Spending the summer hacking away on Nmap

On April 26, 2011, In Open Source, Projects, Security, By Shinnok

I was accepted part of Google Summer of Code 2011 to hack on the popular Nmap Security Scanner to bring it to new horizons and make it more solid then ever(Hollywood behold). In case you missed it, Google Summer of Code, has been running since 2005 and its aim is to bring students close to Open Source and get them to contribute and integrate into Open Source communities of their choosing and, well, make some $$$ while at it. In other words, students are paid for the duration of the summer(3 months) to hack away on Open Source projects. The aim is to help students acquire real world programming experience as an alternative to internships and to contribute to the magnificent Open Source ecosystem, on which Google built its strengths, tools and services. This 2011 GSoC iteration, Google has put up close to 6 million dollars in funding amounting to 1116 accepted students distributed amongst 175 FLOSS projects and organizations. I wish to thank the Nmap team for choosing me amongst many other fine student applications and to Google for making this possible(and paying me), the first giant to recognize the strengths of Open Source and doing something about it, thus setting a trend, a trend that many new giants, including Facebook, are religiously following(Microsoft is the only stubborn giant here, suffering already, from fighting against the current). You can find more on GSoC here.

Kick-ass!

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The “gravy sucking pig dog” in BSD

On April 14, 2011, In Rants, By Shinnok

There’s been a while since BSD systems have this easter egg in the shutdown command source, “Die you gravy sucking pig dog” embedded into the name of the function the performs the actual halt or reboot.

FreeBSD has it(line 96):

void die_you_gravy_sucking_pig_dog(void);

OpenBSD has it(line 93):

void __dead die_you_gravy_sucking_pig_dog(void);

NetBSD has it(line 100):

static void die_you_gravy_sucking_pig_dog(void) __dead;

Even Apple has it too, but they #ifdef-ed it to another name since they don’t condone that kind of shit:

#ifdef __APPLE__
void log_and_exec_reboot_or_halt(void);
#else
void die_you_gravy_sucking_pig_dog(void);
#endif

This kind of source code profanity is really common in the open source world ,thus no news here. 🙂

I wonder for how long has this gravy sucking pig dog been wondering the BSD sources, maybe it can be traced back to Berkley BSD? If you happen to know, please feel free to share with us in a comment to this post.

Oh, almost forgot, and Linux is not better, for eg. here is a graph of a small selection of swear words in the Linux kernel or if you wan’t to see a more entertaining piece, then grab a bag of popcorn and read through file:///Sebastian/Droge/please/choke/on/a/bucket/of/cocks(that’s an http url ofc) bug on Debian. Enjoy.

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Hackers: Wizards of the Electronic Age

On April 9, 2011, In Trunk, By Shinnok

Hackers: Wizards of the Electronic Age is a short historic documentary about the early days of hardware and software hacking as well as the huge industry(ies) that was about to explode. The documentary dates from around 1985, well before the internet took shape and the web didn’t even exist, not to mention that opportunity to see the likes of Steve Wozniak and Richard Stallman in their youth and in action baby! Take 30 minutes and watch it, it’s worth every minute:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl_1OybdteY

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Juicy geeky insight into the Tron Legacy movie

On April 7, 2011, In Rants, By Shinnok

I just stumbled across a cool post by Josh Nimoy a special effects artist who did work on software art for the the movie Tron Legacy. I’m sharing this because I think it is not so often that we get this kind of juicy insight into these processes that go on in the backstage at Hollywood. You will find out why nmap was rejected from featuring into the movie and why emacs(sorry vim users :-P) was selected as well as many other interesting facts and screenshots. Take the jump, it’s worth it:

https://jtnimoy.net/?q=178

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