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Computed tomography of the abdomen showed a severely distended colon with fecal stasis compressing the abdominal organs and elevating the diaphragm.

via kevinMD

I woke up this morning with the worst back pain of my life. I lay down on the floor to try and stretch and get more comfortable, but was wracked with a series of back spasms so awful that the house echoed with my screams. I couldn’t get up off the floor or get comfortable. Scared. I had Kate to a call around to see if anyone had any drugs, but our friends are way too ethical to donate prescription medication. I took an Ibuprofen horse pill and eventually got up into a sitting position. I sloooooly became more mobile over the next few hours.
I got a referral for PT and a prescription for muscle relaxants. The PT, who was extremely competent, figured out that my pelvis gets tilted, twisting my spine a bit and causing a lot of pain. He said, “we’re going to fix this today, but it will probably make your back worse for the next 24 hours”. This really scared me, but the tugs and twists that we did not put me back too far. I must say that the muscle relaxants bring out my sense of humor. I was the jolliest PT patient ever. So now I’m looking forward to this miracle of pelvic straightness that should begin tomorrow and leave me feeling great by the weekend. Until then, walk it off. So, I’m off to the library to try and get back in their good graces.

I’m getting faster at using vim, the editor that relies entirely on the keyboard.

First, the most useful command ever:
]I lists the lines that contain the word under the cursor
Second most useful:
:sp filename

The strangest firefox plugin: Vimperator. turns your browser into something resembling vim. I’m not yet convinced of the sanity of this. I do like to be able to move around the page with vim keystrokes. It gets me in shape for when I really have to use vim. The greenies would sit inside a dark tent all day so that their eyes would be accustomed to the dark when they went out to hunt for Charlie. This is just like that, except with a Unix text editor. The inexplicable part of it is that text boxes such as the one I am typing in right now are excluded from the vim goodness.

In order to get better at vim, i’ve devised a series of katas, named after the repetitive exercises with small variations that allow martial artists to perfect their skills. I might have 10 minutes free early in a particular evening, which isn’t enough time to drill down into real work, but enough to do a few exercises that stretch my abilities. It helps to have a concrete exercise to do when I sit down at the computer. Otherwise I might waste that entire 10 minutes looking at things like this.

The oldest O’Reilly book still in use in our office: Learning the vi editor. nearly 20 years old!

Twice in the past few years, in situations with beautiful mounds of loosely guarded food, I have said, “Nice Spread”. I meant, “everything looks gorgeous”, but the frowns I got made me feel like I was testing a springboard for a big swan-dive into the Buffalo Wings. So, I’m thinking “nice spread” is something “takers” say when it is all about how much free food they are gonna eat.

Someone said “nice spread” at a picnic the other day and didn’t seem to offend anyone. Maybe I’m more threatening to food displays than most people.

So, what is the deal? Can I say “nice spread” or is it boorish? Is it only for outdoor use? Is it like the “I’m quite a swordsman” comment in The Manticore? Help me here.

One aspect of higher energy prices and climate change is that this uniquely American requirement of a daily shower has to go out the window. I was reading a tip at Lifehack called how to develop a non-optional mindset and a daily shower was listed along with changing a poopy diaper as a non-optional thing.

Q. Why do you take a shower each and every day? (please tell me you shower every day!)

A. Because programmed into your ‘how-to-live-your-life’ hard-drive is a command that says you must wash every day. For you, it’s not an optional behaviour, it’s part of your normal running pattern. As a result, you have no motivational problems and no discipline issues when it comes to your personal hygiene (I hope). It’s just a thing you do on auto-pilot. The thought of not washing doesn’t occur to you because cleanliness is one of your non-negotiable habits.

I didn’t take a shower this morning and even though I rode my bike to work (and home last night) I don’t think I’m approaching poopy diaper status. I willingly submit to any sniff tests. I’m quite sure I don’t smell like I took a shower recently, but I’m not offensive. I just smell like a person. Get over it.

One result of the Coming Global Shitstorm it is the end of hygiene as we know it. TEOHAWKI. We are going to have to get used to the way humans smell.

Say it with me

TEOHAWKI
TEOHAWKI
TEOHAWKI

these are funny Click on the picture for more.

The Secure 360 conference was mostly geared for a high level overview of a bunch of topics I would be more interested in at a detailed level. There were a lot of management types, salespeople and students. I spent some time helping with the OWASP booth and doing penetration tests of the snack stations.

I attended 3 separate presentations on digital forensics and was surprised to see Metasploit project mentioned in all of them as the leading “bad guy” anti-forensics tool. I’ve been preparing to give a presentation here at work on Metasploit. I’ve decided to become best friends with the framework by contributing to the wikibook.

Metasploit tips for if you are just starting out:

• Everyone says, “Metasploit is a skiddie tool that my grandmother could use”. Not so. Metasploit is a sophisticated framework that can be as simple as pointing and clicking to break into a vulnerable computer system or as complex as writing your own exploit to perpetrate a multiple-step intrusion.
• Use a vm to test exploits. Remember that wildebeest that had bugs eat into it’s brain and all it did was run around in circles? That’s my Windows XP box now.
• find old, insecure versions of software to practice with at https://www.securinfos.info/old-softwares-vulnerable.php
• A good place to start is with the War-FTPD 1.65 Username Overflow exploit. War-FTPD 1.65 crashes when exploited, but is ready to stand back up again immediately.
  1. Download WarFTP165_vulnerable_USER_BufferOverflow.exe from https://www.securinfos.info/old_softwares_vulnerable.php
  2. Run the exe. It will unpack warFTP.exe into the same directory
  3. Run warFTP.exe. A gui application will start.
  4. make sure anonymous connections are allowed (or create a different username)
  5. Click the lightning bold icon to allow connections
  6. from the attacking machine, click on the “exploits” tab in metasploit
  7. choose War-FTPD 1.65 Username exploit
  8. choose the generic/shell_bind payload
  9. enter the IP address of the machine running warFTP into the RHOST field (leave username and password with the default values unless you have created a different username in War-FTPD)
  10. Click Launch Exploit.
  11. Click the Sessions tab to see a list of live sessions. There should be one for war_ftp_username. Click on it to open a console. This console is a command window into the remote system. Type a command like “calc” or “dir” to prove it works.
  12. if anonymous users are denied, the exploit can still be run with the windows_exec payload. This payload allows you to fire off one command on the remote machine before the ftp services crashes.

