finally learning a little bit about hacking
Having been a website admin I often had to deal with the aftermath of someone hacking a server, but my response wasn't usually all that sophisticated. About a week, and a half ago someone started leading a "expliot workshop" to work on trying to create new exploits as a learning exercise. The book "The art of exploitation 2nd edition" was pointed out as one of the best guides to actually doing this, and I decided to get a copy. Recently I've been trying to seek out fun programming tasks, and hacking always felt rather game like.
Hello new blog
As is common for technical projects I abandoned one solution because it was frustrating to use, and found something else that is new, and shiny, but ends up being more work to setup. I'm using ikiwiki for this blog. It has the misfortune of having one of the most awful default themes I've seen in years. I started trying to customize it, but I'm not a designer so I probably just made it look worse. The purple is from a picture of a sunset, and the green is from avocado. If you see this later it might not have these colors any more because I'll probably change it soon. I picked it because it appeals to my sysadmin tendency to pick whatever creates the least system load. It can theoretically handle slashdot linking to it even with my mediocre hosting resources. I want to write about the tech stuff I'm working on, and have the time to work on it not futz with the website. If people use RSS to read this will they even see the crappy theme?
ikiwiki
I love the idea of it, but unfortunately it looks rather iki by default. I looked into hacking at the templates, but I don't like the templating system. So I'm going to poke at making it able to use Template Toolkit instead of whatever it is using, and then getting a friend to help create pretty templates. Hopefully a fun process.
Starting a business
About a month ago I started working on setting up a new business. I knew it would be a lot of work, but after a month I don't even have the basic marketing in place to have earned my first $1. I think I'm almost there.
GO
I learned to play go tonight. I expected to be destroyed, and I was. I learned a little bit. Maybe next time I won't be destroyed as badly.
I'm working on fixing this website
This website has been broken for a long time, but I wasn't really motivated to fix it because I wasn't feeling like writing blog posts very much, and the domain was serving it's other purposes just fine without the blog working. External forces have motivated me to fix it though, and I've been feeling more like blogging lately too. I've been poking at getting the old blog working, but it looks like it is broken in a way that is hard to fix, and not giving me much debug output. I'm probably going to switch to joomla as I've already spent a lot of time learning how to work with it, and it's actively being developed. In the mean time you can look at my old entries on archive.org.
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