Stack and Assembly

Its long time, I've written something here. Actually was busy with my project, which finally completed yesterday. So for some time now I am kinda free; I am trying to utilize this time to do something useful and something that I've always wanted; that is to learn "Assembly language". I particularly like the tricks with the stacks and the small and smart tricks that can be done with the Assembly language.

So, keeping this thing in mind I have started out with Assembly. As of now I have set 2 tasks for myself:

1. To change the return address on the stack.(should be easy one :) )
2. To execute a shellcode and spawn a shell.

Lets see, how does it goes. If I succeed in doing these, then maybe I will post a small howto of the same.

Feelings......

I wish all my feelings for you could be like these flowers........

DEAD.

KDM Login

I finally successfully installed both Windows XP and Fedora 10 (Both KDE and GNOME) on my acer aspire whose pre-installed OS (Linpus Linux) had been screwed by me earlier. Windows fonts were fine for the small screen, but i had to manually change the default fonts both in KDE and GNOME. The default fonts were too large for the small screen of aspire one. What took me more time figuring out was the font size of KDM login screen. After much going about the filesystem, i fixed it today.
It goes as follows; the file /etc/kde/kdm/kdmrc is the configuration file for the KDM. In this file under the [X-*-Greeter] section there is a Theme option that points to the folder containing the currently used KDM theme. After this all that needs to be done was to edit the xml configuration file.

My first netbook - Acer Aspire One

Hey,
guess what ?? today i purchased my first ever laptop and its Acer Aspire One :) Went in the evening to Nehru place with Sunder (my colleague in the office) and brought it. Its configuration is quiet good for what one could expect from a laptop that comes for just Rs. 17550/ Yes, i brought it for that much. I brought the blue one with Linux as the Operating System. It has 1 Gig of RAM, 160 gigs of hard-disk, Ethernet, Wifi, Web-cam, Speakers, audio-jacks, microphone, USB, card-readers, the screen is just 8.9 inches, which can be a problem in some situations. Lets hope those situations don't come.

The first thing i did after coming home was to have a look at the accompanying documents, although i did not read them, and then i screwed the system in just 30 minutes. Now, I am not able to boot in the gui nor to the command line. It's kinda sad, but i cannot blame anyone else except for me. Actually i was just trying to find out which kernel version was used, what is the desktop environment (i have never seen like this ever), which distribution etc. I was quiet successful in my attempts, before i screwed up everything; like i came to know that they used Fedora 8 (werewolf) to build the kernel(kernel version 2.6.something), used XFCE as the desktop enviorment, and some Acer customized packages.

So, i am back again to ground zero, using my friends machine to write this post, but i'll fix it soon. I am planning to install Fedora 10 on it with all the eye candies. I'll do the installation tomorrow..........

Download videos from Youtube

There is this very nifty thing that comes along with fedora, they are:
youtube-dl and ffmpeg. If you don't already have them on your system then you can install it through yum.

yum install youtube-dl ffmpeg

You can download any video from youtube by youtube-dl and convert them to your desired format using ffmpeg.

To download the video from youtube:

$ youtube-dl <url> -o <filename>

eg. $ youtube-dl http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=mCMuDP0Qhq0 -o AmericanPie.flv

And to convert them to avi format

$ ffmpeg -i AmericanPie.flv americanPie.avi

or

$ ffmpeg -i AmericanPie.flv americanPie.mpg

to convert them to mpg.

you can convert the videos to any format that you want. Just go through the man page of youtube-dl and ffmpeg to discover all their abilities. :)