Similar to the NYT Article Skimmer I posted recently, Newser.com provides another option if you want to absorb the news rather than read it. +5 points to them for reducing burn time spent on the internet.
NY Times article skimmer
The NY Times has a new prototype page called Article Skimmer for displaying news. After being spoiled by the efficiency of Google Reader, I like where they are going with it.
online flowcharting
Lifehacker brings us lovelycharts for all our “free, I don’t have time to download and install dia” needs.
No really. Watch here.
Now they just need to finish up Jarvis from the Iron Man movie and we’re all set for RL to become obsolete.
Since a lot of my friends have been “converting” over to Apple machines, they often ask about programs I have running that they don’t recognize. Here’s a (fully linked) partial list of applications I use daily either at work or when at home:
Now I know I said free software, but I had to include the following paid software I couldn’t live without:
Update: Want more? Here’s one list and another list.
What did I miss? Comments.
Does anyone remember when the FBI busted a major spam ring? Bravo to those boys for what must have been a tough job.
Here’s a pic of what a huge difference it made according to submissions to spamcop.net:
Hmmm, not much to see here.
Today I saw an article in the Washington Post talking about how Web Host McColo was shutdown after being accused with spam activity. Here’s this week’s spamcop.net pic:
I leave it up to you the reader to determine which day and at what time McColo was voted off the island.
My RSS reader constantly has 1000+ entries left to read. My average day doesn’t budget enough time to get through them faster than they arrive.
Time to reduce, reus– err, prioritize!
Many of my favorite blogs are part of the gawker media network, which features a “top posts tag.” This is perfect. I can now let other people do the dirty work of weeding out the less interesting posts and leave only the cream of each day’s crop. Great, but what if I want to read / stumble new websites?
alltop’s got you covered.
Problem:
Proposition:
Just think of the possibilities.
Thoughts?
P.S. I admit I partly stole this idea from Tom Liston’s LaBrea tarpit.
Programming project: construct a program that can listen to perimeter traffic and construct http proxy-like logs. The weapon of choice? libpcap! The app will need to listen for both DNS (udp port 53) and HTTP (tcp port 80) traffic to accomplish this.
First up is determining where all the interesting bits in each layer of the OSI stack are located within each packet. In logical order:
With all that reference material, you might think this is a lot of reading! Okay, fine how about a copy and paste job? Tcpdump is the perfect place to exercise your mouse wheel click skillz to get all the data structures and defines you’ll need.
One last useful tool that should be in every network programmers tool belt is of course, Wiershark (aka ethereal). In this case, it comes in handy to double check your program is disassembling the packets the same as Wireshark.
A BPF is used to speed up the filtering of interesting packets from useless ones and is passed in to the program as follows:
dns_sniffer “udp port 53″
When writing any network aware application, the best place to start for documentation is always going to be the applicable RFC for whatever protocol you plan to speak.
When figuring out what bitmasks were needed to mask out specific bits (namely the first two bits for parsing DNS compression) Conversion Table came in handy. I also found this handy page if you need to brush up on bitwise operations (I sure did, since I hardly use them.) And don’t forget your ASCII-Table!
Have you ever wondered how your lonely little-endian wintel laptop / desktop is able to communicate over the same IP network to a big-endian speaking SPARC system? It certainly kept me up at night! See for yourself how it is able to work.
More to follow… (you know, like source code)
Information Security, Internet, Linux, My Ideas, Programming