Archive for February, 2007

Gmail Error Code 766

I just got this error when I tried to read an email from my inbox in Gmail:

Oops… the system was unable to perform your operation (error code 766).
Please try again in a few seconds.

The text was in a Javascript alert-box, and it appeared twice when I refreshed the page. It worked when I tried again after a few seconds, just like the error message said.

Wordr for Finding Rhymes

Wordr is a site that searches a Wiktionary dump in order to find rhymes and alliterations. You can get quite interesting results in several languages.

Comparative Commentary between Nurse’s Song and Nurse’s Song

This is a comparative commentary between two poems, written in a bit more than an hour and without a speciific word limit. It focuses on the tone, as opposed to the many metaphors.

William Blake, an 18th-century poet, has published two poems named Nurse’s Song. They were, however, published in two distinct collections — Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience — five years apart.

The two poems are similar in many aspects, although their meanings are different. First, they are constructed in a similar manner from a number of stanzas, each containing four lines and with the second line rhyming on the last one. The number of stanzas differs, though — four in the former, the song of Innocence, yet only two in the latter, the one of Experience.

Second, the narrator of both poems is the same; she is an old nurse shouting to her children, who are playing on a field. Except for the titles, this can be seen throughout the whole poems since they consist of a single monologue talking to its children — see line five in both poems, “come home, my children”. However, the tones of the voices are highly contrasting. In the former poem, not one single word with negative connotations is used. Instead, the vocabulary brings the thoughts to the happiness and innocence of childhood, such as in line 2: “laughing is heard on the hill” and line 11: “in the sky the little birds fly”.

The corresponding poem in Songs of Experience effectively creates a directly opposite atmosphere despite its short length. Line 4 contains the almost exclusively negative words “green and pale”, and the last line, 8, mentions “winter and night in disguise” — the “bad” counterparts of summer and day, made more sinister through disguise.

In both poems, the tone is identical to the mood of the narrating nurse. Analysing the poems’ storylines, it is obvious that both describe a nurse calling her children home at dusk: “come home, my children, the sun is gone down” at line 5 in both poems. In the former poem, the nurse is calmed down by the children’s games, reminding her of good memories from her own youth: “My heart is at rest within my breast, and everything else is still” on lines 3–4. As opposed to this, the nurse of the latter poem is disturbed by the children. She recalls memories, too, although they make her bitter of jealousy: “The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind, my face turns green and pale”. The nurse of Innocence lets the children keep playing when they request to do so on the basis that the sun is still up (“let us play, for it is yet day” on line 9, and “go and play till the light fades away”, line 13) while the nurse of Experience never allows the children to oppose her judgement. Instead, she condemns their game as useless: “Your spring and your day are wasted in play” at line 7.

Except for this difference, the poems are very similar: the first line in the first stanzas and the two first lines in the second stanzas are identical. This leaves only five unique lines in the Nurse’s Song from Songs of Experience, although they are used very well to show the difference between the two nurses’ personalities: “whisperings are in the dale” instead of “laughing is heard on the hill” on line 2. In this manner, more sentences are substituted with others having the same meaning but different connotations.

Other poems in Songs of Innocence are The Lamb, Laughing Song and Infant Joy — positive titles, just like the word innocence. In the same way, the other poems in Songs of Experience are negative and describe the sad parts of life. Examples of poems therein are The Sick Rose, Infant Sorrow and A Poison Tree, following the same naming convention.

My interpretation of these two poems is that Blake attempts to show the two different personalities that a person can evolve into. The nurses are on the surface the very same person, since their origin is the same, but their souls are widely different; the nurse who narrates the poem of Innocence is just that — innocent and happy, still carrying the spirit of her childhood within herself. Diagonally opposite, the nurse of Experience has let bad experiences cloud her mind and made her bitter.

Daemon Tools: File not “accessable”

I got this error when trying to mount a (legal, copyright-less) CUE file:

DAEMON tools
Unable to mount image. File not accessable

The file did not seem to be accessible. It was simple to resolve: the corresponding BIN-file had the same name, but in a different case: File.bin instead of file.cue.

Things Fall Apart — the Tragedy of an Individual or the Tragedy of a Society?

This was written as an ungraded timed essay with a limit of 45 minutes.

Everyone who has read Achebe’s masterpiece about the tragic end of the Ibo clans understands that it tells about the fall of a society — however, I see the work from a different point of view.

