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I just did the nerdiest thing I can think of at work today. I built a device that presses a button. Keep in mind, I’ve never programmed anything prior to owning this Arduino!

The portable air conditioning unit that cools our server room has a nifty feature that allows it to automatically restart in the event of a power failure. Sometime in the past year or so, that feature has stopped working on our unit. That means the server room gets HOT if we have a power blip over the weekend. This little device saves me a 40 mile (soon to be 1000 mile!) drive to push a button.

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You’ve got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught
From year to year,
It’s got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade,
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You’ve got to be carefully taught!

The Florida road trip was an epic, all around success! A quick list of stuff I did:

• Set mom up with a WiFi enabled digital photo frame and digital camera.
• Had lunch on the backwaters of Naples with a good friend.
• Got within 30 feet of a 10-12 foot alligator and took some great photos of it.
• Drove through the Everglades at sundown.
• Woke up to a sunrise on the Atlantic Ocean.
• Toured the Kennedy Space Center.
• Hung out with a girlfriend that I had when I was 15 years old. (Yes, sparks flew!)
• Hung out with some friends from a car club I was a member of over 5 years ago.
• Toured the Drag Racing Museum in Ocala.
• Took a walk through Payne’s Prairie amongst countless alligators, Blue Herons, turtles and Egrets – and photographed them as well.
• Toured the Museum of Naval Aviation in Pensacola.
• Had an amazing dinner with two of my best friends from high school whom I hadn’t seen in 15 years.

Long story short, it was one of the most amazing vacations I have taken, merely for the lost connections!

Photos from the journey can be found over at Flickr

It’s time for a change. Not a small change – like which route to take to work – a big change. I’m moving back to Florida next summer.

It all started when we had an emergency all-staff meeting at work last week. In a nutshell, as part of a long judiciary process, a judge granted the state’s motion to terminate their contract with our organization. Without this contract, our organization cannot survive. I don’t have a time frame to base anything on yet, but gut feeling and conversations with those in the know put the official lights out date sometime in the summer of next year.

I sat down and had long conversations with myself as to what I would do when I no longer have an office to go to. I ran through the scenario of running my own consulting firm and shot it down. I’m not networked enough in the area to feel good about jumping in feet first like that. In previous gigs, my best jobs have been referrals from other consultants that got in too far over their heads. I won’t have that luxury here. I’ve also noticed the area is generally low-tech on average.

I thought about contacting a recruiting firm, much like I did when I found my current position and having them do the dirty work to find me another position. This one makes the most sense, and although my position should pull a strong income – the positions just aren’t here in Memphis. I’m driving 42 miles one way to get to work right now. I’d love to find a position closer to work, but there are none. Even if there were positions available, my pay rate would be slashed to 1/3 of the amount my skills should fetch. This is looking worse than doing consulting. I can charge a lot more per hour for consulting than I could get in a locally filled position.

I thought about a different field altogether. A full time Law Enforcement Officer gets crap pay. I’d love to go full time behind the badge, but I couldn’t do it for the pay. I’ll stick to my on-call status with no pay.

I then thought about where I’m at. What is here? What makes me love the area. Why do I want to stay here?

That’s when it dawned on me – There’s nothing about Memphis that I particularly love. Granted, I’ve got friends here who I’ll miss and I’m sure we’ll keep in touch – but what if they weren’t here? I don’t belong here.

I see and hear people talk about how they love Memphis, they’ve left Memphis only to come back a few years later, etc. Today, for example, Twitter was full of people hammering out the #ilovememphis hashtag and why they loved it.

One that cracked me up was: #ilovememphis but now that I’ve gotten sucked back into Dexter I’m not sure I’m going out on the town tonight.

And that pretty much sums it up. I really and truly don’t know more than a half dozen people in the Memphis area outside of work. I talk to several more, but actually hang out and do stuff people – just a few. I’ve tried to enjoy Memphis and let it take it’s hold on me so I could get tangled up in it’s magic – but the magic just isn’t there.

Off to Florida!

I tossed around the idea of heading out west – which I really want to do. I’m just afraid I’ll run into the same thing with Memphis. I fear I won’t love it.

