New Laptop: Asus Zenbook Prime

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 laptop from eBay, an Asus Zenbook Prime.  While similar laptops are occasionally available from woot.com as refurbs, careful auction hunting  netted it for less.

ASUS UX31a Laptop
Asus Zenbook UX31A-DH51

Here’s the exact specs:

Asus Zenbook UX31A-DH51

  • 13.3″ 1920×1080 IPS LCD screen
  • Intel Core i5-3317U 1.7GHz
  • 4 GB DDR3 RAM
  • 128 GB Solid-State Disk
  • Intel HD Graphics 4000

Since I wanted a computer that could be setup as an example for the students, I didn’t buy another Apple Macintosh.  The Asus is pretty comparable to a mid-level Macbook Air, and this used one cost me about 33% as much.  The new laptop has a ding or two, and didn’t come with all the accessories, but it works and fits my needs.  The speed at which Windows-compatibles lose their market-value is surprising to a long-time Mac owner (and a topic for another post).

I immediately blew away Windows 8, and replaced it with Elementary OS (Luna).  All things considered, installation went pretty smoothly.

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 of external customers (my family). We have used ChoreMonster in the past, but they started charging subscription fees, and I think that’s completely ridiculous for the functionality.

A tool for teaching programming would be more widely used, but is a much harder, less tractable problem. On the other hand, a campus renown for its teaching program might be just the place for such a project (not that the last semester’s class used those resources).

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 lots of fun, or really painful.

Cape Cod: Pairpoint Glass

Chakra ballAfter 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 close-up tour of glassblowing from the craftsmen. We did buy a “Chakra Ball”, as a souvenir though, our isn’t quite as pretty as this photo, but it’s still lovely.

Next time we might have to book a witch ball session, or maybe we should check out the Sandwich Glass Museum.

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 out to the end of the line 🙂

Kite Flying

And yes, I have a scratched lens on my iPhone.

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 packages as I’m continuing my use of LaTeX apace.

  1. tlmgr uninstall
  2. download and install the current BasicTeX package from tug.org
  3. update PATH environment variable to include the current install location: /usr/local/texlive/2013basic/bin/universal-darwin
  4. tlmgr update --self
  5. tlmgr update --all
  6. tlmgr install collection-fontsrecommended
  7. tlmgr install subfigure
  8. tlmgr install exam
  9. tlmgr install algorithms
  10. tlmgr install lastpage
  11. tlmgr install paralist
  12. tlmgr install enumitem

You can find the documentation for algorithms, lastpage, and paralist on CTAN.

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 was a pretty easy install as these things go.  I use homebrew for packages on Mac OS X, so if you use something else your mileage may vary, but here’s the steps I used:

  1. brew install openconnect
  2. download and install TunTap virtual network drivers
  3. startup drivers manually, or reboot.
  4. test out your vpn connection.
In my case, I had a few other small things to do, I needed to extract and install the root certificate for Towson, and allow access to openconnect in /etc/sudoers.

For the record, uninstalling should be pretty simple, just:

  1. Re-edit /etc/sudoers
  2. delete the cert in ~/Library/Certificates
  3. brew uninstall openconnect
  4. rm  -r /Library/Extensions/tun.kext /Library/Extensions/tap.kext /Library/StartupItems/tun /Library/StartupItems/tap

BasicTeX 2012

I just upgraded to BasicTeX 2012, and here’s a quick synopsis of the steps:

  1. tlmgr uninstall
  2. download and install the current BasicTeX package from tug.org
  3. update PATH environment variable to include the current install location: /usr/local/texlive/2012basic/bin/universal-darwin
  4. tlmgr update --self
  5. tlmgr update --all
  6. tlmgr install collection-fontsrecommended
  7. tlmgr install subfigure
  8. tlmgr install exam

The Exam package is new (chalk it up to the new job), and the impetus for the updated install. The rest of the steps are really based on my previous TeX posts: here and here.

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.

  1. Open the Start menu, and type gpedit.msc in the search line and press Enter.
  2. Navigate to: Local Computer Policy\Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Windows Logon Options
  3. Set the Secure Attention Sequence to enabled for “Services and Ease of Access applications”

Now whenever I need to generate a ctrl-alt-delete sequence on the PC, fn-control-command-delete on my Mac does the job.

Update #1: I had to modify power settings on my Windows 7 system to get around a bug:

    For Windows 7 Synergy servers


powercfg -REQUESTSOVERRIDE process synergys.exe system display awaymode

powercfg -REQUESTSOVERRIDE service "Synergy Server" system display awaymode

    For Windows 7 Synergy clients

powercfg -REQUESTSOVERRIDE process synergyc.exe system display awaymode

powercfg -REQUESTSOVERRIDE service "Synergy Client" system display awaymode

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 commands one at a time:


sudo rm -rf /System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/*.jdk
sudo rm -rf /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/*.jdk
sudo rm -rf /Library/Internet\ Plug-Ins/JavaAppletPlugin.plugin
sudo rm -rf /Library/PreferencePanes/JavaControlPanel.prefpane

The first one should request an Administrator password, but the rest should run without it. You may encounter a “No such file or directory” error with some of these commands… no worries then, you just didn’t have that component installed.

Since I need a version of Java installed for development purposes and to use Photoshop CS4 (??), I went ahead and re-installed Apple’s supported version of Java SE 6. Java for OS X 2012-004 sounds like it requires a previous install of Java, but it seems to work fine with Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8.1) and no existing SE 6 install.