Its unfortunate that Twitter has met with such friction and disappointment over the years of trying to become a profitable company. To have everyone push back from the table last week as the stock dropped must have been about as disappointing as being rejected by a classmate you just asked to the junior prom. Personally I can recall several of the overstuffed emails in my inbox describing yet another change to Twitter’s Terms of Service, as they change their information distribution, access and privacy policies in repeated attempts to corral their margins into the black. The platform, the service, even the structure of the tweet itself keeps changing as the back office struggles to find their wind. But one thing has remained constant:

It never works.

My hats off to Dorsey who keeps trying and trying with all of his ninja and know-how, but still the stock drops.

Stock price: TWTR (NYSE) $17.56 -2.29 (-11.54%)
Oct 10, 4:00 PM EDT –

I looked up and saw this after a google search. While I’m wishing them the best of success in their reach for the stars, I find myself wishing that Twitter stays right where it is.

I don’t see Twitter as a social network, an app, a place to gripe about company X because their widget didn’t come in the color that you expected.

Twitter is infrastructure. Like a bridge, a subway, an energy plant. Twitter has become so ingrained into our everyday digital experience, its the first go-to link right after every Facebook icon in most existing digital real estate. It is part and parcel of the modern social internetworking lexicon. It is a part of us. I hope it is valued for more than just the new football and debate feeds that it supports and given the appropriate status therein.

For someone who spends so much time in linux, but not so much time on the same box, I need a way to automate the usual setup tasks every time I spin up a fresh install. I will need to write a script and store it somewhere offsite where it can be quickly accessed through the command line, like in a github repo. Lets figure out how to do this:

Fist lets make a list of all the configurations that I would want to automate with this script:

1. SSH server — of course.
2. Vim configuration preferences  — manually configured by creating .vimrc file, mind you.
3. dev goodies ( python, ruby, etc )
4. Standard updates
5. what else is there… ( will return… )

Could not combine logical operators into an evaluated expression to account for a 3 factor condition with 2 combinations. — chose to write ANOTHER elif statement which made it work but felt it was a loss.

What about openBSD makes it secure?

This is a question that digs into your knowledge of how openBSD as an organization, functions. If you understand their focus on security, the slowness of their adoption and their public tally of how many times they have been owned remotely, you understand what makes them secure.

More fun stuff..

stay tuned for some cool commercials after the content! LOL

file: describes the contents of a file

cat: outputs the content of a file, associated with the stdout.d library.

How do we find how many javascript calls cnn.com makes?

pseudocode:

1:  pull javascript calls doc from cnn
1.5 load them into a txt file.
2. parse calls by delineating calls with script
3.  count calls with script file
4  you are the man.

cat cnnindex.txt | grep -i “text/javascript” | wc -l

What did we learn here:

wc = word count

piping commands channels output sequentially making things act like batman.

a javascript call looks like this: <script type:”text/javascript”>

again:

Pull the contents of a file down from the net with curl or wget
use the > delimiter to output that command to a file, in this case cnnindex.txt
open the file up and learn something about javascript calls… we know what they look like from the line just above this paragraph.
grep -i with the text that designates the code as a javascript call inside double quotes,
and pipe again, that contents to the word count command which counts the number of instances pulled back from the contents we piped to the grep command.

our output was 20 and we are now the man.

In as much as being a security consultant is cutting edge, its not cutting edge unless you have had proper exposure to the administrative tasks and coding frustrations of building out and working within an enterprise environment. Im going to be bemoaning all of the painstaking frustrations and things I learn here in my bloggy blog for future reference.

quick points:

-Shift-ZZ is how to save the file you were just editing in VIM and exits to bash.

-If you fail overwriting a file completely in Unix, it will create a swap file that is hidden that starts with a “.” — what a nightmare if your ssh server is configured with one of those.

-The sshd_server in Unix is configured by default to connect to port 22 and you must UN-comment the lines in the config file to get it to route to the new port.

-Unix comes configured with a firewall that will override your configuration changes if you try to connect to an sshd server on a new port number. You can flush all your firewall rules by using the “service iptables stop” command.

-Updating python from 2.6 to 2.7 is a process.

-Homebrew is awesome sauce.

Using terminal from my mac and performing all this work on a CentOS box in my DMZ. Im just not in the mood to run Django locally….

Why have one externally facing webserver when you can have two at twice the price?

Or none… thank you vmware…

🙂