Florida, on the other hand, I love. I grew up there. I don’t think I’ll go back to Pensacola. I love Pensacola, but I want to live somewhere different. I’ve got a friend who lives in Naples. I visited him a few years ago, but Naples is so full of CASH MONEY that the pavement smelled like the US Mint. Yeah, you could make money there, but be prepared to shell it out big time in the process.

Jacksonville was another option, but, like Memphis, it never really grabbed me.

Gainesville though… that’s a different story! I’ve got some RX-7 buddies that live in Gainesville that I’ve known for close to a decade, I’ve got a couple of high school buddies that live there now and it’s a college town. It’s also a couple of hours away from watching the shuttle launch, watching the Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona, visiting the Everglades, you name it. I’m taking 10 days off in a week or so to make a trip to Naples, through Miami, up the east coast of Florida and a few days in Gainesville.

I can’t wait to get back to the humidity, alligators and palm trees. They are my love for Florida the way Beale Street, Elvis and the Mississippi River are for Memphis.

In my quest to get a balloon into the Stratosphere, I ran across a few teams using Arduino boards to operate payload functions and some that used the Digi Xtend RF modules for communication. I bought both!

The photos can be found on flicker by clicking here. There’s WAY too much to post here without going overboard!

If you can see this, then the server move is complete!

I’ve always had a thing for space. Ever since I was a little kid I was in awe at the shuttle launches on TV and the fact that chances were good – no matter how hard I tried – I probably would never visit space in my lifetime. It’s basic odds. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out. The odds are stacked against you if you want to go to space.

I want to do the next best thing. I want to send up a balloon and take photos. Well, “near space” anyway. It’s feasible to send up a balloon to 100k feet above the Earth’s surface with no special skills required. Where do I start? It would be difficult to do on my own, so if you’d like to help out it would be much appreciated!

Current goals for the balloon:

• Live photo feed
• Record HD video
• Transmit live GPS data with elevation for tracking and recovery
• Record and transmit internal and external temperature

Oh, and I want it to tweet that stuff to Twitter in a readable context in real time

The three main systems in a Near Space Balloon are:

• Flight Control
  • Provides telemetry data to ground control, allows ground control to operate servos or switches in the payload.
• Payload
  • This is what you want to do. Take pictures, record balloon movement, monitor temperature, etc.
• Envelope
  • Sadly, this isn’t a cool term for “Launch Window” or anything cool like that. It’s what the actual balloon is called.

I need to keep it under 6lbs to be clear of any FAA restrictions, but I want it to do some awesome stuff too. I need to first work on the Flight Control/Payload combination. I’m not quite sure what all I want to accomplish, but I’m going to brainstorm some ideas and get them on paper. From there – it’s BUILD TIME!

I’ve been toying with the idea of getting a new Canon DSLR recently. The 20D I purchased earlier in the year was released to the wild in August 2004, and as we all know – electronics improve over time.

I’m not a professional photographer by any means, but I like to have some control over my photos and the 20D has been a wonderful tool to step into the high dynamic range only DSLRs can provide. Even my boring, random photos look more “alive” than the ones I took with my previous point and shoot – an Olympus SP-350. The Olympus was a good camera but the shots it took never “awed” me.

I’ve been hearing a lot of buzz lately about the Canon Rebel T1i (aka: Canon EOS 500D) and decided to rent one and an EF-S 18-200mm F3.5-5.6 lens for a week from LensRentals. Since I’m local, I skipped the shipping charges and picked it up for $104.00. Not bad for a week to play with $1600 worth of hardware. Seriously check them out. They’ve got a ton of stuff!

The one feature that really had me intrigued was the ability to record HD video with the T1i. The footage it takes is nothing short of amazing, but it sucks at the same time. I tried several different lenses to try and eliminate the lens being the problem, but the autofocus goes bananas in video mode. It hunts up and down trying to get a sharp focus all the while you hear nothing but the focusing ring over the video. Sure, if you’ve got a sturdy tripod and know where you need to zoom or focus you could cut a nice little clip with it, but it’s definitely not a point-and-shoot video camera where zoom or focus changes are needed. Oh, and in order for it to autofocus you need to keep a button pressed on the back of the camera. I would have left the feature out completely.

So, now that the feature I most wanted to check out is out of the way, what about the rest? 