Umuofia and its neighbouring villages were indeed brutally forced to Christianity. For example, Abame was wiped out in a matter of minutes (p. 102) and the elders of Umuofia were imprisoned and mutilated (p. 141). Despite this, I would say that Achebe uses the demise of the Ibo as a tool to further the suffering that Okonkwo has to endure, only to meed his tragic end.

Okonkwo lived a hard life, with his constant fear — throughout the book portrayed as bravery — keeping him alive. He was bornt into a lazy man’s family, and so learnt to hade idleness in all of its forms (best shown on p. 10). Thus he worked, without being exhausted, almost all of his life. His efforts paid off, but did he really have any use of it?

Wit hhis mind set on one goal — taking the highest rank of the clan — Okonkwo loathed sloth and expected to see his own zeal in others, too. This lead to great disappointment when his son, Nwoye, revealed that he was a “wimp”, preferred feminime stories and ultimately joined the Christian missionaries (p. 112). One might argue that it is Nwoye’s own choice and that Okonkwo must accept it. However, this is exactly what Okonkwo’s perpetual suffering is based on — he persuades himself that he must succeed, after which he cannot let go of this paradigm.

Okonkwo bases his values on those of his clan, and thus respects it as an entity. The clan stands for strength, abandoning the weak, and respecting the gods and traditions. Because of this, he panics when he sees the path that his clan is treading.

When Umuofia — the foundation of Okonkwo’s philosophy — fails to live up to his expectations, he has nowhere else to turn. Okonkwo gives his fellow people one last chance to prove themselves unchanged, but they do not take it. Thus, Okonkwo takes the only path left and ends his life of suffering.

HTS Realistic 2: MySQL-Inject the Nazi Party

Chicago American Nazi Party: Racist pigs are organizing an ‘anti-immigrant’ rally in Chicago. Help anti-racist activists take over their website!

In Hack This Site, Realistic mission 2, you must sieze control of the evil nazist website. Knowledge of SQL is required.

From: DestroyFascism

Message: I have been informed that you have quite admirable hacking skills. Well, this racist hate group is using their website to organize a mass gathering of ignorant racist bastards. We cannot allow such bigoted aggression to happen. If you can gain access to their administrator page and post messages to their main page, we would be eternally grateful.

When you first reach the target site, you will se a simple layout with a few image links on the bottom. Don’t follow them — they lead to a real nazi site, which is illegal to try to hack. The first step is always to check the source code. You will find the following interesting part:

<a href="update.php">
  <font color="#000000">
    update
  </font>
</a>

It is a hyperlink, hidden with the same colour as the background. This is a very simplistic way to hide the administration page, since a search engine would index it. Follow the link to http://www.hackthissite.org/missions/realistic/2/update.php, and you will find an authentication form.

As always, start by viewing the source of the form. Unfortunately, this time we cannot find anything interesting. That is when we realize that the attack must be done on another level.

We can be pretty sure that there is a PHP script processing the form data, since the form’s action-attribute is update2.php. Using PHP/MySQL is a very common way of managing a list of users. Now, imagine how the SQL query sent to the database by the PHP script would look like:

SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = '$USERNAME' and password = '$PASSWORD'

The SELECT clause determines which part of the row is selected (fetched) from the database, and the asterisk (*) is a wildcard, signifying that every column is fetched. The FROM clause determines the table to fetch data from. It is the WHERE clause that is interesting — it contains the conditions for the row that will be fetched. In this case, the username should be what we entered, and so shall the password. For instance, if we entered “SomeUser” and “SomePass123″, the query would be:

SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = 'SomeUser' and password = 'SomePass123'

This is where the injection part in MySQL-injection comes into play. Ponder that our username contained a single quote (’). It would break the string, and render the query invalid. With this information, it is possible to hi-jack the query completely! Just come up with a username and a password that will bypass the normal conditions in the WHERE-clause. I used the following as both the username and the password:

' OR 'a'='a

The processed query willl be like this:

SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = '‘ OR ‘a’='a‘ and password = ‘‘ OR ‘a’='a‘

Thus, it doesn’t matter if we use the incorrect username/password combination as long as ‘a’ is equal to ‘a’, which it usually is.

Unfortunately, few sites protect themselves against this kind of SQL-injection. I once managed to get myself a report to the police when I used it on a small social networking site.

Uninstalling PageAddict

I’ve decided to uninstall the PageAddict Firefox extension now. These are the sites that I’ve been browsing for more than 30 minutes in total: