Insecure Tech

Coolest thing ever on slashdot today, a clock that uses fly blood for power. The premise is that the fly gets stuck in flypaper and then gets dropped in sometype of baterica and then the chemical reaction actually powers the clock. There are fuel cells in the blood that cause the reaction and thus the power. I can so see a PETA law suit in the works but it's pretty damn cool.

link to original article here

We had a good turn out friday night at the binrev meeting, I gave a short ettercap filter presentation and we played with backtrack 4 all and all a good meeting. Last night I actually had some time to record an HPR episode which will be released tommorrow.

I was in the middle of my daily read of slashdot and came across an article of a boy who was hit by a pea size meteorite. The first thing i thought of is how unlucky are you, seriously what are the odds of walking down the street and have a meteorite strike you in the hand causing you to have a scar. My second thought is if that would have hit him in the head he would be a dead because it left a foot crater in the street. On another note, I learned the definiton of smote which is the past tense of smite.

So i've finally returned to a normal schedule, I missed being up during the day. I have been super busy this week catching up on things and I think i've finally made some headway on a major redesign I am working on. I've still got alot of work left to be done but at least returning to days makes me feel that I am actually accomplishing something. Our new night guy has been working out with a few bumps in the road but we are getting there. Maybe i was too quick to judge him but we will see.

Well I've been on nights now for three weeks training our new night guy and I've officially given up on having a normal schedule on the weekend. I am just going to sleep when I am tired. If I return to sleeping at night on the weekend Mondays royally suck, and I am usually up way way to long. The bad part about working nights is that the last part of my shift when I am not training should be my more productive code time, however i am usually tired at that point and getting interupted constantly so my code production hasn't been very good these last weeks.

Being the geek I am, I don't tend to throw away any electronics at all. My justification is that I'll find some use for this particular piece of junk. Over the years I've collected alot of old boxes that others didn't want, and various other stuff. My frustrations started about a month ago when my media center pc died, the power supply had issues and the box was just old and slow. So I went to my collection of junk, thinking that I could put something together that would get the job done, and be faster then what I currently was using.

I've recently started playing with adsense on a few of my smaller sites. I am a big fan of using Drupal as my CMS and I did a little research and found that drupal has a modules for adsense, so I thought i'd give them a try. So I downloaded two modules, Adsense and Adsense injector and placed them into my /modules directory. i then went to the modules table in the administration interface, they appeared and I enabled them. I then proceeded to start playing around with the different options I had, i unfortunally couldn't figure out how to get the ads to appear on the site.

So here's my beef with so called hackers "reforming" and becoming PenTesters, first the twisted way the public has defined "hacking". I tend to shy away from the term most of the time because of the negative connotations that it brings. Hacking is all about tinkering making something do a task that it wasn't intended to do, whether that is a computer system, your favorite gaming console or even a very low tech device. So now that we've defined what a hacker is, lets talk about what it's not Hacking is not breaking into computer systems, it is not destroying data, it is not stealing things.

So yesterday I decided to make some of my smaller oracle backup jobs automated. I thought instead of installing some job scheduling application, I would just use windows scheduler and create a small batch file that dumps my database table zip up the exports and then moves them to our backup staging area. Well I wrote the little script and it would work on it's own but would not copy the files to a network drive that I had mapped on the box when it was running through the scheduler, the rest of the script would run but not the copy.

Since i am working on this on my lunch break, I've gotten a few updates done trying out a few skins and generally working on some of backend blog setup. I'll have more updates in the coming days.