Cogitations by Brad

Doing this project for my work, which requires me to crack passwords from a long list of users, has taught me a lot of general things about passwords. I’ve actually figured out 600 745 of the 2000 passwords from users just because they were pretty weak passwords.

Passwords that are words in the dictionary (or multiple words combined) are easy to figure out. Never use your username, information about you that can be easily found out, “password”, or information about the site your account is on as your password. Fully alphabetic or numeric passwords aren’t too hard to figure out either. Combining them helps, but using “animal1″ won’t get you too far. Passwords that are short (less than 6 characters or so) aren’t too hard to figure out either.

The best password is something that’s really random, and not even your closest friends could figure out. A word that is rarely used, such as an exotic animal, food, action, or tool, is a good starting place. I would then add multiple numbers to one side of the word that you can remember, but is not something public to the rest of the world (license plate is no good). Capitalize a random letter or two in the word, and maybe even change some of the letters to special symbols (a -> @, T -> 7, A -> ^, S -> $). If you don’t replace letters with special characters, put some in between, after, or before your password. Finally, it’s a good idea to use the different password for different accounts if possible.

So I’ve got a 3rd project now. I’m supposed to see if I can break passwords from a computer. This will be used to email them and let them know that they need to change their passwords. It involves cracking, but for a good cause. It’s going to be a fun project if I can figure out the best way to do so.

If there’s one thing I don’t like about breaks, it’s coming back from them. I can never get back in the mood to be productive after doing little more than a few chores for a week (or more). I have talked to my boss, and I may start actually going in to do some parts of work, which will be good so I don’t get distracted. Usually if I get to working on something for a while, I’m motivated to finish it ASAP, but if I do it at home, I’ll get distracted and who knows when it’s going to get finished.

I did finish my homework for tomorrow. I haven’t had much all semester, but now I have more than a few things to do. I don’t like it, but I guess I still survive…

I’ve moved all of my websites to new servers. It’s on the same service provider, but I’m paying less and I have more bandwidth and space. It was a good 4 hours or so to move everything over, but I only lack one server because of a feature difference, which I hope to get resolved soon.

If anyone else is in the market, I really like site5, and I think they do a good job with their servers and the support.

I can’t seem to stop worrying about everything.

I recently got a ticket, and I opted to take drivers safety. I thought I would have to pay $30, but that all my fees to the county would be erased. Nope; court fees still apply. It makes me angry, upset, worried about funds, and a lot of other things. I thought the deal with drivers safety was to prove that I’m not a bad person, and because I haven’t gotten a ticket in the past year (or taken the course, actually), I agree to spend another 6 hours training to be a better driver. Basically all it does is to take it off my record. Woop-dee-doo.

I also found myself in a situation where my LCU bill was due (actually today). So last night, I wasn’t asleep, so I said, I’ll go pay for it… Guess what? The LCU Information Technology department decides to take down all the main servers for an upgrade on the day that I’m supposed to pay my bill. So I was on and off the computer trying to figure out how in the world I’m going to pay because they are going to have it down for multiple days. I finally found the link to the payment site through sneaky and ways that most people would not consider, but I think I should be payed (hopefully they won’t try to stick me with a late fee).

With all this, I just can’t seem to get much sleep. I sit in bed and find something to worry about. It’s mostly been money lately because my boss hasn’t given me work in a couple of weeks. I wish I could get this feeling out of my chest that seems to be a developing ulcer. I don’t think it is, because it’s felt a lot worse, and has gone away, but it’s still annoying not to be able to sleep.

I know the Bible says plenty about worrying, but that doesn’t make it any easier. Last night I had to say “God help me not to worry, give me some sleep tonight,” over and over until I finally went to sleep. It does help. If there is one thing in life I want to do without, it’s stress. Money problems bring on the most stress. Girls can be good at it too, but lately I’ve been lucky enough not to have any problems there, which is actually no luck at all; I’d rather have girl problems than not have a girl in my life at all.

What is “radical holiness?” To be holy means to be set apart. I take it as, to not be used up by sin, or, pure and blameless. Radical can mean extreme, or drastic. So radical holiness is taking drastic measures to be free from sin.

As Christians we’re called to be holy (1 Peter 5:13-16). That seems to suggest that it’s not ok just to live as though grace is going to fix it all no matter what I do. Some Christians seem to have the mindset that living a life that’s extremely good is too much to be expected. They justify sin because perfection cannot be reached, so why even try.

