Em7 ad naseum

You know, for as much as people were rushing to weigh in on how Kanye West is a jackass, it still needs to be noted that he was 100% correct.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mVEGfH4s5g

Tonight is the last game of the season for the company softball team. We did about as well as you'd expect for a team full of accountants and programmers. But we're better than our KC Chiefs level of play last year or Detroit Lions of the year before (which was pre-Farthing, so that probably explains that).

I have a list of books that I'm always on the lookout for. Anything that tickles my fancy tends to end up on the list and I'll watch for it at bookstores or the library. The library is great for most stuff, but computer-related books don't tend to show up there in a timely manner. Plus, it's nice to have a permanent copy as a reference in most cases. What I've come to realize about bookstores here is that they are, quite often, a total waste of time.

That's right, the warm-up exercise is IN THE BAG.

Not the most difficult buffer overflow to accomplish, but the process of working out the how and why was much harder than I would have guessed. Maybe I should have expected that since this first exercise has highlighted several other things I don't know very well either (namely, how to read assembler). I'm still trying to work out why the DCBA order is reversed when the program reads the cookie value. It's probably related to that 'endian' thing I barely remember from school.

But that is a problem for tomorrow. Tonight I'm going to make sure my neighbors aren't complaining to the landlord about when I stood up and howled in victory when I saw the success message.

Spoilers below for anybody who feels like cheating.

We're having a pen-test at work in the near future. I've been watching the firewall logs come in with the first wave of recon that the consultant has been trying and even though most of them target items that we don't run, he has still managed to find a couple of interesting things. I'm definitely not allowed to discuss these things on here, heh. But it's already a learning experience and the guy hasn't even come into the office yet.