I missed my bus yesterday, I thought it was booked for today. So I went to Greyhound and made my error a reality. I am now leaving today :)
I have four job interviews. I really hope I find something that will give me some decent security experience. If you are looking for a mostly competent graduate who want to be a security person, read my CV and hire me, please.
In retrospect mentioning that I missed my bus and asking for a job in the same entry may be a mistake.
A legal researcher specialising in digital forensic law at Rhodes University, Lunda Wright, has an interesting post on cyber-crime trends. He lists the trends (slightly modified) as:
- An increased rate of prosecutions of cyber criminals.
- An increased clamping down on cyber-piracy related to film and music works.
- Novel lawsuits and strategies for litigation.
- Greater dependence on the skills of computer forensic experts in both corporations and government.
- An increased inter-government co-operative efforts.
Continue reading "Trends in Cyber Crime"
Today was the last tutoring session of my life. I have been tutoring since my second year (2001). That's five years of tutoring which ended today. In that time I have tutored:
- Stats 1D
- Comsci 101 and 102
- Comsci 1P1 and 1P2
- Comsci 201 and 202
- Comsci 301 and 302
The department split CS 1 into 1P and 1L for 'Programming' and 'Literacy' in my third year. I am feeling happy about it all, especially after receiving these nice words from our departmental manager, Caro Watkins:
We know you're an excellent tutor, and have feed back from students to say so!
We have been praying for him every day, and I would ask anyone who stumbles past this entry to do the same, even if you don't know him. If you or someone you know has ever battled with the disease please tell me about it, I would love to hear it and pass it on to him.
I hope John gets to read this entry one day, clear of the dread disease. John I dig you and want you to get better, ok?
O Heart of Love, I place all my trust in Thee, for I fear all things from my own weakness but I hope for all things from Thy goodness.I live through the mercy of Jesus, to whom I owe everything and from whom I expect everything.
Yet, O Lord, though I have no feeling of confidence in You, nevertheless, I know that You are my God, that I am all Yours, and that I have no hope but in your goodness; so, I abandon myself entirely into Your hands.
You make a root below the soil flourish and you can make fruitful the darkness in which you keep me.
I adore all Thy purposes without knowing them; I am silentl I offer myself in sacrifice; I yield myself to Thee; I would have no other desire than to accomplish Thy will. Teach me to pray; pray Thyself in me.
May I be patient! It is so difficult to realise what one believes, and to make these trials, as they are intended, real blessings.
My own heart let me more have pity on.
Lord, thank you for revealing your being. I prostrate myself before you, and pray that your grace flows into our humanity. Your eyes are upon all of us at all times in all places in all ways. See the tranquil eyes that are grief torn, steeped in fear and anger, groping for a new way. Let your warm and merciful spirit transform this pain into the infinite joy of your friendship.
Let the light of your love pass through those of us of strength and into those of us of weakness.
Valknut/DCGUI on windows seems to think this is an appropriate error message.
<DCGUI> Error: 'No error'
Yesterday was so hot I decided to cut off all my hair. During the shearing my girlfriend, Daniela arrived. I was so delighted with her reaction at my half shaved head I thought I would keep the 'do' for a day or two. I have been told it looks like a cross between Jim Carrey in Lemony Snickets and Crusty the Clown.
A young lady recently came to me with a non-booting IBM thinkpad. It had previously contained Windows 98. I stuck in an Ubuntu Live CD, found that her data was alright, and let her play around. She loved it. An hour later Ubuntu (Breezy) was up and running on her machine. The next day I went to fix her Valknut (DC++) and noticed that she had changed the background, altered the toolbar transparency, fiddled with themes and generally set the machine up to look pretty sweet. What surprised me is that she had been too scared to do anything in Windows. Even better, her 600Mhz laptop is running faster that I could have hoped.
I was happy to use our new local Ubuntu mirror, so she can get software security updates for all her installed software instead of just OS components. It was lovely explaining to her that she doesn't need to scan for spyware every day.
That was by far one of the easiest and best 'repairs' I have ever done. We are one step closer to closing bug one.
This is by far one of my favourite new blogs. It isn't just for Debian types, and has all sorts of useful administration tips and tricks. Whenever I need to do something, even if I have a good idea about how to do it, I do a quick search of Debian Administration to see if it has a handy how-to.
I hadn't heard of socat until recently, and found it incredibly useful. Here's a snip from its man page:
Socat is a command line based utility that establishes two bidirectional byte streams and transfers data between them. Because the streams can be constructed from a large set of different types of data sinks and sources (see address types), and because lots of address options may be applied to the streams, socat can be used for many different purposes. It might be one of the tools that one `has already needed´.
You can install it (on Debian) with your favourite command:
apt-get install socat
Continue reading "socat"