Chris Gerling

I had my tonsils removed yesterday, which went surprisingly well.  I have a bit of a sore throat but other than that I am doing fine.  I can’t wait to eat solid food again though.  Matt was right when he told me you could start to count backwards from 6000 and not even make it to 5999 once they start to put you under.

While I was relaxing yesterday I put my 64 bit copy of Windows XP on the new thinkpad.  I also downloaded the 64 bit trial of VMware and I must say, it’s very noticible from the 32 bit counterpart.  I installed 32 bit XP Pro in a VM on it, and it’s literally like having a native install of it.

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.

Yes, I haven’t forgotten, I’m still sticking to the minimum of one post per week.

This week has been mostly work, although I did get my favors in this past Sunday so I can call in some karma later on when I need it. Helping friends move can get pretty interesting sometimes.

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Some black hats have discovered a vulnerability in the device driver for certain types of wireless network cards.  The article is over at Infoworld and is pretty interesting.  Apparently the card even being powered on is enough for it to receive this attack.  The premise is flooding it with large numbers of packets, basically like a buffer overflow, causing it to fail and/or allow unauthorized code to execute.

I bought one of these over the weekend, and it arrived yesterday.  Setup was a breeze, didn’t bother using the CD.  I now have WPA2-PSK securing my wireless network.  Definitely worth the upgrade over my old Gateway router that came with my laptop back in 2004.

I’m going to upgrade the firmware on it that was discussed in this lifehacker article.  Hopefully I don’t brick the router.