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Locking a script to a given user with Perl
From a security point of view it is useful if you lock sensitive scripts (for example things which download untrusted data from the Internet) to run with a low privileged user. However it is also a good idea to make sure programatically that they are run only with the given user. One possible solution (which…
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Get the IP of the local computer from Perl
Caveat: this is only documented on Windows and may or may not work on other OSs (it doesn’t work on Ubuntu 8.04). Also, if the computer has multiple IP addresses (like a LAN, WLAN and a VLAN IP), there is no telling which IP this will return. Just a little snippet of code: print join(‘.’,…
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Reboot Windows – the hard way
I was clicking around via an RDP session on a Windows server and managed to kill the LSASS process (note to myself: next time pause the view of ProcessExplorer before killing processes!). The one minute till reboot screen promptly appeared and my first reflex was to stop the countdown (this is a trick which came…
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Other bugs which are passe
After talking about a problem with older versions of Opera, here is a problem with version 5.8.4 of ActivePerl for Windows (but which isn’t present in 5.8.8, so the simple solution is to upgrade): If you use the POSIX module to print out the day of the week (Friday, Monday, etc) with a code like…
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Benchmark with care
I saw this site recently: PHPBench.com was constructed as a way to open people’s eyes to the fact that not every PHP code snippet will run at the same speed This is useless! Or let me reformulate: this is misleading! For one, it uses microtime to do the benchmark, which measures physical time as opposed…
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Things you can get for free
It is amazing what you (commercial) software you can get today for free: Delphi Visual Studio IDA if you are a student, you can get lifetime (!) access to all of Microsoft’s products, provided you don’t use them for commercial purposes I for one welcome our overlords prefer the open-source alternatives, because I know that…
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Mixed links
First of a nifty tool for all of you (us?) people using RDP: Terminal Server Ping Tool. What’s even better, it’s written in Delphi and the full source code is available. Opera 9.5 is out, making problems with older versions obsolete. At the same time, via the the Think Vitamin website, Opera Dragonfly. This seems…
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Subscribing to a members-only SMF forum via RSS
This is one of those bug or feature? cases. I’m member of an online forum which uses Simple Machine Forum (or SMF for short. This is a members only forum, meaning that if you are not a member (or not logged in) you see a very little subset of the forum. Now I would like…
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Flaws in the Cisco PIX appliances
Via NetworkWorld (emphasis added): Crafted TCP ACK Packet Vulnerability Crafted TLS Packet Vulnerability Instant Messenger Inspection Vulnerability Vulnerability Scan Denial of Service Control-plane Access Control List Vulnerability The first four vulnerabilities may lead to a denial of service (DoS) condition and the fifth vulnerability may allow an attacker to bypass control-plane access control lists (ACL).…
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Story cards
This is really nice: From the Atlassian Developer Blogs