harrison

We are a good team

Here's mine

Haha, there's a good one of me and Wess singing "California Love", haha!

Man, I saw my boss dual boot Mac OSX / Windows yesterday on his new Macbook Pro. I am totally getting one and switching to that setup.

Me on left.

well he does like the green leafe cafe...

Is that a pearl necklace Darren is wearing?

I highly recommend starting out on a unix platform. I would recommend compiling the code manually with gcc or something that way you'll get a lot of experience debugging your code on your own without some of the fancy error messages that you get from development envionments. The benefit to learning to code on a UNIX platform is that you figure out the guts of the system and how it works. Often times many people start out on MS VS and then become dependant upon it, because it's so helpful that it practically writes code for you. In a business environment when time is crucial, this can be extremely helpful, but it's not a good way to learn because you will be unable to write code without the help of VS. It's very easy to transfer from coding on UNIX to coding on Windows, but it's very difficult to go the other way around. Even still, I use jEdit to write my code, and manually compile it with gcc in the terminal. I just prefer to do it that way. However, if you plan on spending a lot of time writing code on linux (or some UNIX variant) I might suggest checking out VIm and learning that editor. I never took the time to learn it and now I sort of regret it, because I have a friend who knows it very well and can write code much quicker than I can because he has all his macros and hotkeys and shit set and memorized. VI is powerful as hell, but I just prefer the simplicity of jEdit. I don't use jEdit's IDE, I just use the editor to write code (not compile). I sort of went off on a tangent there, sorry about that, but basically I would highly recommend starting your C code on UNIX and then when you are ready and confident in your skill with the language, start moving over to Windows if you become interested in writing gui apps on VS and such. I have been using VS .NET at work lately developing in C# and it's a very nice IDE and makes it real easy to build GUI apps. The only problem is that I feel like it's rotting my brain because it's so sickeningly easy to develop in, and often times I let the IDE just use basic functions (like sort() ) instead of spending the time to implement my own sorting function (which I think is better in certain situations because you can specify which parameters to pass to your function, etc). But I have to switch back over to Gentoo for like 20 minutes at the end of the work day and write some C in jEdit just to make myself feel better.

Yeah that cracked me up. I was watching that race and couldn't believe what happened to poor Button. From 1st to 6th, and then his car blows up, haha. Of course I don't really like Button because he's sort of a prick, but I still feel bad for his bad luck. Of course bad luck didn't cause him to get into 6th place from 1st. Both my cars fucked up though, which sucked big time.

C is my favorite language and I have quite a few books that I would like to recommend. However, with very little prior C experience I would recommend they be read in a certain order. 1. Practical C Programming - This book is what I used to start learning C, and it did a great job walking me through the basics and scaling up to some somewhat complex programming concepts such as linked lists and tree searching. I think it's a good starting point because it assume you have no prior programming experience, which is good for idiots like me because I have to have things spelled out for me. 2. The C Programming Language - This was the second book on C that I read, and it's probably the best all around book on C written to date (as far as my knowledge). I absolutely recommend this book 100%. If you are rather confident in your past programming experience, by all means skip the first one and go straight to this one. It's written by one of the (two) guys that developed C, and explains the language in a fast concise manner, giving you everything you need to know to fully understand the language. If you don't read this first, definitely read this second! It will fill in all the gaps that were left behind from any other book on C. 3. Expert C Programming - I can't say enough good things about this book. I highly recommend it as a follow up to any basic C book. This is by no means a book to read if you are unfamiliar with C, it assumes that you already know the language. But it will definitely deliver what the titles says; it will change you from an alright C programmer to a very good C programmer. It's written by a retired compiler writer from Sun. What this book does is teach you trips, tricks, and shortcuts that typically require years of experience to pick up. In the preface to the book, the author makes note of a few topics that give a good foresight to the rest of the book. For example, "What's the difference between char *foo[] and char(*foo)[]". Or "what's a buss error? What's a segmentation violation?" Or "How can I pass different-sized multidimensional arrays to one function?" Or "Why doesn't extern char * p; match char p[100]; in another file?" These sort of questions are answered in full and explained simply. The book definitely helped me write more effeciently. 4. Mastering Algorithms in C - My friend loaned me this book to read, and now I want to buy it to keep as a reference. Great book for a good C programmer! It goes through many different algorithms used for tasks like searching or sorting (among many many others) and explains how they work, and how to write them into C programs. It also has some cool info on crypto algorithms, which I found particularly interesting. I definitely recommend this book. 5. Pointers on C - I haven't bought this yet, but it's next on my shopping list, I'm actually planning on picking this up this week. I've read really good things about this book, so I can't wait to read it. I want to make a living in the security field after I graduate, and you are definitely right about the value of learning C. I've asked what the best thing I can do to break into the industry is, and many experts that I have talked to have said the same thing, "learn C like the back of your hand". Because C, unlike many other languages, will force you to learn the guts of a computer, and how to manually manage your memory and control your hardware. This is crucial because often times you will be working with software specifically designed to control hardware at a low level, like firmware on routers, etc. Exploiting software is probably the most important aspect of attacking digital security. If you examine exploit code, it's almost always in C (sometimes in perl), with assemly being used to write payloads. And often times the software that you will be attacking is in C as well. I hope this helps. I love C, and I love to spread the love of C. I learn much better from books that I do from online resources because I can't stand sitting in front of a computer reading. Even though books can get expensive, I still prefer to dish out the cash when I can and get a good book that I can carry with me and read whenever I find time. Good luck, keep in touch, I'd love to help out :)

From birth as far as I know.... I didn't become black until college though.

But shit doesn't run fast! Daaaaamn, I got buuuurned. How long did it take you to think up that one? Hehe jk

eye matie!

You forgot Void11, which often times works better than anything else.

Open Office is the shit, check it out

I like Live cds that have been put on flash sticks so you can boot up from USB thumb drives :) Get a 1GB Corsair and you can carry around nUbuntu with you.

hahahaha

I'm so confused, how the hell can anyone get "owned" by ep 8.5? I mean, it's an internet tv show, how the hell did someone get "owned"?

I would have to say mine is definitely better than all of these. It's a picture of me so drunk I can barely speak. I mean, and I am so much cooler than all you guys anyway, so obviously that rocks.

Pretty sweet plugin

I don't think there is any sense in doing a hak.5 linux distro unless you had something to offer that you couldn't get on some other distro. But it would have to be significant. There are a million live distro's out there that have a fuck load of good shit on them, hacking tools, etc. In order to compete with them you would have to include so many extra things that it is worth downloading an ISO and going through the trouble of burning it and running your computer at reduced speeds. If the live distro only has one or two unique things, the users may as well just download those one or two things that they want and run them on their computer. Personally I think it would be a waste of time, unless you can convince TomB to slap a hak.5 wallpaper on nUbuntu and just use that, because that's pretty much the best live distro I've seen to date.

I have been using Gentoo as my main operating system for about 3 months now. Before that I used OSX / Solaris as the two operating systems I used most. For work however, recently I have been using Windows again because of a .NET project in C# that requires a .NET connector for SAP that is only for Windows :( So I suppose I am spending an equal amount of time on Gentoo and Windows. I write all my personal code and school code on Gentoo, and my work code is being developed on Windows currently.

Gentoo + Fluxbox. Seems to be a very good combination. This is taken from my ThinkPad t42p, and it runs fast as shit on Gentoo.

snakeoil

No, but you could get arrested if you opened the door and took the keys, copied them, then returned them and told the person about it