How does it compare to the ancient 20D? First off, comparing the 20D to the T1i is like comparing apples to oranges.  They’re both DSLRs, but aimed at two very different end users. In order to compare apples to apples, I’d have to compare the 20D to it’s successor, the 50D.

I’ve had the T1i for about 24 hours now and have taken some nice shots, but nothing I couldn’t have duplicated with my 20D.  Yes,  the images are physically larger, but most of my photos hit the web and I rarely print anything out. With no appreciable difference in image quality, I decided to compare feature to feature to help me determine if it would be a good idea to make the switch to the T1i. Let’s take a look at which camera wins out. Any features not listed are either not available on either model or they are equal.

Here they are in order, and you can follow along by checking out this PDF.

Price: 20D – Since it’s been around a while, they can be had for cheap.
Release Status: T1i – The 20D is discontinued, the T1i is brand new.
Max Resolution: T1i – The 15.1M Pixels of the T1i wins out by providing a physically larger photo.
Sensor Size: 20D – Surprisingly, the 20D still has a larger sensor. Larger sensor = good!
Pixel Density: 20D – Less dense is better. (erroroneously attributed to T1i advantage in PDF)
ISO Rating: T1i – The T1i has AUTO and 6400-12800 which the 20D does not.
White Balance Override: 20D – The 20D has the advantage of manually overriding the white balance in Kelvin.
Max Shutter Speed: 20D – 1/8000 of a second. TWICE as fast as the T1i.
Flash Range: T1i – It has 1 more meter range than the 20D.
Metering: T1i – The T1i includes a spot metering function that the 20D does not.
Continuous Drive: TOSSUP – The 20D shoots faster, but can’t take as many in a row as the T1i does.
Movie Clips: T1i – The 20D turns it’s nose up at movie making.
Remote Control: T1i – The T1i uses the E3 Connector and Infrared. The 20D uses only the N3 connector.
Viewfinder: 20D – The 20D uses a pentaprism design, which is superior to the pentamirror design of the T1i.
LCD: T1i – 3″ screen
LCD Dots: T1i – 920,000 vs the 20D’s 118,000
Live View: T1i – the 20D does not have a Live View function.
HDMI: T1i – The T1i includes a mini HDMI connector
Battery: 20D  – The 20D uses a 1390mAh Li-Ion vs the T1i’s 1050mAh Li-Ion.
Size and weight: T1i – The T1i is lighter and more compact than the 20D.

If you’re keeping tabs, then you’ll see that so far the T1i is in the lead as far as feature for feature goes but that’s not the deciding factor. The items that the 20D wins out on are what makes it so great. It’s a much better camera when it comes down the the nuts and bolts. It’s faster, the pixel density isn’t crowded, it has better optics and the weight of the camera feels solid in your hands.

I don’t think my 20D is going anywhere anytime soon. A new lens or two may be on the to-do list, but the T1i doesn’t have what it takes to make me give up the 20D.

I’m not talking about script kiddies or those that purposely attack other systems to gain access, I’m talking about the real hackers. Back in the late 1990s I was surrounded by those in the hacker scene. Hackers that reverse engineered software to bypass hardware checks, hackers that were experts in social engineering, hackers that made electronics do things they weren’t made to do. I fondly remember the days that had me reading the Black Crawling Systems Archive, following along with Fravia and learning the tricks of trade via IRC.

Along with the online presence that has dissipated, the meatspace presence has dwindled as well. Sure, people get older, have families and move on – but where are their replacements? Swap meets used to be full of people with odd ideas, obsolete – but coveted computer hardware, enthusiasm for making something from nothing. Maybe I’ve just been disconnected from it for too long. Maybe the era is over. All I know is that even in a city as large as Memphis, there are no Hackerspaces, the local 2600 appears to be fizzling out (from what I can see) and there isn’t as much as a local computer club.

I would love to see a Hackerspace put together in Memphis. Maybe the right person will come across this post and help find funding to get it off the ground. Hackers are everywhere, they just need a place to call their own to share ideas and teach others. Otherwise, they slowly fade away to obscurity in the masses of the internet. Maybe that would light a spark – at least in the Memphis area – to bring back the real hackers.

