The Call Stack – a Practical Review

March 5 2012 by Antonio Herraiz in development |No Comments

I can’t think of a better way to start a new week other than revising the stack. Why would I want to do such a thing? Well, it’s always good to know what’s going on under the hood, and I’m bored.

Jokes aside, the reason for doing this was that I started “playing” this wargame called IO @ SmashTheStack. Those guys have an amazing setup ready for you to exploit all the way to the root. I’m enjoying the game a lot so far, and when I reached level 5, I realized a good call stack review was in place. We will also review some gdb commands on the go, so let’s get to it. [Read more]

Automating Jobs in Unix, revisited

February 15 2012 by Antonio Herraiz in linux |No Comments

Every user has its own crontab, including root. Then there is a generic, system-wide crontab which is in /etc/crontab. This has the following by default in Debian 4.0. Read the comment at the beginning of the file, it explains why this crontab is special.

Diving into /etc/crontab [Read more]

elBulli.com infected with a Trojan

January 30 2012 by Antonio Herraiz in internet |No Comments

The world’s most famous restaurant, once run by the iconic chef Ferran Adrià but now closed, elBulli.com, appears to have been infected by an unknown source. As of 22:50 (CET +1) on Jan 30th the site elBulli.com is welcoming its visitors with an unpleasant surprise.

The site drops a malicious trojan downloaded via a hidden script in the favicon.ico file. Follows an analyzing session dissecting what the script does and how.

UPDATE: At 8:40 CET+1 (Jan 31st) the malware was removed from the site and the source of the exploits was found and patched, as reported by the sys admins. It is once again safe to visit elBulli.com [Read more]

Introduction to Artifical Intelligence: A Revolution in Online Education

January 13 2012 by Antonio Herraiz in internet |No Comments

8 weeks. 8 weekly assignments. 222 class quizzes. 2 teachers. 2 exams. 1 score. Might sound like just any other university course. Except there’s one number missing, and it’s probably the most important. 160,000 students signed up for this course. It was an experiment, the first one of its kind, and I had the opportunity to be part of it. [Read more]

How to cd to a directory using partial naming

November 17 2011 by Antonio Herraiz in linux |No Comments

Annoyed sometimes because directories you want to change to have very long names or repeating prefix or just plain silly cumbersome naming?

If the “cdspell” from the shopt builtin is not enough for you, and you are annoyed by the fact that -exec cannot call a builtin such as cd as in:

$ find -name '*part_name*' -exec cd {} \;

then what you want is to simply add this small yet effective simple function to your .bashrc and enjoy the ability to change into a directory only typing its name partially. [Read more]

Customizing your own Trinity Rescue Kit

October 27 2011 by Antonio Herraiz in linux |1 Comment

Trinity Rescue Kit (TRK) is a Linux distribution specialized in data and system recovery. The latest release as of this writing is 3.4, build 372, and it’s ideal to run off a USB stick or a CD as it’s just over 100 MiB. You can download it from here.

I decided to tackle my latest recovery project with TRK, which proved to be a great tool and apart from giving me access to some really old, mostly useless but full of nostalgia stuff, I also learned some recovery concepts and some more Linux on the way, which was cool. Anyway, after using it for a few days I found the need to run a package that was not included by default in the distro, and was also missing some of the utilities of my own environment, so I decided to put the recovery project on hold and modify TRK a bit.

[Read more]

Setting a default Firefox profile

April 11 2011 by Antonio Herraiz in development, web |6 Comments

Twice on the same week. I’m getting better at not seeing the obvious. Or maybe I’m right saying that it was not that obvious in this case. Ok, less ranting and more to the point.

If you use more than one profile in Firefox, you may end up having the wrong environment settings, which cause your system to open new URLs (those associated with FF anyway) in one of the other “not default” profiles, effectively bringing up another Firefox instance when you already have your “default” one up. And that can be annoying. It’s really easy to change though, keep reading. [Read more]

Running Xdebug on Windows 7 64bit

April 10 2011 by Antonio Herraiz in web applications |2 Comments

Trying to get Xdebug to work on your Windows 7 64bit can be a nightmare. If you’re lucky, you won’t run into the many existing problems, but if you’re not, you’ll bang your head for 3 days trying multiple approaches and probably go nuts in the process. That’s what happened to me, and as with many other problems, the solution was easier than expected. A lot easier. [Read more]

Top 5 problems writing your first Firefox Add-On

March 3 2011 by Antonio Herraiz in web applications |No Comments

Here is a list of problems I ran into when writing Delicious Pick, a simple Add-On that allows you to randomly choose a bookmark from your Delicious account. As simple as it might be, you still have to get used to the framework you’re going to develop on, and in my case, I also had to re-enter the world of JavaScript, which I hadn’t touched in years.

So I thought: well, now that I have spent all that time stuck with those silly little details I might just take note so this doesn’t happen again in the future. So here’s the list, in the order I ran into every one of them. [Read more]

Do I really have to leave Delicious?

February 19 2011 by Antonio Herraiz in web applications |1 Comment

And now Google gives us a tool to import bookmarks from our Delicious: clearly one step forward towards abandoning our long beloved bookmarking site. Since the leaked Yahoo slide, it’s all been about alternatives and competitors. The official statement from Delicious’ blog is they’re not going to shutdown, and even though it’s a bit worrying they haven’t updated their blog since then, there’s no need to run away like crazy and abandon a service that has done us well for such a long time.

Google Over Delicious [Read more]

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