BrT

I joined Purdue University in 1996, and joined the COAST laboratory (Computer Operations, Audit, and Security Technology) in the Computer Sciences department, under the direction of Gene Spafford. A couple of years later, COAST became CERIAS (Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security). Under both names, it was a great place to learn, to study and to do research, full of interesting, engaging and fun people.

A few days ago, CERIAS was named as the top program in information security among U.S. universities.

Congratulations to everyone at CERIAS! It’s a well-deserved honor.

I have been giving Twitter another good try lately, and I’m actually liking it. I think the trick is to collect a good group of entertaining/interesting/weird people to follow. It’s been fun so far, and I have actually reconnected with a couple of old acquaintances through Twitter. In any case, if anyone is interested, you can follow me on Twitter. I have installed Alex King’s Twitter Tools wordpress plugin, which should produce a new Tweet every time I post something here, and you should be able to see my latest tweets on the sidebar.

I’m trying to track down why some of my attachments keep being downloaded to ~/Library/Mail Downloads/ even after I have set my Downloads directory in Mail.app to ~/Downloads/. I haven’t found it yet, but in the process I wrote a quick script for searching for a regular expression in .plist files, converting them to XML automatically if needed.

Here it is, use at your own risk (Download link)

#!/usr/bin/perl
# Usage: plistgrep regex file.plist [...]

use strict;

my $regex=qr($ARGV[0]);

shift @ARGV;

foreach my $i (@ARGV) {
  plistgrep($regex, $i);
}

sub plistgrep {
  my $r=shift;
  my $file=shift;
  my @text=plistread($file);
  print map { "$file: $_" } grep(/$r/, @text);
}

sub plistread {
  my $file=shift;
  my $type=`/usr/bin/file "$file"`;
  my @result;
  if ($type =~ /Apple binary property list/) {
    open F, "plutil -convert xml1 -o - '$file' |"
      or die "Error running plutil command: $!\n";
  }
  else {
    open F, "<$file"
      or die "Error opening file $file: $!\n";
  }
  @result=<F>;
  close F;
  return @result;
}

Almost two months ago, I wrote about my new productivity technique of keeping a handwritten log of my daily activities. At the time I had been doing it for about a month, but I was still in the “excited about it” phase, so I thought it would be fair to do a review after two months have passed.

The good news is that I am still keeping my daily, handwritten, detailed logs. The logs have helped me identify interruptions, which has in turn helped me to establish measures for avoiding those interruptions (e.g. turn off IM/Mail, close my door when I’m working on something).

The bad news is that it requires discipline to keep it up. I have found it easy to slip in the sense of not recording everything I do (which is the crux of the technique - every little thing has to bee there) and after a few hours have passed, just back-filling it with what I think was most relevant). Some days in which I have been really low on energy or motivation, I have simply stopped writing. But the positive side is that, even for those “bad” days, keeping the log helps to realize when they happened. And I think it’s OK: everyone has good days and bad days. The log has helped me to keep track of both of them, and hopefully to fix what I can.

In conclusion, keeping the log has been a worthwhile technique for me, so I will continue doing it. And looking back through my log, it’s very satisfying to see all those check marks for my completed tasks.