Subversity

At work I'm currently researching systems and process automation for our internal servers. I have also been researching distributed datasets and am currently looking at the Cassandra project. Other things that have made it to my brain: Heartbeat, Linux Virtual Server, and DRDB for High Availability solutions.

So what about when I'm not at work? Believe it or not, Web-based RPGs have played a big part in my "off-work, on-line" time for awhile now, so I guess I'll update anyone who is here from any of those games: I've quit Bootleggers. Roderik, if you read this: Keep my points, haha. The short story is that I had been IP banned (due to a mis-understanding, not due to anything malicious) but there was a bug in the appeal forum's authentication that allowed anyone to access the details of those bans. This made my ban public knowledge. While Sabin was certainly kind enough to fix it as soon as it was brought to his attention, I decided that it made a good "walking away" point.

So what's next? Well, I've been playing Downtown Mafia as well as doing some game development of my own. I'm currently writing a code-base for some web-based RPGs I have had ideas for. I may eventually try to sit down and learn ActionScript/Flash/Flex and start making my games a bit more... "immersive" but, for now, regular HTML (with maybe a little bit of JavaScript) will suffice. And of course, with web-based game development comes web-based game development research...

Out of state plates + factory tint on my back windows + cooperation = pat down by L.A.'s finest. Hmph.

One of the many nerdy things I enjoy doing is reading the Word of the Day RSS feed from dictionary.com. Anyways, today's word of the day is sesquipedalian.

sesquipedalian \ses-kwuh-puh-DAYL-yuhn\, adjective:
1. Given to or characterized by the use of long words.
2. Long and ponderous; having many syllables.

Boy, they weren't kidding. Unfortunately for sesquipedalian, defenestrate is still my all-time favorite.

And for those who are interested, dictionary.com has also started releasing Word Explorer Podcasts!

In light of the recent decision by the U.S. Senate to allow the NSA to continue to perform warrantless wiretapping on U.S. Citizens, I feel that the use of encryption is now more important than ever. Here's a few things you can do to keep your private communications between you and your intended parties. These tips won't just help to keep you safe from the government, but will also help to protect you from identity thieves and crackers as well.

I have purchased an SSL certificate and am happy to announce that you can now access this site via HTTPS. As donations come in, I will purchase SSL certificates for my hosted sites as well. My goal is to have 100% of content on this server available via HTTPS.

I'm on the road for the next few days, driving from Connecticut to Los Angeles, CA. There will not be (m)any updates during this period of time. If you wish, you can stalk me using BrightKite.

Update (7/5): I made it! I drove 3000 miles and I am now a resident of Los Angeles, CA! My promised updates should begin appearing soon.

I wrote a very simple program to read Minesweeper's memory and display a grid showing where the bombs are. I used OllyDbg for disassembly and reversing and CheatEngine for quickly finding known values in memory.

During this process, I found out that Minesweeper CHEATS, only spawns about half the bombs, and moves bombs mid-game. (Sometimes to where you are clicking, sometimes it will move a bomb that you click on.) Regardless, I consider this project a success.

During this process, I found that Minesweeper will sometimes assist you and move bombs away from where you are clicking on. Originally, I thought that Minesweeper was only "spawning" about half of the bombs, but as it turns out I misunderstood the way minefield was represented in memory and all bombs are generated at the beginning of the game and not first click or any later clicks.

I'm in L.A. right now. I came out here for a job interview which went very well. I really like the area, the people at the company I interviewed at, the company itself, and the offer I was given. There is a 90% chance I will take the job and move out here within a month. :-)

I haven't added anything here in awhile, so I decided I would post a little about what's been going on with my bad self.

I got promoted at work to Technical Services Manager and now I am in charge of almost all of the daily operations at my work and also have a huge hand in infrastructure planning. I guess all my network geekery is starting to pay off.

I'm currently planning on increasing the versatility of our OPTEMAN links between our datacenters by implementing Q-in-Q on our core Foundry equipment. OPTEMAN is a service provided by AT&T that is basically just Ethernet over Fiber via their Metro. Area Network (OPTical-Ethernet-MAN). What I ultimately hope to accomplish, is the ability to use CARP across multiple datacenters to provide redundancy for some of our core infrastructure services; For example: DNS.

Oh, and even though I just got promoted and love my job I've decided I am going to move to L.A. It's something I've always wanted to do but did not have the means to do. I have decided to do this while I am still young and don't have anything holding me back. More on this later.

Another big part of the reason on why I haven't updated is that I don't really know what to write about? So far, everything I've written for this site has been information that I had alot of difficulty finding, or just plain didn't find anywhere else. I haven't come across anything that has been difficult to find lately, with the exception of all of the information I have on Q-in-Q. This information will be made available as soon as I get it up and running myself -- fully tested. I put alot of pride into my writing, and would hate to release an article based soley on assumptions. Because hey, you know what happens when you assume. ;-)

I have been modifying Sebek to get it to work in more recent 2.6 series (~2.6.18) kernels and ran into some snags. Most notably, I could not intercept/redirect/wrap any system calls. As it turns out, Sebek couldn't find the system call table. The code Sebek was using to find the system call table is 100% identical to the code found in this article on KernelTrap.

Unfortunately, that code is outdated as either loops_per_jiffy, boot_cpu_data, or sys_call_table appear to have been moved. I found that I could find the system call table between unlock_kernel and loops_per_jiffy and have modified the code as follows.