Did you know that scientists estimate 90% of the things you do in a normal day are unconscious?

Activities like walking, recognizing faces, chatting to colleagues.

The brain likes to automate these activities because it’s much more efficient. By learning and becoming proficient in a skill (for example learning how to change gears in a car while driving), your brain actually moves the processing done while performing that activity to a different part of the brain, the ‘expert’ region.

It wasn’t long ago, maybe just a few hundred years before today that getting enough energy to keep our bodies and our brain going was a daily struggle for most people. If you’ve ever watched Survivorman (yes it’s at least partly fiction but the point stands) you’ll see he is thinking almost obsessively about finding sources of energy (meat, moss, insects, roots). It’s the key to survival.

So as a survival mechanism your brain has learned to take note of the tasks you do regularly and stores them in a way that Read more »

I’m working on some checklist / light process management software for small business.

I’m trying to put a lot of effort into the way it looks and feels, the way it guides the user to do exactly what they want to do at that point in time and not display any extraneous / useless data that will just clutter the screen. One of the key pages is their task list / checklist.

When it got to the point of writing the code to help users through their first login and initial setup of their environment I was thinking hmmm…. well there’s actually a few steps, do I need some kind of wizard for this, but where would it go? And I don’t want to force them to do all the steps right away. Maybe some kind of…….. checklist?

Then I realised, it’s checklist software, it’s sole purpose is to handle your list! Just make the setup tasks the first tasks on their list when they log in : P

Sometimes it’s hard to practice what you preach ; )

In this article I’m going to briefly outline the role and purpose of a Systems Engineer. This should hopefully come in useful for either Project Manager’s in industries such as the Defence Materiel Organisation or Defence Industry who seek to hire one, or engineers who seek to become one. Although it’s a bit of a niche, the renumeration can be good due to the variety of different skills and technical background required, as well as the fact that there’s typically more demand than supply. For employer’s seeking one, it can be useful to understand their role better in order to determine whether the person is really suitable, or whether you could train a regular engineer into a systems engineer. In my mind, a potential systems engineer would want a strong technical background, the ability to read and understand mountains of documentation and turn that information into actionable tasks, and the ability to think big picture.

What is Systems Engineering?
Systems Engineering is fundamentally a tool for dealing with complexity in large systems.

It’s not necessarily suitable for all systems, but when projects get large, suddenly the things that seemed easy get more and more complicated. It can be hard to keep track of the scope of the problem, which can span multiple disciplines and have Read more »

I thought I’d post a -very early- screenshot of some software I’m developing.

‘Teams’ within an organisation are displayed hierarchially, and drawn dynamically onto the screen. The elements can be dragged and dropped to change the hierarchy, organisations edited and the focus changed to move up and down the chart.

Doing the chart this way instead of showing the whole thing really puts the user into the context of the organisation they’re focusing on. What is my boss doing? What are my subordinates doing? This page will soon be improved with chart lines through GWT Canvas.

Many more features to come. I hope to make it a 100% free, web-based team and task management tool, with many useful additional features. Release 1 coming soon!

Boston Dynamics have just released a video of their latest machine – Alpha Dog.

As per the contract he has to be able to carry 180kg’s of equipment, so they’ve made him bigger and loaded him with weight lifting weights (you can see them on the sides and back) to prove he’s up to the task.

The new version also doesn’t sound like a swarm of bees. Presumably outside all you’d hear is the clacking of his metal feet on rocks.

The closer we get to removing all humans from combat the better. And we can thank the US for spending so much money developing dynamic controls for robots, it hopefully won’t be too long before we see these in use by civilians. Next step, robotic firefighters to run into burning buildings, and maybe one to run and get things from the printer for me!

Here’s the link:
Alpha Dog – Youtube

(note: falling over at the end of the hallway is part of the program, he’s out of room)

And a bonus, some funny video’s of the old BigDog from the past:
Big Dog – Youtube

Something I’ve been looking into recently is privilege escalation.

