/dev/null

Is the neocon agenda so well construted that even an idiot can execute it?

This weekend was excellent. Here’s a quick rundown of the activities…

Friday night: Matty, Tristan and I went to the Saint Paul Saints game. I was worried because we didn’t have tickets and I couldn’t find scalpers ANYWHERE! Finally I found a few people selling tickets but 3 is an odd number By the time we made it to the front of the ticket line, some guy came up behind us with a stack of GA tickets being sold for face value. yay! The Saints lost 4-3 but I really didn’t care. It was a beautiful night and it was so nice to be outside. After dropping Matty off, I went to S & T’s to spend the night (they have AC and my apartment was really warm).

Saturday morning, I went home at about 9:00am. Matty just bought a mountain bike so we took a nice long ride around Lake Calhoun and Lake of the Isles. Then I went back to S & T’s to go hang out at the pool at their housing complex. It was sooo nice to be in the water on a hot day. Then Tristan grilled up some dogs and brats and we had a few cold ones.

Sunday, I went to church, came home, and started cleaning up the apartment. On Saturday I was lucky enough to find an open storage locker in the basement (they’re on a first-come, first-serve basis and there hasn’t been one open for almost a year!). This was a pretty big deal for me as I finally got to move some boxes that were sitting around since I moved in. Now I have a nice little desk in my bedroom which is perfect for my laptop (plus, that’s where the air conditioner is). At about 5:00 I went to Valley Fair with Gus, Mike, Vince, and Adam. It was fun but really hot and sticky outside. Normally, I don’t get scared by the rides but the “Power Tower” changed that. It’s a simple ride where you’re liftend slowly straight up into the air and then suddenly dropped. I kid you not, the first second of the ride I was so absolutely terrified that I couldn’t even make a sound. It was so much fun that I could have sat there and ridden it all day! We finally took off at 9:00 or so and came home.

I’d call that a successful weekend

There’s nothing like dropping large sums of cash on a new gadget only to find out that you’re actually _worse_ off than before! Ok, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but that’s how I felt the other night.

Somehow my Treo 650 (SprintPCS) got screwed up to the point where every time I received a text message, my phone would reboot. After the second reboot, the Treo wouldn’t connect to Sprint’s network (so as to avoid an endless reboot loop, I suppose). As long as the message is still being broadcast over the network, my phone was essentially unusable. Obviously this isn’t ideal. I was busy for a few days so I didn’t get a chance to fix it. Finally, on Wed night I was fed up. I tried deleting old apps, upgrading firmware, removing my SD card, notta! Stupid thing kept on rebooting. I really needed to use the phone so I finally bit the bullet and did a hard reset. After hot-synching, I was back in business. Things are back to normal now and I’m happy again. New technology sure is wonderful….</sarcasm>

I ran across an interesting piece of sotware yesterday called rrs. rrs is a reverse connecting shell. I had a need for a tool like this since I have a box that will be 5.5 hours away with no way to remotely administer it since it’ll be sitting behind a NAT. I have no control over the router at that location so punching holes through the firewall for SSH just isn’t going to cut it. It turns out this software works perfectly. Here’s how it works…

Machine A: this box is sitting behind a NAT with a private, dynamic IP and no way of accessing it externally.

Machine B: a machine on a network that I control which allows incoming TCP connections.

On machine A, I startup the connector piece in daemon mode:
rrs -s -P rrs.pem -D –infinite-reconnect 15 flyhouse.homelinux.org 2222

The options are: s) use SSL P) public key D) daemon mode –infinite-reconnect) attempt to reconect every 15 seconds and don’t close after a successful connection

The above command will attempt to initiate a connection with my machine at home. It retry ever 15 seconds until my machine accepts the connection.

On machine B (flyhouse in this case), I startup the listener:
rrs -ls -P rrs.pem
The options are: l) listen for a connection s) use ssl P) private key

After I execute the listen command, I wait a few seconds and bam! I’ve got a shell from machine A.

