Kalimat al-Mutafalsif

Got this idea last weekend from a friend of mine, I forget the situation (and am too lazy to grep my GAIM logs at the moment, hate mornings) but what one listens to whilst programming came up. Apparently there's many misconceptions out there about, something like "Only listens to death metal", or some such. THis is simply not the case, and I thought I'd give you a top 10 albums and songs I code to, and why.

1. Dream Dance (Many Volumes) - Various Artists - I like dance (I'm man enough to admit it) because its monotonous beat keeps me on track and thinking. I'll normally start coding with dance/trance music.
2. A Gothic Industrial Tribute to the Smashing Pumpkins - Various Artists - I love this album because Industrial is even more rhythmic than regular dance, and this has some great driving riffs.
3. Push The Button - The Chemical Brothers - Again, slightly harder than normal dance, I'll use this when I start getting stuck on a bug or problem.
4. Dangerous Man - Trace Adkins - What can I say, I wish I were a country boy, and I use this album in my more melancholy coding stages. Cleaning up code, or if I just can't get motivated.
5. Mud on the Tires - Brad Paisley - Again, country boy, all that. This is a great melancholy album for me as well, and I'll normally queue it up with Trace Adkins.
6. Any album by Richard Cheese - A lounge singer who covers pop artists? Yea, its just that soothing. I'll use this when I want to calm down after coding for an extended period of time with harder trance or metal.
7. Any album by Stephen Lynch - He's amazingly funny, and this is for those projects that kinda write themselves, and you can sing along.
8. Hackers Soundtrack - Hackers, the Movie - My favorite movie currently, not for realism, just to laugh at. Oh, and the asoundtrack is amazing. Some great dance, trance, and rock on here,m really great mix to program to.
9. Summer of Darkness - Demon Hunter - While "metal" this is not the hard side of it, this band can be very lyrical, and I enjoy breaking them out when I have short projects that I just need to jump into and finish.
10. Burial - Extol - Far and away one of my favorite bands in any genre, this is also among my heaviest metal. They get broken out on the rare occasions that I can't think, and I'm pissed off. Heavy driving bass is a lot like techno in that it keeps my mind on track, and screaming vocals help me to actually use my anger constructively, instead of blowing up.
11. Any of the songs I'm going to list under "Songs that I love for their geekiness" - Because they're just stinkin cool.

In terms of "Songs I love for their geekiness" these are songs that.... well... I really feel could be listed as my theme song, for whatever reason.

1. Its All About The Pentiums - Weird Al
2. White and Nerdy - Weird Al
3. Code Monkey - Jonathan Coulton
4. A Laptop Like You - Jonathan Coulton
5. Eternal Flame (God Wrote is LISP) - Julia Ecklar
6. Geek Love - Fan 3
7. Slash Dot - Fat Boy Slim
8. D&D - Stephen Lynch
9. Super Mario Rap - Benefit (warning, explicit lyrics)
10. Ok, seriously anything by Weird Al, and most of Jonathan Coulton could be on this list.

Finally hit 375 Jewelcrafting the other night. Also hit level 70 today, which was cool. I think I'm more excited about the jewelcrafting, however, because its a really cool craft. For those that don't play: The basis is jewelers can make some items that give stat bonuses, rings and necklaces. These aren't as sought after as our jewels. High level items have "sockets" that gems can be set in that give small stat bonuses, and if you match the colors correctly it'll give an additional bonus.

Now, I've always believed in free combines (customer gives me the materials for it, and I charge nothing) because of repeat customers. When I was big on Engineering, I had a few people that would come to me specifically to make bullets 20 stacks at a time. They'd tip, of course, but the asked price would be free. This is when I learned how to intice customers by just plain being friendly. With Jewelcrafting I now have 10 "repeat customers" who come back a few tmes a week for upgrades. One tips as high as 20g a cut. Its all because I put myself out there and treat them with respect, and take the time to make recomendations. So, my next goal is to be the best known jeweler on Lothar, which I've got a decent leg on so far. Have people that know my ads by heart, and whenever I'm in a cap city I'm offering my services.

