synfinatic

Woot.

It's Funny

Headhunters!

Got a phone call from a headhunter yesterday. I’m not sure if this is really a rant or just funny watching the headhunter squirm, I’ll let you decide. Conversation went sorta like this: Me: Hello? HH: Hi, is this Aaron? Me: Yes, who is this? HH: Hi Aaron,

/dev/random

Boring...

So I’ve watched a few world cup games… mostly because nothing else was on TV at the time. One thing though I don’t really get is, why do people like soccer (or football for everyone outside of the US). I’ll admit that the players have to be

/dev/random

Suck

Well looks like things have gone from bad to worse. Server has hung in an apparent I/O wait condition @ load of 25+. Existing ssh sessions have hung and can’t login. Ping still works. The word “hosed” comes to mind. Hopefully when I hit the reset button in the

Tech

Murphy is my hero

I’m a big believer in Murphy’s Law… especially when it comes to computers. If you work with computers long enough, you learn to expect the unexpected. Case in point: My company has a server. It’s got a crappy Adaptec RAID card which is smart enough to tell

It's Funny

This is my badge...

I came across a fun email from an ex-coworker and friend at a privious company shortly after that company changed it’s badge policy to be, shall we say, “more strict”. mercy!!! have mercy on me!!! i wore my badge in the *shower* this morning! I AM A MAN!!!! I

News

More site news

Well looks like Speakeasy had about a 2hr DSL outtage at my POP so my site went down. Doh. Oh well things are back up and everything seems grand. On a completely unrelated note, I’ve just re-enabled Project Honeypot for synfin.net. If you haven’t setup a honey

Security

DHS: So glad they're on our side!

Let’s see, a guy walks into the DHS HQ with a fake Mexican ID which even if it was real wasn’t considered valid identification. So what do the rocket scientists for security do? Why they let him in of course! Now of course, the fake ID was really

tcpreplay

Making progress

Woot. Actually making progress with the tcpedit libraryization. The API is finally coming together and seems usable. One of these days, I should make libtcpedit a plugin chain rather then a bunch of static code, but that’s like a 4.0 feature. :) Anyways, hopefully in a couple of weeks

tcpreplay

Tcpreplay News moves to my blog

I’ve come to the realization that my blog is a much better way of reporting of what’s going on with tcpreplay then the news section, so I’ve decided to move to using the blog for now on. Anyways, with that said, tcpreplay is still in active development

/dev/random

Site news

Well let’s see… * I upgraded WordPress to 2.0.3. * Enabled mod_deflate to apache so that pages should load faster. * Added some pics from my latest track day at Thunderhill Raceway. * I’ve significantly improved the docs for tcpreplay Anyways, right now, my main goal is to learn

/dev/random

Great quote

I have a poorly maintained hobby of keeping track of great quotes. Just recently I read another great quote which I found very timely considering what is going on in the world and the US of late: As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an

Politics

Why the NSA spying on Americans isn't helping

I don’t usually think of Computerworld as a particularlly great place to read Op-Ed pieces, but this article by Ira Winkler, an ex-NSA analyst explains why not only is the NSA warrentless spying on American’s phone records is illegal (duh) but counter-productive as well if your goal is

Tech

Is the US really behind in creating engineers?

I dunno, but this Washington Post article shows that it’s not a slam dunk that the US is really so far behind India and China creating engineers as common knowledge would have us believe. Turns out there’s a good chance that the US numbers were quite a bit

Cool

Defective By Design?

Would you believe that some products that you and I buy today are designed to be defective? That is to say that these products could do things which the designers went out of their way to prevent you from doing with them? Why? Since when in a world when companies

Cool

Thanks Ralph!

Just want to thank Ralph for sending me a DVD of Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit from my Amazon wishlist for my work on tcpreplay. Thanks Ralph!

/dev/random

Adaptec/Supermicro sucks

I’ve been fighting a drive apparently going bad for a little over two weeks now. One of four drives in a RAID 0+1 array apparently has some blocks going bad and neither the drive nor controller seem to be able to remap the blocks. To make matters worse,

Rant

Chinese ticket spam

So lately it seems that a certain Chinese company has started going around and spamming Trac sites by creating tickets promoting who knows what (honestly, I have no idea, it’s all in Chinese). Once was annoying, twice pissed me off, so I added this to my httpd.conf: RewriteCond

Geek Law

Confidentiality in email redux

So maybe it’s just me, but it seems that these “confidentiality notices” in emails are on the rise. Anyways, I’ve decided to do a little experiment. Many of these notices contain verbage to “notify the sender” if you receive the email… what will happen when I start replying?

Geek Law

7 Years under the DMCA

The EFF has written a great piece on how the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) has really effected the country. Unsurprisingly to many in the technical community, the DMCA hasn’t been used to stop would-be copyright infringers, but rather to stifle innovation, threaten scientists, restrict free use and threaten

Politics

Comedy Central censors pictures of Mohammed

So I’ll be honest, when I watched part two of “Cartoon Wars” and saw that Mohammed had been “censored” I figured it was just Matt & Trey (the creators of South Park) pulling a gag to make a point. After all, South Park had shown Mohammed multiple times in

Tech

GSM + powered subwoofer == pain

So being a geek I enjoy your typical geek toys like my Treo 650 and home theater (just upgraded to an Onkyo TX-SR803). Anyways, ever since switching from Verizon (expensive, not great feature list, but good coverage) to Cingular (less expensive, more features, almost as good coverage) I’ve been

tcpreplay

Just how many replay tools are there?

So my friend Chris sent me this link to yet another tcpreplay copycat. There’s already IDS Informer and Traffic IQ. Of course, the above tools have pretty GUI’s and have some features not found in tcpreplay, but the fact is that if you take tcpreplay, tcpdump, ethereal and

tcpreplay

Making progress...

Well tonight, my allergies were going bonkers and I knew I wouldn’t be able to get any sleep until the drugs kicked in. Hence I not only found time to continue working on the new tcpreplay website, but also to make huge strides on moving all the packet editing

tcpreplay

Tcpreplay has a new home!

Well as of today, other then the tcpreplay mailing lists and file downloads, I’ve moved off of SourceForge. SF is a nice service (hard to complain about free) but it’s missing a lot of features which I’ve grown to expect. Hence, I’ve now moved the offical

It's Funny

22 years of years in computer systems engineering and operation...

Apparently doesn’t mean a whole lot! This is a great little example of how no good deed goes unpunished. Thanks to Linux Weekly News for that link.