On Blogging

Posted on February 14, 2019 · 1 min reading time

I really like this idea from a longer post about the ethics of blogging by Brett Terpstra I sometimes wish that job résumés and Tinder profiles required an appendix of all of the comments a person has left on other’s work in the last year. You can learn a lot about a person from how they approach offering criticism when it’s not face to face. Anonymity’s a mess, I’m thankful I seem to live on a nicer part of the internet most of the time, more through lack of exposure. [Read More]

TheHive and Elasticsearch Initial Errors

Posted on January 29, 2019 · 1 min reading time

I was trying to install TheHive and ran into some issues with configuration. When trying to log in for the first time, I was getting “Elasticsearch cluster is not available” as a little red popup on the login screen. When checking the log /opt/thehive/logs/application.log I found the following line: 2019-01-28 21:22:34,494 [WARN] from org.elasticsearch.client.transport.TransportClientNodesService in main - node {#transport#-1}{1eyCBCV1Rs-oVwFIHuQ7cw}{127.0.0.1}{127.0.0.1:9300} not part of the cluster Cluster [Cluster], ignoring... This means the cluster name doesn’t match between TheHive and elasticsearch - mainly it is probably not set in elasticsearch - because that’s the default on install. [Read More]

Robert A. Caro and Lyndon Johnson's Story

Posted on January 28, 2019 · 1 min reading time

This fascinating story of a life-long journey to explore the story of President Lyndon Johnson’s life was amazing read. I don’t have any real interest in American politics, but I do love great writers, and Robert A. Caro is definitely one of them. He didn’t look up. After a while, I said tentatively, “Mr. Hathway.” I couldn’t get the “Alan” out. He motioned for me to sit down, and went on reading. [Read More]

Bug-O Notation

Posted on January 26, 2019 · 1 min reading time

This article by Dan Abramov about Bug-O Notation is a great one. The Big-O describes how much an algorithm slows down as the inputs grow. The Bug-O describes how much an API slows you down as your codebase grows. Without explicitly calling it out, he describes using simple Finite State Machine concepts that allow for explicit, identifiable state positions rather than nested calls and race conditions. It’s a great way of thinking about things - if you know where you are, you can explicitly reset the UI and rebuild it with much less effort. [Read More]

M5Stack Flow flashing on Linux

Posted on January 23, 2019 · 3 mins reading time

This post has been updated - I found some errors which don’t brick devices, but cause issues with wifi. Don’t use old versions of esptool! This is a pretty sparse example but it got me working on my Ubuntu machine. Install esptool from pip - don’t use the one from apt, as of this writing it’s v2.1, where pip has v2.6. The command is pip install esptool Download the M5Flow MacOS version from http://flow. [Read More]

Citrix SSL Trust Error 61 on Linux

Posted on January 8, 2019 · 1 min reading time

Trying to log into the Citrix Xenapp Storefront at work today, it looks like they’ve got a new certificate. This is a pretty easy fix, search for the certificate name and download it, then put it in the right place. For me, on my Debian machine, it’s /opt/Citrix/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts. I didn’t have to do anything else, it just worked at that point - start the client again and back to work. [Read More]

VMware Horizon/View on Ubuntu and Firefox

Posted on January 4, 2019 · 2 mins reading time

I’ve been running Linux on my main laptop for a while now, first Debian (Kali) and now Ubuntu 18.04.1. Since Firefox updated to their “Quantum” rebuild, I haven’t been able to use my work’s VMWare View environment, which is a bit annoying. There was an issue I reported here on the VMWare forums with handling the vmware-view:// URI for some reason. Since a workmate had recently replaced his Mac with a Ubuntu laptop, I offered him lunch to try his hand at working it out. [Read More]

Leadership Mode Activate

Posted on December 17, 2018 · 1 min reading time

A great article from Allen Pike on newly becoming a leader and considering your ability to be “on the tools” Okay wait, you may say. That’s cool, but I like Doing the Thing. I’m pretty good at it, and if I’m leading a team, will I still get to do it? Will I still get to perform the work that got me to where I am today? The short answer is: Yes, you can! [Read More]

Forged and Filed

Posted on November 30, 2018 · 1 min reading time

This is pure hand-tooled metalwork porn. More of his work at SethGould.com. [Read More]

Opsec, Who Needs It?

Posted on November 7, 2018 · 2 mins reading time

This article from Sophos’ Naked Security shows some incredible failures of opsec “because it just kept getting used.” Unfortunately for the US and its agents, it didn’t take long to find the moles. That’s due in large part to what one former official called an “elementary system” of internet-based communications – one that was never meant to stand up to sophisticated counterintelligence efforts such as those of China or Iran, let alone one that should have been entrusted with the extremely sensitive communications between the CIA and its sources. [Read More]