Unfortunately, I had to drop Engineering. I ppicked up Mining, instead, so that I'll have my own stream of mats coming in. With my own mining I crunched some numbers and think I'll make between 50g and 100g a day just from gems I sell. This will also enable me to make higher-end items for raids, and should help me pay for my flying mount.

This is just a quick update about the story I posted last week regarding a nice security hole in a major Internet Site. The tech support there have actually been really, really great in working with me to fix this problem. They emailed me an intial "Hey we got your report" the day I sent it out, and later this email I'm sharing with you. I initially expected to lose that account (and at one point today, I kinda wish I had), but so far it hasn't been locked or damaged in any way that I can see. I got en email from them that I'd like to share as an example of doing things the right way.

Hi {Name},

We are aware of the issue that you described, and we will look into some possible solutions that won't disrupt page load times and general site performance. Thanks again, we appreciate the email and the blog post.

Thanks,

{Name}
{Title}
{Site}

I fully expected something more along the lines of a Cease and Desist letter, as I've got quite a few friends who managed to procur those from simply pointing out insecurities. Apparently some corporations feel the correct response to an academic report of a bug on their site is the same response one would use for a malicious hacker attempting to exploit their site. This company, however, was different and literally turned my perspective around. I really, really did not like them for a variety of reasons (mainly revolving around security) but after this they get an A in my book.

Bottom line: No code is flawless, its how you deal with the bug reports that sets your site apart, not how perfect you can make it in the first place.

These guys got it, and once the issue is resolved I might even put their name up here (with their permission) and support them openly because too few companies are that willing to accept criticism and security hole reports.

I don't think I've said it publically yet, so a little heads up, I've gotten my first contract as "Three Planets Software". Rather (I hope) easy site in PHP/MySQL and some other goodness, but you'll hear more about that later when I put out a call for Beta testers. So I coded up all the login and registration pages two days ago, and now am working on some other fun stuff. Some fun stuff that required more than one user to test. Ideally, more than 10. I did *not* want to sit in phpmyadmin creating 20 dummy users that would only be used in testing, so I turned to perl.
Read More »

Its really pretty out today as we already had a bunch (a bunch for here, not a real state) of snow on the ground and its snowing again today. Not the harsh/nasty wintery mix we had a few days ago, but really nice fat sowflakes, lazily falling around the evergreens outside my window. Well between that and the coding binge I've been on (forgot how much fun Friday nights can be with just me, a coupla computers and a goal for X lines of code) has put me into a nice melancholy mood, which is making me wax poetic (publically) for the first time in a long time.

Some Haiku
Softly swirling bits
Bytes gusting between servers
Winter on the wire

And a (poorly written) Sonnet
Awake, sweet muse, and guide my finger's stroke,
That I may write the code I hear inside.
Instantiating offerings of Coke,
Mayhaps some Bawls, and Fritos warm and dried.

Ifs, fors, while loops, maybe gotos I'll type,
Controlling structure planned with care afore,
The loop invariant we'll have to load,
And make sure defaults always get a store.

"Aha", I cry, "I've found that drasted bug!"
That haunted Beta testers for so long,
Commit the changes, hope that I get Dugg,
A lifelong goal I'd rather not prolong.

Release the code under the GPL
And cry: "It gives the power to rebel!"
*Raises fist*

(I put that last line in in favor of a rip on Dell or Intel, man that was hard).

I got a request earlier today from a friend from #simud, Allaryin, for a little hack on Blizzard. He's requested a few addons from me before, but I've never had time, this one was quick, however. Right quick I'll tell you that Blizzard distributes World of Warcraft patches via Peer-to-Peer transfers. They're actually using an early Bit Torrent protocol, I believe. Sounds great, right? Since Torrents are so fast? Well, somehow my Blizz downloads go slow as heck, seriously it sucks. So we'd like to be able to use real torrent software to track and download these patches, especially the huge ones.

