Tonight will be RC2 of Hak5 Live, and should hopefully be much better than RC1.
I will be discussing the Nokia N770 Internet Tablet and my roommate will be talking about his fix for the Xbox 360 3 rings of death problem.
Tune in at the website here which is going to be powered by Ustream.tv and Stickam. IRC is irc.hak5.org in channel #hak5.
I tried to sit down and write a couple of times during the week, but I was just too busy.
The Enterprise Fiasco from Hell
The family came down and spent 5 days with me, which was a blast for the most part. We had a horror story worthy of an entirely separate posting, but I will summarize it a bit here: Read more »
I made my appearance on hak5live last night and all I can say is that it was quite an interesting night. I was a little tense with the cameras at first but I think I managed to pretend they weren’t there after a couple of minutes.
My show and tell involved Homebrew roms obtained from http://www.pineight.com/gba/ and http://www.pdroms.de/ from within an Ubuntu 7.04 environment using an Xbox 360 controller and the VisualBoy Advance emulator. I used the VBAExpress frontend for it to save on the command-line usage.
I think we all learned quite a lot about how different production is for a live show versus a show that undergoes editing before being released. The first 35 to 40 minutes after the 30 minute delay in starting went pretty well I thought. The next time they do this it should be much more streamlined.
The show should be edited and available for download sometime in the next couple of days. Visit http://www.hak5.org and http://www.hak5live.org for more details.
I succeeded in setting up a dual-boot of Windows XP and Ubuntu 7.04 on my laptop yesterday. It’s an (almost) 3.5 year old Gateway M505XL (with an extra 256MB RAM, and an Intel 2200 B/G vice the stock 2100) but everything was recognized, no driver issues at all.
The main purpose was for the Hak5Live show coming up this Saturday where I will be demoing some homebrew emulation with my 360 controller. Nothing too fancy really, but I think some folks will appreciate hearing about something a little out of the norm.
This past Sunday I obtained my SANS GCIH certification. That brings me up to four, with two more left in queue (Linux+ and CISSP). I am proud of my 92/91 test scores for it, and plan on taking it Gold along with my GSEC sometime in the next year or so.
I’m presently working on some slides for a course that the command is going to send new personnel through. I will be teaching for a good couple of hours according to the current plan it appears, which is fine by me. I like teaching.
One interesting thing that popped into my mind a little earlier was regarding the knowledge that we all collectively have and share. It’s a little hard to put into words, but the basic premise is that regardless of our level of intelligence, or individual wisdom and experience, there are certain things that we all know, and strangely they are things that at the same time, we don’t know.
We are the masters of our mind and body, yet introspectively know little about how we actually tick. We know how to think and breathe, but we don’t really understand how these actions are actually performed from within ourselves. Obviously there are theories that cover this, like Freud’s Id, but it’s fun to think about being able to know and do things, and yet not at the same time.
Learned a new word today, which applies quite nicely to me. Audodidacticism
It’s basically defines a person whose education is primarily through self-directed learning, self-teaching. It’s not any sort of special label, as everyone can be defined by this at numerous points in their lives, but I did find it neat to learn a new word.
I found it by reading about Alan Watts, whom I learned about when I stumbled upon this very insightful passage by him, redistributed and animated by Trey Parker and Matt Stone (South Park guys).
I went awhile without an update. The Ubuntu article before this was actually written about a week ago, but I had not gotten a chance to get on and publish it, and did end up publishing it a little incomplete, which is why I am going to do another update in a few weeks on Ubuntu.
The past two weeks have been pretty busy for me, both professionally and personally. I’ve been studying for Linux+, GCIH, CISSP, and now CEH. The basic plan is to have CEH and GCIH done by the end of next week if I hear back from EC-Council soon enough. I’m also looking at switching to AMU from Strayer because I feel their program will be a better fit for me.
I did a little packet analysis at home the other night for someone in an IRC room I frequent. A sysadmin from a university came in and was having trouble identifying some traffic on his network. A quick check of the pcap file that he sent me revealed it was simply CUPS traffic, whether or not it was authorized was another story since he did not appear to know what CUPS was, but did mention that his network had both Windows and Linux workstations. It was fun in any case.
Among the many projects I have, is a desire to setup another computer dedicated to running some virtualized servers in VMware Server, probably a bunch of Ubuntu LAMP setups from their server cd. The idea would be to go a route similar to how LSO (learnsecurityonline.com) does their capture the flag contests. Perhaps I will email them and ask how they set their boxes up, whether it is in a VM or not.
I’m not going to do some kind of weird april fools joke here, as for one, I don’t have the audience, and two, there are already about 4 billion floating around.
In any case, don’t believe what ya see today, 
It’s everything.
How you present yourself to the world will almost always dictate how the world sees you. It’s a fairly simple concept really, but one that a lot of people don’t really understand for awhile, if ever.
From the way you dress, to the way you talk, presentation has arguably the largest impact on whether someone will respect you, trust you, or hire you.
Obviously I’ve neglected to mention much about what happened outside of Shmoocon this past weekend, mainly because I wanted the Shmoocon posts to be about Shmoocon, and not much else.
So here we go:
DC Sleeps Alone Tonight
I had never really partied in DC before, and it makes VA Beach look like an elementary school playground. There are so many places to go, it’s a bit overwhelming. I should’ve paid more attention to the actual names of the places we went, but I know The Reef, Bourbon, and Adams Mills were pretty decent.
Friday night involved roughly 50 people from the podcaster meetup at the Chipotle near the Marriott Wardman. It was basically a train of geeks bar hopping, and while we didn’t cause any damage or get into any trouble (c’mon, geeks!) it was very entertaining.
Saturday night was even bigger, with the entire Adams Mill bar being taken over by Shmoocon people. Picture well over a hundred geeks talking about linux or hacking or whatever with a billion attractive women walking around, and those women finding themselves lacking attention. Well okay i’m fibbing a little, but hey this is semi-professional right?
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