I have the joy of working on an Excel spreadsheet right now. To replace an asterisk or wildcard, you must escape the character with a tilde. For example, changing all * to .+ would be Ctrl+H to bring up the Replace window, then use ~* for your search character and .+ for your replacement.
Replacing wildcards in Excel
May 26th, 2009hackerspaces presentation
May 3rd, 2009i just uploaded my hackerspaces presentation from the may first meeting. thanks to everyone who came and listened and pretended that my realultimatepower.net inspired presentation was funny 
Google Brings 3D To Web With Open Source Plugin
April 21st, 2009“Google has released an open source browser plugin that provides a JavaScript API for displaying 3D graphics in web content. Google hopes that the project will promote experimentation and help advance a collaborative effort with the Khronos Group and Mozilla to create open standards for 3D on the web. Google’s plugin offers its own retained-mode graphics API, called O3D, which takes a different approach from a similar browser plugin created by Mozilla. Google’s plugin is cross-platform compatible and works with several browsers. In an interview with Ars Technica, Google product manager Henry Bridge and engineering director Matt Papakipos say that Google’s API will eventually converge with Mozilla’s as the technology matures. The search giant hopes to bring programs like SketchUp and Google Earth to the browser space.”
Chrome Experiments
April 4th, 2009http://www.chromeexperiments.com
“We think JavaScript is awesome. We also think browsers are awesome. Indeed, when we talk about them, we say they are the cat’s meow – which is an American expression meaning AWESOME.
In light of these deeply held beliefs, we created this site to showcase cool experiments for both JavaScript and web browsers.
These experiments were created by designers and programmers from around the world. Their work is making the web faster, more fun, and more open – the same spirit in which we built Google Chrome.
Naturally, if you’ve made something fun and fast with JavaScript, please send it in. We can’t post everything, but we’d love to see it.
Thanks for visiting, and happy experimenting.”
Cisco router gets hacked – attacker adds tunnel
March 30th, 2009Wow, I mentioned this in a presentation a while back, talking about ‘remote sniffing’ via tunnels. Looks like a perfect storm of holes allowed someone to actually try to pull this off. Also, pay special attention to how the good guys caught it.
DNS Offenders
March 12th, 2009I noticed some interesting DNS error messages in my syslog and wanted to find out who the biggest offenders were.
sudo grep named /var/log/syslog | awk -F”: ” ‘{print $3}’ | grep ‘^[0-9]‘ | sort > dns_harass_ip.txt
for ip in $(uniq dns_harass_ip.txt); do echo -n `grep -c “$ip” dns_harass_ip.txt` && echo ” — $ip”; done | sort -nr
Let’s break these down and explain.
- sudo grep named /var/log/syslog: Show any syslog messages from named
- awk -F”: ” ‘{print $3}’: Using the characters colon-space as a delimiter, print the third field (IP)
- grep ‘^[0-9]‘: Only show fields that start with a number (IP)
- sort > dns_harass_ip.txt: Sort and dump the IP addresses
- for ip in $(uniq dns_harass_ip.txt); do: For each unique IP address
- echo -n `grep -c “$ip” dns_harass_ip.txt`: Print, without a newline, the number of occurrences
- echo ” — $ip”: Then print, with a newline, the actual IP address
- sort -nr: Sort by numeric value in reverse, or descending, order
That’s all. From there you can firewall any outstanding offenders or select a different course of action.
