Recently I needed to connect to a Cisco router and didn’t have a serial cable on hand. The Cisco routers just like their switches come supplied with a console port built in. This console port is usually a female RJ-45 in the back of the unit and is labeled console. A lot of other manufacturers also use this method to connect to their equipment; everything from Sun servers to appliance servers.
Author Archives: Bohack
Get the URL from a hyperlink in Excel
Recently I needed to extract a links from a web page; normally I would use some Linux commands ported to windows and get the job done. In the end I needed to format the relative link to a full URL, so I decided to use Excel. However when I imported the web page into excel I found that the URL was embedded in the friendly name of the hyperlink.
Bascom-AVR and the Atmel ATtiny2313
Back in April I attended the Notacon the hacker-art convention up in Cleveland Ohio. The hardware hacking room had a number of little project kits they were giving out to teach people how to solder. These project kits included the chips, resistors, LEDs, serial connector and everything except the solder. They ran labs and the last day they just wanted to get rid of these project kits. So I grabbed a couple that caught my eye. One kit had an Atmel AVR programmable chip, eight LEDs and sported a 9-pin serial connector. The kit is the Mini-POV3 sold by http://www.adafruit.com/ for $17.50, it’s all you need to get started with programmable chips!
Compacting Microsoft Virtual PC VHD Images 101
I’ve been using Microsoft’s Virtual PC for the past 7 years, ever since I spoke with a kernel developer at Microsoft and found that they solely use Virtual PC for debug and development. Since then I have used it to build images and teach in the classroom as a learning device. It allows me to teach with what I call a surgical approach, because every lab is perfectly clean every time for every student. However it is all about the footprint when it comes to storage of the Virtual Hard Drives, sometime you need to keep several VHD images around. So over the past few years I have put a collection of tools together that lead to the best compaction method.
T1 RJ-48C Wiring and the Smart Jack
Again I find myself wiring up T1 circuits for a Telco provider that my company is going to use. I also find myself scouring the Internet for color codes for the T1 cable at the “Smart Jack”. The smart jack is where the demarcation point or demarc resides. So what is a demarc and what exactly is the smart jack… The demarc is where the Telco ends their responsibility and yours begins. The Telco needs a way to start your responsibility for wiring and internal maintenance, that is the threshold of the demarc. The smart-jack is a way that the phone company can loop or loopback the signal so that they can remotely check that everything is OK on their side.
Query and Parse XML from VBScript
Toying around I needed to query XML from VBScript and parse it out for only the elements I needed. So I wrote a VBScript and figured I would share it. Many posts out there just load a file rather than a URL, this script will do both and I simplified it a bit.
How To Find Out Where Someone Lives by Their Phone Number
Well you really can’t find out where someone lives exactly, only the phone company can tell you that and that information is confidential. However you can find which town someone lives in using the NPA/NXX database. The North America Numbering Plan was first introduced in 1947 and adopted by AT&T in 1951. The NANP was made to simplify and speed up long distance calls or calls that needed to leave the Central Office they originated from. That is where ‘Mabel’ would get on and you would ask to connect to Bayside-0213, Bayside was the central office or ‘229’ b=2 a=2 y=9 or you could ask for 229-0123. The letters on the phone are there for a reason and that was when the NANP came into existence.
Simple VBScript to Display a Web Page
I was currently working on a VBScript to pull some information from a web page. So decided to build a function for it, so that it can be reused over and over again in other scripts. It uses the XMLHTTP library to query a URL and return the elements, I just ask for the responsetext and return it.
How to Default Back to Search Companion
Microsoft Search should not be feared, it is now an optional install from Microsoft Update Services. It is integrates into Office 2007 for email search capability. However one problem is it changes the default search of Windows Explorer to Desktop Search. So it has pissed off a lot of people and made them uninstall it. There is hope and a way to switch it back.
PHP Page Stop Watch
Lots of time I have web pages performing complex functions and want to make sure that they execute without a problem. A problem would be they just take too damn long and time out when put under a load. This is the problem when things don’t scale properly, they just get really slow. So in order to gauge how long a page takes to load we really need a stop watch. Luckily we the components of one…