December 28th, 2007 Anthony Towry
It's been a while since we've seen a major update to Perl, but now it's here!
What do I like about the release? Well, named captures when using regex for one. I love named captures. They save time and improve readability. This is one of those things that .Net's regex engine has had that I couldn't believe Perl was living without. So I'm excited to see this get into the release.
Will the new release hook some of the old camel lovers that jumped ship to Ruby? Will the new incompatibilities break the living hell out of CPAN modules (one of Perl's big wins)? I'll try to do some experimenting soon and find out.
Check the changelog here.
Posted in Programming | No Comments »
December 27th, 2007 Anthony Towry
CourtTV's new show is getting quite a response from the infosec community. If you've been watching the DC or securityfocus lists, there have been more than a couple of posts regarding the program "Tiger Team".
I've watched both episodes and I was thoroughly entertained. It's pretty much what I expected it to be. It comes in low on the tech side and high on the drama and social engineering angle. This is cool though. They keep enough physical security and low tech kung-fu pumping to be exciting.
Hell, what else is on?
Posted in Security | 1 Comment »
December 27th, 2007 Anthony Towry
An article over at infoworld is acting like Silverlight has a shot in 2008. Granted it certainly has a better shot with the release of 2.0, but I still consider the whole thing bogus and here's why.
- Silverlight will never be everywhere, Flash is.
- The artsy folk aren't clamoring for Microsoft products. They're married to Adobe. Some of them will always think of MS as the producer of Frontpage.
- Silverlight 1.0 was a tremendous disappointment that left a bad taste in the mouth of more than a couple .Net devs.
Now, I'm certainly not in the middle of the firefight. The user experience is not the highest of priorities at my organization, as it probably isn't at any organization with a significant backlog of work. That said, I think Silverlight is weak and it isn't going to take much for this to pull a "vista" and flop outright.
Posted in Programming, Web development | 2 Comments »
December 14th, 2007 Anthony Towry
In an attempt to get at the very least my basic infosec tools running on OS X I've been banging away at getting something loaded to sniff. I've been around the block with the MacPort of ettercap, which works to a point, but unfortunately seems to lock the console once I've got a session going. Well fret no more boys and girls!
Ethereal works right out of the Fink package manager. I love working over the filters in Ethereal/Wireshark, but with Ethereal I don't get the "live" packet captures. It's a capture then analyze hand-off, which I'm probably going to have to go another way with sometime soon. But damn, I'm just glad to have something to help me out.
Posted in Security | 1 Comment »
December 13th, 2007 Anthony Towry
Jake Kouns of OSVDB recently sent around this e-mail:
Just a quick email to let everyone know that we have started the 2.0
upgrade. The new site, with all new (and very cool) data management
interface will be online Friday night. In the meantime, kick back and relax!
So if you haven't signed up to do some vulnerability research yet this is a great opportunity to get in on a new era with a killer project.
Posted in Community, Security | No Comments »
December 13th, 2007 Anthony Towry
So, I recently took a little trip to the Apple store and grabbed up that MacBook Pro I was talking about getting. I must say, it is a sweet piece of hardware. I'm really enjoying it.
My first step was loading up VMware Fusion and checking out performance on an installation of Windows XP and Visual Studio 2005. No problems so far. I'll need to stress it out with SQL Server 2005 here soon and see if it smokes. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Hardware, Operating Systems, Security | No Comments »
December 1st, 2007 Anthony Towry
Scott Guthrie has recently posted a fresh look at the .Net Web Product Roadmap which includes details on Silverlight and it's integration with Visual Studio 2008. If you've been watching the whole Silverlight thing unfold you know that when 1.0 was released it came with a bag of disappointment. It's lack of controls and communications support made it fairly useless outside of streaming video (which happens to be exactly 0% of my daily development).
As with so many products, we've been waiting on the next release. Up until yesterday this meant Silverlight 1.1, but not so today. The team has done something smart and rebranded the next release as Silverlight 2.0. The second release appears to have a much better chance of not being a steaming bowl of crap and brings much needed controls and network support. Take a look.
Posted in Programming, Web development | No Comments »
December 1st, 2007 Anthony Towry
So, lately I've been thinking about getting a MacBook Pro to use as my main computing platform. I've been wanting a machine with native *nix support and kicking virtualization options (VMWare Fusion) since I'll be keeping one foot in the .Net world. Of course I risk joining the fanboy cult of Mac, but "what are ya gonna do?" Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Hardware, Operating Systems | No Comments »
