Author: peter

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All I Want for Christmas

Note: this post is for the benefit of friends and family members who say they “have no idea what to get me.”
World peace. I’ll settle for a lot of aikido practice.
A car mount and charger for my iPhone 3Gs. My iPod recently vanished. I suspect the worst – that it fell out of my pocket during a recent snowstorm. Therefore, I need to use my iPhone as an iPod as well. That’s okay, except the battery life is terrible. Also, when I do try to use it as a GPS, it would be nice if I could have it dash-mounted.
Learning Python (Animal Guide). Okay, seriously, I asked for this book for like three years in a row, and nobody got it for me when it was only 384 pages. Now it’s over 1200 pages, and we’ll all suffer because of it! Me because it’s tripled in size, and you because of shipping costs.
Daemon The security community loves this book because, while it’s a work of fiction, all of the attacks are real and the scenarios possible, which is what makes it really scary. The companion book, Freedom (TM) also comes out in a couple of weeks.
An espresso machine. A big one. The professional kind you see in coffee shops. A dual-header. I understand if this one has to be a combined Christmas and birthday gift because it would be silly for me to expect someone to spend $8000 or more on just one gift-giving event. That’s okay. I understand.
A Zircon Ultrasonic Measure with Laser Targeting. Tape measures are so 20th century.
Gift certificates to thinkgeek.com or Amazon.com

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A Quick and Dirty "It's Back Up" Bash Script

Today, I had a client’s T1 line go down. Unfortunately, FairPoint Communications has had a mixed track record when it comes to telling us that they have (or more often, have not) fixed the issues.
So I wrote a simple bash script to ping the IP address of the router on the down T1 line, and email me when it came back up. Think of this as the ultra-poor man’s Nagios. Continue reading “A Quick and Dirty "It's Back Up" Bash Script”

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Book Review: SAMS Teach Yourself Regular Expressions in 10 Minutes

I bought this book, Sams Teach Yourself Regular Expressions in 10 Minutes, years ago, and read it back then after not being able to completely digest O’Reilly’s Mastering Regular Expressions (a much larger book). While the O’Reilly book has a lot more content, more examples, and covers several different languages’ regexp parsers, I found the SAMS book a lot easier to process. As the name implies, each chapter is designed to be covered in about 10 minutes, so if you have a couple of hours to kill, you can easily plow through the whole book and try out its examples to get a decent working knowledge of regexps. Continue reading “Book Review: SAMS Teach Yourself Regular Expressions in 10 Minutes”

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Hundred Pushups Redux, Now With Squats!

Yeah, I’m back on the hundred pushups challenge, again. I’m also doing the two hundred squats challenge on alternating days! I’m in the middle of week 4 (since I was easily able to bang out 50 squats on the first week) of each.
Now, to make it through three Thanksgiving dinners (ah, the joys of large family and being popular) without totally mucking up my progress on making physical self-improvements. I briefly was back up as high as 174# a week ago, but I’m dropping back into my comfort zone below 170#. With an “ideal weight” for a man my height and age ranging anywhere from 125-169#, depending on who you ask and what method you use, I’m toward the high end, but I am adding some muscle mass and I feel great, have lots of energy, and am told I look great, so, I’m cool here.

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Heatbox and That 1 Guy Rock Higher Ground

Last night I saw That 1 Guy at Higher Ground in Burlington, VT. Regulars of my blog may recall I saw That 1 Guy last year in the same venue. As with last time, he provided a great amount of entertainment. His stage presence (along with the Magic Pipe) is great, and he interacts wonderfully with the audience, this time including antics such as passing out giant mustaches while directing laser beams out across the crowd (hence, the tour name “Mustaches and Laser Beams”).
However, I have to say I was even more impressed with his opening act, who goes by the handle “Heatbox.” Continue reading “Heatbox and That 1 Guy Rock Higher Ground”

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What a Month!

I think I’ve had my busiest October ever. Here’s a quick summary:

I plan on elaborating on all of these points.
Eventually.
Perhaps.

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Hipocricy

Ensure that the third party who has developed your key software will continue to support that software, provide updates in a timely manner, and can provide you with source code in the event that the third party can no longer support the application.

Source: Recommendations from the Microsoft Security Assessment Tool. ?Okay Microsoft, I’ll take that source code for Windows NT and Office 2000 now, thanks.