Hacker for Hire

That’s right, our second iteration for the REM project has been completed. What is the REM project you ask … sorry, can’t tell you, that’s proprietary and you’d need to sign an NDA … nah, I kid. While I don’t want to spill all the beans, I will say that we are working on an web-based, AJAX-ie-nebulous type of application that will hopefully kick some major booty down here in the Tri-state area … those of you who know what it is and what it does … keep ‘yer yaps shut until we get so far ahead of the competition that Google decides to buy us .

The big things that I’ve taken away from this project already are:

We’ve been working with the Dojo Toolkit and while it is very robust … the voodoo that one must conjure into making things function is unbelievable. From functions that die magically in the middle of running without warning (check your commas (,) in JavaScript) to things like programmatically creating a pop up dialog widget only to have it cover your “user input” area because there is a magic order to doing it one way over the other, Dojo is filled with all sorts of things that would make a lesser programmer cry. Still … it is better than writing it by hand and pseudo-object oriented programming is better than nothing. Anyways, I’ll have another post up shortly about some idiots that have come across my site, but haven’t managed to read my blog (oh yeah, you know what I’m talking about ).

“Gmail for Mobile” is something I’ve been looking forward to for a while. I must say I’m very impressed. I was a little panicked when I went to log in and there was no “save my password” check box, but that is some magic that happens in the background . Browsing messages looks beautiful on my Nokia E60. I love that a lot of the AJAX-ey sort of stuff like showing multiple messages, searching through contacts, clicking on messages and having them expand just like they do in Gmail. It really provides a very crisp and responsive user interface. I also like the fact that I can view most attachments right in the application itself. Here’s a link if you want to download it directly to your computer to hack around with:
http://gmail.com/app/v1.0.0/en/gmail-g.jar

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First off, I’m sorry it’s been a while since I’ve updated. I’ve been insane busy fighting the battles that need to be fought at the house; however, I do want to document this since I can’t seem to find how to do it anywhere else on the Internet and I know that I can’t be the only other person in the world that would ever want to store a PKCS#12 certificate in OpenLDAP using C. It took a little longer because I wanted nice clean sections of code for people to look at. Kudos to the Code Snippet [direct download] plugin for making that happen, originally found at http://blog.enargi.com/codesnippet/. (The guys blog is down and has been for some time … I though I’d make it available to anyone else who wanted this kick-ass plugin.)

First a little background information on the “userPKCS12″ object in the schema. I quote directly:
PKCS #12 [PKCS12] provides a format for exchange of personal identity information. When such information is stored in a directory service, the userPKCS12 attribute should be used. This attribute is to be stored and requested in binary form, as ‘userPKCS12;binary’. The attribute values are PFX PDUs stored as binary data. OpenLDAP note: “;binary” transfer should NOT be used as syntax is binary

Now does anyone else think that it’s really stupid that the file is STORED and REQUESTED using the “;binary” transport syntax, but that you aren’t allowed to use it? If you do a Google on this, you’ll find a nice little mail message about someone who was trying to overcome this issue but never said how he did it … and that’s what I’m here to fix.
Continue reading ‘Storing PKCS#12 Using the OpenLDAP C API’ »

Well, after 10 years I finally decided to get a new monitor. No, the old 15″ CRT is still working fine, you just have to jiggle the cord every now and again to get the color to go back to normal instead of the funky purple haze.

I must admit, I was a little leery of getting a wide screen monitor though I’m not really sure why. Movies are wide screen, DVDs are wide screen, and most TVs are wide screen these days; however, I’ve never had to sit and stare at a monitor that was a wide screen. I think the big turn off was I saw wide screen laptops before I got the chance to try out a real monitor. I don’t care what you say, it’s not a “lap”-top with a 22″ monitor.

Needless to say, I’m beyond impressed. At $190 shipped (thanks New Egg), this has been one of the best computer investments that I’ve made in a long time. With 1440×900, 5ms, 32-bit goodness, my eyes love it. It’s super bright, though some have complained that it’s too bright … I’d say those people are wusses and aren’t used to burning out their corneas on a daily basis. One of the best parts is that there is NO DRIVER for it in Windows (Winblows) XP, it just works like it does in Linux (Xorg was a touch fussy for a moment, but we’ve come to terms). If you’re in the mood for a new monitor and want something that’s big enough to see everything, but small enough to not emit unhealthy doses of gamma radiation, I highly recommend this monitor.

Booya … back in the saddle again! Sorry for the outage folks, but the migration of the hackerforhire.org domain is complete … that and the repairs to my fscking electricity are almost completed. The campaign (not just one battle mind you) will be up later after I pull these posts out of Word documents and blog-o-fy them.

This also means that HTG’s web hosting is now up and functional. It’s going to be a few days before we start offering services since we want to make sure that we are providing nothing but the best service (yeah, it sounds like marketing bull, but its the reason we’ve decided to do our own hosting instead of these other jokers) so stay tuned. Same bat time, same bat channel.

