How to make a simple text logo for your website or blog - Pimp your blog Part III

Now that I have thought of the name "Tutorial Geek" for my blog, I am going to make a simple text logo rather than just having simple text. I will show you how to do this in Inkscape. This is similar to my post on Textures. Feel free to refer to that for additional ideas. Read article...

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How to change your Blogger domain URL - Pimp your blog Part II

This is going to be about how I changed my blog name and URL from mckayhead.blogspot.com to tutorialgeek.blogspot.com and kept all my stats and links in tact. Read article...

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How to make a blog background - Pimp your blog Part I

Paper texture for a blog.http://mckayhead.blogspot.com/2010/11/creating-business-card-using-inkscape.htmlNow that I am getting somewhat serious about blogging, I figure I might as well have a blog that looks somewhat decent. The background sets the tone for your entire blog, so this is my first step.The look I am trying to go for is kind of a geeky designer look. I have kind of been liking the grunge look recently and think I want to go for something...

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How to Draw Hello Kitty

Hello Kitty!So the last post I did was drawing a pumpkin. I am not too happy with that so I wanted to get something new up quick. Being in a somewhat Asian mood this morning, I decided a nice simple project would be to use Inkscape to draw Hello Kitty. Read article...

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Trying Ubuntu 10.10 in AWS Free Usage Tier

After trying 60 Free Minutes with Ubuntu 10.10 in Amazon EC2 yesterday, I decided to take the next step and try the AWS Free Usage Tier. This blog post by Jay Andrew Allen titled Getting Started (for Free!) with Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) helped me. One important caveat applies: this activity will not be completely free. The AMI chose uses a 15 GB filesystem, and the terms of the free usage stipulate no more than a 10 GB filesystem....

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Draw a pumpkin using Inkscape

Well; it is almost Thanksgiving and I love pumpkins so why not do a nice tutorial on how to draw a pumpkin. My goal for this is to make the pumpkin look as realistic as possible. Read article...

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60 Free Minutes with Ubuntu 10.10 in Amazon EC2

I decided to try Ubuntu in the Cloud because 1) I had a few minutes this afternoon and 2) it's free. If you follow the directions on their Web site you'll have access to an Ubuntu 10.10 server for 60 minutes, hosted by Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). It's really simple, so easy a caveman could do it. (Ouch.)First make sure you have a public-private SSH key pair.richard@neely:~$ ssh-keygen -t rsaGenerating public/private rsa key pair.Enter...

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Stop Killing Innovation

I hear and read a lot about how IT is supposed to innovate to enable "the business." Anytime I see "IT" in one part of a sentence and "the business" in another, a little part of me dies. Somewhere there is a Nirvana where "thought leaders" understand that there is no business without IT, that IT is as part of the business as the sales person or factory worker or janitor, and that IT would be better off not constantly justifying its existence to...

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The Problem Is with Gmail

In my last post I lamented a problem with Sendmail on FreeBSD. I was trying to troubleshoot a problem sending email from FreeBSD's periodic scripts to Gmail. I've determined that, as crazy as this sounds, Gmail is broken. (Some of you are probably not surprised. If you want to skip the drama and see the bottom line, scroll to the bottom of the post.)Let me start my case by showing network transcripts of one successful "periodic" email and one unsuccessful "periodic" email. I'm not going to change any email addresses in this post.The following...

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Creating a business card using Inkscape

If you are in the design business, a business card is a great way to show off your level of professionalism. No one will take you seriously if you claim to be a designer but use an inkjet printer with some business card template cutouts. I will try to make this look as legit as possible. Read article...

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FreeBSD Sendmail Problem

Thanks for the help with my script issue recently. I was wondering if anyone has seen this problem with Sendmail? I aliased root to "taosecurity at gmail dot com" as shown below. (I used the real email address on the computer.) This is a fresh install of FreeBSD 8.1.$ uname -aFreeBSD vm.taosecurity.com 8.1-RELEASE FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE #0: \Mon Jul 19 02:55:53 UTC 2010 \ root@almeida.cse.buffalo.edu:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC i386vm# diff -u /etc/aliases /etc/aliases.orig --- /etc/aliases 2010-11-18 10:30:37.000000000 -0500+++ /etc/aliases.orig...

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Thanks for Help with Startup Scripts

Thanks to @sevanjaniyan and @cperciva for helping with my FreeBSD startup script issue. By removing the ${barnyard2_flags} argument from the command_args section I was able to start barnyard2 properly:root 45842 54.9 0.5 18572 11116 ?? Ss 7:15PM 0:00.00 /usr/local/bin/barnyard2 -D -U -d /nsm/r200a -f snort.unified2 -c /usr/local/etc/nsm/barnyard2.confIn other words, the script has this now:. /etc/rc.subrname="barnyard2"load_rc_config $namercvar=`set_rcvar`# set some defaults: ${barnyard2_enable="NO"}: ${barnyard2_conf="/usr/local/etc/barnyard2.conf"}:...

