Cатсн²² (in)sесuяitу / ChrisJohnRiley

Yesterday was a strange day. It started out well enough, studying for my up coming SANS SEC560 exam. It wasn’t till I hit a problem that my newly re-installed Linux system didn’t have a tool that things kind of came off the rails. Still after many hours I started to think about the mentality of a hacker. I’m not talking about the evil doers of the world as the uneducated media like to think of hackers, in-fact I’m not even thinking of the hackers in the “white-hat” good guy computer hacker sense. At least not in the way in which we’ve all come to think of them in recent years. I’m talking about hackers that just get deep into something because it’s interesting, challenging and new.

Yesterday was for me a prime example of that mentality. After discovering that my Linux system needed to have Nikto installed, I went to the usual sources and installed. Simple you’d think, that is until I realised that through my search, download and install I had no music playing. Not satisfied with the iPod sitting on my desk I wanted to play something from my SAMBA share. Naturally uBuntu 804 has a couple of problems with the default SAMBA client / libraries. So a forced downgrade to the previous version was needed. After that was done, I started to think how nice it would be to dump that nasty Windows stuff and just run Linux. Of course with an iPod I need to sync it somehow and my music collection is rather large (more than 80gb at least check). So out came the Google search window. After a brief dig about, Banshee and Songbird were downloaded and appropriately tested. Neither met the grade, so WINE was upgraded to the newest release and iTunes was installed….. needless to say, it was a long day. Then again, iTunes install on Linux seems about 10 times quicker than Windows. Pity  the actual interface isn’t that quick.

What did I learn from yesterday…. apart from the fact that my attention span is very short most of the time. Well I learnt that fixing problems is sometimes a lot of fun (even when it’s frustrating). I also learnt that if you don’t have a problem to fix, then some people, with the appropriate mindset, will simply set out to solve a problem that doesn’t exist yet. After all, even if I did get iTunes working on Linux, I’d just get bored and want to install Banshee again anyway 😉

Still….. guess I should get back to my studies. After all I’ve got no excuse to make Counter-Strike source work under Wine today….. maybe tomorrow 😉