Author Archives: Tim H

About Tim H

I am a Large Fluffy Chicken called Bob.

modsecurity

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I re-enabled modsecurity, this time with the PCRE JIT.

To do this I had to do the following:

Build the latest version of pcre.
Install it in /usr/local/pcre

Modify the apache startup to use LD_PRELOAD to load the new libpcre.so instead of the standard system one.
I could have overwritten this using ld.so.preload but that’s a system-wide changes and I don’t know what else I might break, seeing as most other things will be compiled against the old version.

Finally I had to modify the apache2 binary so that it’s allowed to create code at runtime (we are doing JIT here, afterall)

paxctl -cm /usr/lib/apache2/mpm-prefork/apache2

Now it seems to be working fine.

PCRE was compiled like so:

./configure –prefix=/usr/local/pcre –enable-jit –enable-pcre16 –enable-pcre32 –enable-utf –enable-unicode-properties –disable-static

Would You? Would you really?

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—–Original Message—–
From: Tim Harman [mailto:tim@muppetz.com]
Sent: Tuesday, 26 November 2013 9:11 p.m.
To: info
Subject: Would you? Would You Really?

Hi!

Every time I get down your packet of cones from the top shelf of our pantry, I see the little message on the side that says “We’d love to hear from you” and I always think to myself “Would they? Would they LOVE to hear from me?”. Then I make an Icecream, slide the cones back up onto the top shelf and think to myself “I should ask them that one day”

So I guess this me asking “Would you really love to hear from me?”

Look at it from my point of view: I’m a 37 yo man. I work in IT, doing network designs (You’ve probably fallen alseep by now, right?) I don’t even _eat_ the icecream cones, I make them for my wife. She loves Goody Goody gumdrops. (I’m not so sure myself, I’m more of a plain old chocolate icecream guy myself.) I just don’t think there’s that much about me worth hearing about, at least in the context of Icecream Cones.

Anyway, I hope you have loved hearing from me? If you haven’t, I would suggest updating the wording on future packets to say something like “We might like to hear from you, but only if it’s Icecream related”. Though that probably wouldn’t fit on the box as easily.

Yours in a love of having burning questions answered,

Tim

PS: At least I have enjoyed writing to you! 🙂

——————————————–

To: tim@muppetz.com

Hi Tim!

Thanks for asking a great question. I hope I can offer a satisfactory answer to you.

Absolutely!

There are a few reasons why we really do love to hear from people.

I am sure you can appreciate the value in receiving feedback on our products. We learn what people enjoy about our cones and sometimes we
get ideas for new cones coming through too.

But most importantly, and simply, is that it subsequently provides us with an opportunity to personally thank people for choosing our
products.

Your family may have been purchasing our cones for years without us knowing about it.
But now, since you took the time to make contact, we can finally say it – thank you for choosing our products!!

Tim, have a great Summer. Enjoy some chocolate ice-cream (perhaps even in a cone!) and next time you pick one of our products off the shelf you’ll know that we appreciate you making that choice.

Thanks again and best regards,

Mike Dephoff
General Manager
Tawse Foods Ltd

PS – I’m more of a coffee ice-cream guy 🙂

You Get What You Pay For

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Bought a cheap arse memory stuck for micro. 128GB for $40. Does it work? Hell yes it works. Formatted as FAT32. Format the fucker as EXT4 and you think it works? Hell no. Can’t find superblock. Can’t find this, can’t find that. Error error dead dead fuck you error.

I’m sending it back. I didn’t really expect it’d work, but I kinda hoped that maybe it would you know?

Idiot.

Powershop: 1 – Tim H: 0

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You gotta hand it to powershop, they know how to have a good laugh.

They posted this to their Facebook specials page:

Seal up those cracks, the southerly’s back, and he’s bringing the chill as he’s blowing flat tack. But relax Powershoppers, all is not lost, our Wintervention will help you defrost!

Me, being the eternal plonker, posted this in reply:

I quite liked the poem, though I thought it could have made better use of rhyming techniques and maybe had a similie or two. However it was a fine attempt for a Friday afternoon, 3 and 1/2 out of 5 stars.

So as a reply, they posted this!

@Tim H, a tale for you
it sounds a bit strange, but we swear that it’s true!

Our rhymes they are awful, of this we’re aware,
but don’t blame the writer, that wouldn’t be fair!

Our old specials gremlin wrote a little too clunky,
so we traded him in for a well trained monkey!

Now the monkey he tries, but he’s quite prone to fail,
which is perhaps our fault! (we got him on sale…).

So the reason the rhymes have been a bit crazy
is probably our doing, today we were lazy!

We gave monkey the wrong brain-med prescription,
and then made the poor thing write the description!

Now’s he’s all hopped up and running a muck,
we’ll have to try and catch him! (Please wish us luck)

So this week we’ll blame that drugged monkey-freak,
but we hope to improve, a humans writing next week…

-The Product Gremlin

NSA

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Find it hard to believe people are really shocked about the whole NSA thing. Really? You’ve worked in tech for that long and it’s a shock?

I’ve seen enough “extra super privs” commands on routers and the like to realise this isn’t new.

I guess it’s the shock of it being exposed maybe, but really? This sort of stuff has been happening for years.