Now, the patches are distributed when you try to login to a higher version server. Your client downloads a file of the file type: WoW-version-locality-downloader.exe. For instance: WoW-2.0.7.6383-to-2.0.8.6403-enUS-downloader.exe

Hmm... to paraphrase ObiWan Kenobi, That's no Torrent File. But if you pop it open in a hex editor, you'll find some two things. First off is a huge bunch of garbage, this is a bundled downloader (torrent tracker). Cute, but we're not using their software, we need to skip this. After that you'll see:
64 38 3A 61 6E 6E 6F 75 6E 63 65
In ASCII that translates to: "d8:announce" and is the start of a normal torrent file! Go ahead and start giggling now, yea, it is that easy.

Ok, there's one small twist that makes it not "THAAAAAT" easy. After the torrent file there's still two commands left for Blizz's downloader that we have to leave off. So here's the drill:

1. Open the downloader.exe file in some hex editor, I like hexedit in Unix.
2. Do an ASCII search for announce. It'll be in there a grand total of twice (at least once, all the files I've seen have it in twice).
3. Go back two characters to start at the "d8" and cut to the end of the file.
4. Now that you've trimmed the file, lets get rid of those last two commands.
5. Find the 13:launch target almost at the end of the file, this is the first of the Blizz commands we want to leave off.
6. Cut everything from 13:launch to the end of the file, its all garbage.
7. Save what's left as sorryBlizzIlikeAzureus.torrent and you're good to go!

There's one other tiny thing. For the files I tried I had to add the letter 'e' to the end of the file. I'm not sure if this is true for all clients, but for Azureus it wanted two lowercase 'e's at the end of the file, not just one. Anyways, if you get an error saying this isn't a valid file, try adding an 'e' on to the end of the file.

That's it, now you can use whatever tracker you like to grab these patches. Also, there's already programs out there that'll rip this torrent out, but if a few people beg me and I've got the time I'd like to knock out a Java version so it'll be platform independant. (I'm writing one in c right now, but it'll be for Unix, not Windows if I care enough to finish it).

So I was feeling kinda down a few days ago, and I turned to the thing that always cheers me up, hacking. Nothing malicious, just seeing what bugs I could turn up. Found a great one dealing with why sites should use HTTPS instead of HTTP traffic by default. Oh, I've taken the liberty of attempting at clearing out all links to my accounts. Don't worry, my account doesn't use that security question any longer. Also, because this post isn't malicious, I'm omitting the name of the site I found this on (and really, it could be any of the major sites out there, they all act a lot the same and I've yet to go check some other major ones) because they deserve anonymity as much as I do.
Read More »

Last year I had a fairly, bleh, Valentine's day post. It was rushed, poorly done, and all over the place. This year, this year is different. You may notice that this is BEFORE Valentine's day... that's true. I'm putting this out early, with the same hopes as last year, that some geek out there might score a date for the rest of us! Now, my plan this year, is a personalized Linux LiveCD that I'm calling the LoveCD. So, this post is going to be 10 fun ways to personalize a CD for that special someone (or laptop, in my case).
Read More »

Lately I've been really frustrated with myself over the issue of time management. I've never been very organized, and a habitual procrastinator. But this semester I've had an awesome schedule, only class two days a week, so that I could work the other three. Well, it turns out I played much more games than working, and time not spent on games was wasted Internet browsing. To quote Trace Adkins in "I Want to Feel Something": "Damn it all to hell I'm done, 'Cause I don't like what I've become..." Now, he said those words in regard to relationship issues, but that song (a favorite of mine for a while) kinda spurred me to realize I'm fed up with wasting so much time when there are people my age that spent free time coding and are millionaires now. Not that I just want money, but something to feel proud about. 8 straight hours of WoW, or Quake 4 (if you haven't played Q4... go get it, now) yields absolutely nothing, whereas 8 hours of coding would give me a site for Three Planets Software, which still needs one. So here are my resolutions:
Read More »

Saturday I got a letter that I thought I'd share. It's really interesting to me, since I've dealt a lot with phishing emails, and this real letter set does many of the things that both phisers, and unfortunately legitimate companies, do. If companies would stop doing these things, Phishing would get harder! This is gonna be a long post, please bear with me. Without further ado, I give you: The Car Registration Scam (which later turned out to be legit).
Read More »