I hadn’t really thought about the long-term ramifications of teaching a Malware course, but it appears that I will be teaching it annually for the foreseeable future. Since I don’t think it’s the wisest idea to mess with live malware on my day-to-day system, I bought a “new” laptop last week. It’s actually a used …
Author Archives: sandro
Software Engineering Class Projects
I’m still debating the best project for this semester’s class project. We’re probably going to have 10-12 people per team, with two competing teams. Some of my current thoughts: Cross-Platform Synchronizing Chore management system Software Tool/Environment for teaching children to program The chore management system is needed around our house, and we have a group …
Spring 2014 Courses
This semester’s schedule is going to be interesting: ITEC 325 – System Administration COSC 412 – Software Engineering COSC 485/670 – Reverse Engineering / Malware Analysis The reverse engineering class is a new one, and I’ll be dusting off some old-school skills to pass along to a new generation. This is either going to be …
Cape Cod: Pairpoint Glass
After a couple of failed attempts at taking the kids to watch glassblowing, we stopped off at Pairpoint glassworks on our way off Cape Cod. Pretty cool stuff. While the kids only got to watch from windows located above the glassmaking area, visitors who scheduled a “Design your own witch ball” session were treated to …
Cape Cod: Kite Flying
At the end of July, the whole family spent 4 days on Cape Cod. I managed to squeeze in a bit of kite flying with one of our daughters. She’s flying her Uncle Christopher’s shark kite, and I’m flying a brand new parafoil 5. You might not be able to tell, but she got it …
BasicTeX 2013
Well that didn’t take long. Only 1 month after the release of BasicTeX 2013, I find myself in need of a new package. The TeXLive repository has already deprecated all of the 2012 pacakges, so I’m off and running installing BasicTeX 2013. This year the steps are mostly the same, with the addition of more …
Avoiding Cisco AnyConnect on the Mac
I haven’t had much luck with Cisco VPN software on the Mac in the past. Unfortunately, the Cisco AnyConnect software that we use at Towson doesn’t accept connections from the built-in Apple VPN client. Luckily (and predictably), the open-source community has a solution to this problem. OpenConnect is an open source replacement for AnyConnect. It …
BasicTeX 2012
I just upgraded to BasicTeX 2012, and here’s a quick synopsis of the steps: tlmgr uninstall download and install the current BasicTeX package from tug.org update PATH environment variable to include the current install location: /usr/local/texlive/2012basic/bin/universal-darwin tlmgr update –self tlmgr update –all tlmgr install collection-fontsrecommended tlmgr install subfigure tlmgr install exam The Exam package is …
Synergy
I’m such a geek. I just got Synergy running at work. Now my Mac keyboard and mouse are controlling both the iMac & PC. To generate the ctrl-alt-delete sequence needed to log-in to Windows, I need to modify the Group Policy to allow Synergy to generate the attention sequence. Open the Start menu, and type …
Uninstalling Java for OS X
Wouldn’t you know it, I install Oracle Java SE 7 for my Mac just days before a serious exploit is found in this newest version of Java. If you’re like me, it’s easier to just uninstall Java until Oracle has a chance to fix exploit. Here’s how: Using the Terminal application (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal) enter the following …