Author: admin

  • De-ActiveX-ifying an ActiveX Component

    Some ActiveX components add “enhancement” to the browser by dropping in custom controls for forms or other fanciness. Those types of components require the browser, because they augment the user’s experience within the browser. Other ActiveX components are little more than a standalone executable that can get it’s command line arguments from the web page…

  • Make a Program Run as a Windows Service on Boot

    Components that run automatically with Windows on boot up often establish themselves as a system service. Other options are to add programs into the registry in places like HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run and HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run, or into the “All Users” Startup group folder (C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup, C:\Users\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup). There are pros and cons to each method,…

  • TLER and MD Arrays

    TLER is the Western Digital “feature” for making a hard drive give up trying to read/write before it normally would. This can be useful in a RAID environment in that a RAID controller is able to recover from a read/write error faster than an individual disk would since the RAID controller can consult the redundant…

  • Bash Snippet: URL Encoding

    Bash Snippet: URL Encoding

    One approach would be to encode everything, but the approach I took was to just encode things I thought might be problematic to pass over the query string. URL (a.k.a percent) encoding of a string in bash: urlencode () {         tab="`echo -en "\x9"`"         i="$@"      …

  • Bash Snippet: Calculating the Distance Between 2 Coordinates

    Bash Snippet: Calculating the Distance Between 2 Coordinates

    I have a tendency to do things in bash that I’d probably be better off doing in perl or python. Although bash may have super powers, math is not one of them, and so like my last post this script also requires bc. I’ll try and keep these code snippet posts short and sweet, and…

  • Bash Snippet: HTML &#code; decoder

    Bash Snippet: HTML &#code; decoder

    A short and simple way to decode HTML decimal (and hex) character codes in bash. html_decode () {     html_encoded="$1"     html_encoded=${html_encoded//&#/ }     html_encoded=(`echo $html_encoded`)     for html_dec in ${html_encoded[@]}     do         html_dec="${html_dec//X/x}"         html_dec="${html_dec//;/}"         if [ "${html_dec:0:1}"…

  • Antivirus Detection Detection

    If you read my last post then you may recall I had to update some aging antivirus software recently. As part of detecting which machines on the LAN still needed updating I wrote a quick and dirty script I’ll share with you. In the process of looking up the GUIDs for the version of Symantec…