Archive for the 'FreeBSD' Category
I have been a long time Zend Studio user for developing web sites and PHP applications. Now, don’t get me wrong. I am a huge fan of the Zend development environment. It is a multi-platform application (thanks to Java), has excellent code completion and highlighting capabilities, and is overall a well designed IDE. But, some of its turn-ons are also turn-offs.
Java is extremely bulky. I have never been a fan of Java applications. Now, there’s nothing wrong with Java or Java based applications, but I just haven’t ever particularly liked Java apps. I prefer an application that is native to the operating system I am running, which these days is Mac OS X on an Apple MacBook. When I used to run FreeBSD exclusively, I preferred applications that would run natively on FreeBSD. But, I was able to run Zend Studio on FreeBSD due to the fact that it runs in a Java Environment. See what I mean?! The turn-ons are turn-offs and vice versa… It’s like a catch 22.
Zend Studio also has a ton of useful features for developing web sites. Utilities related to SQL and debugging, etc. Basically, a lot of features I never used. I only used the development portions of the environment so I really don’t know how good the other utilities in the Zend Studio are for development.
So, what if you could have an application with an excellent development interface with code highlighting and completion, built-in previewing of your applications, a graphical CSS editor, a built-in SSH client for connections to a remote server or a local shell, a PHP manual/language reference, and books. That’s right… books! And, what if this development environment was developed to run natively on Mac OS X?! Sound good (to you Mac users, anyway)?!
Well, now is your chance. This software may not be new to you, or the general public as a whole, but it is to me. The application is called Coda (cool web site, eh?!), developed and distributed by Panic, Inc. Imagine everything you love about Zend and runs natively on your Mac… Plus it has books! That’s right… books!
I have been using Coda for a little over a month. The interface is extremely sexy (well, it does run on Mac) and intuitive. The way sites are displayed is extremely nice with a screenshot preview of the site you have defined. It is a lot more fun to choose a site to work on based on a home page preview than from a list. Not real functional, but definitely a plus in the eye-candy department. Having all of the built-in features (that I described earlier) at your disposal within this easy to use window is extremely helpful, and helps reduce desktop clutter.
So, since I have been using Coda, I have been very impressed with the IDE. It is intuitive (which I said before), extremely sexy (which I said before), robust in the functionality arena, and it has books… Have I mentioned the books?!
Now, I haven’t used the books, but I have “virtually” thumbed through them. Well, it’s really only one book but it is divided into three parts: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The book these subsets are from is titled The Web Programmer’s Desk Reference from No Starch Press. It is extremely handy to have these references right in your development environment for easy access when you need to know what property X does in CSS, or what arguments function Y accepts in JavaScript.
And my last words are this: If you’re a Mac OS X user and also a web developer, I highly recommend you give Coda a try. There is a “Try Before You Buy” download available from the Panic web site (again, nice web site). Give it a try and let me know how it compares to your current development environment. I’d be interested to see what a.) other development environments and tools you all use, and b.) what you think of Coda.
Until next time…
All 4 of us average admins (ok, maybe there were more, but in reality, there was probably less…) used to frequent the #averageadmins channel on irc.freenode.net (freenode.net). This was back in my FreeBSD days and I was using the command line version of BitchX and loved it. I could switch between different windows, have different chat sessions in different IRC rooms opened, etc., etc. Life was great back then.
Now, since I have been using Mac OS X on my Apple MacBook, I have become a bit spoiled in what I expect from applications that I use on a regular basis. The Aqua User Interface is so so beautiful and I am now getting to where I expect everything I run to be just as beautiful, even if it is a third-party and/or open-source application. That’s bad, I know…
So, I want to get back into chatting and monitoring IRC chat rooms these days as there is a plethora of information and support available in these chat rooms. BUT, I want to do it from my MacBook with the same beauty I get from my other applications. Well, that time is now for my IRC needs. I discovered an IRC client today called Colloquy that really brings IRC to life on the Mac. It provides a number of useful features that I am not used to in BitchX. The interface is just as you would expect from an OS X application and the different plugins available and scripting options at your disposal makes this a truly full featured IRC client.
If you’re using OS X and want to try a little something different for your IRC needs, I highly suggest giving Colloquy a try. It is very impressive and has a lot of options for meeting your IRC needs on a Macintosh.
Update: Join me and/or anyone else in the #averageadmins channel on the irc.freenode.net IRC server if you ever just want to hang out with some “average” guys. I’ll be on most often after 6:00PM Central Time.
