The IggBlog

Last night I had to go to the store to get rum. The rum was gone. I posted about it on facebook. It was a problem. I announced my intention to my loving fiancee, who promptly asked me “honey, could you get me tampons?” in the most adorable “I know you won’t want to do this, but I know you will if I’m cute enough about it” face. It’s cool. I’m a man, I’m secure in my manliness. She starts to describe what it is she needs me to get. I tell her to just get me the box. She brings out the box and continues her description. I just rip off the top and put it in my pocket. She seemed surprised at my concise resourcefulness. These matters are not to be trifled with.

Ladies, ladies, ladies… If you translate things like this into a framework men can understand, and make a joke out of it, we’ll be much more likely to help out. For this case, think of an ordered system men are familiar with, and get as close to that system as you can. Below is a table of simple translations for you, and a few sound clips. Sounding right is important, you want to lock in as many senses as possible.

The tampon chart, for men:

Try it out. Teach your man the scale and next time you’re running low, tell your man you need box of RAMPAGE! or two. Just make sure he doesn’t end up flagging a customer service monkey. That could get awkward.

So I’ve been away from blog-land for a while.  I recently migrated my main server for iggdawg.com from FreeBSD to Ubuntu, mostly due to lack of CUDA support on FreeBSD.  The details aren’t important, and you probably aren’t here to listen to techno-babble.  Unfortunately during the move, a Bad Thing happened and I managed to lose my WordPress database.  This sort of put me off to blogging in general for a while since WordPress has been my main medium for a while, and I really wasn’t motivated to start from scratch.  Recently though I was looking around the software again, tinkering with the idea of starting it all up again, when I found that WordPress had a quick and dirty livejournal import tool.  I’d been crossposting to LJ since I started using my own blog, simply because I’ve been on it for so long.  It never even occurred to me that I more or less had a backup copy of everything sitting around.

So the upshot of all this is that not only did I get all my posts back, but I have my entire livejournal history imported into WordPress.  All the way back to 2002 when I first hooked up to LJ to keep in touch with Brian.  To boot now I have all my comments from people sync’d up as well.  The only downside is that my imported posts now have that little “you can comment over at iggdawg.com too!” footer from my crossposts.  I can’t think of an easy way to zap all of them, and its ironically self-serving ugliness serves as a scar to be more careful with my backups and server migrations.

Anyways, it’s good to be back writing on my internets again.  Moderate cleverness and tolerable complaining are coming soon to an internet near you!

I thought this was good enough to repost. Alt-text reproduced faithfully.

Ref: http://xkcd.com/712/

My stupid red slider phone was showing signs of aging and abuse, and I was starting to outgrow it. It was pro at using the internet 120×120 pixels at a time, texting, and streaming internet to my laptops via bluetooth (still a favorite trick of mine). But the signs of aging and abuse were starting to show… the chassis was made of cheap plastic and was getting beat (the battery cover didn’t really “stay on” so much anymore), and the battery life was standing up well to time, but still degrading. And there may or may not have been a rapid deceleration incident involving my hand and some asphalt. The phone was a trooper no doubt, but my 2 years was up and I had the opportunity to look around.

There was a buzz about my workplace when the new iPhone 3GS came out. The regular iPhone 3G was getting cheaper, and my company is in bed with AT&T. When the new 3GS came out, the price for an 8 gig 3G dropped to 50 bucks for employees here, along with a discounted rate plan including enterprise unlimited this-and-that. That put it into “I’d be stupid not to” territory. So 50 bucks later and a few clicks on a web form, and I have myself an iPhone. Don’t get me wrong, I hate Apple as a company. I think they have terrible business practices when dealing with other companies, and their dedication to customer lock-in is worse than Microsoft. But They have some really good hardware. My boss put it best, “I had so many reasons to hate the iPhone before I got it, but now it’s probably the coolest thing I own”. Gonna have to agree with him there. I still hate the company, but this is an awesome little piece of hardware.