Obvoiously, this isn’t rocket science but the only time I’ve actually used a reverse shell is when playing around with metasploit. I thought it was a cool idea and I’m really glad someone has written this excellent utility which will save me from a 5.5 hour drive if something ever breaks

last night was the first meeting of the professional organization that Aaron, myself, and some others are putting together. Everything went well and I had a really good time. I have to comment on one amusing thing…

So we’ve been using a wiki to track correspondence. Aaron put up a page listing a bunch of food items to bring and people signed up for what they’re brining. We ended up bringing too much food, but obviously that’s not a big deal. We thought we had all of our bases covered: grill, charcoal, meat, buns, beer, soda, chips + dip, salad, cookies, plates/eating utinsels…oh wait!? hahahaaha, apparently no one even thought about bringing plates or forks or anything. Here we’ve got 10 guys who are obviously quite intelligent yet we completely spaced out one of the most imporantant things for a picnic. Personally, I could care less but I guess the ceasar salad was a bit challenging to eat using only one’s hands. hahhahahaah…NERDS!

Anyway, it was a fun event and I think the org will be a great balance between a “networking” organization and a more technical organization. I’m looking forward to our future meetings.

hahahaha, Mitch is my hero….

so I was bored the other day and decided to learn to type on a dvorak keyboard. wow…it’s amazing how programmed the mind becomes and how difficult it is to change one’s habits…I’m typing using the dvorak layout now and this post has taken WAAAAAYY to long to post! I have to say, it’s a fun mindgame though! hehehehehe….

One of my cousins graduated from high school this weekend. It was a sort of family reunion and I got to see a lot of relatives that I haven’t seen in quite some time. One of my older cousins has a boy named Aaron who’s amazingly brilliant. I’m not sure how old he is, but he’s probably 9 or so. The kid has always been what I consider a “stand out.” He used to run around and bang on things like he was drumming. Now he’s been taking piano lessons and from what I’ve heard, he’s amazing. Aaron has also always had a fascination with computers. For crying out loud, he know how to burn a CD when he was like 4!

I happened to be talking to Aaron’s dad Jeff (my cousins husband…a great guy) and I pulled my new Treo out of my pocket. Jeff said “you need to show Aaron that, he’ll love it.” So I sat next to Aaron and showed it to him. I started to “explain” how it worked when he picked it up, pulled out the stylus and asked “oh, you can’t just write on the screen on this one? Scott showed me a tablet that hand handwriting recognition.”

Ok….no need to explain anything to this kid….Aaron then found the camera and asked “what kind of memory does this take.”. “SD”, I replied. “Oh, that’s what my parents camera takes. Let me try something.”.

So he pops out my memory card, takes a picture, and copies it to his memory card (keep in mind that it took me like 5 minutes to figure out how to copy things from the onboard RAM to the SD card!). His parents camera wouldn’t display the image but he says “thats ok, I’ll just copy it onto my computer…and the good thing is that the file won’t get developed since it’s not stored with the other files.” Ok, kid…stop SHOWING OFF!!!! He then proceeded to send a text message to his dad, check his email, and visit a few web sites.

Anyway, it just blew my mind to see how quickly he understood the “big picture” of how things fit together. There were no questions of “is that a PDA, is that a phone, how do I use the keys, what does it do”, notta! The kid just picked it up and intuitively knew how to use it. Absolutely amazing!

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Gwyneth and Mr. M. for their musical recommendations on their respective blogs. I’m pretty lazy so having other people filter music for me is excellent

I’m loving that Hot Hot Heat album (Gwyneth) and I’m still listening to that Postal Service album (and some Death Cab for Cutie)…thanks Mr. M!

I’d highly recommend the new Gorillaz album…freakin’ F-A-N-T-A-S-T-I-C!

I traveled up to WI today for the project I’m working on. It was a super long drive (5.5hrs). My two coworkers and I are staying in a quaint little inn in downtown Sturgeon Bay. I have the room with a jacuzzi….hahahha, yeah, I’ll be using that…Thankfully, they have wireless here, which is fantastic, so I decided to post a quick message. Anyway, here are some pics of the room that I took with my new phone….

peace out.