You crack your way into a box (for example through the FTP service) and manage to hijack control of the thread. The problem is, you only have the permissions granted to the application. If it couldn’t edit system files, neither can you yet. This didn’t use to be a problem on old Windows configurations because often everything was run with administration privileges. These days, after compromising a box you may need to escalate privileges in order to achieve anything useful.

Here are two posts I found helpful on the topic:
Windows
http://www.netspi.com/blog/2009/10/05/windows-privilege-escalation-part-1-local-administrator-privileges/

Linux
http://insidetrust.blogspot.com/2011/04/quick-guide-to-linux-privilege.html

Another option is to find, configure and use ready made exploits at exploit-db.com or securityfocus.com. Or you may get lucky and find that Metasploit has options available for you.

From a Meterpreter console you can use the command ‘getsystem’ to attempt to automatically escalate privileges. Or, once you have a session type ‘search post’ to see all the modules you can use on that session, some of them are escalation. You simply ‘use’ that module, set the session variable to the session you want to escalate and type ‘exploit’, and wait to see if system or root is delivered straight to your door.

If you liked this post, please consider a Bitcoin donation. Even a few cents would be huge! My address is: 1HcgS9GCPRQ1APv2TcqZMMskDxLjBaAKsG

Kind Regards,
Nick Cooper

Robots are sneaking into our lives faster than anyone really thought (unless you say, lived in the 70’s, you probably believed we’d have robot butlers by now).

No robot butlers just yet, but the US Military and large technology corporations are pushing the boundaries. Read more »

It’s not a sure thing just yet, but it’s possible that in the future we may see the dominant emergence of a currency called Bit Coin.

Bit Coins are a virtual, peer-to-peer crypto currency. They differ from everything that has come before in three ways:
– They do not require regulation and have no central governing organisation,
– They can be used completely anonymously under certain situations
– They do not claim to have any inherent value, instead relying on the market to decide their value Read more »

If you’ve ever made a website, you’re no doubt aware just how much impact a photo adds to the end result. With photos, everything just seems a lot more professional.

The only problem I had was finding photos that were a) good and b) copyright free.

As a law abiding citizen and business owner point B is actually quite important. Although it’s easy to simply take photos from images.google.com, if you use them on a professional website you’re actually opening yourself up to some serious theft of copyrighted material litigation, so you need to find photos that have been declared copyright free by the owner, or buy the license to them.

At first I looked at IStockPhoto.com, who have a massive database of photos that you can license. I hear they’ve really changed the game, changed the way photographers work, but you know what? They’re just damn expensive.

Then I found sxc.hu. Great, it’s all copyright free, the only problem is everyone wants attribution. So if you use the image in say an ad banner somewhere, you have to write who took the photo and link back to the site, urgh.

Wikimedia Commons seems pretty good, and I’ve actually used a few of their photos before. Although a lot of them seem to be of big buildings or infrastructure from the outside. They’re mostly donated by governments I think, who can’t keep the copyright anyway.

Then I found the solution, 123rf.com. At the moment it’s only $25 for 15 photos (buy more and it’s even less), completely copyright and attribution free. They’re pretty artsy too. I like sxc.hu (especially because it’s free), but for the sites I’ve started doing it’s just not cutting the mustard and I didn’t want to pay iStockPhoto, 123rf are one of the oldest players around anyway and really came to the rescue.

More professional looking sites are on the way..

If you liked this post, please consider a Bitcoin donation. Even a few cents would be huge! My address is: 1HcgS9GCPRQ1APv2TcqZMMskDxLjBaAKsG

Kind Regards,
Nick Cooper

New website launched. The old one was google sites, more an experiment in using ‘apps for your domain’. It was interesting to see that these days you really can have free web hosting from google (as well as gmail@yourdomain, calendar, everything) for just the cost of the domain. Very competitive, although of course that’s googles strategy! Give you free things and use your usage data to give you more effective ads. Can’t say I’m complaining, plus they’re great online citizens.

This setup is more appropriate though, google sites still looks immature. Expect to see more posts regarding the forefront of systems and security and the things we learn about their use.