Tims Blog

Oh this just fills me with so much joy. I have a major weakness for baby animals; god. I found them huddled underneath a tree outside my back door today. It made my day.

Since I got my windshield I’ve felt very refreshed. I dunno if it’s summer or that I gave myself a gift after cutting back for so long or what, but I’ve just felt better recently. At work, there’s been a lot of talk between myself and the central web team about nessquik and it’s problems. Allow me to elaborate.

nessquik is getting to be old code. It’s due for a refactoring which is currently underway. The CWS team runs 7 or so webservers and every time they scan them with nessquik, they ultimately get incorrect results. Vulnerability scanning is an art more than a science, and we tell them that, but they don’t listen.

Well they’re getting flustered because they need a set of reliable results, and are looking for ways to automate things. nessquik has a limited API which is mainly used for communication between the Nessus server and the nessquik webserver. It was never really meant to be consumed by users.

So me and the CWS team sat down and had a heart-to-heart. They gave me 4 big requirements. I told them that those requirements were already in the pipeline for 2.6. I then told them that I intend 2.6 to be available for use sometime in October since that is when performance reviews come around and I want some money. They decided to postpone their complaints until October; horray.

Of course that leaves me on the hook; damn.

As a result of me just feeling better lately though, I’m under the impression that the workload for 2.6 isn’t all that big and I’ve spent a lot of productive time actually hashing out ideas. I’ve expanded the API significantly. It’ll all be available for use by anyone in 2.6.

So I’ll be working on the classes on the backend that support all that. Here’s to hoping I get it finished by October.

Holy cow a windshield makes a difference on a motorcycle. Like, wow, I can hear myself talk and think. I can hear my bike a lot better; the whining sound I heard from the engine is like gone. I guess I was hearing it over the sound of what was coming out of the muffler. Anyways, yeah, totally worth it. I rode for like an hour today and wasn’t the least bit tired, which is saying a lot, because usually I’m holding on to the handlebars for dear life at higher speeds. As a result I’m usually exhausted when I get to work or get home.

For the life of me I couldn’t get to sleep last night, but it was sufficiently late that I didn’t want to start anything because I really should have been getting to bed.

My dad and I are going to see the new terminator movie this Thursday. I can only speak for the previews, since I saw them during the Star Trek movie, but I personally thought they looked pretty cool.

• preparing your information for disaster
• analyze svchost
• jquery time entry
• ida plugin writing in c/c++
• tuna casserole recipe from simple dollar
• table drag and drop jquery plugin
• jquery in-place editor
• parallel inventory access using postgres
• the secret is a total load of crap

The motorcycle has been sold! Craigslist came through for me, amazing.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted from home but that’s because I can’t reach this site from home…because I host it from home. In a nutshell I needed a DNS server at my house to see my own site because otherwise the packets go in the same hole they come out of and that makes routing really screwy.

Well thanks to good-old DNS class that I took a couple months back at work, it was a snap (the hard part was getting off my butt to do it). But now I once again have DNS good-ness and can see my site.

I’ve been in the process of trying to sell my GSXR for bout a week now. I listed it on Craigslist and would you believe I actually got offers? Sure surprised me. I didn’t think anyone took Craigslist seriously, and I really didn’t think I’d get even a single offer. I hope it sells!

I tell ya, every time I ride my motorcycle to work I either forget my office key or my lunch. Today it was the office key.

I guess that’s really not that big of an issue because one of the guys I work with has a key to my office and he gets in early, but this week it’s especially problematic because of the pentesters on site.

In other news there’s been some unrest with service desk tickets assigned to my group. Big deal, I’ll get to you when I get to you. One of them has to do with an application that I hack on every now and then. It’s not officially supported, but people make the assumption that I support it. Truth be told, I don’t have any clue how the software works; it’s all black magic. Now however, someone isn’t able to get their work done because it’s not working.

Boohoo, cry me a river.

It’s a mac person, obviously, so no wonder it doesn’t work; nothing on macs ever does. She’s stopping by around 3:30 for what I can only guess is going to be the shortest troubleshooting session ever. It’ll go something like this.

Her: Can you help?

Me: Using Mac? Globus?

Her: Yes

Me: Can’t help, buh-bye

• 3 free ways to transfer movies from Tivo DVRs
• realtime visitors map using georss
• b and h
• wrapping c classes in a php extension
• gmail makes email switching easier
• 5 great code highlighting programs for wordpress
• 37signals getting real
• pasco IE forensic analysis tool
• dronebl

It’s been quite here for a while. It started when my DSL modem went kaput. That’s more-or-less been sorted out, but a few things changed in the process. First, the new modem I have makes things funky in regards to DNS and what happens when I surf to my site here from home. I have to set up a local DNS server on my network to see myself though. So until I do that, I guess I have to post from “off site”.

I got a Verizon USB dongle to work over 3G. Amazingly, it worked more-or-less out of the box with my laptop. I needed to upgrade to Jaunty in the process, but it’s been a pleasant upgrade.

Mother’s day has come and gone. My brothers, sisters and I got together at my mom’s house and cleaned her place for her. I made a thing I found on allrecipes called a Strata. It’s basically an egg dish with bread and half-and-half. It was really good. I also made a homemade vanilla pudding for dessert that I also found on allrecipes. It was good, but it kinda had the consistency of Hershey’s syrup. We layered it in glasses with graham cracker crumbs, whipped cream and a dash of cinnamon. Yum!

At work we’ve been busy. I can’t really remember all of what I’ve done recently, so I’ll have to refer back to ThinkingRock. I do remember one thing. I wrote an anonymous read/write FTP detector for use on site. We have a policy that forbids writing to an FTP directory and then being able to read back from that directory. It’s meant to stop nefarious individuals from finding an FTP server on site and using it as a warez drop.

Nessus has a plugin that claims to do this, but the plugin works by creating directories. This doesn’t work for us for obvious reasons. I hacked some of their plugins into a new plugin that does what we need it to do though. It was quite a learning experience; I hate raw FTP as a result.

My car lease is up in about 2 months and I’ll probably be buying it out. It’s been a good car, and it will still have 2 years left on it’s warranty.

I finished Atlas Shrugged a day or so ago. I thought it was a fantastic book. It’s about 1100 pages, but it reads fast and the story really frustrates you (due to the characters…they’re so evil). I’ve started on another book called The Black Hole War. It’s a physics book about an argument between Stephen Hawking and Leonard Susskind. So far it’s entertaining. He’s talked a lot about quantum mechanics and the physics of black holes, but has done so with the lay-person in mind. This kind of stuff fascinates me.