I recently had to get my iPhone restored at an Apple store because I was away from my home computer and my phone was stuck on the loading screen (with the pretty metal apple). I was a little pissed because I knew they were going to upgrade me to the newest firmware (3.1.3) and I didn’t know there was a jailbreak out for it, but I needed my phone!

When I got home, I started sniffing around for a 3.1.3 jailbreak and came across sn0wbreak (ih8sn0w.com/index.php/welcome.snow). I started the app and followed the instructions to get into DFU mode, but the app never moved on from there… always stayed at the DFU Starter Help screen. Realizing sn0wbreeze is not an “official” dev-team release, I went to their blog to see what was going on: that’s where I learned about the Spirit hack.

The Spirit hack (spiritjb.com/) is a small download and a simple screen. You run it with your iPhone attached (some stipulation if you’re using a 3GS) and when the process is over, you have a jailbroken iPhone. Done. The people rejoice.

[edit 2010-05-10]
I posted this on my facebook account and received a well-deserved lambasting for up-voting the article.  I hadn’t thought hard enough on the problem of domain trusting with such a distributed, flexible, and multi-point service such as email.  Mat Whitney gave me a lesson on the difficulties of domain reputations when the domain is something like gmail.com or live.com — they’re publicly available and that’s where the majority of spam comes from, so how can you trust any sender from that domain without specifically white-listing the address?  That means there are only baby-steps in security available through a huge effort on the part of IT administrators with the technologies described in The Register’s article.  I take back my promotion of this article until I am able to speak more intelligently on the matter.   Whoops!
[end edit]

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www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/09/email_and_trust/

An article on The Register writes about finally adopting existing technology (software, not hardware) to allow people to trust their inboxes again.  With all the worms, identity theft attempts, scams, and general nogoodnickism that happens via email today, users are hesitant to open emails even from addresses they recognize.  It’s like getting a package delivered by USPS and wondering if you’ll find a pipe bomb or anthrax in each one.  Well, in the digital word, electronic messages can be signed in such a way that trust can be (largely) restored and, as with the Web, “feature rich” email is the way of the future.

The article describes that, as everyone should realize, social hubs like Facebook and [the defunct] Google Wave will grow in popularity and virtual size and will begin to experience the same problems that email users have to deal with daily.  Identity theft, worms (www.google.com/search?q=koobface), and hijacked accounts occur in Facebook already and there will be no long-term decrease in these activities because they are making money with them.

My words of advice: read the article; expect trust-restoring technologies in the near future that may look a little different from the email you’re familiar with, but will be fundementally the same; be wary of what you put on social media sites (Facebook, Google profiles, MySpace, etc.); be wary of who you friend and who you show your information to.  I absolutely DO NOT advise to stop using social media websites because they carry value (that’s for a different article), but realize that it’s just a picture and text — the person you think is behind that profile may not be who you expect.

As always, your thoughts/opinions/comments/defamations/flattery/proposals are welcome.  I have to refuse some of those on principle but send them anyway.

I consider myself relatively browser agnostic but I use Firefox for a lot of my work.  I utilize multiple profiles and use the –no-remote option to actually run these multiple profiles at the same time.  It keeps the cookies, extensions, add-ons and sessions all separate which allows me to work more efficiently.

I also rely rather heavily on Firefox extensions to do my work: Hackbar, Web Developer, Firebug, FireTitle and several others are my staples.  I recently upgraded to FF 3.6 and that unfortunately broke my FireTitle extension. (side note: FireTitle is used to change the title bar of my different browsers so I know which profile I’m working under in each window).  Looking for a solution and not finding any, I decided to try to “fix it” on my own.  I tried to alter the install.rdf file that sits in the C:\Users\foo\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\y1g9vafa.WebAppTest1\extensions\{f4b962b4-ab75-41bf-8da7-a0435258a27c} folder.  There’s a line in there that says <em:maxVersion>3.5.*</em:maxVersion>.  Knowing how clever I am, I changed that 3.5 to 3.6 and restarted FF!  FAIL.  So I looked for something else…

I can across the Add-on Compatibility Reporter and, just wanting to have an avenue to report that the extension wasn’t working, installed it.  I restarted FF 3.6, went to the add-on screen, clicked the Compatibility button next to FireTitle, selected “This add-on no longer works” from the drop-down, submitted my report and restarted FF.  Much to my surprise, the Options button for FireTitle was now enabled!  The settings were reset to default, but something about that whole process enabled the extension.  I repeated it for each of my profiles and now I’m back to where I want to be.

Of course, none of this would be necessary if Mr. Nowitz would just update it.  Cheers Jonathan, and thanks for a great tool.  I truly do enjoy it.

Go here: mrdoob.com/lab/javascript/harmony/. Play with Harmony. You’ll get it. It. Is. Dope! HTML5 is the media-rich future of the World Wide Web and this sort of thing is going to become more prevalent very quickly. I’m excited!