As a Systems Administrator I find myself always needing a certain tool of boot CD I don’t have with me. I’ve recently stopped carrying any CDs or DVDs with me as they always find a way to get damaged. I’ve just kept an 8GB Sandisk Cruzer thumb drive on hand with some specific tools. Until the other day these tools consisted of basic antivirus, system configuration tools and a couple of portable apps. I wanted something more, but never had the time to put together The Mother Of All USB Thumb Drives until now.

Let’s face it, the best USB thumb drive will boot on it’s own into it’s own operating system or specialized utility. Those are the thumb drives that save the day! Of course, if you have a thumb drive that boots into a drive imaging utility that really does you no good at all if you need to do a virus scan. That’s where Multipass (Multiboot) USB comes in.

Here’s how it works:

Every bootable drive has a set of instructions at a certain place that tells the computer how to load and run what’s on the drive. Normally, these set of instructions tell the computer to load Windows, OS X, DOS, Linux or whatever type of system you’re using. With the addition of a “Boot Manager”, the drive tells the computer to load the boot manager the same way – except the boot manager can now give you a selection of what you want to boot your computer into. Boot managers have been around for a while, but making their way onto USB drives is relatively new.

OK, so what’s the plan? What are we going to do with this USB Drive? I have several tools I consider “favorites” and we’re going to combine them all on one USB thumb drive. Here they are and what they do:

Trinity Rescue Kit – “Trinity Rescue Kit or TRK is a free live Linux distribution that aims specifically at recovery and repair operations on Windows machines, but is equally usable for Linux recovery issues.” - Trinity is my newest favorite tool. It resets passwords, runs virus scans from 4 different vendors, rootkit detection, filesharing, drive evacuation – you name it. It’s a very thorough tool.

Kon-Boot – “Kon-Boot is an prototype piece of software which allows to change contents of a linux kernel (and now Windows kernel also!!!) on the fly (while booting). In the current compilation state it allows to log into a linux system as ‘root’ user without typing the correct password or to elevate privileges from current user to root. For Windows systems it allows to enter any password protected profile without any knowledge of the password.” - It does exactly what it says it does. very well and damn near seamless.  Fantastic for Forensics and getting back into machines that you’ve long forgotten the passwords to.

Ophcrack – “Ophcrack is a free Windows password cracker based on rainbow tables. It is a very efficient implementation of rainbow tables done by the inventors of the method. It comes with a Graphical User Interface and runs on multiple platforms.” – As the one in charge of IT security, it’s my job to make sure your passwords are secure enough. This fantastic tool will tell me who passes and who fails the test!

DBAN - “Darik’s Boot and Nuke (“DBAN”) is a self-contained boot disk that securely wipes the hard disks of most computers. DBAN will automatically and completely delete the contents of any hard disk that it can detect, which makes it an appropriate utility for bulk or emergency data destruction.” - With a government IT background and my current position having to rely on HIPAA guidelines, DBAN is a great tool to wipe a computer’s hard drive to Department of Defense specs.

Hiren’s 9.9 – Hiren’s Boot CD is the standard by which all other Rescue CDs are measured. This CD has an amazing amount of stuff on it. It was my #1 go to CD for a long time.

Ubuntu 9.04 LiveCD - “Ubuntu is a community developed, Linux-based operating system that is perfect for laptops, desktops and servers. It contains all the applications you need – a web browser, presentation, document and spreadsheet software, instant messaging and much more.” – If the machine won’t boot at all and you NEED to get into an operating system for something, an Ubuntu LiveCD will save the day.

Windows 7 Install DVD – Windows 7 is going to be a hit. I’ll be prepared with the ability to install it from a USB drive as well as boot into the recovery mode to solve problems.

BackTrack 4 - “BackTrack is the most top rated linux live distribution focused on penetration testing. With no installation whatsoever, the analysis platform is started directly from the CD-Rom and is fully accessible within minutes.” - Again, as a security professional, I need to know when my systems are vulnerable. This amazing set of applications allows me to attack my systems and find their weak points.

Macrium Reflect - “A complete disaster recovery solution for your home and office. Protect your personal documents, photos, music and emails. Upgrade your hard disk or try new operating systems in the safe knowledge that everything is securely saved in an easily recovered backup file.” - Time for a new hard drive? Boot into Macrium for a fast way to clone your existing data to your new drive. It’s today’s Symantec Ghost.

