This is kind of depressing. The new jailbreak method for the most recent iPhone 1.1.1 firmware was publicly announced today…and it relies on a vulnerability within MobileSafari. What a bummer. Update: I assumed the link posted above was the same as some others floating around, but it is not. The iPhone Dev Team’s jailbreak does not not use the MobileSafari vulnerability. Nevertheless, the below still applies. When the original iPhone firmware was cracked, applications were loaded on using currently-existing functionality within the iPhone software. I was fine with that. Now, however, you have to actively exploit a vulnerability to gain access to the filesystem. I have a problem actively exploiting software on my phone to install SSH and Yahtzee. This is my phone, my main point of contact…not some handheld game console. ...

It was quite the marathon weekend, in more ways than one! I flew into Chicago’s Midway airport at 1am Saturday morning. I was originally going to fly in at different time, but work situations changed and alas…there I was. So I hopped in my rental for the 4 hour drive to Toledo. Yea, I know - what was I thinking. I think it was worth it when I rolled up to the front desk at the hotel and the woman asked me “Checking out, sir?”. Uh, no…checking in, thanks. Just in time for breakfast? No thanks, just in time to pass out! ...

Let me just state up front that I’m not a huge fan of VMWare products these days. Sure, the technology is impressive and it’s very useful - but I’ve always run into odd quirks with their software. I suppose I like their desktop products better than their server products, though. Perhaps that’s because I had such a good experience with Microsoft Virtual Server and my ability to easily set up “virtual labs” through scripting… ...

“Life goes by pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” – Ferris Bueller It’s been two weeks since I last posted. What the heck have I been up to? Well let’s see. I worked most of the weekend of the 15th on a visualization project I’ve been working on at work. We had a little conference on the 20th where I presented the results of my work and research. I spent the days (and nights) leading up to the 20th also working on the presentation and supporting tool. It was worth it, though, as I think the presentation was pretty well received. ...

So my personal laptop’s hard drive recently bit the dust, or so I think. I haven’t had time to bring it in and get it checked out…but it doesn’t boot and it makes a strange, repeating sound that doesn’t sound so good when I try to boot it up. It’s not a clicking, per-say, but more of what seems like a failure of the actuator arm trying to move across the platter. …but what do I know? ...

And people wonder why I love Unix/Bash. I had to combine a few different files yesterday that had email addresses, but with different delimiters and a bunch of dupes. This basically goes through those files, standardizes the delimiters, sorts it in a fashion to get find the emails with the most info, uniq’s out the dupes, and then reorders it into a csv file. Schwag. {% codeblock %}sed ’s/:/,/g’ Email\ List.txt | tr -d “’” | sort -r | awk -F, ‘{print $2"\t__"$3"\t__"$1}’ | sed ’s/^[ ^t]//;s/[ ^]$//’ | uniq -f2 | tr -d “__” | sort | tr “\t” “,” > Emails.csv {% endcodeblock %}

Being the Apple neophyte that I am, I’m always looking to compare my ability to achieve things in the Mac world as opposed to other worlds. My challenge this evening - creating a spreadsheet in iWork ‘08’s Numbers application from an HTML table. Source Data: Music sources from episodes of This American Life. I love the background music on TAL and was in search of some of the songs. I this metafilter post, which ultimately led me to the Wayback Machine as the TAL site has been updated since that post. I then wanted to get the list into a format I could use for some scripting goodness in the future. ...

One of the things that’s always bugged me about the dig command is the standard verbosity when used with its default invocation. This has kept me using the host command for a while for generic lookups, but today I figured I should emerge myself into the greatness that is the dig command. After a brief google for something actually unrelated, I came across this great DiG HOWTO that answered all my questions and addressed all my misgivings. Now I can go forth and query the Internet as it should be.

Congratulations to the happy couple! It was a beautiful day for a beautiful couple. It was even better to see all my friends again, some of whom I hadn’t seen since November of last year. It had been far too long and I regret not going back to Chicago more often to see my friends!

I uploaded the Damon Moguls video mentioned by rnast to YouTube.