Author: gpanther

  • Physical condition

    I mentioned some time ago that I’ve started the one hundred pushups program. A small progress report (hopefully this can inspire others to start doing a little more exercise): In ~7 weeks (not counting the holidays) I went from 5 pushups to almost 60! This is not exactly the 100 which I should have done…

  • “Official” DDoS tools

    There are quite a few people who perform computer attacks while claiming political reasons. The Arbor Network blog discusses a recent example: a group of people asking you to download and run their tool it “help israel” (this could maybe be called “political-engineering”, and is quite curious, because people are being told that the downloaded…

  • pl/lolcode

    The news (via Joshua Drake’s blog): video / audio / slides available for two more talks on the postgresql conference site. Now for the funny part (this is from the slides of the “Babel of Procedural Languages” by David Fetter): HAI CAN HAS DATABUKKIT? I HAS A RESULT I HAS A RECORD GIMMEH RESULT OUTTA…

  • New packetlife contest

    The January contest for PacketLife is up. As usual, I have absolutely no idea on how to approach it :-), but I’m very curious about the solution.

  • Congestion Control in Computer Networks

    Here is a short presentation I’ve done about congestion control in computer networks. Some thoughts: Things usually are simpler than they look. For example the TCP congestion control algorithm. Still, they can be very powerful (this is similar with DES for example – which I’ve had to reimplement for “educational purposes”, and found that, at…

  • RIP Thiemo Seufer

    The news of Thiemo Seufer’s dead fills me with great sadness. We crossed paths a couple of times on the QEMU mailing list. He will be missed.

  • Enumerating objects / methods in Javascript

    I was reading the following post on the Metasploit blog: Fuzzing Flash For Fun (ASNative), which described how to use an undocumented feature of ActionScript to get the list of all functions and then fuzz them. I thought: surely, there is a simpler, documented way to do that. Now, the following code was written in…

  • Be honest about your reasons!

    Update: Kurt said it much better in the comments. You should read it instead of my ramblings :-). I also remembered the French version of this saying: Qui s’excuse, s’accuse. Unfortunately meta-justifications and white lies seem to be a deeply embedded part of humans (so much so that we invent names like “politeness” for them…

  • Style is important

    Because you are not writing programs for the compiler, you are writing it for the human who is coming after you (and he might be a psychopath who knows where you live :-)). Here is a nice related post from the creator of VirtualDub: Undoing indentation hell.

  • 000webhost.com trying to install malware

    I needed a quick, free webhost. Incidentally (it is funny how things come together sometimes) I remembered Andreas Gohr mentioning 000webhost.com, so I decided to give it a try. Now, I knew that nothing is free, so I expected to need to insert some banner ads in the pages, however it seems that this hosting…