Originally published at The IggBlog. You can comment here or >there.

One of my favorite sites that I subscribe to is The Art of Manliness. It’s not like GQ, Maxim, or macho type manliness… More like “the lost art of being a real man and a gentleman”. It centers in on Integrity, physical and mental fitness, style, relationships, career, and everyday tips for things men deal with. It’s really a stellar site. One of the things they do from time to time is historic themed motivational posters that center in on some of history’s greatest men. I thought I’d post a couple here. Of course every man has his foibles, so let’s just leave those at the door. These focus in on what they had to offer as men, and what they did to live their lives as great men.

Theodore Roosevelt

George Patton

Winston Churchill

These all remind me of one of me of some of the Courage Wolf memes. Unlike the original Advice Dog memes, a lot of what courage wolf has to say can be thought of as actual motivation or direction. Among my favorites, and the one that specifically reminds me of the Art of Manliness threads:

The only way I ever excel at anything is by biting off more than I can chew, then chewing it. Failing if I have to, learning from it, and being able to take a bigger bite next time. I rarely excel by slowly building up to an achievement. Resolve: Fuck yeah.

Originally published at The IggBlog. You can comment here or >there.

Many moons ago I had a “pics” directory on my website full of random crap, with a bunch of subdirectories also full of random crap. Among these was the pics/misc directory full of anything I found on the internet that was remotely funny, useful, or offensive (usually the latter). I knew nothing about scripting at the time, so I wrote a monolithic hack of a script to manage everything. When invoked by browsing to index.cgi, it would check each file, and if it was a picture it would generate a thumbnail and stick it in a thumbnail grid for easy browsing. Pretty much the most basic possible page to take care of thumbnails and gallery functions. It worked well for a while, but my image dump has grown considerably. Loading ~800 images on a single page is bad for a number of reasons… especially when the page is generated on the fly. Originally I used it as a method to learn more about bash scripting, so you can imagine how gracefully it was written.

I decided I wanted something new. First and foremost it had to be ridiculously simple… I didn’t want anything with bloated features, flickr integration, or some kind of drag-and-drop GUI. I wanted a script that got dropped into a directory, and would simply generate a gallery of all the images in that directory, as well as links to subdirectories. Some smaller features I wanted was something that would split thumbnails into a reasonable amount per page, create links to subdirectories, have a big preview pane, and be driven by some sort of sexy javascript. So I basically chopped up my old script, and messed around with some CSS and JQuery till I got it looking how I wanted, learning a ton in the process.

Anyways… here’s how it looks now:

Image dump, now sexier

Its only requirements are a couple jquery files and a few CSS files. Once you have them placed, it’ll work in any directory. It looks in its present working directory for a “thumbs” folder with 75×75 and 500×500 version of each image. I have a script that is a terrible, terrible, awful hack that does this via ImageMagick. It’s basically the guts of my old script when thumbnails were generated on the fly. The CGI script, CSS, Jquery, and thumbnail generation files are all here:

The main sexy: the index script (rename index.php)
The above file is the only one you need to put in every directory. The following only have to be placed once.

Basic CSS file
Gallery specific CSS file.
Dropdown menu CSS file
Main jquery library (current as of 07/2009)
Galleriffic jquery plugin (same caveat as above)

And my own little creeping horror…
Thumbnail generation script, use it if you need it.

I have a link to an upload page in the dropdown menu, which is a feature I was going to include into the page itself. But for now I’m leaving it separate for my own reasons. I leave the menu entry there because it works for me, and as a placeholder for anyone else that wants to use the script. My only gripe is that I’m unwilling to dive deep enough into the javascript to figure out how to make it launch a full sized image in a new tab when you click on the preview… for now you have to click “download original” on the bottom right. It’s still a kludge of a page, I’ll take 9/10 things I wanted accomplished. Feel free to use, redistribute, hack up my script.

