Kalimat al-Mutafalsif

Happy Thanksgiving! I’m spending the break catching back up on the state of Bluetooth security because, hey, I love the subject. Everyone has a phone with Bluetooth, just about, and many overlook it as a security hole because they feel there’s nothing insidious that can be done with just replacing wires with some radio broadcasts. I’ll give a quick rundown on how to get Bluetooth working under Linux, then the software I use, and finally give a tool I wrote watching the Dallas Game to speed up identification of Bluetooth devices.

I’ve been badly addicted to I Can Has Cheezburger for a while now. Like me, those pictures are cute and funny. Unlike those pictures, I know how to grab them all! I finally got fed up with having to click next, and decided “What the hey”, I can get all the URLs for the direct images! So I cooked up a quick Perl script that spits out a text file, one line for each image. Of course, once you have the aforementioned file, wget becomes your best friend. I needed a quick script success, and this little tidbit has both provided that, and given me something to do for the rest of the wee— erm, night.

So, real quick as I just got the idea to actually post this little story, I was writing a little script. This script dealt with ids I’m using for a project. Basically I knew there was a lot to begin with, but wanted a flat file, not a database because I figured “Hey, I’m dealing with a lot, why pay the overhead every id of doing a bunch of queries?” Among other things, this script couldn’t list an id more than once. So I (stupidly) chose an array to store the ids and sort through them. At first, no issues, I could process a few ids in a second and get all my work done on them. Well, after I hit around 15,000 I had issues. It was now taking about 5 seconds an id. It only got worse, and worse, and worse. Around 19,000 ids I finally CTRL-C’s the script, to retool it. I changed it over to throwing all the ids into a database, accepting a tad more overhead per id, but overall this becomes linear time. I stupidly forgot my Big-O notation classes, and that sorting through a large list of numbers takes longer than a very short one. *sigh*.

If you follow my blog, and sadly most of my readers have stopped checking, you’ll remember the security hole I found on a major website around Valentine’s Day. You should also remember I had a very good experience with the developers there, in terms of their competance and politness.
Well, I just tried to log [...]

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.