Curiosity in Practice
At work this week I needed to compare two files to see if they had the same MD5 or SHA256 hash. After spending way too long trying to get hashdeep and md5deep to work correctly and not finding anything else to easily do this I wrote compare.py today.
This script is the definition of utilitarian but I hope it can help you also.
I see these types of listicles on LinkedIn or Twitter a few times a week:
5 tips to protect your business against cyber crime
Ten ways to prevent a data breach and protect your small business
3 tips to keep your company secure from hackers
They are written by *security experts* and they say effective security is as easy as:
The only way to respond to these articles is:
The truth is SECURITY.IS.HARD!
When an *expert* writes an article based on the premise that effective security is achievable by following a canned security framework they devalue the whole security industry. Implementing security in any organization is about performing the unique risk analysis and that cant be achieved through a checklist.
So the next time you see one of these listicles just say…
“Mr.Gamblin this is your sixth year in the role of my father. How do you think this year has gone?”
– My son during my imaginary yearly performance review.
Most holidays are set aside to celebrate an event that happened in the past while father’s day is mostly a day to celebrate what was accomplished in the past year.
It is impossible for me to celebrate without stopping and thinking about the past year. The easiest way to do this is to go straight to some classic performance review questions and apply them to my parenting skills. So here are the five questions I asked myself this morning:
“What went well this year and what might have gone better?”
“What can I do differently next year?”
“What are the most important goals for the coming year?”
“What knowledge or skills do I need to develop to meet my goals in this job?”
“In the past year, what achievement am I most proud of?”
Overall I think I did a good job this year but being a dad is one of the few roles in my life where I do not mind and actually expect to get a few “needs improvement” and no “exceeds expectations” because I am the one setting the expectations and I can never do enough for my son.
I spend a lot of time dealing with risk at my job.
I spend a lot of time dealing with how to communicate risk at my job.
I spend a lot of time dealing with how to accurately communicate risk at my job.
I put together this risk statement flowchart to help make sure I include all the information necessary when communicating risk. If I dont have something in every box I know my job isnt done.
Here it is in PDF format if that works better for your needs.
Last December I visited my Doctor for my yearly checkup and he told me I was getting a “little husky” and that I was over 200 pounds for the first time.
That was a wake up call. I had always thought of myself as “athletic” although I had slowly went from a waist size of 30 to 34 over the last 10 years.
So I made a goal to try to be under 160 pounds by June 1st.
After reading online I decided the best was to do that was follow these 3 rules:
Only eat 1000 calories a day.
Go to the gym 3 or 4 times a week.
No excuses.
On January 1st, 2015 I weighed:
201.2 Pounds
155.7 Pounds Lean
45.5 Pounds Fat
22.50% Body Fat
It wasn’t easy and I knew I had a lot of work to do. I used to eat 1000 calories at some (OK most) meals and I hadn’t routinely been to the gym to workout in years.
I gave up eating much pasta and bread. I stopped eating candy. I started to run and lift weights again. It worked.
Today I weighed:
153.5 Pounds
136.6 Pounds Lean
16.9 Pounds Fat
11% Body Fat
I still have some work to do as I would like to add back about 15 pounds of muscle mass and get under 10% body fat but it is nice to feel “athletic” again.
“I am useless by myself.
My success hinges entirely on the people in my life.”
I was challenged this weekend to think about this statement and decide if I really believed it or not. It was such a thought provoking statement that I wanted to share it and not overly pollute it with my own thoughts.
I wrote Bad Actors this weekend to automatically generate a list of known bad IP addresses. My plan is to use it to do data mining with against my ELK stack but It might also be handy for firewall and IPS rules or any other use you could come up with.
I had a friend recently tell me about how he was using a tool called rPlay to airplay his apple devices through his raspberry pi. As a guy who is always looking to save $67 I decided to give it a try.
After configuring it I couldn’t get it to work and after some investigation I found an error message that rplay couldn’t connect to test.vmlite.com on port 9080. Since I practice egress filtering on my home network I wasn’t surprised that it didn’t work.
After a network reconfiguration I was now rPalying to my office TV. I was actually impressed by how well it worked.
I was also running tcpdump port 9080 -i eth0 -w 9080.pcap at the same time to see what was so important that my raspberry pi had to talk to test.vmlite.com.
Come to find out it was so that it could do this:
According to the Unofficial AirPlay Protocol Specification rPlay is basically forwarding everything you do while using rPlay to a server running off a residential DSL line in California.
I would suggest if you need to airplay you stop using rPlay and do yourself a favor and spend the $67 on an Apple TV.
How Do You Handle Challenges?
We have all been asked that question during a job interview and went on to talk lie about how much we love new challenges and how well equipped we are to handle them.
Most people hate challenges. We strive for easy, stable and guaranteed results. Challenges are hard, unpredictable and always have a chance of failure.
Here is a quote from Muhammad Ali that I have been thinking about recently:
It’s lack of faith that makes people afraid of meeting challenges, and I believe in myself.
-Muhammad Ali
If you want to be successful everyday you have to look for new challenges and accept them.
You also have to be willing to fail and failing hurts.
Are you ready to accept new challenges or are you just going to keep playing it safe until your next interview?
