What the Hack?

Today is the day I’ve been working on for the past few weeks. Today, in the SU, about 30 electrical engineers, computer science students, professional software developers, photography geeks, penetration testers, system administrators and anyone else interested, will come together to hack. Today, we’re going to find out if it actually works; there is nothing planned, nothing prepared, and nothing expected. All we have is a FB group, FB event, Hackerspaces.org Wiki, and a few IRC conversations. ...

October 23, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

Hackathon

On Saturday the 23rd October, the Hackers invade The Space! In association with QUESTS, Dragonslayers, and IETNI, HackerspaceBelfast will be running a series of events over 24 hours of software, network, and hardware hackery goodness, as well as screening hacker movies, DIY repair, and maybe, just maybe, how to build a laser. Running parallel to Dragonslayers’ 24 hour gaming event, which will incorporate console, PC, and tabletop games, attendees will be able to both play and make games to their hearts content. ...

October 14, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

Citrix Web Client with Ubuntu

Ubuntu is one of those polarising technologies; Its really easy to use on a recreational basis, or as part of a institution/business wide rollout, but heartbreakingly awkward to use ‘alone’ within an entrenched business setting. One such setting is that of Queen’s University; the only form of secure remote access that is made (quietly) availiable is through a Citrix XenApp gateway. Great in theory; everyone can take a slice of a virtualized desktop, do whatever they need to do, and that processing power and memory can be easially reappropriated when they’re done. Unfortunately, in an effort to be ‘secure’, you HAVE to use Windows, and you HAVE to have Internet Explorer installed, and you HAVE to install the propitiatory XenApp client. ...

July 24, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

Intel 4965: Poor wireless performance under Ubuntu

I had an incident recently where the Windows 7 side of my laptop connected easily to an open AP, but the Ubuntu 10.04 (or 9.04, tried both) wouldn’t, with the Intel Iwlagn drivers reporting in syslog a deauth (reason=6), basically the card spoke too soon. I eventually found the solution. After several weeks of asking the same question everywhere I could think of (as well as emailing Intel…) I found the answer a lot closer to home, from a PhD student ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Graduate in my University over LinkedIn (Ironically enough, I’m actually working with him on my Final Year Project next year… Good stuff to come :D ) ...

July 8, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

Mod_Rewrite in Apache2

Just incase you forget how to fix this the easy way: Enable mod_rewrite for URL voodoo; (Or any module replacing the rewrite ) $sudo a2enmod rewrite $sudo service apache2 restart Remember to fiddle with /etc/apache2/sites-available.*< \pre> and change "AllowOverride none" to "all" in any places that you're having trouble with rewritten URL's

April 1, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

Shared Items - 31/03/2010

NumberQuotes Gives Perspective to Your Statistics, Is Great for Presentations [Statistics] The Menaissance: The Death of the Metrosexual and the Rise of the Retrosexual Jesus Loves Me? World’s Most Stunning Data Centers Jason takes us through exploit a web application, uploading a… IF YOU DON’T STUDY Recursively remove all empty directories Top 10 Atheism Quotes Dynamic lighting effects in Canvas Digg: 4000% Performance Increase by Sorting in PHP Rather than MySQL ...

March 31, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

Installing and Configuring NS-3 on a Ubuntu System

** NS-3 Appears to have a staggeringly steep learning curve so I hope these posts help out someone else (or me, when i forget all this in a month). Running off a virtualised Ubuntu 9.10 system, the prerequisites I installed were all the ones listed here. (And i removed some out of date packages) sudo apt-get install bison bzr dia doxygen flex g++ gcc gdb graphviz imagemagick libgoocanvas-dev libgtk2.0-0 libgtk2.0-dev libsqlite3-dev libxml2 libxml2-dev mercurial python python-dev python-kiwi python-pygoocanvas python-pygraphviz sqlite sqlite3 tcpdump texi2html texinfo texlive texlive-extra-utils valgrind ...

March 14, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

Mercurial Quick Start Cheatsheet

I hadn’t used Mercurial before so I thought it might be a good idea to leave a reminder for me and anyone else who comes across it… For tidyness, I do all of my dev-stuff (Subversion, Mercurial, CVS, Git etc) under ~/src and only take root privileges when its needed; any good makefile should relocate the necessary files for you at the ‘make install’ or equivalent point. **Update:**This article was picked up by the guys at DevCheatSheet.com and I’m really honoured to be included in a site that I’ve been dipping into over the years, so if you need any kind of cheat sheet or quick reference, I highly recommend checking them out. Anyway… ...

March 13, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

GSOC or Having a go at Network Simulator

I had been looking at this years Google Summer Of Code google group and saw the list of organisations that are getting involved. While i was alooking at it, I knew i didn’t want to even consider the big boys (I’m looking at you, Debian, Drupal, KDE, Apache, X.Org, etc), they’re too big to get my teeth into, and I’m currently in the throws of ‘WHAT THE HELL AM I GOING TO DO MY FINAL YEAR PROJECT ON!!! ’ (For any Americans, that means ‘dissertation’). ...

March 12, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

So what can you do with 32 Million Passwords...

So I have a piece of coursework for a CS module I’m taking at Queen’s University Belfast and one of the focal points of it is the recent RockYou! SQL-injection breach that released 32million passwords into the internet, and I thought I’d have a closer look at that list. I ‘acquired’ the password list from your regular neighbourhood tracker, and thought I could walk through the process of getting a probability-sorted password dictionary. ...

March 10, 2010 · Andrew Bolster