The server I was hosted on before started going belly-up, so I moved over to www.bluehost.com (as recommended by E$). So far I’m pleased with the experience: it wasn’t seamless by any means, but there’s a good support team and other than a couple Gallery2 plugins that don’t work right, I’m back in action.

I’m experimenting with permalinks for the my blog. Instead of www.cyberpir8.net?p=192, you’ll see a link to www.cyberpir8.net/2009/10/06/quick-nslookup-bash-script/. Let me know in the comments if this causes any pain or consternation.

Thanks,
Cyberpir8

I recently had to determine if a large set of URLs resolved to the same set of IP addresses. Knowing a little about a few different scripting languages/technologies let me know that this was definitely possible, so I just had to figure out which one I wanted to use for the most efficient results. I decided to just go with Bash shell scripting (since I’ve recently gotten a little used to it).

Say I have a file called urls.txt (newline delimited). This file started with more than just the hostname (e.g., www.example.com/foo/bar.aspx). I had to pare those down so I opened the list in vim and did a little replacement. I could have done the same thing with sed but I’m most familiar with doing this in vim. In vim, open the file and type:

:%s#/.*##g

Ok, ready for some nslookup action in a Cygwin Bash loop. Note that this does not output what I’d like to do, which is the format of “url,ip” and output to a .csv file. It’s also important to note that the loop will take the input line-by-line, so the output file will have all the results in the right order. I could do this in perl very quickly and get the results I’m looking for, but it takes that much more time to write the script. Anyway, here it is:

$ for i in `cat urls.txt`; do nslookup $i 198.6.1.4 2>/dev/null | grep Address | tail -n 1 | cut -d " " -f 3; done > ips.txt

The “$” is the prompt, so don’t write that. For all values (i.e. lines) in urls.txt, do an nslookup of the url and specify the uu.net DNS server to avoid any problems with local resolution (I was having trouble, so had to go outside my corporate DNS server). Redirect all nslookup STDERR messages to /dev/null (there’s a header). Only show me the lines with “Address” and only give me the last of those lines (head & tail working together). Then strip the “Address: ” from the remaining line to give me the IP address by itself. And when you’re done with all that work, redirect to ips.txt instead of STDOUT.

Now I open an Excel or Calc spreadsheet and drop the values from urls.txt right next to ips.txt and I’m cooking with gas.

I recently had a moment of clarity with regards to my historical stance on downloading software that I have not paid for. It wasn’t the sort of clarity that helps me to pass on my point of view to others, but the sort that is more or less self-defining.

A new jailbroken iPhone application has been released into the wild that allows users to install cracked versions of pay apps as if they paid for it. It’s no different than using a cracked version of Photoshop or Premier or any other pirated software, but it’s new because it’s on th iPhone! The new app is called Installous (available at www.hackulo.us) and it is a great idea.

I saw my friend using a very expensive application ($70) that he hadn’t paid for and I though, “I want to do that too!” I downloaded the app and installed a couple games that are normally pay-only. I was messing around a little more today and it dawned on me again, after many years … I don’t want to pirate software.

This was particularly poignant because I was recently speaking with someone about the importance of revisiting semi-religious decisions like this with some regularity. I don’t know that I can take a stand against the moral implications of piracy, because I’m honestly not against the concept of learning how to use an application from the cracked (i.e. pirated) versions. But I can say that I have followed-through with my conscience regarding my desires to “have” and to “be able to resist”. I have learned to do without these toys this long, and I can do without them longer if I don’t want to pay for them.

What are your thoughts on piracy? Do you feel you’re just saving money? Do you care?

(Written from my iPhone)

I’ve been using Window 7 pre-release on my home desktop for a couple weeks now and it’s probably a decent time to jot down some thoughts.

I really dig most elements of the user interface: the organization of the screen, as well as the addition of Mac-ish features like preview from the taskbar, make it pretty easy to find directories (aka folders) when you aren’t necessarily good at navigating that sort of thing. I believe there are a few more elements from Vista-land that Vista users have shown me, but I forget to check it when I get home.

I’m am not sure I like the way Win7 handles the congregation of the My Documents folders. I haven’t looked too far into this, but the requirement that I add folders to My Documents instead of just switch where that folder is located is sort of annoying.

The thing that I truly dislike is how hard it is to act like an administrator. When I’m an admin, I don’t ever want to have to use the “Run as administrator” option. I even disable UAC and still am hamstrung when installing or trying to delete certain files. It’s very frustrating when I’m so used to the XP experience, so I’m going to definitely check out what I’m doing wrong there.

Overall I report positive things. I think the average Windows user will like the changes. Being a true power-user, there are a few things I would like to see or use differently.

My computer died… all of a sudden… for no apparent reason.

My main home desktop is was Windows XP SP3.