Rodale Books == SPAMMERS

I would publicly like to thank Rodale Books (the company that produces Bicycling Magazine, Men's Health, Prevention, etc.) for spamming the crap out of me. Thanks for all of the unsolicited email, folks! Also, thanks for providing no reasonable way for me to get off of your mailing lists.

And actually, let me also thank Active.com for providing Rodale Books with my email address. I am certain that this is what happened, since I used a unique email address when I did business with Active.com.

I have a special message for the folks at Rodale Books: let me be very clear: I will never ever ever ever buy one of your books or magazines.

Idiots.

The anatomy of a silly network attack

It has been a satisfying week at work. I have recently been working with ${organization} on a weird network problem that they've been having. Actually, "working with ${organization}" isn't really right -- they've been complaining and I've been telling the staff that runs ${organization}'s network that I strongly suspected that their network was suffering from a certain type of problem. But the staff at ${organization} won't follow my simple recommendations...not without any evidence of my theory.

So, I decided to put together some proof for my theory. The network problem that ${organization} is suffering from only happens during odd hours, and it was my observation that this problem involves a particular computer protocol. Specifically, this problem involves a particular verb in this computer protocol. Even more specifically, this problem involves too many of these verbs being transmitted onto the network at once. This is sort-of a denial-of-service attack....

In order to prove my theory as to what was going wrong on ${organization}'s network, I put together a simple deep packet analysis tool. Next I hacked together a postprocessor that went through all of the data that was collected and produced a histogram from this. Here's the final product:


Like I said, the problem occurs at odd hours. I thought I had some pretty compelling evidence of my theory at 10:30pm (their time) on March 11th. But then at 3:30am on March 14th my evidence became overwhelming.

For my analysis, a graph like this is invaluable. With this graph, I was able to zero right in on the problematic traffic on the network.

I'm still working with ${organization} on addressing their network problem. I wish I could say that one evil villain caused this problem, but my evidence shows that multiple end-users were involved with this problem and I have to assume that the problem is more of a mis-configuration problem rather than an actual network attack....

bash programmable completion

I am a huge fan of the bash programmable completion project. Just this morning I found myself typing:

scp remote-host:some-long

...and then I hit tab. At this point, the "bash programmable completion" code took over and within a half-second my terminal window was updated with:

scp remote-host:some-long-long-filename

...and if you really understand what went on when I hit that simple tab character, you should be truly impressed.

I love this package! This is one of the neatest, most well-put-together projects I have seen in a long time.