Until next time…
Lately, Chris and I have been rekindling our love of wireless technologies. We’ve been doing some wardriving and have also been messing around with WEP and WPA cracking again (See the notice at the bottom of this page). Chris has been able to successfully crack his WEP keys before using the tools available in the Aircrack Suite on Linux, Debian to be more specific. Now, me on the other hand, I’ve never been able to crack my WEP key.
My first attempts were flawed because I was never able to successfully patch the drivers for my ORiNOCO Classic Gold PCMCIA card under Fedora Core Linux. I needed to patch my drivers so I could put my card into monitor mode for use with Kismet or the Aircrack Suite.
Once I came back to the *NIX (Unix/Linux) world and reentered the game with FreeBSD, my Orinoco Classic Gold card was fully supported. I could put the card into monitor mode and what not but for some reason I could never get it working with Kismet. I then moved to a Linksys WPC55AG ver. 1.1 PC Card which uses an Atheros chipset and therefore was supported with the the ath driver under FreeBSD. Now Kismet was happy, but guess what?! The full set of tools included in the Aircrack Suite wasn’t completely ported to FreeBSD… Tough break!
Here it is 2007 and I’m sporting a 13″ Apple MacBook. The best commercially supported Unix on the market, in my opinion. I’ve blogged about it before and I’ll reiterate it here again that KisMAC is an extremely nice application for keeping your eye on wireless activities. Well, I recently found out that its also an extremely powerful tool for attempting to crack WEP keys and that it also supports my newly acquired D-Link DWL-122 wireless USB stick for performing such tasks.
I have made two attempts to crack my APs WEP key and both have failed miserably. I’m not sure what is happening, but once I have gathered almost 30k packets and am injecting weak IV packets back into the mix, the application kind of locks up. It doesn’t lock up completely as it is still capturing data and injecting packets, but every option in the drop down menus of the application become disabled/grayed out. It makes it kind of hard to do anything else with the application since your hands are tied and you can’t even save your data, attempt a crack of some sort, or even exit the application properly.
So, I have ordered another KisMAC supported USB wireless NIC. I purchased 4 (I couldn’t pass up the price they were being sold at on eBay and they’re supported on Linux as well as Macintosh) Ashton Digital WRUB 2011i NICs. I only bought two items off of eBay but there are two NICs in each box. Hopefully, this is better supported in KisMAC as I read some documentation about some issues with the DWL-122… after I bought it of course.
Hopefully, once these new NICs arrive I will finally be able to crack my WEP key for the first time. I look forward to the day when I am able to do this on a platform of my choice and I don’t have to break down and run Debian like Chris just to be cool and crack my WEP key! Of course, there’s always virtual machines… Maybe I could run Debian in Parallels on my MacBook and crack WEP that way… It’d still be done “from a Mac”, right?!
Until next time…
Notice: No, we’re not trying to crack our WEP keys so we can learn to do something malicious to anyone else’s network. We’re merely interested in the technologies involved in cracking such keys and the fact that the “security” vendors are selling us is so easily penetrable. Its research ladies and gentlemen. That’s it!
I have been fascinated with the Mac Mini for quite sometime and actually thought that this piece of hardware would be my entrance into the world of Macintosh due to its size, price, and the fact that you can use your already existing DKM. When I purchased my MacBook from the Apple Store in Plano, Texas, I talked with a salesperson about the Mac Mini. She said that a lot of people were purchasing the Mini for use as a server. I thought that was an extremely cool idea.
Think about it. Most data centers aren’t getting any bigger. Every server manufacturer out there is trying harder and harder to cram more and more into 1U rackmount servers. Even so, the length of these machines is way too long. I mean, you took a tower server and squashed it down to like an inch to an inch and a half tall but the rest had to be flattened out and spread over a larger footprint. The Mac Mini measures 2 inches tall and is 6.5 inches square. How many of those things can you fit on the real estate a 1U server takes up?! A lot!
First of all, let me just ask, is it 11:54PM or 10:54PM… My mind and body can’t tell. The time change last night appears to have taken place already on all of my physical clocks, computers, etc., but my mind hasn’t really caught on yet. Just to be safe I have ironed my clothes for tomorrow and have already shaved my head and face. I don’t expect that my alarm going off at 6:35AM (5:35AM “my time”) tomorrow morning will have a very nice effect on me and I just might get up a little late… We’ll see.
I should also let everyone know (you know who all 3.234 of you are) that I didn’t ever get around to creating my giant poster (or was it a huge poster?) this weekend. I ended up doing some things around the house, working on a couple of projects for FS, and went to work today with Chris.
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