Damon Cortesi's blog

Musings of an entrepreneur.

Beta Test Monad!

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Monad is the new shell that will be included in Windows Longhorn, and it looks like it’s going to be awesome! A beta test is available for your pleasure!

I just signed up for it - I can’t wait to get the download information. I love my command line interfaces.

Windows XP SP2 and Nmap

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I’ve been building some XP images for our lab at work and figured I would throw the release candidate of Service Pack 2 onto them.

As one might expect, the networking components are severely disrupted, resulting in nmap syn scans coming back as all filtered. TCP connect scans come back fine, however. I tried to figure it out using different versions of winpcap (but later versions require an unreleased version of nmap to work) and digging into some of the firewall options on sp2. It’s not just the firewall, though, as I can disable it completely and still have nmap not work.

For now, I guess I have to drop back to SP1. Too bad, I kind of liked the firewall in sp2…much more configurable!

Site 17 - Dyett Academic Center

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I volunteered for the Chicago Cares Serve-a-thon last weekend. It turned out to be a really fun event. We went to a school where they needed some classrooms, lunchrooms, and lockers painted. My group was lucky enough to work on the lockers, which actually proved to be somewhat difficult, given the requirement to tape the locks and numbers so they don’t get painted over.

It was a great day, though. The best part was when the vice principal walked into the room where the volunteers were congregated and was simply overwhelmed by the number of people that had showed up.

The AC happened to go out in the hall we were painting in, but as long as one stood by the door it was still somewhat cool. Halfway through the day, they also put some tunes on over the loudspeaker and when one certain song came on…there was some dancing going on, that’s for sure!

I was amazed how sore I was the next day, mostly from all the squatting and brush strokes…it was a good hurt, though, and I topped it off with a good bike ride.

Finally!

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It took two years, but I finally pimped out the bimmer! The best part of that upgrade is the Pirelli Pzero Nero tires I put on - those suckers stick to the road like glue, it is amazing! They’re also much quieter than my previous all-seasons.

Why must Illinois have such a lack of twisty roads!?

Tub Oops

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Oops –>

I turned on the water in my tub the other night to clean it out as it doesn’t get much use. Silverfish have been known to show up if I don’t flush the jets occasionally. Unfortunately, I forgot about it. Thanks to some engineer for drains at the top of tops, or else it would have been a bad night!

486 Is 15 Years Old

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It seems that the 486 is 15 years old. This is pretty big for me as the (2,3,4)86-based systems were some of my first. I can remember writing book reports using the LeScript word processor on the old computer in the basement. I can also remember begging my Father for a Pentium-based computer, solely so I could play Quake.

Happy 15, 486 - I must be getting old. grin

Anatomy (Not Really) of a Good Hack

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Every once in a while, I find myself challenged by work. I don’t mean challenged as in “boy, this is tough - how will I ever do this”… (I have that every day) I mean challenged as in “this is possible - it’s simply a matter of time, luck, and skill”. Time is running short, luck is for the lazy, and skill…well, skill will only get you so far without the other two.

Nevertheless, the challenge presented itself and let’s just say for now that it was overcome. Again, it’s that great feeling of hack. I have a good description somewhere…here (but more from an internal perspective)! Enjoy:

It’s like an addiction, isn’t it.

You get in

Clock starts ticking

You find the ip scheme

You find the gateway

But it’s the wrong one

You keep scanning

You keep enumerating

You see another option

You take it

yOur p@ckets start trav3rs!ng th[- n37

…you’re in

…now what

Your blood pressure drops

You wait for the next time

I will have to make an addendum to that…