I was looking for some old documents today, and while I didn’t find what I was looking for I did find something else. I’m a bit of a pack rat, so while looking through my old files I came across stuff as far back as high school. Old loves lost, regrets I’ve had, inspirational words given to me by my parents - a lot of wonderful stuff that was fun to go through and see where I’ve come in the past 10 years. It was also pretty fun to pick out the documents that marked a significant turning point in my life, many of which I still have - my application for my first “real” job, a letter from a girl that defines what we had, a map from when I first moved out to Chicago and was looking for apartments, poetry I once wrote and a whole bunch of other stuff. Which leads me to question - what will the next 10 years bring? I couldn’t even guess. Thinking back to my senior year in high school, I had no idea or ambition that I might be a respected information security professional all the way out in the pacific northwest having just recently summited Mt. Rainier and dawdling in amateur competitive ballroom dancing. ...

I went boarding again today up at Crystal Mountain and had a great time. I’m doing pretty well now and can make it down a blue trail without falling…too much. Not too bad for the second time around. I’m also not too sore…yet. We’ll see how I feel tomorrow. It was good to come home, though, and after a long, hot shower I quickly called up a local Indian joint for some butter chicken and garlic nan. I hit the grocery store, took a drive to the Indian joint and picked up my food. I was parked around the corner of the main drag and as I was putting my food into my car, I heard the distinct screech of brakes out on the street. I turned around just in time to see two cars nearly T-bone each other right in the intersection. It wasn’t a head-on, but they collided quite hard and parts went flying. Soon enough there was a girl from one of the cars running around crying - I’m not sure if she was hurt or if it was one of the other passengers that was hurt, but it was disturbing nonetheless - the driver of the car that got hit was doing exactly the same thing I had just a couple minutes earlier. Pulling across a fairly busy street from a side-street. ...

As previously mentioned, I recently came into the possession of a MacBook pro. Always being the diligent student of security, I decided to enable FileVault for my home directory. Unfortunately, with the combination of Parallels and merging gigs of pcap files, the performance wasn’t really holding up and I decided to revert the process. Relying on the ease of use of Apple’s software, I went into my Security preferences and clicked “Turn off FileVault”. After entering the requisite passwords and dialog boxes, the system logged me out and began the process. A few moments later, I was greeted with this unfortunate message: ...

So I’ve continued to play on the same soccer team that I joined while I was out in Seattle this summer as it seems they continue to play outdoors in the winter. While Seattle’s winter is still somewhat milder than what I’m used to, we’ve been going through a little bit of a cold snap here. So it was with a little bit of guilty pleasure that I heard our Sunday evening game was going to be cancelled. Alas, as fate would have it, the specific field our game was scheduled on was one of two fields that were still holding games. So there I was, 7pm, flood lights canvasing the field, jumping up and down in approximately 28-degree weather. It was awesome, though - I had a great time and thoroughly enjoyed myself. But now…it’s time for a nice warm shower.

I just started using FoxyProxy about 3 minutes ago and I already love it. As somebody that does a lot of security testing through a variety of proxies as well as tunneling my standard HTTP traffic through my home proxy, I know have a solution to avoid mixing the two. FoxyProxy has the capability to use a proxy based on a regular expression or pattern, so it is now extremely easy to proxy all testing traffic through my HTTP interceptor of choice.

Holy mac Fanboy, batman! It’s going to be an expensive day for Damon. MacWorld rules supreme! ohsobeautiful Dear Steve, I just wanted to let you know that my “SmartPhone” is going in the trash immediately if the iPhone is as good as it looks. Thank you, DCortesi.com

I have a confession to make. I didn’t realize it until this morning, but… well…let me just tell you what happened. … I got into work this morning and popped open my new Macbook Pro and instantly thought “oh man, MacWorld is tomorrow, I can’t wait!” Yes, ladies and gents…I believe I may now officially be a Machead. Combine the above statement with the fact that I now use the Mac for both my personal and work laptops and no longer own a Windows laptop, and I believe you see how I reached my conclusion. ...

I’ve recently had the need to seriously mess with packets on the IP and TCP layer and went on the hunt for some good tools to do so. A quick search and some general knowledge led me to some of the most useful packeteers out there today - Tcpreplay, Bit-Twist, and of course Scapy. While I’m being a link whore, I should mention geek00l’s blog, which seems to have posts on quite a bit of packet mangling that have come in very useful. In any case, here’s a few interesting examples of how I used these: ...

I’m frequently firing up tcpdump on my mac, but then having to restart it with the correct interface if I happened to be on a wireless network (which I frequently am on the mac). I finally got tired of that, so I whipped up a quick script that determines which interface is up and consequently starts tcpdump on that interface. Allow me to cat /usr/bin/stcpdump for you: {% codeblock %}#!/bin/sh INT=ifconfig | grep -A3 "en.:" | grep -B2 inet\ | head -n 1 | cut -f1 -d: sudo tcpdump -i $INT $@{% endcodeblock %} Much better - saves me a big of grief. ;o)

One of my more famous quotes from a previous job was “oh yea, I’ve got a script that does that…". Most of my co-workers know that if it can be scripted, I’ll do it. Perhaps the recent post over on the PowerShell blog, Philosophy of Automation, explains why I’m such a script junkie. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Alfred North Whitehead, Introduction to Mathematics (1911) English mathematician & philosopher (1861 - 1947) I've been playing with PowerShell quite a bit lately as you noticed from my base64 copy/paste one-liner. I've also been playing with it's integration with .NET and COM objects (read: IE Browser Automation!) and am fairly impressed. There's a _lot_ that can be done with PowerShell.