synfinatic

Woot.

Politics

Obama's 180

Benjamin Franklin once said, “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Obama’s one-eighty on the so-called “compromise” FISA bill which eviscerated the 4th Amendment and gave President Bush the immunity he asked for even after Chief Judge Vaughn

Cabernet

Building a Community

Since good things come in threes, I decided to write about what I think it takes to build a successful team to run a community website. If you haven’t yet already, be sure to read Part One and Part Two first. I have two reasons for this article: 1)

Cabernet

I don't completely suck after all

So I’ve spent a great deal of time over this 4th of July holiday working on Cabernet and I have to say, it’s beginning to look presentable. A big props to everyone at Dynamic Drive from where I’m happy to admit I stole CSS styles for the

FBI/CIA/NSA

Obama: Bad law is good enough

This is a pretty disappointing speech given by Obama on the recent bill in the House which effectively grants immunity to TelCo’s who helped the Bush administration illegally spy on Americans. UT Documents: Statement of Barack Obama supporting Hoyer FISA bill Note to Obama: I fail to see how

tcpreplay

3.3.2 is out the door

I released Tcpreplay 3.3.2 today. Almost all the bugs fixed and enhancements in this release were requested by users, so a big thanks to everyone who opened a ticket or emailed me their suggestions/bug reports. 06/20/2008: Version 3.3.2 - Fix (again) tcpbridge --unidir

Tech

Merging CentOS install images

So I had an interesting problem. I wanted to install CentOS 4.1 on a box which had new enough hardware that you needed 4.4 or better. Getting this to work was an interesting problem, here’s how… First grab the .iso’s for CentOS 4.1 (or what

Cabernet

Rails 2.1

I’ve successfully migrated Cabernet over to Rails 2.1. Not being a power-rails developer, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot that has changed. Most of the API remains the same, and the one thing that’s changed (pagination) has been replaced with an easier to use

Code

Ruby: JBYCDMYS

So a co-worker sent me this link of “cool Ruby tricks“. After looking at them, I’ve come up with the Ruby equivalent of Perl’s TIMTOWTDI (There is more then one way to do it.) JBYCDMYS – Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Seriously, anyone who thinks

Politics

Disappointing McCain

Wired reports on McCain’s apparent change of heart, no longer supporting our right to privacy and instead believing the presidency is all powerful and can choose which laws to follow. Obama keeps looking better and better…

Cabernet

Cabernet isn't dead

With tcpreplay 3.3.2 development wrapping up, I think I’ll take a break from C and concentrate on Ruby. I’m still using Cabernet and with Passenger, it looks like my goal of distributing a Rails application is finally doable. So that means getting Cabernet ready for Rails

tcpreplay

Turning Lechers into Contributors

Yesterday, I touched on some of the problems of creating a pcap repository. I explained how you need to market the site to vendors in order to solicit their contributions, but obviously you need more then corporate donations to make the site successful- you need individuals. So how do you

tcpreplay

If I build it, will they come?

I originally wrote this post back in March ’06, but never posted it. Since then, I’ve been distracted with other tasks and openpacket.org has gone live. I’ve decided to post this now, because I’m tired of being lazy. ——— So for about 4 years now (6 years

Life

Mission statements

So I was reading an article about a talk the Subversion authors gave and one of the things that stood out was the importance of having a mission statement to guide development and keep focus. This is actually very relevant to me right now with Tcpreplay. As the project has

tcpreplay

Tcpreplay 3.3.1 and the future

I’m proud to release the second stable version of the Tcpreplay 3.3 train. Things seem pretty stable right now, with many end-user reported bugs resolved. I’m not sure, but I’m hoping this is the last of the 3.3.x series so I can start working

It's Funny

How to test IDS/IPS Hardware?

Recently, someone asked this question on the IDS email list: Hi guys, Can you please give me some reference or links on how to test IPS/IDS hardware box. Clearly this person hasn’t read Eric Raymond’s How To Ask Questions the Smart Way. Later on he tried to

tcpreplay

3.3rc2 is ready!

So I’ve merged in the new high-accuracy performance code into the mainline trunk. Depending on your operating system you may or may not notice any improvement, but here’s the rundown of the changes: * Add support for OS X’s AbsoluteTime() functions which are *really* accurate! * Add support for

tcpreplay

Tcpreplay + Fragroute = v3.3.rc1

I’ve finally got a basic integration of Dug Song’s fragroute with tcprewrite. I’m pretty excited about this not only because it’s something I’ve wanted to do for over two years, but because it really shows the power of Open Source. Anyways, big thanks to Dug

Rant

Ticketmaster is more evil then I thought

So here’s the email I sent to my season ticket holder account representative: Hi [name redacted], I’m very upset at what can only be seen as deceptive business practices by the Sharks partner, Ticketmaster against their best customers- season ticket holders. My wife and I are going to

Rant

SSL = Secure Sucky Layer

I upgraded from Apache 2.2.6 to 2.2.8 and found out it broke compatibility with SSL certificates requiring an intermediate signing certificate. Without getting too techno-babbly, cheaper SSL certificates ($30/yr vs well over $100/yr) that you buy require a slightly more complicated SSL configuration on

tcpreplay

openpacket.org is open for business

So the gang at openpacket.org finally has made it to 1.0 and the website is officially open for business. Honestly, I’m quite happy to see that someone has finally made something like this available- Tcpreplay users have been asking me where to get pcaps for a long

Life

Notes From Warren Buffett Meeting

This is a great report of a Q&A session that Warren Buffet gave to a bunch of business school students. While there was plenty of good business/economic discussion, my favorite quote had to do with Mr. Buffett’s outlook on life: As Bertrand Russell says, “Success

tcpreplay

Tcpreplay/Cabernet sites down for a few days

I’ve had to disable the tcpreplay and cabernet trac sites for a few days due to an incompatibility with Trac and Python 2.5 which was crashing Apache and taking all my sites down. Probably will be a few days before I get a chance to hack up a

Security Theater

We Must All Do Our Part To Preserve This Climate Of Fear

Great article on The Onion. We Must All Do Our Part To Preserve This Climate Of Fear. Once again, the truth is stranger then fiction.

The Law

Bush to Americans: The gov't will keep spying on you

Cleaning up my drafts, here President Bush tells Americans and Congress to suck it– his administration has convinced the telecoms to continue to allow the NSA to spy on you without a warrant. Of course, just before this, he was telling us all that he couldn’t continue to do

Over Reaction

Teen faces WMD charge for plastic toy

So the boy in this story is hardly innocent, but if the story is accurate it just goes to prove how much authorities continue to over react to jokes and well, kids being kids. Teen faces WMD charge after plastic egg explodes. Now here’s the thing, “plastic air-gun pellets”