Discovering Myself

These are the applications that I think are essential.

1. Adium (Instant Messenger)
2. Colloquy
3. AP Grapher
4. AppFresh
5. Cyberduck
6. Disk Inventory
7. iPodDisk
8. KisMAC
9. NeoOffice
10. OpenProj
11. SmartSVN 4
12. Transmission
13. WaterRoof
14. VLC
15. WireShark
16. NMAP

iStat Menus

Well, I was tinkering around last night and I finally wrote my first Mac application last night. It’s a little app that I wrote off of a tutorial, but it gives me an example of the basic structure of how things are designed in this system. I should be ok from here on out.

I did FUBAR my system the other night, I think what happened was that I installed a firewall and it conflicted with the existing firewall on the system, so it just didn’t like that. I subsequently reloaded the whole system. So I’m on from scratch!

Well, not 4 days after my purchase of a brand new MacBook, I have successfully fubar’d the system!  I’ve had to reload the Mac from scratch.  ROUND 2!

Well, let’s take a look. The way that Anti Virus programs work is that they create a “signature” which is a hash of the virus. From this hash, the anti-virus program will match the malware hash with it’s database and if there is a match it will block it.

Now, let’s take a look at polymorphism in viruses.

Definition of a Polymorphic Virus:
A virus that changes its virus signature (i.e., its binary pattern) every time it replicates and infects a new file in order to keep from being detected by an antivirus program.

So there you go, it changes it’s signature EVERY time that it infects a computer. So there is no anti-virus that can catch everything using that mechanism. They are starting to get better with heuristics, which is a method of detecting an infection by what it does rather than what it looks like.

So, that is why it doesn’t stop everything!

I would definitely not want to see this one approaching me if I were on the ocean in a barge!

Ocean Storm Front

Well it looks like someone is trying to hack my site.  Looks pretty generic, they are executing a possible overflow and sql injection technique it looks like.  Hopefully my service provider is protecting against such things.  My WP is always up-to-date so we’ll see.

Well, I finally broke down and bought a MacBook.  And of course before even turning it on I upgraded the 1gb of RAM to 4gb of RAM.  DUH!

Well, so far I’m happy with it, I bought it just so that I could learn the technological aspects and to see if it would help me in my career with penetration testing and other network and hacking related stuff.  I am a security engineer so I need to know what every is using in order to protect against it.  It’s one thing to have the technical knowledge, it another to be able to utilize it.

So here’s to me buying an Apple… *sigh*  I never thought I’d do it.

This is a great question… how old would I be if I didn’t know how old I was?  I’d probably say late twenties… *sigh* and I’d be right.

How old would you be if you didn't know how old you were?