Gl.ib.ly

You should be scared and not just of Sinn Fein -- Labour is pretty scary too! Take a look at the scandalous proposals of the opposition.

Fine Gael's looks promising and it would be nice to compare with Fianna Fáil's only they don't have a plan.

Over at the Honeynet Project they used to run security competitions which were quite a bit of fun. I remembered one in particular which I looked at but hadn't completed. It dealt with the forensic investigation of a floppy disk. I was tinkering with an application to measure byte entropy and thinking of a way that it could be used in a forensic investigation. There is no point using the little application to analyse my terabyte (TB) sized drives so remembering the floppy disk challenge I downloaded the floppy disk image (1.44MB;MD5 = b676147f63923e1f428131d59b1d6a72).

Continue reading "Analysing the byte entropy of a FAT formatted disk"

One of the elective courses in the final year of my undergraduate degree course in software engineering was Graphics I (and later followed by Graphics II). For our Graphics I project we were first shown Pixar's famous lamps short. After it had played we were told our project would be to do our own 3d animation greater than 1 minute in duration. The only restriction was that all objects needed to be generated in the program, so no loading up really complicated open source stuff. I wrote a 3d animation of fighting stick men which was way more than I could chew at the time so they ended up shooting each other from a distance :-p. Anyway since then I have been in love with generating all types of images using pure code.

Continue reading "Programmatically creating cool images"

On September 1, 2008 Google announced a A fresh take on the browser. I greeted this news enthusiasticly; some people believed that google was mobilizing to crush Microsoft in an all out internet browser war. At the same time Firefox crackpots (I am nearly one :op) riled at how inferior Google Chrome was or still *is* -- what no browser extensions? I decided to hold back on what I thought and give it a fair chance.

Continue reading "My experiences with Google Chrome"

A week ago a development database server lost power, which is usually no big deal only that I have some reporting scripts that run every 5 minutes for each database. When these databases became unavailable they (the scripts) like to send me a quick mail telling me what went wrong. The network switch also was out of action so there was no route to the outside world from this small development network. The server lost power for three days and a massive amount of mail built up in the mail queue. When power was restored the SPAM started pouring in.

Continue reading "Deleting specific emails from the postfix mail queue"