Author Archives: samurai

About samurai

I like computers... A lot. So I tend to spend a lot of time doing varied things with them. Often you'll find me playing with Python or PHP, fighting with operating systems, ranting about some off-the-wall concept, or preparing for zombies.

A “hacker” Christmas carol

Posted on December 23, 2010 by samurai

Tired of singing the regular 12 days of Christmas? Then this year as you’re stuck doing the rounds, try and slip this one into the mix: The 12 hacker days of Christmas – brought to you by Hollywood.  Movie references … Continue reading →

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Writing IRC bots using ii

Posted on October 2, 2010 by samurai

I recently read about ii, a file-system based IRC client, over at IRC-Junkie which really sparked my interest.  ii provides a clean interface of FIFOs organized under a directory structure for users to communicate with an IRC network.  After playing … Continue reading →

Posted in Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Review of Surviving Cyberwar by Richard Stiennon

Posted on September 13, 2010 by samurai

If you’re looking for depictions of “cyber-Katrina” or “cyber-9/11”, this book isn’t for you. Richard Stiennon’s[1] new book “Surviving Cyberwar”[2] points out as early as in the introduction that it’s not trying to scare people with scenarios of “cybergeddon,” but … Continue reading →

Posted in Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Odd bugs and the case of an aging database

Posted on August 29, 2010 by samurai

I was doing some troubleshooting recently trying to fix some issues reported in the Captcha of a registration system. The Captcha wasn’t always properly displaying and wouldn’t recognize valid code entries intermittently. After tracing some of the PHP to find … Continue reading →

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Defcon 18 – photos and followup

Posted on August 2, 2010 by samurai

Another year, another Defcon has passed. This year I went with CarbonLifeForm (who helped out with this post) and we attended talks, mingled with fellow enthusiasts, spread the psych0tik word, and enjoyed general debauchery. I was asked to take some … Continue reading →

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Preserving partitions when adding datastores to ESXi

Posted on April 15, 2010 by samurai

I was recently building out a new ESXi box and bought a Seagate Barracuda 1.5Tb SATA 2 drive to use as the datastore as well as to backup some data from a laptop who’s hard drive was acting up. The … Continue reading →

Posted in Guides | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment