average admins

Here’s the deal…my wife and I have maintained a site (blog) for my son since he was born. Now that he just turned a year old, I would like to go back and make a book out of the first year’s worth of posts. I would like an actual hard bound book, capable of having pictures.

I found a piece of software called BookSmart, made by the folks from Blurb. It looks like it might do what I want, but it has a limited number of templates and options. It does however have support for “Slurping”…basically if your blog is hosted at Wordpress.com, or a few other blogsites, it will go out and pull down all the posts/comments and automatically (if you choose) populate the book for you. However in practice, this didn’t work quite so well. I temporarily made a copy of our blog at Wordpress.com just for this feature. It ended up only getting the first couple months of posts, and no comments.

I have been looking for other options to do what I want, and the only other thing I have found is some Mac software (iLife I believe)…but alas, I don’t have a Mac.

Has anybody else done this, or heard of it being done? I wouldn’t be opposed to manually copying all the posts/comments myself if I HAVE to, but that would be a lot of work…and there may be a better option.

Long live the original average admins blog! I recompiled my kernel this evening for my laptop and in the process wiped out my NDIS driver for my built-in wireless card. Guess what?! I blogged about how I got that working back in the day, my 5th entry in “My FreeBSD Diary” to be exact.

There is some good stuff over there at the old AA blog! Check it out! Here is a link directly to the search page… Don’t laugh too hard. I made that blog from scratch! I think I did quite well considering I am one guy with a limited amount of time for maintenance (which is why I switched to WordPress).

Until next time…

From Security Monkey:

Look At All Of These Passwords!
Posted 8/21/2006 by SecurityMonkey (Information Security Investigator)
Comments (61) | Trackbacks (0)

If you use any number of popular web forums or even some commercial services like classmates.com, amazon.com, netzero.com or your provider’s webmail service, you may not be aware that you’re sending your credentials over the internet in the clear.

Some sites appear to secure your credentials, but they really don’t. Some offer SSL sign-ins, but don’t make them the default. Others don’t even make an attempt to use proper SSL encryption or any attempt to obscure the credentials.

Remember the wall of sheep from DefCon? All of those people that kept logging into net resources assuming that nobody was listening? They were wrong!

Let’s look at a couple of great examples of sites that have really awful security design, and see exactly how easy it is to steal credentials if you have access to the wire. These were obtained using nothing more than a linux laptop, a cable modem, ettercap (running ARP spoof and MiM gateway) and a bit of coffee.

Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past year I have become very interested in content management systems, or CMS. These systems can come in a few different forms: blogs (such as this one), wikis, bulletin boards, and so on. Some of these CMSs, such as Mambo or Wordpress, are quite exhaustive in their reach and feature set.

(more…)