Today I was confronted with a situation where a task we have been doing weekly now needs to be done daily. I didn’t feel like the hassle of writing code, or doing it manually every day myself. Because the task is done on our production server, this is not something our customer service department can do. It involves running a database procedure and e-mailing the date-stamped file to a mailing house.

A friend of mine had mentioned a program that allowed you to write macros in Windows. I wanted to find something slightly more robust but with the same idea of scripting a sequence of events. And, without having to write any scripts. After hunting around I found a program called WinAutomation. This has a nice little GUI where you can drag and drop actions like “Send E-mail” and “Delete Files” into your job. It has flow control and limited but serviceable error handling.

WinAutomation Job Designer

I was able to learn the program and write my mailer job in a few hours. The hard part, as with many programs, was thinking through and handling each possible error. I was so thrilled by this that I decided to tackle another tedious job, deleting Tomcat log files. Some of these roll over each day, while others are date-stamped with the time the server started but can’t be deleted — so for those, the newest version needs to be left alone. Strangely enough this job was harder to write than the first one, but eventually I got that done too.

I’m very happy and looking forward to writing more jobs. The price is pretty reasonable too — $129 for the standard program, or $199 to include the compiler feature which allows you to turn a job into an executable that will run on computers without WinAutomation. As with most of these things, you can get a free Window scripting alternative. But it doesn’t have a GUI, and if I’m going to learn a new language, I might as well code it the old way.

WinAutomation apparently has been offering bloggers free licenses to review the product. Alas, I am not in that category . Just thought it was a neat product.

At any rate, I just assumed this was part of GooTube’s plan to populate the world with ads. But, when I looked at my video, I saw that it had over 1,400 hits. That was a surprise. After some digging, I discovered that we had been featured (again) in a MAKE: Online blog post. Unlike the Speed Vest entry though, Gareth didn’t know this video came for me or that it was connected to a blog. So it’s a more anonymous credit. Still exciting, but lesson learned — I will tag all future public offerings with a link. And I’m now allowing YouTube to show my real name.

The idea of making the DVDs fold up is an interesting one. It’s been my goal all along to avoid doing the standard stacked CD design. I think it is possible to justify a longer body depending on the robot’s function and artistic goals. Some rotational freedom is appealing, too. Full folding, though — that’s tough, unless a human does it, and I am having trouble thinking of a good reason to put it in there.

I plan to finish a basic version of the bot in time for the deadline. The programming may be a challenge. I have been very impressed by the various contestants who have built bots within days. It takes a lot longer when you are doing it for the first time. When I get version one up and running, I hope to come back and explore some more exotic options.

The e-mail could not be sent.
Possible reason: your host may have disabled the mail() function.

Well. This was not  good at all.

Fortunately GoDaddy had a record of the original admin password, and I had never changed it, so I was able to get in. I then added the username/password combo to our secure corporate knowledgebase.

This is not a fool-proof solution, though — it would not necessarily track password updates. I want e-mail password recovery to work! After some searching I found the following post, How to Send Email with WordPress from GoDaddy. After setting up a GoDaddy e-mail account, then downloading and configuring the recommended WP Mail SMTP plug-in, I was able to send a test e-mail.

On our old hosting plan, any e-mail sent to thekanes.org was automatically forwarded to me. In solving this problem I discovered that wasn’t the case. With a little work I configured that option.

Moral of the story: if you install a new app, check that the e-mail password function actually works. You never know when you will need it.

Systems intrusion and computer security is not really my main area, but it is hard to resist a conference that encourages you to throw balls at speakers you disagree with and has a contest for the most creatively printed barcode. And by default I am the Chief Security Officer for SentryLink.

For those of you not on the East Coast, DC was hit today with one of the worst snowstorms in history. So getting to the conference was something of a challenge. The worst snowfall started tonight so I thought I could go to some afternoon sessions, mostly travel by Metro, and only have a short drive in the storm. This more or less worked as planned, though I was almost the only car out driving at 6pm tonight.

The opening session made the point that most of us do not use common sense in protecting our networks. We have password policies that aren’t all followed, computers are more interconnected than they should be, and a great deal of existing hardware won’t support upgraded security. I must admit that we certainly are guilty of that. One thing I am very glad about, is that our servers are separate both physically and from a network perspective from anything in the main office. But the depressing fact is that a skilled hacker could undoubtedly find a way in. We try not to have anything valuable in our database, and the few things that might be use our own private encryption scheme, which is completely non-standard and separate from the database itself. Nevertheless there is always more that can be done.

After that slightly demoralizing but valid opener, the next talk was on GPUs (graphics processing units) vs. CPUs (computer processing units). This is something that I learned about in my computer graphics course last year, and it is very interesting stuff. For tasks that can be broken up into lots of parallel pieces — not always easy to figure out — GPUs are incredibly fast. And they are very cheap too, as their evolution has been driven by computer games. And if you need to break into a system by running through every single password possibility, why yes, you can make that a parallel process very easily. It is possible to break 40-bit encryption, standard for many SSL sites, given a few hours. Scary. For more information on programming with GPUs, I recommend the CUDA site.

My new lockpick set.

I was really looking forward to the talk on Economics of Cybercrime, but the weather prevented that speaker from getting here. So I wandered around a bit, and stumbled onto to the room run by TOOOL, The Open Organization of Lockpickers. There were tables with padlocks, combo locks, and handcuffs, and people trying to get them open. One fellow loaned me a tool and showed me how to open handcuffs with it, which I was able to do within a few minutes — fairly easy and satisfying. Then there was a presentation on opening keyed locks. I couldn’t resist this one, so I paid $20 for a lockpicking kit and started trying various padlocks. This was harder than it looked. But after 10-15 minutes I was able to get an “easy” padlock opened. Then another fellow showed me how to open a combination lock.

I am sure that if I had to do this in the real world, I would be very very slow at getting a lock open. I am glad to know the basics though, and who knows, maybe it will be useful. The kit is very small and light, easy to carry around.

There is supposed to be two feet of snow on the ground by tomorrow morning. If that happens, I’ll be watching day 2 of the con through the free live video.

I finally remembered this, and moved to GoDaddy. Only $5 a month and there are numerous free hosted applications available, including WordPress. So here we are. As a family we have numerous outposts on the web already, but hopefully this will provide a unified directory for them. The blog portion is useful for longer essays, and for logging engineering projects.