Myrddin´s Shaman Blog

Archive for the ‘Information Technology’ Category

While playing around with some wordpress functionalities I realized that my old theme was getting really old. No widget support and the posts are looking somewhat boring.

During the next days I’ll play around with themes and designs … If you realize that some things aren’t working as they should you should come back in a few days.

There will probably be minor design glitches, but the postings and comments should still be functioning. The new design will provide many useful interesting functions :-)

Once more I had the need to recover a lost password. The tool I used checks each word in a word list to check it as possible password. Since the password was well chosen, the ordinary word lists failed me. The only way left was to use brute force, by guessing all passwords from 00000000 to ZZZZZZZZ.

Brute force is taking very long and for that reason you try to narrow the possible solutions down. A real password will most likely not have the same characters more than 3 times and sometimes there are certain passwords that use patterns, e.g. first character is a letter, or every 2nd char is a vowel. To know this will help to reduce the possible combinations and thus the time needed to crack a password.

Usually I have a good eye for this, but on the other hand I always lacked the tools needed to create my custom needed dictionaries easily. A few days ago I was in that dilemma, knowing the pattern of a password, but not having a tool that was able to create a wordlist for that purpose – as short as possible and thus decided to make a tool of my own.

If at all I am a hobby programmer and the code is not optimized, but so far it works well.

Here is a Screenshot of the little tool Word-Gen:

The strong point of Word-Gen is that each of the characters can easily be configured individually and that results with 1+ occurence of the same characters can be filtered out.

The Tool is slow (you are welcome if you want to improve it), requires .NET Framework 1.1 and still requires some tweaking. I have a good AntiVirus Solution, but in your own interest be cautious with Software you download via the Internet.

Don’t forget that this will create huge word lists – roughly 100k words per second (testrun – 7 digits, 10 mio words, 108 sec, 85 MB). Selecting a large range will require a lot of time and a lot of disk space. There is no progress bar (yet).

You can download it here.

According to the Shanghaidaily 500 000 mostly young chinese men are living from playing online games. They farm virtual money or items and sell it for real money to mostly European or American Players.

This is no news really for someone who plays online games. The real surprise was only the large number. How many people are too lazy to farm their own items if 500000 chinese can live from that?

Back in 1994 at the University of German Armed Forces security was not as important as it is today and thus the University Server stood wide open and let me have the very first Student Webpage online. Nude celebrities attraced a lot of visitors, much more than the University Homepage. Well back then there were basic layouts. Backgrounds were grey, links were blue, Internet Explorer did not exist and there was actually just Netscape.

About a year laters I started to use tables to position the content at specific locations on the Screen. One of my webpages even won a price. A little they introduced Netobjects Fusion and I designed with it until about 2 Months ago. I really love this tools and was able to work around some of its restrictions.

Nowadays there is a big hype about Typo3 and even though I have been reluctant to get involved with it I am basically forced to use it. From Netobjects Fusion and all its WYSIWYG Webdesign back to CSS, Typoscript and entering code is a big step.

In Germany the Government of Rhineland has its website on Typo3, the baker next door uses Typo3 and in 2006 we are still need to edit code? Where is the easy to use WYSIWYG-convert-to-typo3 Software? All You ever find about this subject are templates that are for sale from 150-1500€.

Well there are tools to get you started, tools that help with all the CSS like Topstyle, NVU, etc but I wonder why the Big Companies do not pay any attention at all to this kind of need. Where is Macromedia’s Typo3weaver, Adobe goTypo3 or Netypo3 Fusion? Isn’t it better to have customers that use typo3 as contentmanagement than not having them at all?

For the first 100 lucky internet users France Telecom is testing fast FTTH (Fiber To The Home) internet access with 2.5 Gigabit/s download and 1.5 Gigabit/s upload. The customers located in the Paris area pay 70€ a month for Internet, digital television and telephone flatrate.

Read on here(German) for further Information or browse the Site of France Telecom.