Manifold

I didn’t do it!

Wish I could take credit for this one, it’s genius.

Friend of mine named Joel Esler (same exact name, even middle) made a flash based game called Manifold. It’s not me :)

Joel and I met almost 10 years ago now, online, and have kept in touch ever since. We have the same first, middle, and last names. He lives in Australia and is a graphic artist. (And apparently makes really good flash games too!)

So I just wanted to clear that up, it’s not me, it’s him, go support him!

Good job Joel!

Outlook and Mail.app

At the client I am working at, they actually use the Outlook calendar how it is supposed to be used. Scheduling appointments, conference calls, and inviting people to them, using the Accept, Decline..etc buttons within Outlook to actually schedule conference calls.

I am baffled by the use of this technology, since most offices that I’ve worked at don’t use Calendars on their computers as they are supposed to. I have no idea why this is so hard for people to grasp.

Anyway, I have noticed that when people send me an invite in Outlook and I receive it in Mail.app, it basically looks like this:

When: Wednesday, September 26, 2007 7:30 PM-9:00 PM (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada).
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Which, is annoying. I want it to look like an iCal icon, allowing me to click on it (or even do what it’s supposed to and automatically import into iCal) and add it into iCal. Well I Googled.

Found these two: OMiC and MailTags, but I didn’t want to install an app. Why should I have to install a third party app!? i don’t want to do that. So I started looking some more, and decided I should poke around the menus. After looking for a bit I found that by hitting the “Command-[“ key combination Mail.app would switch the format of the mail around and I got what I wanted. No third party app.

Why isn’t it ALL that easy?

Manifold

I didn’t do it!

Wish I could take credit for this one, it’s genius.

Friend of mine named Joel Esler (same exact name, even middle) made a flash based game called Manifold. It’s not me :)

Joel and I met almost 10 years ago now, online, and have kept in touch ever since. We have the same first, middle, and last names. He lives in Australia and is a graphic artist. (And apparently makes really good flash games too!)

So I just wanted to clear that up, it’s not me, it’s him, go support him!

Good job Joel!

Outlook and Mail.app

At the client I am working at, they actually use the Outlook calendar how it is supposed to be used. Scheduling appointments, conference calls, and inviting people to them, using the Accept, Decline..etc buttons within Outlook to actually schedule conference calls.

I am baffled by the use of this technology, since most offices that I’ve worked at don’t use Calendars on their computers as they are supposed to. I have no idea why this is so hard for people to grasp.

Anyway, I have noticed that when people send me an invite in Outlook and I receive it in Mail.app, it basically looks like this:

When: Wednesday, September 26, 2007 7:30 PM-9:00 PM (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada).
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Which, is annoying. I want it to look like an iCal icon, allowing me to click on it (or even do what it’s supposed to and automatically import into iCal) and add it into iCal. Well I Googled.

Found these two: OMiC and MailTags, but I didn’t want to install an app. Why should I have to install a third party app!? i don’t want to do that. So I started looking some more, and decided I should poke around the menus. After looking for a bit I found that by hitting the “Command-[“ key combination Mail.app would switch the format of the mail around and I got what I wanted. No third party app.

Why isn’t it ALL that easy?

Review of the Snort book

Friend of mine Richard Bejtlich posted his review of the Snort Book that I had a hand in writing. I just wanted to say that I agree with every word he had to say. He did make some nice comments (and some bad comments -- citing the publisher at fault -- which is true) about my chapter, can’t fault him for that!

Thanks Richard for posting the review. I totally agree!

Full Disclosure

In the interest of Full-Disclosure for this blog and everything I’ll let you know where I stand.

-- I love Macs and everything Apple. Don’t care what you think, it all works for me. Don’t have any problems admitting it, even if one of my best friends thinks I am a tool because of it. (WuTang)
-- My first OS was DOS, first computer was a Tandy 1000 SX bought from Radio Shack. My OS progression has been:
DOS
Windows 3.1
Windows 95
Windows 98
Windows ME + NT
Windows XP + 2000
Redhat Linux
Mandrake Linux
Slackware
SuSE
OSX

