Recently I was reading the blogpost on the BrekingPoint labs log about parsing pcap files with Perl and I immediately said to myself: it is impossible that there isn’t a module on CPAN, because Perl is great. Turns out I was right, there is Net::TcpDumpLog which can be ...

While most of the time I simply skip / delete any malicious content encountered, from time to time I do some quick investigation on items which peak my interest. For example the following comment was posted on a friends blog:

You make a good point, and it is one I often ...

A short story with a happy ending: my Asus WL-500g locked up and it wasn’t starting, even after I hard-reset it (removed the power and plugged it back in). All the LEDs were constantly on (normally, when you plug in the power, they should light up for a ...

Geek PSA: Yesterday was PI day (3.14, get it?). Lets celebrate with this spiked math comic:

Last week I saw the following problem which peaked my interest:

Compute the last (decimal) digit of 2 raised to the power e where e might be very large.

We assume that we ...

…and of the Perl modules in general. I had the following problem:

Given a list of 16 character alphanumeric IDs, find all the lines from a large-ish (\~6GB) logfile which contain at least one of the IDs.

The naive approach was to construct a big regular expression like \W(\QID1 ...

About DRM (this is floating around the interwebs, I’m not entirely sure about its origin):

The second one is from a webcomic (added to my reader :-)) which I discovered via Bruce Schneier’s blog:

And finally, for all the programmers out there (found it via The Reinvigorated Programmer’s ...

This is an interesting problem which can appear in certain cases (although not very often). A little searching around led me to many posts stating that there is no easy solution and the following easy solution:

^((?!my string).)*$

It works as follows: the matching string must contain zero or more ...

There is a lot of debate on the intertubes if one should or shouldn’t use wildcard imports. I’m mostly indifferent to the discussion (mainly because all the package references are resolved compile time – so there is no performance overhead – and because today’s IDE’s contain a lot ...

Finding relatives was always a topic which interested me marginally, so I was interested in checking out the Finders UK website (which BTW, can also be read in other ways because URLs don’t have the concept of capitalization implicitly – lets just leave at that). They offer different services like ...

After looking at the site of this Medical Alert company I’m left with troubling questions in my mind. Having an ill grand-parent makes me acutely appreciate the need for Medical Alert services, but this company leaves many open questions, especially considering the fact that this is a company which ...