I really like my domain name, why else would I have bought the silly thing? Anyway, I like it. I think that it’s clever, catchy, and relevant to the service I wish to offer, Computer Security for LEGITIMENT BUSINESSES. I find that more and more, I’m receiving emails from people who want me to do illegal and unethical bull crap. I think I really need to get my FAQ up on what Hacker For Hire is and how it’s not a whole sale house for people who want to break into school computers and change grades, or people who want to read their husband’s or wife’s email.

So as a statement: IF YOU AREN’T A LEGITIMENT BUISNESS WITH A LEGITIMENT NEED FOR A COMPUTER SECURITY EXPERT, DON’T EMAIL ME ASKING FOR HELP ON WHATEVER STUPID YOU ARE TRYING TO ACCOMPLISH. UNLESS YOU HAVE EXPLICT AND UNDENIABLE OWNERSHIP OF THE SYSTEM IN QUESTION, I WILL NOT HELP YOU IN ANYWAY.

Now, that being said, here are the most recent email I’ve received from people trying to get me to do dumb shit.
Continue reading ‘To Legit to Quit’ »

As you may or may not know, I purchase a new phone and switched my service to T-Mobile. I found out that the Nokia e60 will actually play video (no, I didn’t pay attention to that, I was more concerned with the SIP coolness capabilities). So I stared doing some research into making/converting video for access by mobile devices.
Continue reading ‘3gp And Other Oddities’ »

Where’s the fire? In my pants? No … you pervert … my laptop hard drive burst into flames. Ever since I got my Tecra M4, I’ve had issues with it overheating and locking up. At first I thought it was the processor; however, a simple little application to monitor processor temperature showed me I was looking at the wrong place. Once again, Linux saved my ass by telling me that my S.M.A.R.T drive status was in a pseudo failed state due to the hard drive overheating about 50% of the time that I used it. Problem was that I needed my laptop at my job(s) and I couldn’t bear to part with it for more than a few days; hence, the 3 weeks Toshiba said it would take to fix … totally unacceptable.

Fortunately, now that I’m off contacting and using other people systems I could get it in for repair. The “closest” service location is basically the Cincinnati Airport (which is not in Cincinnati, go figure). The next closest place is Columbus. Well, I figured that when all the black stuff on my system’s display turned permanently red, I should take it down to Pomeroy (not that I wanted to … I don’t really trust their low level technicians from prior experience) and loose it for a week so I didn’t have the urge to kill someone (staring at a read screen with green text does that after 8 or so hours). But that’s just a side story that leads up to the real blog post.
Continue reading ‘Holy Firey Bits Batman!’ »

After I don’t know how many hours of surgery/disaster recovery/uncontrollable swearing/whatever you want to call it, MOST of hackerforhire.org is back up and running. Email is still flaky, but that’s of no concern to anyone other than me. That’s the short
version of what happened … this is the long one.
Continue reading ‘Clear! **BVHSITTT** …. Beep, Beep’ »

As the time to join the Xetron workforce draws closer, I’ve been killing (hunting implies failure) around the mobile phone market trying to find a new phone/toy that will be “legal.” By legal, I mean no camera. As you can imagine, this is a huge pain the the butt because there are about 40 out of 4000 cell phones that meet this stringent little requirement. The number gets even smaller when you try to add Bluetooth into the mix.

Fortunately, I came across GSM Arena. They’ve got a niffy little “Phone Finder” tool that allows you select exactly the features you want (or don’t want in my case) and presents you with the answers. It worked so well, I was ready to cry. The best part is Google Notebook just arrived the other day and it makes a very nice place to keep my results. Here’s the phones that I’ve found that “might” meet Xetron requirements. I say “might” because I’m uncertain how they feel about phones that have internal memory even if you don’t have a way to access it other than downloading stuff from the web over a piddly 384kpbs stream. The phones are ordered as to my preference towards each, most popular one at the top.

Now I’m going to go complete off track and say “WTF?!?”

Would someone mind telling me why the “cool” phones never come out in the US first? If you look at my list, there are two Sony Ericsson phone on it. Both are usable within FCC regulations at connect to my Cingular service; however, Sony isn’t going to be releasing them in the US. I even checked their website. “Oh yeah!!! These are going to be out in the UK, the Middle East, Asia in about 2 months!” But the US is no where listed on the release schedule. In fact, all the countries around the US are on getting the phone … but not us. Explain this to me. Enlighten me as to why this stupidity is allowed to roam free in the world without someone killing it. Until then, I guess I’ll just have to buy it and import it off of the foreign websites. Guess what phone manufacturers … The Jerk Store called and they are all out of you! And while they were on the phone, they also said they were out of their biggest seller … your retarded marketing morons that say a camera has to be in every fricken phone!