That’s not all the OS’es I know, that’s just the ones I’ve personally had loaded on my systems.
-- I have an iPhone, iSight, Mac keyboards, docs, Mice..
-- I have a 3G iPod
-- I have a PowerBook G4
-- I have a PowerMac Dual G5 2.0
-- My wife has a MacBook Black
-- I work for Sourcefire, we make Snort, it’s the best company I’ve ever worked for, and I love it. I believe in our products and our philosophy of customer service. I work in the Professional Services department. Which means I am half sales, half technical, and another half jack-of-all-trades. (Which is 3 halves for you doing the math) It’s a great job, I have great management. I travel ALOT and actually, as I said in this post I am off the road for a year to work with one customer.
-- In my spare time I grade GIAC Gold papers for GIAC.org which is affiliated with SANS.
-- In my other spare time I am a handler with the Internet Storm Center. It takes a lot of time, and we get a lot of email.
-- I wrote a chapter of a book. I edited a another chapter, but my edits weren’t included in neither my bio or the other chapter (even though I was paid to do the edits).
-- The book sucked. Even my chapter had errors in it. (TCP Conversations do NOT start with a “FIN” wtf!) The publisher took the rough draft (read: not the final edits) of all the authors and published the rough drafts, this is because the publisher for the book quit in the middle of the process, plus Syngress (the publishing company) was bought out, so I am sure there were some things lost.. There are a couple chapters in the book that are excellent, and it’s worth the purchase. But on a elementary grading scale of the book, I give it a C-.

Anything I forgot? Leave a comment. If you are going to write about me in your blog, leave a comment on my blog pointing to your post!

Stoned.Angelina makes its way back..

Does anyone remember this boot sector virus? Stoned.Angelina? no? It’s only 13 years old.

Apparently a bunch of laptops pre-installed with Windows Vista Home Premium (wtf ever that means) was found to be infected with this 13 year old virus.

What happened to that MSFT anti-virus?

The Register has the story. Albeit funny though.

It is “an unfortunate” mistake for the company that put it on there “Bullguard”.

Bullheaded move is more like it.

Update: Apparently this dude over at computerdefense.org didn’t really like my post. First of all, it’s meant to relay information and yet, be funny at the same time.

So, #1 -- This is Bullguard’s fault. If you couldn’t read into that in the above post, well I am sorry.
#2 -- This is not Vista’s fault. Just MSFT being a victim of circumstance. This shouldn’t happen to an Apple computer because they control the manufacturing process of the hardware and the software. MSFT doesn’t. They just make the software, so they are at the hardware manufacturers mercy.
#3 -- I was definitely making fun of Vista’s naming structure. “Vista Home Premium” What does that mean? My question for Microsoft is, why couldn’t there just be ONE version of Vista. OSX does it! Linux does it! (yes they have versions like “Advanced Server” -- or whatever it’s called now..)
#4 -- I was poking fun at MSFT’s anti-virus service.

However, the dude that calls me everything but the kitchen sink over on his blog, says “I’ve actually had AV Vendors tell me that they pull old and out-dated virus signatures…” How is that responsible? So all I have to do if I want to infect computers is to introduce a really old virus? What kind of liability issues does that raise?

Further down in the posts in his blog he says “Now, I’m often accused of being a Microsoft Zealot...” Well, at least he admits it. He’s on the MSFT side of the fence, I am on the Apple/Linux side of the fence. At least now, I know where we all stand.

If you are going to write about me in your blog, leave a comment on my blog pointing to your post!

Waiting in Line (or, how humans are lemmings)

I live near this small town in Delaware named “Middletown”.

At the intersection of 71 and 299, there is a single stop light, 4 way (with turn lanes) stop in the middle of town. Everyday I drive North on Route 1 to get to work and South on Route 1 to come home. The closest exit to where I live is the 299 exit off of Route 1. So, I would be approaching town from the right (headed West). Now, since the overwhelming majority of people that live in Middletown and Townsend work in either Dover or Wilmington, most people use Route 1 or 13 for the commute. (If you use 13, you just don’t want to pay the toll and are a cheapskate).

Anyway. Everyday, when I get off the exit headed towards Middletown, there is a line... A LONG LINE of people waiting at the light at 299/71. Like, a mile long... Now, as you can see from the above map, Middletown was built with the logical “Block” concept where the roads are in squares surrounding the main intersection. One way streets and everything. Aside from Lake street, which is not really the best street, the rest of the streets are normal small town neighborhood streets. Why oh Why do all these people wait at the light like 1984 zombies waiting for the light to change? Why doesn’t anyone go down the side blocks? Wouldn’t that make life so much easier? Or, perhaps, spend the 2 miles it takes to learn the shortcuts to avoid the intersection in the middle of town all-together and save alot less stress.

It makes me sad to make the turn to avoid the intersection, like I do everyday, and see the long line of people waiting... So sad.

