Over the past few days (It is September 23, 2007 now) I have noticed what appears to be a bug in Yahoo! Messenger concerning unread mail. No matter if there are unread messages or not, Messenger always reports new mail. I have even gone through the trouble of deleting EVERYTHING from my mail account and it still pops up. The same behavior happens on Yahelite and Pidgen so it is a server side bug. Yahoo! has been upgrading their server so I would expect that this is a side effect of some of the upgrades.

Of course this could be confined to me so let me know if you are also having this problem.

I think I have some weird form of slow motion ADD. I tend to work very vigorously on one project of mine until I get completely burned out on it. After a few weeks to months of rest the urge to start work again will brew. I will take for example my house landscaping. I started ripping up mulch and weed fabric early this spring. After a few weeks of hard work I gave up on it for awhile even though there were still some eye sores in the yard. I then started working on my garage for a few weeks. I then moved inside and this month I am back to the landscape. Maybe this is a personality fault but that’s the way I am.

As the days start to get shorter and it gets harder and harder to do landscaping, my ADD will gradually move back inside. I am already starting to feel the itch to start coding again. Once summer and early fall have passed I think you can expect some more YCC updates.

I have to apologize for not answering some of your questions in a timely manner this summer but I hope to do better. I hope you can overlook my urge to be outside for a little bit longer.

I have had an interesting week. During the first part I participated in the digital combat exercises. Our team done well and we placed second. At first I felt really bad but I found out that the winning team is professional pen testers so that made me feel a little better. The downside is my main computer arrived back at my house DOA. After a few days of tinkering and pulling components I finally got it back together. As I type this on my secondary computer I am reformatting my main computer. Hopefully this week I can start pushing out some more content to the site.

Needless to say, I am no Linux guru. In an effort to prepare for the digital combat exercises I have to have a useable *NIX platform. I have already loaded Red Hat Fedora Core 6 on VMWare. The install went fairly well with the exception of two conflicting packages that would not install. After the third attempt I finally figured it out and got a full install. Right now I am trying to get VMWare tools installed. Apparently I have to recompile the drivers to get it to work under FC6 as there are no drivers by default. I have found some fairly good directions but as stated previously, Linux can have a steep learning curve. After I get the drivers installed and get a resolution greater than 800×600 then I am going to work on p0f.

Sorry that I have not posted very much in the past few weeks but my focus has shifted slightly for the next month. Not to worry, I still check the blog and forums everyday to see if any new posts have come in.

In about two weeks I hope to participate in a “digital combat exercise.” Basically it is a sanctioned hacking competition. It’s not all that big of a deal, just a local event but last time my team and I took first place and I intend to keep that title. I have all the basics in place; VM Ware, every flavor of Windows known to man, Fedora Core 6, Nessus, Metasploit, netcat, nmap, and much much more. I still have a lot of work ahead of me. I am not that familiar Metasploit and I am current scouring the Net for working exploits. If you have any friendly suggestion let me know. If I get enough feedback then I may open a special forum area.

I have finished yet another “book” on Yahoo! entitled “All About Yahoo!” published by Smart Computing Magazine (http://www.smartcomputing.com). This is actually one of those special issue editions published by a major computer magazine that focuses on a particular topic. It is a general discussion about all of the Yahoo! services with brief mention of Yahoo! Messenger. There was nothing new reveled to me with the exception of a reference to http://messenger.yahoo.com/edit/?.src=pg. This shows a list of your buddy list and allows one to message or change user options. I am sure that this is a well know fact to most but I was unaware of this particular link. It was OK to read but I would not recommend it.

I just finished “Ping! The Yahoo! Messenger Guide to All Things IM.” It was a fairly good read but as expected, not at all technical. It is geared toward a 14 year old girl that is just getting into messaging. It is 95 pages with some really nice graphics. It took me about an hour and a half to read everything so this is not heavy reading at all. Not for the technical reader but you never know where you will pick up a small gem of knowledge. http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?z=y&isbn=1402728174&itm=1