Monday, April 18, 2005

Two useful tools from Microsoft: LogParser and PortQry. LogParser allows the interactive disection of various logs and log-like sources with an SQL-like language. Great stuff! PortQry is way better than telnetting to the port under inspection and decoding the output. 10:06:26 PM    comment []

I have to read this article on higher-order functions more carefully. There seems much that I can learn from it. Within the first few paragraphs I discovered what the difference is between lambda functions and the run-of-the-mill variety that we all use in any decent language: The normal functions are created and named in one step. 9:54:31 PM    comment []

As a one time amateur musician, I sorely missed the camaraderie of playing together in a band.The end of academe signaled the end of that: the band members were cast upon the real world and we all went our own ways. With the coming of modems that could transmit data at decent rates I though that jamming over the wires would soon be reality. Even now with high-speed broadband connections, it isn't there yet. The problem is not bandwidth but latency. Skype would be a favorable starting point. And some have started using it for such a purpose. The result is not awe-inspiring but at least it is a start. Maybe, tagging network packets and prioritizing them is the next step whose time has come. 9:49:29 PM    comment []

A few times my internet server was bogged down with a cpu-hogging perl process. As I did not suspect malicious activity, I just killed the process after checking the user that the process was running as. And I went on my merry way. On two occasions, however, my ISP called me and reported that their firewall could not handle the traffic and had to be restarted due to packets from my server. I could not figure out what it was until I pulled out my Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass and dedicated about 30 minutes to the problem at hand. What I discovered made my hair stand on end: I was hacked! Not rooted, thank god. The weakness was an old version of a twiki that could be used to run any perl script by searching for a non-existing item. Of course, the search query had to be carefully constructed with lots of %XY character codes to achieve the desired effect. WIth this in place, the perpetrators could DOS IRC's they did not like and perform other nefarious deeds. Needless to say, I have closed that twiki down. 9:29:47 PM    comment []