iTunes Money

Somebody gave me an iTunes gift card as a present. I do download some apps from the iTunes app store. However I only get the free ones. I still activated the gift card and posted the credit to my account. Who knows? Maybe there will be some cool app I need to buy in the future.

This is the thing I wondered about. How does the gift card and credit activation work? There is a code on the back of my gift card. It is a 16 character code. The first 15 characters are alphabetic. The last character is a number. You key it into the app store, and it knows the amount of credit to give you.

Surely these numbers by themself do not equate the money. If that were so, I could steal a stack of them from the store and be app store rich. I imagine that when you purchase the card, the cashier scans it in and that activates the value on the card. That would be the smart way to regulate the cards from theft.

But what is that 16 character code? It might be some sort of encrypted value. Or then again it might just be a random set of characters to make my card unique. This will require more thought before I can figure it out. What do you all know about this number? I want to know.

Control of Your PC

You probably have heard of some malware trying to take control of your PC. But get this. Now people are renting out time for jobs to run on your PC. This appeals to the gangsters. The evil deeds they do will come from your PC under their control.

Damn. This is quite a setup. Part of the defense against criminal activity is to check the IP address of the place where connections are coming from. If a botnet has compromised computers all across the world, the traffic might look legitimate to the untrained eye. Furthermore my computer might be aiding the crime.

I used to not care too much about spyware and malware. Who really cares if somebody is stealing cycles from my PC? Now I know the answer. I care.

Software Impersonation

There are some security peeps in my customer's organization that are looking for malware. They identified some of the programs I was running as suspicious. Here is their reasoning. Nobody else is running programs with the same names as the ones I run. What?

They must be auditing the name of all programs runs by everyone. Then they see which ones are unique to certain individuals. They conclude that there must be something fishy with these apps. Duh. I am a developer. I write and name my own tools.

I tried to explain this to my management and to the customer. They said they would look into it. In the mean time, I am supposed to not run these programs. Hello? I need them to do my job. What is a coder supposed to do?

I figured I could name the programs "winword.exe", or something like that. However that would be a subversive act. It might just get me past the keystone cops. Anyone else with any sense would be able to figure out that I am impersonating Microsoft Word. That might be an even more egregious offense. For now I am rewriting my crucial tools in Java. That way when they look at the name of the program I am running, all they see is "java.exe". Noobs.

Terms and Conditions

I am stayting at a hotel during my vacation. They have free wireless Internet. However you need to agree to their terms and conditions. I am interested in figuring out how they make your browser open up to their TOC page. However I did find the list of conditions interesting.

• Do not display disturbing images


• Do not do anything illegal


• Do not harass others


• Do not destroy stuff belonging to others


• Do not copy protected material


• Do not access any porn


• Do not bypass any security


• Do not install any viruses

They did try to provide some guidance if you need encrption. They recommended some third party virtual private networks (VPN). You should use SSL to access email. You should also make use of SSH. Use your computer's personal firewall. Make use of antivirus software. Don't open attachments.

The Case for Emacs

When I am on UNIX, I use vi for file editing. However I read an article today about emacs that was most interesting. It touted some of the emacs power that I would like to have at my fingertips. I tried emacs before. It just did not feel natural. Maybe it is time for another look.

One thing is certain. Emacs is not easy to learn. A key tenet of emacs is that you should be able to do anything by just pressing keys. There is not cut and paste per se in emacs. They have something like it though.

You can open a whole lot of files in emacs. They each get their own buffer. Emacs has a built in spell checker. Nice. It also has sophisticated undo and selective searching.

The list of emacs featues goes on and on. There is support for regular expressions. You can also execute shell commands directly from the program. I just may have to give it a try.

Best Things are Free

I just went through a huge list of free .NET tools. Thanks to Qink for providing the links. I chose the top four tools I thought you might be interested in. Here is the low down on these freebies.

DotNetZip can do everything you want with zip files. Any dot Net apps can use it. It even works undo Mono. You obviously need the .NET framework to use this thing. It is distributed as a DLL. You can make self extracting zip files with it. The tool even supports AES encryption. Damn. Get this now.

PDFSharp lets you create PDF files. It is open sourced under the MIT license. The routines to draw on the PDF file are the same types you use to draw on the screen (i.e. GDI commands). It supports transparent images. Nuff said.

Selenium is a tool to help test web apps. You can record a session using Firefox. Then you can play back what happened. Alternatively you can export the activity to your programming language for modification. Your app can then work with the Selenium server to play back the actions. Sweet.

Finally there is DocX. It allows you to create Microsoft Word documents. It is released as a DLL. DocX requries .NET and Visual Studio. All the Word goodies such as tables, headers/footers, and pictures are supported.

Hacking Tools

I have been talking about free tools recently. But instead of any old tools, I should focus more on hacking tools. Let's do that here.

Date Cracker 2000 gets you past most time sensitive software. You know. It pwns trial software that expires in 30 days. It also works on shareware. The tools is distributed "for educational purposes only". LOL. The authors have agreements with some software developers. So it won't crack all trialware. It can come in handy when you are coding up some software that expires.

PuTTY is an SSH client. It also does Telnet as well as xterm terminal emulation. The web site where you download it from has a warning. The software is illegal if encryption is illegal in your country. Weird. This program is better than the stock applications that come with Microsoft Windows.

The Advanced Port Scanner is a tool that runs on Windows. You enter an IP address or a range of addresses to scan. This program is fast because it is multithreaded. You actually specify how many threads you want it to run. The latest version of the program was released in 2006. You can save the options for reuse.

Some other tools of interest include nmap and p0f. They are a network mapper and passive listener respectively. Maybe I will review them in depth some time later.