You may not be as paranoid as I am … but you probably should be.  One thing that bothers me is that on a domain system is that my files are accessible to anyone with admin privileges on the domain.  They can read my emails, my documents, see my pictures, pretty much access anything they want. 

Fortunately for the paranoid there is a solution.  You can encrypt your files.  The easiest way to go about this is to surf on over to truecrypt.org and download their software package.  True Crypt is free of course, all you do is download it and follow their tutorial and you will have yourself an encrypted drive volume in no time flat.  Then anything you stick into that drive is encrypted and only decrypted on the fly when you ask for it.  The best part about True Crypt is that you are the only person who knows the password and it uses such great encryption algorithms that, with a sufficiently long password, it would take years to break.

Happy Saturday!  So a fun activity for your free time is to join in working on some sort of open source project.  There are a large number of projects out there that can use a hand.  The place to start is to swing on over to sourceforge.net and search for a project you might be interested in using.  Source Forge is full of projects in all sorts of stages of development and all types of uses. 

Most of the projects will let you get a current version of the source from the CVS and you can make changes.  If you make any useful changes you can generally pass them back on to the group.  Some projects are organised enough that they have specific lists of things that need to be done so you can (and should) follow those lists. 

Happy Coding.

So apparently small children find Boo to be an amusing game.  Because of this I had a request to turn boo into a game instead of a tool for annoyance.  You ask and so you receive.  Here it is Boo The Game.  Run away from Boo as long as you can, as time passes more Boos are created and they get faster.  Have Fun!

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So a common problem you may encounter is the need to mount an offence from your desk with only what equipment you have at hand. While forethought and preparation are often a good idea it turns out that sometimes there is just not enough time to prepare for a proper assault. This site will help you build guns out of your common office equipment. Take a look at their site and try out some of their guns. <Disclaimer>Remember though, don’t blame me if someone bleeds.</Disclaimer>

So yesterday we talked about the event log, you could were you so inclined, just keep the event log open and periodically refresh it thereby keeping an ‘eye’ on the event log.  However, in the end this is impractical.  So what you do is access the event log in code and monitor the events you are interested in, then when one of them fires off you notify yourself via some mechanism that suits you.  So how, you ask, might I monitor the event log in code?  Well I am glad you asked, lets look at the code after the break. Read more

So we haven’t had a discussion on the event log yet. I figure it is about time. The event log is the quintessential defensive tool. Any access you’re your system gets logged to the event log. The main thing you are going to be concerned about is the security event log. Every attempted access to your system, whether it fails or succeeds, gets logged in the security event log. This can be very handy when you are concerned about your co-workers running a shutdown or using psexec on you. Checking your event log can also let you know if someone has accessed the file system remotely to copy over some piece of code they wrote.
Tomorrow I will go into detail on how you might monitor the event log in real time for particular things but for today I remind you that OfficeDefender does just that. Any attempted logins will be displayed in the window and any attempted shutdowns will be aborted.

Welcome back to work everyone, hope you had a good weekend. Maybe some of you even tried out topcoder, if so good for you, I hope you had a fun go of it.

Well on to today’s topic, I have another program for you today, this one is simple, when run it takes a screen shot of the current desktop, then displays that image full screen. What this does is lend the illusion of a no longer working desktop. Try it out on your friends. To end this app just hit alt-F4 or control-alt-delete and use task manager. For that matter you can alt-tab out of it. But it is still good for a little chuckle.

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Ok, this one is for the serious nerds only. Competitive Programing is a rather entertaining thing to in your free time that can even earn you some money. Here is what you do, you go down to topcoder.com and register for a free account. Then you have a few options, you can compete in their Algorithm competitions, which are timed programing exercises. Or you can compete in their software design or development competitions, in which you not surprisingly develop and design software. The best part about topcoder is that the winner gets paid so it is not only fun but profitable.

So several of the applications I have written these last two weeks have involved monitoring the keyboard for key presses in one way or another.  There are a couple of ways to go about this sort of thing, one easy way and one hard (but less resource intense).  The first way is to loop (using a timer) checking the state of the keyboard every so often.  The second way is to use a global keyboard hook, which is a little bit difficult to implement since you have to have an outside dll do some of the work. 

So obviously I am going to show you the lazy easy way since that is what I have been using.  The easy way is the only way to really do it when you are knocking out code quickly for small amusing apps. 

Lets look at the code Read more

Welcome back today, so if you have been reading for a little while you may remember the Shortcut Switch up! article.  Well this program, loving named Boo goes along well with that one.  Basically boo is a super annoying little version of boo the ghost from the Mario series of games.  You run him and he pops up on your screen and begins to chase the cursor.  Not so anoying in and of itself but if he catches you he makes more Boos.  I have however limited him to 10 Boos at a time since otherwise it could seriously chew up your system resources quickly. 

One more thing, the trick to getting rid of Boo is to turn caps lock on.  Then instead of making more Boos, any Boos that catch you will just die.

Download Here