In the spirit of social networking/research interaction, I have established a Zotero group for researchers working in my field; the novels of Thomas Pynchon. The site is here: http://www.zotero.org/groups/thomas_pynchon If you haven't used Zotero before, it's the ultimate open-source, freely available citation tool. It will do all the hard work of formatting your citations and even share them across multiple computers.

My first attempt at Python got a slot on the Ubuntu opportunistic developer slot. Check it out here: http://www.jonobacon.org/2010/03/06/the-grand-app-writing-challenge-submissions/ Also, note, first post to posterous. sshsplit featured was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on March 11, 2010.

Introducing sshsplit sshsplit is a GPL-3 licensed application that multiplexes ssh dynamic tunnels. For example, you might normally run: to get a tunnel on 127.0.0.1:54321 that goes through remote-host. However, if you are using a network-resource-intensive application (torrent clients for example), this single tunnel will not suffice for, say, 1000 concurrent connections.

Currently, owing to a bug, scp in Kubuntu and Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) does not allow you to autocomplete remote directories (when you have a passwordless ssh setup, obviously). While I have submitted a patch for review, this will not be backported into 9.10 and so, those who wish to have this functionality, should follow these steps: Visit this bug to read about the problem.

The latest version of Wine (as of 2009-06-23: wine-1.1.24) fixes an important regression that makes it far far easier to install Microsoft Office 2007 on Wine. I personally never use any of the Office suite for anything except ensuring that the documents that I export from OpenOffice for Word users look acceptable and professional.

Sometimes, the built in functions of a framework are good enough for your purpose and there is no point in reinventing the wheel. Fine examples of this are to be found at The Daily WTF, one of my personal faves being The Backup Snippet. However, sometimes the .NET Framework does a poor job of parsing FTP FastSnap URLs. For instance, ftp://ausername:apassword@IP:port/path.

I came across quite an interesting SQL Injection scenario today. The software in which the vulnerability resides will remain anonymous until fixed, but an abstracted version of the scenario can safely be outlined below. The objective of the software is to restrict user accounts to certain IP addresses when accessing a bulletin board.

Once you have basic, non-interactive shell access to a Windows box, there are a limited number of ways in which you can transfer files to the remote host. This brief article will explicate the echo/ftp method. If you can execute, be it by SQL Injection, or a webserver vulnerability the echo command, then you can write a script file which can fetch a file of your choosing from a remote host.

Sometimes you will find yourself on a machine that has no inbound connections allowed, which can make even the most basic task a complete pain. Never fear, if you can initiate an outbound connection to an SSH server of your choosing, it is no problem whatsoever to remap the ports by what is known as Reverse Forwarding. The first step is to set up key-based, passwordless authentication in SSH.

It can be very handy to be able to login to an SSH shell without supplying a password. Here's how. Firstly, on your client machine, generate a keypair. If you are using Windows you can do this using PuTTYgen. If you are on a Nix machine issue: {% highlight bash %} ssh-keygen -t dsa {% endhighlight %} Next up, we need to copy the public key to the server.

Just sharing something that might be of interest to anyone with a similar problem. A non-technically minded friend is attempting to use Serif WebPlus to create an E-Commerce site with Paypal integration. The problem is that all his stock is in Excel format which, although Serif claims they can handle, throws an error dialog with the helpful information that the worksheet or database does not have the required fields.