Credit to Gallerific for the jquery plugin, this guy for the CSS I stole to make my dropdown menus, and to Dave Taylor for his web gallery CGI script… ancient echoes of which still exist in my index and thumbnail files. My page looks a lot like the Gallerific “advanced example”. The work I did was mostly for the on-the-fly link generation for the thumbnails and directories so that this will work dynamically in any folder.

Originally published at The IggBlog. You can comment here or >there.

Saw this article on Digg today (clicky for full text): U.S. Military are now looking for ways to weaponize hacking.

From the article:
U.S. Defense Department officials were so impressed with the level of coordination between ground military ops and cyberattacks against strategical targets during the recent conflicts, that they are now looking for ways to weaponize hacking. Aviation Week glanced at such a device and reports that it is being designed to be easily used even by non-techy soldiers.

Apparently, there are several devices currently being developed behind closed doors specifically for such purposes, but the one Aviation Week talks about is intriguing. It is basically a highly complex hacking tool designed for the unexperienced that is to turn soldiers into veritable script kiddies. Granted, script kiddies with a lot of firepower.

Script kiddies are widely regarded as being at the bottom of the coding barrel. Whether the government means to refer to soldiers using such devices as such, they basically are making script kiddie boxes. Just as their namesake, script kiddie soldiers would be useful against most civilian targets and most non-hardened or haphazard websites. The irony here being that the stimulus for making these hacking boxes was more sophisticated or coordinated attacks against our own government or military. Any kind of hardware “hack box” that joe blockhead soldier could finger mash would be useless for such an attack.

The device is easily able to map out all the nodes of a given wireless network and, if necessary, cause them to disconnect, then watch them getting back online in order to identify weak spots. Once the best target is determined, the soldier (slash hacker) is presented with several attack attributes and can adjust their respective level by using sliders on a touch-screen. These attributes include, but are not limited to covertness, speed, or collateral damage.

I’m no hacker, and all of those things are quickly and easily accomplished with free tools. Ther are live linux distros that fit on a keychain USB key with all those wireless tools. I don’t think Backtrack has any tools to drop wireless clients, but ARP poisoning is a technique that’ll do it on most wireless nodes. But to do that you’ll need a little talent and patience to learn why and how it works. Ethernet, wired or wireless, is a dumb and gullible protocol. It’s trivial in most cases to fool it into telling you more than you should know, or making it do what you want it to.

I really hope the government is still thinking of employing hackers to do our cyber defense and offense. You can’t weaponize an abstract talent. that’s just not how it works. I’ve always advocated this and I’ll do it again, hacking is a love based skill. A real hacker is a very highly trained and very disciplined person, even if it’s all self taught. You can’t distill that and drop it in a box for anyone to use. Deploying script kiddie soldiers against an enemy with even a couple moderately skilled personnel would be like beating a tank with a baseball bat. And about as good on defense when the tank fires back. Never mind when (not if) any enemy gets their hands on these devices and analyzes them.

Originally published at The IggBlog. You can comment here or there.

Stumbled on this a little earlier. At first it just looked like some kind of vintage computer book. I like those just from the standpoint of seeing what people back in the day thought stuff would be like now. Then I actually started reading it, and it’s been edited a little. It gets funnier as the pages go on. Content behind the cut.

continue reading…

So I got bored and impulsive on Tuesday.

It’s a stylized version of the greek letter Phi, got it on the inside of my right forearm. It represents the Golden Ratio. I got the design from a similar one I found surfing around. For the lazy, it’s a number that shows up all over the place in math, science, nature, art, architecture, etc. I wanted something nerdy that didn’t look nerdy at a glance. This worked out well for me. I’d been wanting to get something for a long while, and I’m happy with my choice. The place I got it at was cleaner and brighter inside than some dentist offices I’ve been in, I was very impressed. Didn’t hurt at all really, a scratch from Dezzy hurts more.

Originally published at The IggBlog. You can comment here or there.