Waiting in Line (or, how humans are lemmings)

I live near this small town in Delaware named “Middletown”.

At the intersection of 71 and 299, there is a single stop light, 4 way (with turn lanes) stop in the middle of town. Everyday I drive North on Route 1 to get to work and South on Route 1 to come home. The closest exit to where I live is the 299 exit off of Route 1. So, I would be approaching town from the right (headed West). Now, since the overwhelming majority of people that live in Middletown and Townsend work in either Dover or Wilmington, most people use Route 1 or 13 for the commute. (If you use 13, you just don’t want to pay the toll and are a cheapskate).

Anyway. Everyday, when I get off the exit headed towards Middletown, there is a line... A LONG LINE of people waiting at the light at 299/71. Like, a mile long... Now, as you can see from the above map, Middletown was built with the logical “Block” concept where the roads are in squares surrounding the main intersection. One way streets and everything. Aside from Lake street, which is not really the best street, the rest of the streets are normal small town neighborhood streets. Why oh Why do all these people wait at the light like 1984 zombies waiting for the light to change? Why doesn’t anyone go down the side blocks? Wouldn’t that make life so much easier? Or, perhaps, spend the 2 miles it takes to learn the shortcuts to avoid the intersection in the middle of town all-together and save alot less stress.

It makes me sad to make the turn to avoid the intersection, like I do everyday, and see the long line of people waiting... So sad.

New Apple Keyboard review

Okay, so I went to the Apple store the other day (the Christiana Mall one is about 2 miles from work), just to see if I liked the new Apple Keyboard that they released at the same time as the new iMac.

Surprisingly, I did like it. I was impressed. I think I like it better than my old white Mac keyboard because the keys don’t travel as far. It’s more like a laptop keyboard (which I prefer), and the keys don’t depress as far as a regular keyboard does, but it has a nice ‘tactile’ feedback.

So, now it sits @ home. I really like it.

In fact, while using it the first day, I mentioned to my wife ‘hey, I think I type faster on this thing’. Of course, she rolled her eyes at me, but I had to test it.

I went to www.typingtest.com where you can take a non-scientific measurement of your typing speed, and with my Powerbook keyboard I can crank out 92 WPM (tested twice), with the new Mac Keyboard I can crank out 90 WPM, but with my old white mac keyboard, for some reason (maybe mental block), I can only get about 84 WPM.

So, like I said, non-scientific. But very interesting. To each his own, but I like it.

New Apple Keyboard review

Okay, so I went to the Apple store the other day (the Christiana Mall one is about 2 miles from work), just to see if I liked the new Apple Keyboard that they released at the same time as the new iMac.

Surprisingly, I did like it. I was impressed. I think I like it better than my old white Mac keyboard because the keys don’t travel as far. It’s more like a laptop keyboard (which I prefer), and the keys don’t depress as far as a regular keyboard does, but it has a nice ‘tactile’ feedback.

So, now it sits @ home. I really like it.

In fact, while using it the first day, I mentioned to my wife ‘hey, I think I type faster on this thing’. Of course, she rolled her eyes at me, but I had to test it.

I went to www.typingtest.com where you can take a non-scientific measurement of your typing speed, and with my Powerbook keyboard I can crank out 92 WPM (tested twice), with the new Mac Keyboard I can crank out 90 WPM, but with my old white mac keyboard, for some reason (maybe mental block), I can only get about 84 WPM.

So, like I said, non-scientific. But very interesting. To each his own, but I like it.

A year log endeavor

For those of you that haven’t heard, I’m off the road for the next year. One of our clients has bought a year’s worth of my services to be at their office helping them configure their IDS’s, and generally help out their Incident Analysis team. Apparently this company (who I am not mentioning) had an Incident analysis team, but it had been downsized, several different managers...etc.. Therefore, they have hired me for a year in order to help them implement our product, and work in their team, since I have a bit of experience in Computer Response Teams, having worked for one for 4 years.

I’ll be able to get back to posting information and analysis again.

A year log endeavor

For those of you that haven’t heard, I’m off the road for the next year. One of our clients has bought a year’s worth of my services to be at their office helping them configure their IDS’s, and generally help out their Incident Analysis team. Apparently this company (who I am not mentioning) had an Incident analysis team, but it had been downsized, several different managers...etc.. Therefore, they have hired me for a year in order to help them implement our product, and work in their team, since I have a bit of experience in Computer Response Teams, having worked for one for 4 years.

I’ll be able to get back to posting information and analysis again.