They wanted $35.00 in fines! I was so frustrated with myself that I chopped up my library card. If I totaled my fines against how much I would have spent for the same items at a bookstore, my fines would be far greater. bah.

What does it mean that the last 3 books I’ve chosen at random all involve time travel?

Fallen Dragon does have some time travel, but the main plot revolves around a well-executed guerrilla war and some alien technology. A fascinating high tech forensic investigation wends its way through the entire book.

I worry that Hamilton spends way too much time imagining how to wage the perfect guerrilla war. Intelligence officers leading an investigation against the guerrillas slowly realize the sophistication of their enemy and this culminates in a perfect honeypot/simulacrum sequence. My surprise and delight at this sequence requires further study into effective honeypot/simulacrum scenes. I suspect that the best ones are the shortest ones. The one in this book was only a couple of pages.

Hamilton writes well enough to create an entire universe and execute his ideas well, but his writing hasn’t really evolved from where it was in The Reality Dysfunction. Like most sci-fi authors, he suffers from bland pneumatic sex disorder. I grew weary of this way before he described someone as “screwing like a kangaroo”. I don’t think I’m supposed to envision someone working out with a speed-bag whenever things get romantic, but I did here. This book describes a future where capitalism makes space exploration and trade nearly as dreary as it has made today’s international trade. Space gets kinda boring and humanity slowly loses its will to travel between the stars because it is too expensive.

• The Boys Are Back In Town
  This is a time travel novel with some eye-watering chills as a creepy enemy shifts the past, making memories dissolve. The author somehow failed to put his real self into the story, instead we get some generic writing about high school. “How did that song go?”, the main character asks on his drive back to his high school reunion, “See some old friends, good for the soul” Ouch. “His stomach rumbled and he thought about breakfast”. Made me wonder if the author has ever spent time inside a human body. An interesting twist on the time travel thing happens when the main character teams up with his past self. As the past self runs through the woods after a murderer, memories form on the spot and they are able to coordinate using them. An obsession with sex catapults this book out of the sci-fi genre into horror/romance. Heavy petting buffers each action sequence.

• Odyssey Five
  In this canceled TV series, five space shuttle astronauts meet a fastidious alien who send them back through time to save the earth. The main story is endlessly goofy in the way the XFiles were endlessly goofy and non-resolving. The characters keep getting distracted by things they could tweak history or improve in their own lives. The characters get to wake up in their bodies from five years ago. They all freak out in various ways and then get together for coffee to try and fight the aliens. A waitress (who is so totally an alien) keeps asking them why they clam up when she comes by. Tired, predictable sub-plots then give the viewer plenty of time to pack a suitcase and move in with the characters. It is going to be a long five years. In each episode, the director announces, “OK, naked time!” and a bunch of extras appear undressed and then they get back to ineptly chasing incompetent aliens.
• Gattaca
  This movie features low key acting and almost no conflict. Everyone portrayed utterly flat emotionless characters. Jude Law, incapable of playing a flat character, made up for all of that with pure bitterness, but warmed up at the end (heh, heh). Perhaps because two of the main characters have heart conditions, there is very little action, just lots of pretending to be genetically perfect. I liked how the culture of this elite institution was portrayed. Everyone was there because of their superior genes, not because of any achievement on their part. A job interview consists of a blood test. The genetic elites suffer from this-not in any outward way, of course-but I could just tell. Everyone felt very uncomfortable when a non-genetically perfect person (an in-valid) out-competed a valid.

I didn’t know this, but in Vista, if you hold down shift key and right click on a folder in the right hand window of Windows Explorer, you get a context menu with some extra commands including “Open Command prompt here” and “copy as path” which are both very useful.

thanks to Mr. Tim Sneath

update: why the hell would I want quotes around the path if I chose “copy as path” stupid
update2: it is a pain in the ass to remember to hold down the shift key to access these extra choices. Much better to fix the registry and get them in the regular context menu.
Instructions Here.

I was watching You, me and Dupree the other day. Dupree gets into riding a bike and I just knew that he would be crashing it very soon. Is it true that when a bike appears in a movie or tv show, it will soon be crashing?

• monkeyshines: main character falls off bike with backpack full of historic bricks, leaving him at the mercy of psychotic helper monkey.
• you, me and dupree: Dupree gets hit by a car to great comic effect
• The Truth About Cats & Dogs: guy falls over handlebars in front of Uma.
• Strongest Man in the world: Kurt Russell hops on locked bike and crashes.
• Karate Kid: crashes bike. ( Video ) Gets gift of antique car and drives that instead, as his life is improving
• revenge of the pink panther. Clouseau rides bicycle across drawbridge and crashes.
• Breaking Away: Iron bar in spokes from Italian cyclists.
• Will and Grace: Grace falls off bike
• The Office: Drunk falls off bike

can anyone think of more bicycle crash scenes?