lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

it is a bad thing to have a life which does not extend beyond office and books.

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A virus spreading message that I got in my email
" The message contains Unicode characters and has been sent as a binary attachment. "

Thanks to egrep for linguists for giving this nice and clear example of using egrep.

There are different ways to match both star and stars within a single search pattern. The most straightforward way might be to tell egrep to look for either the string star or the string stars with the help of a disjunction, expressed with the vertical bar, |. This time the search pattern has to be quoted in order for the program to know where the search pattern starts and ends

    $ egrep -w 'star|stars' sonnets.txt
    Not from the stars do I my judgement pluck,
    And constant stars in them I read such art
    Whereon the stars in secret influence comment.
    Let those who are in favour with their stars,
    Till whatsoever star that guides my moving,

from Tao of security blog, I came across this

One of the details that emerged from Curt's monitoring of the Invita Security network involved a password used by Alexey Ivanov. When accessing one of his drop sites, Alexey's FTP password was www.pidor.com (Internet Archive available). Think of what an unwary analyst might do with that information. Only someone who is monitoring Alexey's actions might know about www.pidor.com. Say that unwary analyst decides to visit www.pidor.com to learn more about the site. If Alexey or a friend is monitoring Web accesses to www.pidor.com, they could learn that they are being monitored. This case demonstrates how important it is for analysts to not "touch" remote or foreign sites involved in intrusions. You may tip your hand to the attacker and ruin an investigation or recovery effort.

Thanks to Aaron for pointing out his quiz . It confirms what I always knew.

Vendorwear - a piece of clothing with a vendor's logo on it. Usually it is a t-shirt.

brain-dead redmond-generated remote distributed virus loaders - Randal L. Schwartz in perl.beginners mailing list.

I have moved my blogging software from Wordpress to Serendipity. It was able to import the entries from Wordpress without any problem. I needed to create 3 additional files to make the transition complete i.e. wp-atom.php, wp-rss.php, wp-rss2.php . These were needed so that people who were using the rss feeds from the Wordpress did not have to change their feeds again.

These files do nothing more than redirecting the users to the new feed url. For example, the content of the file wp-rss2.php is just

<?php
// For redirecting users who are lost 
header("Location: http://rajshekhar.net/blog/feeds/index.rss2");
?>

Beyond this customization, I did not have to do any more labor to migrate to Serendipity