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Calling FreeBSD Startup Script Experts

Has anyone encountered this situation? I've found several startup scripts on FreeBSD that result in duplicate arguments passed during startup. For example:vm# uname -aFreeBSD vm.taosecurity.com 7.3-RELEASE FreeBSD 7.3-RELEASE #0: Sun Mar 21 06:15:01 UTC 2010 root@walker.cse.buffalo.edu:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC i386vm# pkg_infosancp-1.6.1_3 A network connection profilervm# cat /etc/rc.conf# -- sysinstall generated deltas -- # Fri Nov 12 16:36:42 2010# Created: Fri Nov 12 16:36:42 2010# Enable network daemons for user convenience.#...

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Creating a Desktop Wallpaper using Inkscape

After seeing this tutorial for an abstract background, I thought it would be fun to do something similar in Inkscape. Read article...

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Two New Tools in Snort

No sooner do I get Snort 2.9.0.1 running than something breaks. However, thanks to Niels Horn I know a little more about two new tools included with Snort.First is u2spewfoo, which reads Unified2 output files and outputs them as text.[sguil@r200a /nsm/r200a]$ u2spewfoo snort.unified2.1289360307 | head -20(Event) sensor id: 0 event id: 1 event second: 1289360859 event microsecond: 881345 sig id: 2011032 gen id: 1 revision: 4 classification: 3 priority: 2 ip source: 192.168.2.107 ip destination: 172.16.2.1 src port: 44597 dest port: 3128 protocol:...

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Using Git with FreeBSD Sguil Scripts

Before today I never committed anything using Git. Previously I used CVS, but never got around to trying something more modern like SVN. However, I know several developers at work use Git, so I figured I would try committing my FreeBSD Sguil scripts (lame as they are) to Git at Sourceforge. This would allow me to keep track of changes and get the code out of my own repository for sharing and safekeeping.I started by cleaning up the directory...

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Updates to Sguil on FreeBSD Scripts

Early last year I posted Notes on Installing Sguil Using FreeBSD 7.1 Packages where I examined using the various FreeBSD ports for Sguil. In that post I showed that a lot of work was required to deploy Sguil, even if you used the ports or packages. Previously I've written about a set of scripts I maintain for deploying Sguil platforms in my lab. I decided to take a look at those scripts and update them for a modern environment, since a lot has...

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Texture in Inkscape

So I have been using Inkscape for many years now and I absolutely love it. I remember when I was taking some Adobe Illustrator classes in college that I would use Inkscape instead because it was so much easier and faster to use. There were however occasions where there were some assignments for the class that simply could not be done in Inkscape. I have decided to go and look at some Illustrator tutorials and see if I can replicate the concepts...

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Fix the flash on the Nikon D70 DSLR

This morning I fixed my girlfriends pop-up flash on her Nikon D70 camera. I decided to document the ordeal hopefully to help others with this problem (seems to be a poor design on Nikon's part). First of all; shout-out to Steve and Tony for posting on how to fix this problem. The primary reason for this blog post is to give more in-depth info on what is going on and provide an alternate solution to fix the problem.The Problem(s):The flash does...

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The HDR/Tonemapping/Image Quality/RAW vs JPG Experiment

I have been meaning to do an experiment like this for a while. I went on a hike and decided that today is the day I am going to do it.The Experiment:Create an HDR image using different file sizes and type (RAW) and compare the differences to see if it is actually worth bumping up the quality. Also; I will be comparing tonemapping. I have been dabbling in HDR photos for a while now and have concluded that creating an HDR image using 3 images vs just one does not seem to make any significant difference... I will find out if it does or not. In...

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XSS without Browser

To all Sec guys, I had been cracking my brain over these past 2 weeks thinking on how do i verify successful XSS attacks without using the browser. I know it sound absurd, but that's the way it is. All i have is pcap files available. From those pcap files, we can obviously search for those "script" word or other variants of XSS attacks by using regular expression. However, how do we know if an attempt is successfully executed or just false positive. Looking at the HTTP 200 response code, that will tell me that the attempt went through, but how...

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Collage: Defeating Censorship [aka Security] with User-Generated Content

The Economist article Anti-censorship: Hidden truths; A new way of beating the web’s censors brought a system called "Collage" to my attention. Collage, a project by Sam Burnett, Nick Feamster, and Santosh Vempala, described this way on its project site:We have developed Collage, which allows users to exchange messages through hidden channels in sites that host user-generated content. Collage has two components: a message vector layer for embedding...

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