Of course!

"Bad programming? Use good programming. It’s so simple! How could we not have seen it!" -Ptacek

Read this post.

Evil Friday

(YMMV.)

Take one DHCP server that allows you to set your hostname in DNS. Add a whole mess of workstations which are configured with the same search suffix as the DNS domainname. Then call yourself google. Set up a web server and catch all the people who are just typing "google" into their browsers. (I used a Python script to log the request, then 302 the user to google.com.)

host1.domain.edu - - [11/Apr/2008 14:38:27] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 302 -
host2.domain.edu - - [11/Apr/2008 14:46:38] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 302 -
host3.domain.edu - - [11/Apr/2008 14:49:34] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 302 -
host4.domain.edu - - [11/Apr/2008 14:55:21] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 302 -
host5.domain.edu - - [11/Apr/2008 15:03:45] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 302 -
host6.domain.edu - - [11/Apr/2008 15:07:58] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 302 -
host7.domain.edu - - [11/Apr/2008 15:09:45] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 302 -
host8.domain.edu - - [11/Apr/2008 15:10:17] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 302 -
host9.domain.edu - - [11/Apr/2008 15:17:01] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 302 -
host10.domain.edu - - [11/Apr/2008 15:17:37] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 302 -

Optional: go phishing.
Optional part II: clobber the DNS entry for a legitimate host on the network and have REAL fun. (Yes, this works, at least in my environment.)

Bash Brace Expansion

I have to give a little shout out to Bash brace expansion. This is one of the neat little toys that I rarely see mentioned. The really quick summary reads like this:

$ echo test_{foo,bar,baz}
test_foo test_bar test_baz

which is useful enough, but where it really shines is in sequence expansion. The idiomatic Bash For loop I've often seen is something like:

$ for i in `seq 1 10`; do echo $i; done

which is just nasty. Compare to:

$ for i in {1..10}; do echo $i; done

which is nicer, but even more nice is:

$ echo {1..10} | tr ' ' '\n'

(IMHO.)

And of course, something like this this comes in really handy:

$ wget www.somewhere.com/{a,b}{1..9}.jpg

Not sure what I would use that for... ;)