gettilted.com

It was just another day at work today, and as often occurs, one of my co-workers and I took a little trip down "tangential road". Todays branching path to "LOL" started out with my co-worker talking about the TV show "How It's Made" and his watching of an episode about the making of player pianos.

If you are, I've put together a script to do a lot of work for you.

I just released the latest version of DictDefence 0.5.3 last week. All the release notes are at http://stuffivelearned.org/doku.php?id=programming:python:dictdefence and you can download the latest version at https://sourceforge.net/projects/dictdefence. I also got a Bugzilla database up and running for public bug tracking on this and that is located at https://bugzilla.splitstreams.com.

So, I have one of those projects that I've been meaning to tackle for a long time and I hadn't due to familiarity with my current system. That project is my making the move from the old and antiquated CVS version control to Subversion. What a difference Subversion makes over CVS...

Lately, I've been developing a Postfix policy framework. I've spent a lot of time writing this framework in the last couple of months and I'm just about done with the final test phase. I'm hoping to be able to open source this sometime in the not too distant future.

I just released version 0.5.1 of DictDefence. This fixes a really nasty bug in the handling of permanent bans. I highly recommend that if you are running this, you head over to Sourceforge and download it.

Below are the relevant links:
Info: http://stuffivelearned.org/doku.php?id=programming:python:dictdefence
Download: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=212509&package_id=...

There must be some new worm or virus of some sort out there. As you can see if you scroll down a bit, I've written a dictionary defence program. I've been running this on my FreeBSD firewall for quite some time now and the though I've seen a few spikes in number of attacks per day, I've not seen anything like this before. Normally, I block about an average of one or two IPs a day from attacks being run on the 2 machines that I have with exposed SSH. Over this past weekend, I've seen 70 different IPs get busted. Quite a lot of action for a home network.

I just got my copy for Linux here at work. If you are having trouble with mozilla's site, like I was, you can get to all the 3.0 releases via this link: http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.0/.

Get to downloading.

It looks like, according to this blog post: http://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/index.php/2008/06/11/coming-tuesday..., Firefox 3 will be released on Tuesday, June 17th. I've been using the betas on my laptop and I've been quite impressed with the memory footprint and increases in overall speed. This should be a great release so be sure get your download going on Tuesday.

The Firefox team is going for a new world record for downloads in a day to coincide with the upcoming release of Firefox 3. You can head over to their site at http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/ right now and pledge to download the new release of Firefox on it's launch day in an attempt to break that world download record. There is no exact date set yet, but it's looking to be sometime in June.

Personally, I've been using FF3 beta on my laptop and it's looking pretty good so far. The execution speed increases and the decreased memory footprint are the big highlights for me.

A friend of mine passed along this City Pages link, http://articles.citypages.com/2008-05-21/news/moles-wanted/

It is a nice intimate view into one aspect of how fucked up this country is. It deals with a story of one U of M student who was approached by the Mpls. Police and the FBI in the hope that he would become a mole for "the man". It also goes into some other instances of wackjob law enforcement tactics of planting instigators/rioters in peaceful protests to get the police to attack the protesters. Fucking fascists! Sieg Heil!

About a year ago now, I started putting together a piece of software called DictDefence. It is based on the idea behind the Script Kiddie Defence Script and SSHGuard. SKDS was far too limiting (only worked with Smoothwall) and didn't scale well at all. SSHGuard protects against only dictionary attacks against ssh. I wanted something more flexible and scalable so I decided to put together my own software, DictDefence.

A while back, on stuffivelearned.org, I did a comparison of Perl Compatible Regular Expressions in Perl (of course), Python, PHP and even a quick, unofficial comparison of the same thing in C. The results that I came up with were actually quite surprising.

Check it out for yourself: http://stuffivelearned.org/doku.php?id=programming:general:phpvspythonvs...

Yep, finally, the old gettilted.com has been retired. I've moved into the present and it's about time. I'm not sure how much I'm going to be making use of this, or what exactly I'm going to be using it for...but we shall see.