Let’s begin!

There are three tools you’ll need to pull this off – PeToUSB, grubinst and grubfordos. Format the USB drive with PeToUSB by selecting the drive and choosing: Enable Disk Format, Quick Format and Force Volume Dismount. If you have a drive thatps over 2GB, you’ll get an error. Ignore it and format the drive as FAT32 using Disk Manager in Windows. Next, run grubinst_gui.exe from the grubinst package. Select your drive and click install. No options need to be changed. Copy the grldr file from the grubfordos package and place it into the root of your drive. Finally, create a text file called menu.lst and place it with the grldr file. You can now boot from the USB drive. You’ll quickly find out that at this point, there’s nothing to boot into except the bootloader! Time to put your goodies on the drive.

From what I understand, the next version of grub will give you the ability to multiboot directly into an ISO image of a CD or DVD more reliably. As of now, there are only a few ISOs that this will work with. Let’s go through some examples of my configuration.

Hiren’s BootCD: One of the easiest to set up. Simply extract the contents of the ISO and copy the HBCD folder to the root of your USB drive. Edit the menu.lst file and add the following:

title Hirens 9.9
kernel /HBCD/memdisk
initrd /HBCD/boot.gz

You’ll now have the menu option to boot into Hiren’s Boot CD. It gets tricky though. Let’s take a look at Ubuntu LiveCD. For this one to work, we need to extract the entire contents of the CD to the USB drive. Our menu entry for it would look like this:

title Ubuntu 9.04 x86
root (hd0,0)
kernel  /casper/vmlinuz boot=casper ramdisk_size=1048576 root=/dev/ram rw quiet splash
initrd  /casper/initrd.gz

It takes a little trial and error to get things working the way they should, but the payoff in the end is worth it. What about Ophcrack and other BootCDs that contain “BOOT” folders? If you copy all the BOOT folders to one location, won’t they screw everything up? Yes they will. What we will do is put them either in subdirectories or rename the BOOT folder to something like “Ophcrackboot” once they are on the thumbdrive. Here is my Ophcrack entry:

title Ophcrack
kernel /ophcrack/boot/bzImage rw root=/dev/null vga=normal lang=C kmap=us screen=1024×768x16 autologin
initrd /ophcrack/boot/rootfs.gz

Finally, here is my entire menu.lst for my Multipass USB drive:

splashimage=/splash.xpm.gz
color red/black white/black

root (hd0,0)

title Ubuntu 9.04 x86
root (hd0,0)
kernel  /casper/vmlinuz boot=casper ramdisk_size=1048576 root=/dev/ram rw quiet splash
initrd  /casper/initrd.gz

title Windows 7
map (hd0,0)/win7.iso (hd32)
map –hook
chainloader (hd32)

title Trinity Rescue Kit
configfile /submenu.lst

title Hirens 9.9
kernel /memdisk
initrd /HBCD/boot.gz

title Macrium Reflect
map (hd0,0)/macriumreflect.iso (hd32)
map –hook
chainloader (hd32)

title Kon-Boot
map –mem /konboot.img (fd0)
map –hook
chainloader (fd0)+1
map (hd1) (hd0)
map –hook
rootnoverify (fd0)

title Ophcrack
kernel /ophcrack/boot/bzImage rw root=/dev/null vga=normal lang=C kmap=us screen=1024×768x16 autologin
initrd /ophcrack/boot/rootfs.gz

title ntpasswd
kernel /ntpasswd/vmlinuz rw vga=1 initrd=/ntpasswd/initrd.cgz /ntpasswd/scsi.cgz
initrd /ntpasswd/initrd.cgz

title BackTrack 4 BETA
root (hd0,0)
kernel /bootbt4/vmlinuz vga=0×317 ramdisk_size=6666 root=/dev/ram0 rw quiet
initrd=/bootbt4/initrd.gz
boot

title DBAN
kernel /memdisk
initrd /dban.img

title Boot the First Hard Disk
rootnoverify (hd1)
chainloader +1

##END################
boot

So what does it all look like when it’s finished? I’ve added a custom background to my installation and you can too. read the documentation for grub4dos to find out how – it’s super simple. Now for the eye candy!

The HP Mini 1030NR on the boot screen

The boot screen up close