elem_125's New Writeups

Ways to overthrow a government (idea)

2003-05-14T20:53:28Z

Ahhhh, so you've decided that its time for a change have you?

Come in, come in. Please sit down. Some tea? Of course, coffee it is then.

So, let us begin. You've decided to overthrow the government then? Wonderful, a superb choice if I may say so. But let us now discuss how you're going to do it. You see there are many ways.

Disclaimer: Plotting to overthrow a government is a serious business for serious people. Please don't try it "just for a laugh", if you fail you might find that there are some very pissed people looking for you afterwards....

So let us now look at the various ways in which we could presume to overthrow a government, with historical examples of course.

Revolution

Revolution n. 1 a the forcible overthrow of government or social order, in favor of a new system. b (in Marxism) the replacement of one ruling class by another; the class struggle which is

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email (thing)

2003-05-13T13:52:53Z

It is the killer app. The technology that transformed the internet from being a geeky toy to a ubiquitous form of communication that many of us would wonder how we could have lived without. But how many of us know its history, its rich cultural heritage? How can we truly appreciate this tool which we have been given with out an understanding of where it came. To do this let us start with a brief history of the Internet.

In the beginning there was nothing.

And from the nothingness came the ARPAnet. In the glorious year of 1969, while the first moon landings were occurring the ARPAnet was quietly born at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), UCLA, UCSB and the University of Utah.

It was on the 1st October 1969 that the ARPAnet really came into being. On this day Interface Message Processor Number 2 was installed at SRI. The Interface Message Processor, or IMP, was the first ever router. Its role was to interface with a host computer and then…

Writing a Packet Sniffer (idea)

2003-05-09T15:14:19Z

Packets, flying through the ether. Don't you just wish that you could see what they said?

Elem_125 Productions presents:

The Easy (Cross-platform-ish) Packet Sniffer Writing Guide

With the aid of the pcap library (available for Linux, BSD, Windows and other platforms) we can easily write our own packet sniffers. To aid you in this I will walk through the creation of a very simple sniffer that just looks for the start of HTTP streams and prints out the source, destination, packet size and packet flags.

So without further ado let us get started! I've only tested this on my Linux box, but it should (in theory) compile under gcc on windows and BSD, providing the libpcap library is installed.

First we'll start with a few headers:

#include <pcap.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <arpa/inet.h>
#include <netinet/in.h>
#include <

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Red Onion Marmalade (thing)

2003-04-23T14:55:23Z

Very very easy. It goes wonderfully with lamb and beef. It also goes very well with a strongly flavoured cheese, like a good cheddar.

Ingredients

This will make a small bowl's worth, depending on the size of the onions.

Two Red Onions (there's a suprise...)
Five teaspoons brown sugar
Walnut Oil
Quarter cup of white wine vinegar
Handfull of raisins

Directions

Peel and dice the onions. Heat the oil in a pan. Once the oil is hot add the onions to the pan.

Add the sugar, the raisins and the vinegar to the pan.

Once the liquid is bubbling lower the heat as low as you can and leave it for 20mins to reduce the liquid and let the flavor come of of the onions.

Take off the heat and tranfer to a glass bowl. Put in fridge. Use as required.

Yummy!

Lentil and Salmon Stuffed Peppers (thing)

2003-04-23T14:31:27Z

This is very good as part of a main course, along with easy potato cakes and a spicy tomato sauce. I'd recommend serving it thus:

Stuffed Pepper with half a baby artichoke heart on it. Potato cake with spicy tomato sauce poured over it, half an artichoke heart on top. Roasted strips of zuccini, half a sliced hard boiled egg and another half artichoke heart, all drizzled with 15yr old balsamic vinegar and extra virgin olive oil. Teaspoon of red onion marmalade on the side.

Mmmmmm good.

Ingredients

6 Peppers, color doesn't matter except for asthetics
1 Cup of green lentils
1 Cup of black lentils
1 Lemon
200g or so of Smoked Salmon
100g of Semi-Sun Dried Tomatoes
Vegetable stock cubes, or real vegetable stock is even better
Handfull of dried Apricots
Sprig of Rosemary
Walnut Oil
(Optional) Parmesan

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Converting ASCII to Base-64 (idea)

2003-04-23T11:48:55Z

Base-64 is quite useful. It allows us to present binary data in human readable characters. This allows it to be passed through those nice e-mail systems that we all use. Its also quite usefull in that it it means that you can print out binary data and type it in else where. Think crypto, crypto-keys, export law and OCR...

The details of how base-64 works are well explained in the Base-64 node. All I am presenting here is an easy way to convert ASCII to Base-64 in C.

The only complicated part of this function is making sure you get the right bits from your bytes.

      byte 0           byte 1             byte 2
+---------------+ +---------------+ +---------------+
|7 6 5 4 3 2|1 0| |7 6 5 4|3 2 1 0| |7 6|5 4 3 2 1 0|
+-----------+-------------+-------------+-----------+
  quantum 0     quantum 1     quantum 2   quantum 3

From the above diagram we can see that its quite easy to get our quanta.

Quantum 0…