Techie Stuff

In a recent security comment at Whitedust Security an exploit was posted which will make all versions of Firefox and Thunderbird crash (100% CPU usage). So if you you want to mess with FF users include this in your homepage: ;-)

<strong>
  <sourcetext>
    Goodbye FF
  </sourcetext>
</strong>

Try it here. This seems to be an error in the Gecko rendering engine and should be quick to fix, so lets hope there's an update out soon. Not because of the danger that you would surf to sites including the above code, but surely there will be some jokers sending around spam including this HTML-snipped and making Thunderbird crash.

Some browser vulnerability statistics from secunia.com
Internet Explorer (20/86 unpatched)
Mozilla Firefox (3/25 unpatched)
Opera (0/8 unpatched)

Later
Matthias

Please note: A lot of problems are being reported with this release of GIMPshop. I'm still working on a new compilation - so stay tuned. If you get error messages regarding libraries you can try and check if this libraries are already present in a directory in the PATH (i.e. c:\windows\system32). If they are it might be that you have an outdated version of GTK installed.

A while ago Scott Moschella released a new version of his GIMP hack called GIMPshop. I didn't have the time to immediately put a windows version out. In fact I was without internet and didn't even notice there was new sourcecode available

The last time I released GIMPshop for Windows there was quite a rush on it and my server suffered alot of traffic. So I won't put it on my server but instead use something like uploadtemple.com until some people hopefully offer some webspace for mirroring the setup file.

The installer includes a recent GTK (which should make GIMPshop work in Win98), the GTK WIMP Windows theme and the GIMP Deweirdifier plugin to make GIMPshop a single window application which usually is more comfortable in windows.

Get it here: gimpshop_2.2.8_fix1_setup.exe (just 7.35 MB)
  Mirror 1 (at google)
  Mirror 2 (danke Timon!)

The apparently broken version is still here: gimpshop_2.2.8_setup.exe (just 7.35 MB)
  Mirror 1 (at plasticbugs.com, thx Scott)
Get the source at plasticbugs.com

Cheers
Matthias

On September 20th Opera ASA decided to make it's award-winning webbrowser Opera free of charge. Previously you could get a free copy with advertisement banners inside the program. As of version 8.50 these are removed.

What this means is, that even the most notorious IE or Firefox users have no more excuses for not enjoying the Internet as it is meant to be. Now go and download Opera ;-), see what it can do, have a look at the tutorials or the tips and tricks and join the community. If you want to get really advanced have a look at the Opera Wiki.

As a little starter I made some custom buttons for you. To use them just click on the links and they will be added to the My buttons section in the customization menu (SHIFT+F12). After that you can drag them wherever you want them to be in you very own Opera. My preferation looks like this:

click to enlarge

BugMeNot

If a site requires you to log in to continue (i.e. nytimes.com) simply click this button to get a username and password immediately

Search this domain

Do a google-search on the site you are currently viewing

TinyURL

if you want to send the currently open address to someone and it's very long... just make it tiny!

Hope you like these buttons, cheers
Matthias

We just finished and lost our first Round-Robin2 match and lost against the Dutch Aibo team. We clearly dominated the first half of the game and it seemed our code was better. The goalie, though, had problems with locating it's position and left the field twice. This gave the Dutch two possibilities to score and they used them. At least we scored one goal so that we didn't lose to zero.

Losing this match now means that tommorrow we'll have to beat German Team to make it into the quarter finals.

Lots of work ahead
Matthias

Day two was a complete success for the Hamburg Dogbots. We won all matches in our group and finished as group first. This doesn't make the next Round-Robin matches easy as we have to play against the German Team. There is not much chance we can win this except with alot of luck. The first match today will be against the Dutch Aibo Team. We are about equally strong I think.

we are group first after round-robin 1

So it is three matches, one today and tomorrow we're going to play two more matches. Two of these we have to win to enter the quarter finals. That means if we don't win todays match against Dutch Aibo we are pretty much out of the competition.

In the mean time we had to time to check out the area around the Intex Osaka Congress Center. It is so strange that nobody here speaks any language but Japanese at all. Even in the big malls the only speak Japanese. Funny about this is that in Japan, too, everything is being "americanized". English signs everywhere, like Summer Sale. But even there no single person I tried to talk to speaks English, Not in the stores, not at food joints, not even at Starbucks, McDonalds or Subway. Nonetheless the people here are the most friendly and helpful folks you could ever imagine.

Got to go now, I will keep you posted on our first match in the second Round-Robin,
Matthias

UPDATE: I just saw the Round-Robin-2 match German Team vs Wright Eagles. This was very interesting for us since both teams have the German Team programming code as their basis (same as us). I might have to explain thit further. The German Team has superior code and since it is Open Source other teams can use it, too. But there have to be significant modifications if they want to use the code in competitions. Here, at Robocup 2005 I think 8 teams are using the GT code of last years Robocup. The game I just saw was a draw and it must have been pretty embarrassing for the GT to be beaten by a derivate of their own code.