So here’s what you need to do:
1. Download VirtualBox if you don’t have it already.
2. Choose what version of Internet Explorer to install. Then type the following commands in your terminal window:
Install ALL versions of Internet Explorer: IE6, IE7, IE 8, and IE 9

curl -s https://raw.github.com/xdissent/ievms/master/ievms.sh | bash

Install Internet Explorer 7 Only

curl -s https://raw.github.com/xdissent/ievms/master/ievms.sh | IEVMS_VERSIONS="7" bash

Install Internet Explorer 8 Only

curl -s https://raw.github.com/xdissent/ievms/master/ievms.sh | IEVMS_VERSIONS="8" bash

Install Internet Explorer 9 Only

curl -s https://raw.github.com/xdissent/ievms/master/ievms.sh | IEVMS_VERSIONS="9" bash

3. Open VirtualBox and launch your virtual machine. You will be prompted to type in account password, which is “Password1″. The password is also in the “Passowd hint” field if you forget it.

Cheers
Marko

Opendiff simply launches FileMerge OS X utility, which is another one I didn’t know about, and displays differences between 2 selected directories.

The very simple command to compare 2 directories is:

opendiff dir1 dir2

This will then launch FileMerge utility and give you a nice visual representation of differences in your folders:

Marko

I thought there had to be a way to throttle bandwidth on any port using the native IP firewall and traffic shaper program. After reading up the documentation for ipfw, I figured out a way to throttle speed on any outgoing port.

For example, the following example will create a pipe that will allow 25Kb/s to go through port 1935.

sudo ipfw pipe 1 config bw 25KByte/s
sudo ipfw add 1 pipe 1 src-port 1935

To disable throttling, simply delete the throttling rule:

sudo ipfw delete 1

Marko

echo -n "Hello World" | shasum -a 256

You can also hash a file

shasum -a 256 myfile.ext

2. Display server IP address by stripping out all other network information, including the local 127.0.0.1 IP

ifconfig  | grep 'inet addr:'| grep -v '127.0.0.1' | cut -d: -f2 | awk '{ print $1}'

3. Read out first 64 characters from a long string

${mystring:0:64}

4. While loop with 10 iterations

i=0;
while [ $i -lt 10 ]
do
    echo $i
    i=$[$i+1]
done

5. Replace contents of a file. For example search for string1, replace with string2 in myfile.txt

sed -e "s/string1/string2/g" myfile.txt > myfile.txt_temp
mv myfile.txt_temp myfile.txt

6. Display number of CPU processors on Linux
The command simply pulls out all instances of the word ‘processor’ from /proc/cpuinfo and returns the word count of it.

cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep processor | wc -l

Marko

httpd: apr_sockaddr_info_get() failed for 192-168-1-107.tpgi.com.au
httpd: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.0.1 for ServerName

That gave me a hint that my local hostname had changed. I reset it back to what it was originally like this:

sudo hostname myoldhostname.local

Restarted apache and it was smooth sailing again.

Marko

My challenge was to decypt this heavily encrypted content on a different platform, i.e. Railo with underlying Java Cipher capabilities.

The 6 things I knew about the encrypted content were:
1. Encryption Method – AES
2. Mode – CBC (Cipher-block chaining)
3. Padding – PKCS5
4. Initialisation Vector (IV) – given hex string
5. Passphrase – given hex string
6. Encrypted text file saved in base64 encoded string.

For my records, this is how I went about decrypting on Railo:

<cfscript>
// Create some java objects
IvParameterSpec = createObject("java", "javax.crypto.spec.IvParameterSpec");
Cipher = createObject("java", "javax.crypto.Cipher");
SecretKeySpec = createObject("java", "javax.crypto.spec.SecretKeySpec");
BASE64Decoder = createObject("java", "sun.misc.BASE64Decoder");
Str = createObject("java", "java.lang.String");
MessageDigest = createObject("java", "java.security.MessageDigest");
 
encryptedFileContent = "base64encodedcontent";
password = binarydecode("somehexpassphrase", "hex");
iv = binarydecode("somehexivstring", "hex");
 
skeySpec = SecretKeySpec.init(password, "AES");
ivSpec = IvParameterSpec.init(iv);
cipher = Cipher.getInstance("AES/CBC/PKCS5Padding");
 
encryptedContent = BASE64Decoder.decodeBuffer(encryptedFileContent);
cipher.init(Cipher.DECRYPT_MODE,skeySpec,ivSpec);
decryptedBytes = cipher.doFinal(encryptedContent);
decryptedString = Str.init(decryptedBytes);
</cfscript>

Now that we know how the decryption works, encrypting data on Railo should be a piece of cake. For example:

<cfscript>
password = "somepassphrase";
stringToEncrypt = "stringToEncrypt";
md = MessageDigest.getInstance("MD5");
md.update(password.getBytes("UTF-8"), 0, password.length());
rawKey = md.digest();
 
skeySpec = SecretKeySpec.init(rawKey, "AES");
ivSpec = IvParameterSpec.init(rawKey);
cipher = Cipher.getInstance("AES/CBC/PKCS5Padding");
cipher.init(Cipher.ENCRYPT_MODE, skeySpec, ivSpec);
 
encryptedbytes = cipher.doFinal(stringToEncrypt.getBytes());
</cfscript>

The only thing you need to be aware of is the format of parameters passed into encryption/decryption logic, and convert them appropriately. These parameters can be either plain, base64 or hex strings.

Who would’ve thought that reverse engineering could be som much fun

Cheers
Marko

That’s all cool, but I could never remember what modules I needed and how to enable them.  If you don’t load any modules at compile time, this is the most likely error you’ll get when you start apache web server:

Invalid command 'Order', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration

So the following steps worked well for me.

1. Download Apache 2.2 source code

2. Extract the source code and configure apache with required modules. These modules are the ones I normally need. You can customise this to your needs:

./configure  --prefix=/usr/local/apache2 \
--enable-mods-shared=all \
--enable-shared \
--enable-deflate \
--enable-proxy \
--enable-proxy-http \
--enable-ssl \
--enable-cgi \
--enable-cgid \
--enable-cache
 
make \
 
make install \

Check /usr/local/apache2/modules directory and make sure required modules have been installed.

Marko

Split archives are often used to shrink the size of large files for e-mail attachments or file downloads. They can only be decompressed if all the split archive segments are available.

To decompress a series of z01, z02… files you need to do the following

1) Change all .z01, .z02 extensions to .001, .002 and so on.
2) The last extension in compressed series will have a .zip extension. If you have 8 segments, change .zip to .008.
3) Join all segments using “MacHacha”
4) Change the extension of the file produced by MacHacha to .zip
5) Use “The Unarchiver” to decompress the .zip file produced by MacHacha.

References:
http://www.fileinfo.com/extension/z01

PHP Warning: POST Content-Length of 18348279 bytes exceeds the limit of 8388608 bytes

It’s self explanatory, my PHP installation by default only allows up to 8MB of data to be uploaded to the server. To solve this you need to change the following 2 variables in php.ini file:
post_max_size = 8M
and
upload_max_filesize = 2M

Marko

You can specify LoaderContext for each BulkLoader item like so:

var context:LoaderContext = new LoaderContext(true, ApplicationDomain.currentDomain);
var loader:BulkLoader = new BulkLoader("myBulkLoaderInstance");
loader.add( amazonS3Domain, { context: context  } );

Thanks to Trevor Hartman for this snippet.

Also “Using Amazon S3 with Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight” article has some useful tips on this topic as well as crossdomain policy files.

I haven’t tried using this technique to load files from other APIs such as Facebook, so I’d imagine you’d have to follow the same approach.

Marko