ResTek has agreed to let Dr. Bover’s computer security students audit our servers. Hopefully they will learn a thing or two.

Last year, Bover (“Professor Packetslinger“) got a lot of heat for not specifying whether permission was required or not.

I’m curious about what kind of things they’ll find…

Today I was looking for a way to properly wrap messages in Gmail. I started out using Thuderbird, but POP access is a pain on slow connections (most coffee shops, including Hotwire, the coffee shop I’m writing this from) when you’re subscribed to some high-volume mailing lists.

It turns out that switching from the Rich Text to Plain Text editor works just fine for my purposes, but I ended up also finding out about Mozex.

It allows you to launch an external editor (e.g. Vim in a Konsole window). You basically just select which textarea you want to edit, launch the program, and when you save your changes it exits and places the text in the window.

I’m now using it to launch Vim within a Konsole, using my normal .vimrc, but disabling line numbering and setting textwidth to 72 (for e-mail) instead of 79.

I never liked logging in to the wireless here at WWU very much. It only takes a few seconds, but it is rather annoying. I decided to sit down today and write a quick script to make it easier.

It uses cURL and is really only a couple of lines, because I didn’t feel like adding error checking for such a simple script.

Check it out here. You’ll have to modify it a bit to suit your personal needs. You’ll also need to download the certificate bundle for IPSCA from here.

kian@algernon ~ $ sudo sh wwu_bs_login.sh
DHCPDISCOVER on iwi0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 3
DHCPDISCOVER on iwi0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 7
DHCPOFFER from 140.160.128.1
DHCPREQUEST on iwi0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67
DHCPACK from 140.160.128.1
bound to 140.160.130.104 -- renewal in 300 seconds.

Attempting to log in as mohagek from 140.160.130.104 ...
Logged in with IP address 140.160.130.104