Microsoft has released a new patch for Internet Explorer. According to the Microsoft Security Advisory, the reason for the out-of-band release was that the vulnerability described in CVE-2010-0806, “Uninitilized Memory Corruption Vulnerability”, was being widely seen in the wild.

On March 10th the exploit was added to the MetaSploit Framework, and instructions on how to use the exploit immediately being spread on many hacker boards. It was first seen on the replacement for Milw0rm, XpltDB: Exploit-DB.com.

You can find some more info at Gary Warner’s blog (from where I got the news) or at Rec-Sec.com.

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From CyberCrime & Doing Time:

The Energizer DUO, a USB-powered battery recharger, was confirmed on Friday by Energizer Holdings to contain malicious code. According to this Energizer Press Release, they were notified by the CERT Coordination Center that the Windows software that ships with their DUO Charger “contains a vulnerability”.

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What is a sheet? Well, Cocoa introduced several new GUI elements like drawers that aren’t used by too many applications right now. They are used nicely, however, in Mail to house your mailboxes and in OmniWeb to store your bookmarks.

One of the elements that are available to Mac developers are called “sheets”. In particular, sheets are those things that slide out of the title bar of a window. In fact, a sheet is just a NSPanel that is being attached to the application window at runtime. You can see a sheet in action when actually opening or saving a file.

What is the difference between a sheet that slides out and a modal window that pops up? Well, there are some serious considerations. You may also want to check out this tutorial by Erik. J. Barzeski on CocoaDevCentral which I used as a informational and textual base for this post. There you can find a little bit more about modal windows which I don’t want to explain right here in depth.

In short, sheets are a very stylish way to let the user know that a certain action needs to be done or that there is something wrong and that need to be fixed.

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Okay, this is something I have seen before, but it were never attracting my interest so far. But after reading Vladimir Prelovacs short note about adding a version to CSS files using PHP, I clearly understood why this little trick can be so useful when updating CSS files. Dunno why this didn’t come into consideration before.

Basically if you often do any changes to your CSS the old version of the file will normally be served to your visitors as the cache expiration header is set to a far future time.

To remedy this a parameter needs to be added to the CSS file URL that will make it distinct every time you change it. Best way to do it is by using the timestamp of the file.

<style type="text/css" media="screen">
   @import url(<?php echo bloginfo('stylesheet_url'). '?' .
filemtime(get_stylesheet_directory() . '/style.css'); ?>);
</style>

For example here is how my CSS URL looks like:

<style type="text/css" media="screen">
   @import url(http://blog.datenkompost.de/wp-content/themes/barecity_1.5/
style.css?1266235697);
</style>

If you’ve read this post, or this, or this, then you might be interested in another great ghetto hack. But for this one I had to grab deep back into time. With a little help of the WaybackMachine I got this back to present: The Ghettotenna. A great story, btw.

Found in the abyss: glitch13.com via archive.org.

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From cocoadev.com:

The Objective-C runtime lets you modify the mappings from a selector (method name) to an implementation (the method code itself). This allows you to “patch” methods in code you don’t have the source to (AppKit, FoundationKit, etc).

Unlike creating a category method with the same name as the original method (effectively replacing the original method), MethodSwizzling lets your replacement method make use of the original method, almost like subclassing.

This is best used in cases where a single method needs substitution or extension but if you need to modify many behaviors of a class, you may be better off using ClassPosing.

But I found this article way more informative and that, in turn, led my way to the SIMBL Framework which I can greatly recommend.

After thinking about this a couple of minutes you’ll also find a huge amount of possibilities and hack-arounds. But seriously, there are some things to consider like this.

To make it short, Kevin Ballards code did fail in the 10.5 Mac OS X release and had to be rewritten. In fact, many code had to be rewritten which somehow led to JRSwizzle, a very good implementation that runs under Leopard and Snow Leopard.

So either using SIMBL or MethodSwizzling (JRSwizzle in particular) does the trick. It’s absolutely obvious to be very careful when swizzling methods or creating plugins via SIMBL – but the possibilities appear very clear and vast to me.

Another great possibility to hack around with Cocoa is F-Script by Philippe Mougin and F-ScriptAnywhere by Ken Ferry. Two very essential tools when hacking just for fun or seriously developing Cocoa applications.

This plugin for Wordpress allows you to display a chess diagram in your posts or pages.
It uses a replication of the Wikipedia template ‘Chess diagram small’ and a very basic syntax to insert such a board into a post or page.

Quick Chess Board uses small fragments of Viper007Bond’s Templatedia plugin.

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found at longtail.com:

The price of a typical gadget reflects two factors: the cost of making it and the price its inventor is charging for the intellectual property in it. Often the second can be many times the first (as in the case of an Intel processor chip, for example, which costs just a few dollars to make but can sell for hundreds of dollars).

But if you don’t charge for intellectual property, gadgets can get a lot cheaper, and potentially reach a much larger market. That’s the philosophy behind “open source hardware”. You give away all the intellectual property (schematics, PCB files, firmware, software, assembly instructions, etc.) but sell the completed units, charging only a set markup on the cost of the hardware itself, which you disclose.

But what’s the right markup that leads to the lowest cost for consumers and still makes money for you? With the help of some open source hardware experts (Lenore Edman, Limor Fried and Phillip Torrone), Chris Anderson found the business model he settled on.

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Meh is a very simple screen capturing utility which works similar to the Mac OS X built-in screenshot hotkey functions. I just wanted something similar. Here it is.

Thanks to blogwart for all the testing.

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Recently I started to make up my mind to create a simple but yet complex game that is playable via E-Mail. About a year ago I watched my inmate playing Diplomacy. A very simple tabletop that advanced to a very good pen and paper game.

But as the match progressed I found it very boring and way too linear and somehow too static. So I thought about modifications and such, but always ended up changing to many things to call it just a modification. The idea was born.

With all the things in mind I asked some friends if they would like to assist in testing and further developing the game. Fortunately they all agreed, so we collected all our ideas and tried to measure the efforts to get things done.

Here are some of the project goals and features:

• Extend diplomatics
• Tactically helpful and rich detailed map
• Keep the game leader role and slightly giving it more permissions
• More units like: Infantry, Artillery/Tanks, Submarines, Transporters etc.
• Units can have different troop strength
• Implement random events (like card stacks)
• A piece of software that helps managing the game data
• Modified commands and rule-sets

I am currently fiddling the game rules and the world map, as well as all the units, participating nations and such. Most of the things that we’re already written are in German language, so it will take a while till everything is translated.