downgrade.orgThe rantings and insight of an ethical hacker, coder and IT samurai.

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I started using time machine with the network drive hack…

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

This turned out to be a life saver. Last Monday at work things started slowing down, big time. Eventually everything locked up. I could move my mouse but the OS would not accept keyboard input and none of the open apps would respond.

I powered it down and it booted up to the ? folder. I booted into my Leopard DVD and opened disk utilities. No hard drive was detected. How bad is that?

On the new MacBooks the hard drive is a user serviceable part. They had a replacement hard drive to me the next day.

Restoring from my time machine backup got me up and running in no time at all. I found that there are two ways to restore during the leopard install process.

1. Stop the install and go to the utilities menu. Select the time machine restore option and it will restore the entire hard drive as it was before.

2. Go through the install process as you would for a fresh install with your time machine drive plugged in. After the install reboots it will ask you what you want to restore. If memory serves it had check boxes for…

• Home directory
• Applications
• Settings
• Everything else

The “everything else” is useful if you have fink installed as its outside the normal directory structure.

EDIT: Now I know why the drive failed.    It was the same model as the article reports and I did hear loud clicking.  Mystery solved.

I finally got around to updating my layout… as promised.   And I am posting more… as promised.

You can stop kicking me now.

Coming soon!

New layout!  Regular posts (promise)! Free beer!

Wait; let me check my unique visitor count.

No, strike that last one.  I’d go broke.

But the first two still stand.

I am a firm believer in David Allen’s GTD (or Getting Things Done) and have been searching for a nice and easy to use task tracking system. I am also a huge fan of all things gui-less so naturally I started coding series of scripts for the purpose and GeekTool to display todo’s on my desktop.

Initialy it was nothing more the following line added to my .bash_profile

alias todo=’echo $1 >> ~/todo.txt’

But before long I found myself wanting to write a ‘done.sh’ script to remove items. At that point I realized I had to implement a numbering system, use copious amount of awk and sed and spend far more time than I cared to on the project.

At some point I recall briefly reading about something similar on digg. A quick google search lead me to todotxt.com.

What a system this is! Combined with GeekTool I have an excellent way of staying organized.

Rather than explaining how it works I embedded an example video for you.

Now all I have to do is implement a system that uses DUE:MM/DD and a cron’ed script to alert me via growl when something is due. Ahhh, if only I had some free time.

I made a promise to myself that I would keep this updated. I intended on posting daily (okay, at least every-other day). My only excuses are the new job and impending wedding.

I promise once things stabilize I will be back it again.

I have added an image gallery and fixed the search function.  Happy surfing.

I finally decided that it was time to move on to a job, in which all I do is information security. Yesterday I accepted an offer with another department on campus and will be starting in this new role April 16th.

Because MSU uses union titles that don’t describe the specific role, it is difficult to say for certain what my real title would be. Having closely read the job posting, comparing it to other postings on job boards and what I know of InfoSec careers, I would describe it as “Information Security Analyst”.

It will be refreshing to get away from certain aspects of my current job: specifically support. I’m done crawling under people’s desks, thank you.

The best part of this move is that I will be able to devote all of my attention and research to InfoSec.

The whole “job search” process was interesting this time around. I interviewed at MANY different places, for all sorts of security related positions. I turned down a number of offers and had some exciting and interesting opportunities.

The two positions I narrowed it down to are the one I accepted (obviously) and a permanent position as an “Information Assurance Analyst” doing contract work for the Department of Defense. I would have had secret and IT-1 security clearance. It sounded exciting, but I decided that MSU was the best fit.

MSU is a 13 minute commute as opposed to an hour for the DoD and I can pursue a college degree here at MSU.

Putting clients first, by putting employees first, immediately after prioritizing fiscal responsibility and leveraging profitability towards exceeding by empowering our employees to put clients (and themselves) first, in a diverse and respectful environment of only those that come first, first.

Anyone can excel during ideal or normal conditions.

Its how we handle ourselves under adverse and stressful conditions that define us as people.

- Bryan Murphy