Hanno's blog

A couple of projects exist for alternative router firmwares. I used to work with Buffalo Routers combined with DD-WRT.

Now DD-WRT became quite unusable for two reasons. First there was a Cross Site Request Forgery reported on bugtraq a while back, where one of the DD-WRT developers answered in a way that clearly showed he doesn't really understand what CSRF is - so already from a security point of view, DD-WRT seems to be a no-go.

Beside, DD-WRT development more or less is stale at the moment - there are commercial spin-offs and there's been some controversy if everything they did was compliant to the GPL. Fact is there were no new releases since several months - with open security bugs.

Now I've been looking for alternatives. What I'm looking for should be

• a ready-to-use router firmware with easy web-interface configuration from the start, not something like OpenWRT
• free software
• obviously, a project that handles security-reports in a sane way

For now, Gargoyle the only one suitable. It doesn't officially support my Hardware, but it works anyway. I haven't looked deeper into it (e. g. didn't do any security analysis myself), but it seems to do the basic tasks. If you have suggestions of other projects, please leave a comment.

Nebenstehendes Wahlplakat fand ich ja das schönste was mir untergelaufen ist - dabei tritt die Bergpartei nicht einmal an.

Zur Abwechslung werde ich bei dieser Wahl sogar mal wieder ein Kreuzchen machen - bei aller Skepsis hat die Piratenpartei gerade doch meine Sympathie. Ich denke es schadet zumindest nicht, wenn im Parlament irgendwann auch mal ein paar Menschen sitzen, die wissen was ein Browser ist.

This news sounds sensational for all fans of old adventure video games: A new episode of Monkey Island is planned. Ron Gilbert blogged about it a few days ago.

For those who don't know, a very short history of the game series. The first two Monkey Island games were already classics when I played them the first time. In super-pixel graphics, but with an ingenious humor. Already with the third part, many fans were sceptical. Graphics got better, but not 3Dish, which was already pretty common at that time. They even made fun of the tendency to bring all games to 3D back then - they had a 3DFX option, but clicking on that only gave you some sarcastic comment. At least I can say that I found Monkey Island 3 (The Curse of Monkey Island) a deserved successor of the series.

With Monkey Island 4 (Escape from Monkey Island), things got much worse - it had 3D graphics (ugly ones in my opinion) and - probably worse - it completely changed the control. All classic adventures were point and click adventures through the famous SCUMM engine (although the control has changed quite a lot over the time). There even was a SCUMM bar in the first game.
Part 4 had some kind of keyboard control. And the controlling was really bad. So this was the first game in the series I didn't play till the end.

I'm excited to see how the new game will be. It will be released in episodes, I don't know if that's a good idea, but we'll see. I haven't found any information about the controls on their webpage.

Maybe it's worth raising a petition for a Linux version? Seems they don't intend to plan one, though it might be a good idea, as probably a lot of Linux users are retro gaming fans as well.