Thorsten Sick's public interface

My Moodlight 1 Skills I haz it (?)

thorstensick — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 17:48:18 +0000

My first large “look without hands” project is my Moodlight. 5 RGB lights, individually controlled. Adding to that a RGB strip on the bottom of the box (more when I get it running perfectly well).

I shortened the RGB strip (too motivated). The last segment was without the red LEDs. With my supreme hacking skillz I soldered a workaround. Aint i not smart ?

The Imp of the Perverse

thorstensick — Sat, 14 May 2011 10:27:35 +0000

The last few months were busy: My wedding has to be planed, I got a new job at the Avira Research team – with lots of new things to learn and do and other things (most of them sad) happend unexpectedly.

I had to postpone my Seahorse coding, cause there was not time at all.

And still: The Imp of the Perverse got me.

I just ordered an Arduino

2010 Wrap-up

thorstensick — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 21:18:32 +0000

Time for my personal wrap-up of 2010. Turns out it was bussier than I thought.

Just a short one, I wrote about most of the items here already.

Conferences

Fosdem 2010:

A very interesting conference I a city I love. The first time I met some of my Co-Hackers.

Guadec 2010:

There it got more GNOME centered. I hoped to achieve a bit more, but maybe I triggered some processes and ideas. I want a malware free Linux desktop and still fear with enough market share there will be malware sooner or later. Better start securing it before that happens.

VB 2010:

Stuxnet. ’nuff said.

Job

A restructuring in my company gave me the opportunity to go for a more Research centered job. 4 months and 5 bosses later the job turned out to be even more research centered than I thought. Now there is a R&D department and I get the chance to play with lots of cool tech (see below).

Travel

I love to travel. I spend several weeks a year in some other countries. 3 totally new countries on my list are Israel, Canada and Netherlands.

Technology to play with

I got some new technology to play with in 2010. Kindle, IPhone and Facebook are some of them. Firefox extension another one. Thanks to that I found out what JavaScript is good for

Books

My books of the year 2010 are “Pragmatic Thinking and Learning” and the “Dresden Files”

The year of the last Südcon..

…we organized. Number 10 was the last on of the old team, now there is a fresh and new one.

2011

Will be even better. 5 days in the new year and I already know: C++, Hadoop, Java, Javascript, Firefox Extensions and Artificial Intelligences will entertain me the next few months. Huzzah !

Facebook wins

thorstensick — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 09:46:00 +0000

I joined Facebook as an experiment. Wanted to know what all the fuzz is about. I am still not as addicted as many of my friends, but I start to understand some of the stuff going on there. Some of the things behind the curtains. Some psychology.

But to keep it simple: November the 5th is my birthday. Lots of people wished me well, sent greetings…

SMS/Phone (*): 6

Xing: 3

Mail: 2

Facebook: 16

Facebook wins

(*): My little brother did send me 25 SMS, each one containing one word. The last few SMS were (“Now”,”I”,”have”,”a”"SMS”,”Flatrate”), I count this all as 1. (**)

(**): This crashed my cell phone which had full SMS memory already

Result:

I know very well that Facebook became the number 1 communication platform for many people out there. But I am really surprised by the huge amount of people using it.

New challenges

thorstensick — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 21:52:48 +0000

The last few months I started my new job as a “Security Innovator” at my company (www.avira.com). My first most important tasks were to create a Tech-tree/Roadmap for our new security features (create a strategy) and to gather information (intelligence).

Long story short: Get lots of information and try to grasp its meaning.

Images, diagrams and graphs help a lot.

I am very glad I did not start using Visio/Dia because the graphs changed all the time and are grown to 170 items at the moment, connected up, down, left and right. A mess.

The way I handled it was to create a JSON database where each item got a description and dependencies. A small python program creates a DOT file out of it, GraphViz does it’s magic and the result is a very large SVG and an HTML file. Huzzah !

Similar results can be gained by using matplotlib to create graphs from data. I started using Open Office, but keeping the diagrams up to date was a boring chore. More effective is to go for matplotlib and automation again. Long story short: matplotlib is very complicated, but you will need not all its features. Just use the ones which are relevant for you and be surprised how fast you can get results. Do not be intimidated.

Sorry, no more details yet. I am tired

Good night

More soon

Guadec 2010 First Stuxnet presentation ever

thorstensick — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 19:18:09 +0000

As far as I know my presentation at Guadec 2010 about desktop malware was the first presentation covering Stuxnet.

(Please tell me if you know different).

The presentation was focused on potential threats to Linux users and I used the new Malware with the shocking features to show how tricky malware got. The sample I described was not named Stuxnet at that time and only the LNK infection features and the SCADA “support” were known-but that is strange enough.

Now, months later,the Kaspersky/Symantec/Microsoft guys and lots of other researchers did dig deeper. If you have not heard about Stuxnet you should read their papers and their Blogs. Shocking stuff. But maybe you heard enough already-in this case, ignore any post about Stuxnet. Ignore this Blog

CU soon

GNOME Travel Commitee

thorstensick — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 10:14:17 +0000

I was asked to write about my experience with the travel commitee and the trip to GUADEC 2010.

Short: Very good. Whenever you should want to travel to some conference or hackfest that is related to GNOME, ask these brave people for help.

Long: I am no student, but was a speaker at GUADEC (in my vacation time, not officially from my company). So I hoped to get at least some support from the Travel Committee to reduce the impact of the whole trip on my budget. They organised a hotel and payed for it and sent me some information about a very cheap flight (half the price than the cheapest flight I found). The hotel thing included breakfast and lots of other hackers staying there. This alone was extremely valuable.

The only (very small) downside: I had to wait a few days longer for the Travel Commitee’s answers than I expected, but at GUADEC I saw so many people who got the same good assistance from them like me – they had to be working on some kind of caffeine flash to get this all together. Please be patient. Everything worked out perfectly.

Thanks to the Travel Commitee !

Guadec 2010, first days, short

thorstensick — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 08:14:05 +0000

No time to blog. GUADEC is happening… I will make it short

Trips (Amsterdam and Den Haag: You should visit these citys. They are great)

People: Met lots of interesting people, gathered several great ideas and there will be some awesome time the next few weeks when these ideas get implemented

Hotel: Good choice to get Travel Comitee Support: The Hotel is good and with many of us living at the same place I meet lots of great and friendly people at breakfast and in the evening (one word: beer)…plus: I do not have to pay for the hotel. But meeting people is lots more important.

Talks: Interesting. Not much time to do anything else

Hacking: No time yet. A bit sad

Blogging: Should stop that now. Next talk starts

Ubuntu Lucid Lynx (10.4) on my Dell mini v10 netbook

thorstensick — Thu, 13 May 2010 15:51:24 +0000

I updated/installed Lucid Lynx on 4 computers so far. No problem anywhere. My Graphics card (Asus EAH 5770) now gets a driver out-of-the-box. Thanks.

I measured the boot speed on my Netbook and compared it with Karmic Koala

Karmic Koala needed 37 seconds, 7 seconds of that is BIOS (19 %).

Lucid Lynx needs 25 seconds from pressing the button to the UI. (Login screen switched off).

Booting Linux (without BIOS) needs 18 seconds, BIOS eats 28 % boot time now.

It only needs 68 % of the time Karmic needed to boot. WOW ! Good job.

My hardware DVD player needs 14 seconds. My netbook is getting close.

Oh, and the feature I love the most: Nautilus’ F3 dual folder view (or whatever it is called). It has a large impact on my daily work.

Mood: Thankful

HDD dying ?

thorstensick — Tue, 11 May 2010 18:54:08 +0000

My computer acted wired. It was not able to mount some partitions when booting. My Samsung HD 103SI seems to have some broken sectors (40, says Palimpsest), checks do not finish.

The Samsung Windows tool ESWin detects the bad sectors, but everything else seems fine.

I changed the BIOS settings to AHCI, maybe it helps. At least I hope so. The computer seems more responsive…

Palimpsest is a cool tool and the new Ubuntu just rocks – but maybe Palimpsest has some trouble with the hdd and the missing AHCI. Or some driver is a wee bit buggy

If you got any experience with this combination, please tell me !

Running backups now…..