So how do we implement extreme holiness? I’ve been contemplating this for a while now, and it’s not easy to make decisions that proclaim radical holiness. Maybe it’s the shows on TV that we watch that show just enough to be legal, or music that uses cussing. I’d even suggest that maybe to achieve radical holiness, we shouldn’t even listen to music, TV, or radio that uses suggestive language. How about in our clothing, how much skin is too much skin to show? How far is too far to go with a boyfriend or girlfriend? How fast is too fast when I’m speeding?

It’s tough to cope with all the pressures in the culture we live in. High schools break their own school dress codes by giving cheerleaders skimpy outfits, and then they expect everyone else to follow the guidelines. A lot of people want to tag the name “hypocrite” to Christians, but anywhere there are humans, hypocrisy exists.

“Flee from sexual immorality,” Paul says in 1 Corinthians 6:18. Colossians 3 tells us to “Set [our] minds on things above, not on earthly things,” (v. 1) and “Put to death… your earthly nature” (v. 5). “Rid yourselves of… anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language” (v. 8).

He follows up Colossians 3:12 by saying, “clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience.” Watching Family Guy isn’t going to clothe us with kindness and compassion. Listening to System of a Down is not going to give us gentleness or patience. But will listening to the newest music that’s suggestive, or watching a show that’s a bit risqué send us to Hell? If that’s the case, we’ve got a lot of people in trouble. I don’t think that our motivation not to do these things should be because of Hell, but because we want to live a life that is worthy of the calling of Christ.

In Romans 6:1-2, Paul says that by no means should we continue to sin! Being baptized is not an insurance policy. We were baptized to “live a new life” (Romans 6:4). In verse 5, Paul states that “if we have been united with him in a death like his,” which means we can no longer continue to live in sin, we have to become radically holy, then “we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.”

We have been promised a place in Heaven, but that doesn’t let us off the hook. Let us strive daily to be a people that are radically holy!

I think the spammers are getting smarter. My spam filter caught the following comment:

 I found your blog on google and read a few of your other posts. I just added you to my Google News Reader. Keep up the good work. Look forward to reading more from you in the future.

{Name}

Where {Name} was the persons name, and I thought to myself, “Oh, that’s not spam,” but just below that was a comment that was just a modified version of the same comment. I followed the link to the websites they gave me, and sure enough they were connected. I also did a search for sites that link to the website they provided, and there were similar comments made in wordpress (the software that I’m using), so it seems like it was just there for them to get a link to their own blog.

Looks like Akismet is pretty smart after all.

I’m considering not renewing Churchofchristnet.net. It never really hit it off, and I usually don’t even check it but maybe once a month anyways. Alternatively, I could aggregate blogs from church of Christ members all in one spot, but my job would only be to add and remove blogs based on content, people would have to go to the individuals blogs to comment on the post.

I’d like to do something different anyways, because I just don’t think it’s doing much good like it is.

Any comments or suggestions?

I’ve gotten schedules fully implemented, (knock on wood). Drag ‘n Drop goodness, right click menus, and a lot more. I’ve also started a little bit on preparing the program for translations into other languages, but I don’t think it’s quite there yet.

I’m trying to figure out how to shorten main.py. It had over 500 lines of code, but I just got it down to a little less. The farther this program gets, if I don’t figure something out, it will be much longer than it should be. I may have to create a bootstrap file to get everything set up like I want.

I’m glad I could get a lot done today. Usually on days where I don’t have anything to do, I put off everything I could do, and don’t get anything done at all, if that makes any sense at all. Maybe I’ll have ExpoSong 0.3 in a couple of weeks.

My new laptop is fully put together now that I got my pen from Toshiba. The battery is here and everything.

The laptop is a Toshiba Tecra M4, and when I push the joystick button in on the screen, it rotates upside down. Here’s the python script in case anyone wants to do something similar:

#! /usr/bin/env python
"Inverts the screen and back to normal again."

import commands
import re

current = commands.getoutput("xrandr -q").split("\n")[1]

if re.match(".* (left|inverted|right) \\(", current) is not None:
  commands.getstatusoutput("xrandr -o normal")
  commands.getstatusoutput("xsetwacom set cursor rotate")
else:
  commands.getstatusoutput("xrandr -o inverted")
  commands.getstatusoutput("xsetwacom set cursor rotate half")

The pen works well, but I’m still trying to figure out how get the gimp to use the eraser and stylus/secondary button. I wish virtual paper was completed for Tomboy as well.