photobird, camera, SLR

Strobist: Strobist Boot Camp: Rules, Guidelines and First Assignment
Welcome to Strobist’s first-ever Boot Camp! It starts now. This is where you make the transition from “talking the talk” to “walking the walk.”

The main point of SBC is to nudge those photographers out there who have not made the transition to actually trying this lighting stuff out to make the jump. Secondarily, we will hopefully all get a chance to see what many different photogs – from all around the world – do with the exact same assignments. You’ll also be able to ask “how’d you do that?” questions to your fellow photographers. Using Flickr, we will effectively become a virtual classroom.

Very nice. Strobist started a Boot Camp for photography. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on his site.

Tags: Strobist, Boot Camp, photography

Ubuntu Linux 6.06 LTS
Ubuntu, which has become one of the world’s most popular Linux distributions in recent years, launched its latest version on June 1 following months of intense testing. The new release is titled Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Long Term Support), and has a specific emphasis on the needs of large organisations with both desktop and server versions.

Ah yes, finally. Dapper is final, and ready for consumption.
Tectonic has an article about it, and quite rightly also points to the spot where you can download Dapper Drake.

Personally, I’ve been running the betas of Dapper at work for a few months already, and it’s been great. I’ve had next to no problems with it. I at first upgraded to Dapper to try out the new X.Org 7.0 that has support for Xgl and Compiz [tectonic.co.za], and I quite liked it. It wasn’t 100% responsive on my home machine, even on an AMD64 3000+ chip with a PCI-X 6600GT card, but that may very well have been due to some of my own user error. I’ll need to try it again sometime soon. The one big thing I love about Ubuntu is just the fact that it has so far not given me any problems with connecting any of my hardware to it, from scanners to printers to digital cameras to external USB devices to 11-in-1 card readers to PSPs. Not on problem connecting any of those to it. And now, there’s also Picasa for Linux (which, by the way, has a .deb that works 100% on Ubuntu), thanks Google!

Tags: Ubuntu, Linux, Dapper, Dapper Drake, Xgl, Compiz, Picasa

On my travels through bloglines today, I found this gem on lifehacker.com:

Photography Tip: Understanding camera basics [via lifehacker.com]
The Photography Jam blog has posted a beginners tutorial covering several camera basics.

The write-up covers most of your basics such as shutter speed, aperture, etc. The nice thing is that it applies to both the dying film photography and to digital photography (with the help of your more expensive SLR type cameras though. Not many point-’n-shoot cameras allow you to change settings such as aperture priority or shutter speed…)

All in all a good read, with pictures!

Tags: lifehacker, camera basics, Photography, shutter speed, aperture

How To Hold A Camera [via Gizmodo] [also on lifehacker.com]
You’ve bought that fancy new high-ass optical zoom digicam, gotten home, unwrapped it, and started shooting. Problem is, all your shots are coming out blurry. What gives? You may be holding your camera incorrectly.

I know I’ve had to show the kids quite a few times how not to hold the camera (”Take your finger off of the flash!”), but I never really knew the right way to hold a camera. Now I do.

Tags: Camera, digicam

I’ve always wanted a Lego Mindstorms set or ten. Hell, I’ve always wanted more Lego. Now it seems that I might just have to make that extra effort to get some Mindstorms in the near future. Tectonic reports that the next version of Lego Mindstorm will be released under an as-yet undetermined open-source licence.

Never heard of Lego Minfstorm? Shame on you. Go here and check it out.

It also appears that Gizmodo mentioned this subject too, and has some links.

Tags: Lego, Mindstorms, open-source

Following up from my previous post about MacOSX and Windows on the same Intel-based Mac, I found more articles about some new software called Parallels Workstation. Although not quite the same as Apple’s Bootcamp software, Parallels Workstation is a virtualisation app allowing a MacOSX user to install anything from DOS to Windows to their favourite flavour of Linux in a virtual machine. At $50, I think it’s a bit steep for mere virtualisation software. Apple’s solution will likely be much more useful, if running Windows on Mac hardware is your thing. Seeing that MacOSX is based on FreeBSD, surely apps like qemu should be able to run on it?

Tags: MacOSX, Windows, Parallels Workstation, Bootcamp, qemu

Thanks to joystiq.com, I now have another site that I’ve added to my list of RSS feeds: rpgdot.com

Joystiq links to a nice round-up article on rpgdot.com that lists the RPG games for current handheld platforms, PSP, Nintendo DS and Gameboy Advance, with ratings for each game and some screenshots. Can’t decide which RPG game to try out next for your favourite handheld platform? Give that article a read…

Tags: RPG, PSP, Nintendo DS, Gameboy Advance