The Chicago Chapter of OWASP held a Capture The Flag (CTF) meetup which was really cool. The CTF was powered by Symantec, and it ran really smooth. When I arrived, we already had usernames/passwords waiting in our inbox so we could hook up to the VPN. We started promptly at 6:30pm and I started churning through the flags. Unfortunately, due to a scheduling mixup, the CTF ended an hour earlier than originally planned, so I didn’t get too deep into a lot of the technical areas that I wanted to explore.

ThotCon, short for Three One Two Conference (Chicago’s area code is 312), is one of Chicago’s few hacking conferences. This was my first security conference, and I wasn’t sure what to expect, other than to walk away more educated and (probably) more scared. Success on both counts. I also had a preconceived vision of what the crowd would look like: a cross-breed between Linux beards, and someone dressed up for Comicon.

An e-commerce site that I maintain had been working fine, then all of a sudden emails stopped sending. We started seeing this error: Mailbox unavailable. The server response was: 5.7.3 Requested action aborted; user not authenticated We hadn’t changed any code, and our username/password worked fine on the web. It turns out that our web host migrated our website to a new server (with a new IP address), and Microsoft’s security settings kicked in, preventing the emails from being sent.

I’ve had these cup holders for a couple years, and I finally got around to putting them on. They have a nice gap in the side to allow for beer mugs coffee cups to fit right in. They also have a little drain at the bottom for when you’ve had too many “coffees” and can’t manage to remove your beverage without spilling it ;) I’ve had this T-molding even longer. It took me a long time to find the right router bit (kinda pricey at ~$25, and I wasn’t 100% sure it was the right one), and I couldn’t cut the groove until I had everything painted.

I’ve made a lot of progress recently, and can see the light at the end of the tunnel. After painting it, I reassembled it. I couldn’t bring myself to put the 25" tube tv back in, so instead I used a 22" LCD I had laying around. I’m more than happy with that decision. After numerous weeks’ worth of hard drive/raid/motherboard issues, I performed a midnight heart transplant and got everything working just in time for a party we were having.

What’s old is new again. I revived my old VB.NET front-end, rewrote it in C#, and named it MAME Iron. Why MAME Iron you ask? It’s a MAME Front-end (Fe) and Fe is the symbol for Iron on the Periodic Table of Elements, of course! Since I decided to ditch my 25" tube TV for a 22" LCD, I have a lot more pixels to work with. I also don’t have to use Comic Sans in Cyan anymore (the only font/color that would show up on that old, low-res display).

I built a new control panel since the previous one I had built was a proof-of-concept. This one is the same size and layout, but made with 5/8" MDF instead of the 3/4" oak laminate I had originally used. I added a cutout in the middle for a 4-way joystick, and left a little room to the right of it for two buttons (to be added later). I primed all the pieces, and they’re ready for paint.

You want to be like all the cool kids and use Git? Me too. Have a ton of source code history you don’t want to lose? Me too. The steps below will create a Git repository from your Team Foundation Version Control source code including all historical versions along with their comments. Note: This is for Microsoft’s Visual Studio Online cloud offering (formerly known as Team Foundation Service), not to be confused with their standalone Team Foundation Server (TFS) product.

In a month, I had hoped to get 5, maybe 10 beta testers if I was lucky, and I thought I’d have to beat the street posting on Google+, Facebook, Twitter, etc. I ended up with 40 registered beta testers, with only a couple posts on each network! Beta testing should start shortly - I still have some visual tweaks to make. I’m coding specifically for web browsers, however, I want to make sure the experience degrades nicely on smaller devices.