8 bits

Twitter hacked and defaced

As indexed by Google this morning:

 
More information

Free photoshop alternative

I just stumbled upon nice free software to edit photos, maps etc. It's really a nice alternative for programs like Photoshop. At the moment, I use it to make some screenshots of the scripts that I write. The name of this free program is Paint.NET and more information is available here.

Perl for Windows 2008

I was looking for a method to run perl scripts on my Windows 2008 server. I tried ActivePerl, which was working great on my Windows XP machine. However, ActivePerl seems not to be working with Vista and 2008.

I have found a nice alternative: Strawberry Perl. This 100% open source and up to date Perl for Windows runs every script I need (XP, 2003, 2008, Vista and Win7).

Newzleech.com down (as well as a lot other businesses)

Quite a strong action of the Ukrainian secret service, don't you think ?

Login to Windows server using SSH

Sometimes it can be extremely useful to login to a Windows server using SSH. This is a procedure to achieve this.

First, download and install Bitvise WinSSHD on the Windows server. If needed, you can read the documentation first. After installation, you have to start the WinSSHD service in order to activate SSH.

Create diagrams with multi-platform DIA

Do you want people to know what you're developing ? I have found a nice free (and multi-platform) program to make diagrams (in order to make things a lot more understandable). The name of the tool is Dia and you can find all information at:

http://live.gnome.org/Dia (Linux)
http://dia-installer.de/index_en.html (Windows)

Dia is roughly inspired by the commercial Windows program 'Visio', though more geared towards informal diagrams for casual use. It can be used to draw many different kinds of diagrams and has standard sheets for a.o. network, cisco, sybase, database, UML etc. etc. I think it's really a great product !

Synchronize files and folders

I was looking for a free Windows tool to synchronize files and folders between two locations on my network. I have tried Microsoft SyncToy 2.1. Both 32 and 64 bits versions are available.

 

The GUI is easy to understand. But, there's also a command line tool available (SyncToyCmd.exe) which is nice when you want to use a batch job to synchronize your files automatically on a daily basis. I think this is one of the most comfortable tools available for this job!

View the contents of a DD image while it's being made

I'm acquiring an old hard drive. The hard drive is not recognized in Windows. So, the only option for me is to make the image with Linux. At the moment I'm making a DD image, using this command:

dd if=/dev/sdc1 of=/home/my_name/my_dir/partition.image bs=4096 conv=notrunc,noerror

To my surprise, I can open and view the contents of the DD image with FTK Imager, while the DD image is being made and certainly not ready yet. No error warnings at all, in the background the DD process keeps goin' on and the image get's bigger and bigger.

I think this is quiet cool, maybe this trick can be usefull in very urgent cases, what do you think ?

About base64

The new release of UltraEdit offers the possibility to encode / decode files with base46. I want to know more about it. I found nice information in this file from Chris Melnick  (2004).

Lab FTK Imager: file carving using the MFT

NTFS uses the MFT as a kind of database to keep track of files. We can use the MFT to find the location (cluster) of the file and we can carve the file in order to study it. Let's use FTK Imager to see how it works.