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Safari 5 hearts OpenDNS #
There is no shortage of reports on Safari 5's interminable page load times: The "fix" seems to be switching DNS servers to OpenDNS. In my own informal testing, Safari 5 was basically unusable with Google's Public DNS: pages would either refuse to load altogether, or would take much longer than usual. Simply switching to OpenDNS servers fixed the problem instantly. Switching back and forth between Google Public DNS and OpenDNS (along with testing page load times via Webmonkey Stopwatch) confirmed Safari's bias.

/mac | Jun 30, 2010

Flash Cookies #
When clearing your web browser's cache / cookies / temp files / etc, don't forget to wipe Flash cookies (*.SOL files, properly known as Local Shared Objects, or LSO) too. OS X users will find them buried within subfolders in

  ~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash Player/#SharedObjects/ and
  ~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash Player/macromedia.com/support/flashplayer/sys/

Be aware that Flash cookies are not deleted by Safari's "Reset Safari", Opera's "Delete Private Data", Firefox's "Clear Recent History", or any other browser's cleaning method. (Iain Cheyne kindly points out that the BetterPrivacy add-on for Firefox can manage Flash cookies.)

/misc | Jun 29, 2010

Smartphone remote kill switches #
or, "Why I still use a Palm Treo 755p":

/misc | Jun 26, 2010

Convert raw disk image or physical disk to virtual machine #
"Live View is a Java-based graphical forensics tool that creates a VMware virtual machine out of a raw (dd-style) disk image or physical disk. This allows the forensic examiner to 'boot up' the image or disk and gain an interactive, user-level perspective of the environment, all without modifying the underlying image or disk. Because all changes made to the disk are written to a separate file, the examiner can instantly revert all of his or her changes back to the original pristine state of the disk. The end result is that one need not create extra 'throw away' copies of the disk or image to create the virtual machine.

Live View is capable of booting
  • Full disk raw images
  • Bootable partition raw images
  • Physical Disks (attached via a USB or Firewire bridge)
  • Specialized and closed image formats (using 3rd party image mounting software)
Containing the following operating systems
  • Windows 2008, Vista, 2003, XP, 2000, NT, Me, 98
  • Linux (limited support)
Behind the scenes, Live View automates a wide array of technical tasks. Some of these include: resolving hardware conflicts resulting from booting on hardware other than that on which the OS was originally installed; creating a customized MBR for partition-only images; and correctly specifying a virtual disk to match the original image or physical disk."
Related projects:
  • raw2vmdk - Mount raw images as VMDK virtual disks
  • xmount - Convert on-the-fly between multiple input and output harddisk image types
  • mbrChunker - Converts raw dd images to vmdk files (as of 20100812, this is now dd2vmdk)
UPDATE: In my testing, Live View 0.7b / VMWare Server 1.x (2.x not supported by Live View) on a Windows 7 64-bit host did not work, even after trying a number of suggestions in the forums.

Switched to a Windows XP host, and successfully tested with a raw disk image of an XP install. However, attempting to use a partition image instead of a full disk image resulted in the following error on boot: 
   A disk read error occurred
   Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart
Apparently the MBR is not being written correctly, or perhaps VMWare just doesn't play well with images created from partitions.

Finally, I tried using an IDE drive (Windows XP installed) with two different USB and Firewire bridges, but that also failed: 
   ERROR>     Snapshot Creation Failed
   ERROR>     Problem preparing partition1 for launch
   VM Launch Failed
tl;dr: Windows XP is well-supported as a host, but you may not be able to work with anything other than full disk images.

/windows | Jun 18, 2010

Generate wordlists with crunch #
$ wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/crunch-wordlist/crunch-wordlist/crunch2.4.tgz
$ tar -xvf crunch2.4.tgz
$ cd crunch
-bash: cd: crunch: Permission denied

Let's check the file permissions:

$ stat -c %a crunch
644

Ah! Just need to fix that:

$ chmod 755 crunch
$ cd crunch
$ make

Now we're ready to generate our list. In this example, we'll make a list consisting of every possible combination of 3 letters (both upper and lower case) followed by 2 numbers:

$ ./crunch 5 5 -f charset.lst mixalpha -o list -t @@@%%

Even though we've specified mixalpha as the character set, crunch replaces the percent symbols with numbers. This 80MB, 14060800-line list only took crunch 5 seconds to generate.

/nix | Jun 13, 2010

The Peaceful Mind #
  • Nothing, to my way of thinking, is a better proof of a well ordered mind than a man's ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company. -- Seneca
  • A peaceful mind is your most precious capital. -- Sivananda
  • A man is what he thinks about all day long. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • He who always dwells within himself becomes possessed of very ample means. -- Henry Suso
  • The man in contemplation is a free man. He needs nothing. Therefore nothing determines or distorts his thought. He does whatever he loves to do, and what he does is done for its own sake. -- Aristotle

/misc | Jun 05, 2010

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Blosxom Archive
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