Yes, I made a devilish, mad scientist laugh this morning. Why? Because I finally got my LED-on-a-stick to work. w00t! Double w00t! w00t w00t!

The guys who make the pole sent me the the complete docs on it and it was a simple matter to hack up a couple perl scripts to get stuff on my pole. As it stands now, I have weather info for 12 cities and stock quotes for 8 stocks scrolling by on it. Not much, but not too bad considering I should have been packing for PHX.

I snapped a pic and wrote up some stuff on it if you want more info.

I totally forgot to post this: I met Sheriff Joe when I was in Phoenix. He was at that fundraiser at my parents' house that I wrote about. I even got him to autograph one of his posters for me. I had to spell out my name for him: Me: Could you make it out to Wee? The Sheriff: Who? Lee? Me: No... Wee. As in "Wee are the world, wee are the chiiiillllldren... Wee are the ones who make a brighter day..." The Sheriff: Huh? Who do you want it made out to? Me: My name is Wee. W-E-E... Wee. The Sheriff: Huh. Ok. (The Sheriff signs.) Here you go, Wee. Me: Thanks, Sheriff Joe! Anyway, I hung the poster up on my wall. The picture's at right. It's my reminder not to sell tobacco to minors. Which is probably a very lucrative business model... He was a pretty outspoken guy and if the crowd there was any indication, a real hit with the older Republican demographic. I felt kind of bad for the guy whose fundraiser it was because Sheriff Joe was stealing all the attention. But He gave a little speech while he was there in which he said that he wouldn't run for Governor of Arizona. That was the prevailing rumor, and everyone wanted him to. But during the speech, he said that even "the liberals" wanted him to run because (he felt) that would mean he'd be mired in politics instead of reducing crime. And I guess I see his point. The sheriff's office is publicly elected, and the sheriff answers only to the voters. So he has the freedom to do what he wants to do and doesn't have to waste all his time arguing with committees. The funniest thing he said was that instead of run for Governor, he's going to instute the first juvenile chain gangs in the the history of the world. Yep, violent kids wearing striped uniforms over pink underwear chained together picking up trash on the side of the highway. I don't know what it says about society or civil liberties, but if you've ever been to Arizona in the summer, the last thing you'd want to have to pick up trash on some desert highway all day wearing a thick jumpsuit. I could see it being a deterrent for sure. I never committed any crimes, but if I was so inclined, the thought of a chain gang would surely de-incline me. Of course, I saw Cool Hand Luke when I was a kid, too, so I know all about chain gangs. I bet none of the kids in Maricopa County's jails have seen Cool Hand Luke.

My mom bought a bunch of cash registers for her new store. The registers were very new, and she got them for like $30 each. A great deal, when you consider that they came with 14" Optiquest monitors. They are nice systems I guess. I don't have a lot of experience with cash registers, never having worked in retail. But they have all the normal cash register-ish stuff: a steel platform where the cash draw sits (and which holds a smallish keyboard), a thermal receipt printer, a monitor, and a little LED-display-on-a-stick thing which shows people how much their total is.

When I was out in Phoenix last weekend, my brother Trey and I got to talking about them. Turns out that he has the job of building these registers into point-of-sale system for the new store. Kind of a daunting task. I mean, what are they, little embedded StrongARM deals running QNIX? He had one in his car and I went out to look at it. To my surprise, the "cash register" was basically a wee little tiny PC. So I had to take one apart. Trey let me have one of them to play with and I brought it back with me. Tracy was very polite when I told her that I have a cash register for my office.

I did a Google search and found the manufacturer's product page. Sadly, my unit doesn't have the keyboard with the colored keys, just a cheap Taiwanese one. And I don't have the barcode scanner. So I hooked up my Cue:Cat instead. How could I have a cash register and not be able to scan things!?! And the Cue:Cat has been sitting on my shelf waiting for a project anyway (although I once wrote a perl script which decodes it's input, that doesn't have any real world applications -- not like a real working cash register, anyway).

Oh, and I didn't get the cash drawer. They were buried in my mom's warehouse and I was in a hurry. But I'm going to get one next week when I drive out again. And why do I want the actual cash drawer? Well, if I'm going to help build the POS system, then I need to get the drawer part working. And I found the little port on the printer (called a "kick-out" port) that opens the drawer, and that gave me an idea: I want to have my cash register checking my main POP account. When I get mail, I want it to print the message's headers on the thermal printer and open the cash drawer (the drawers have a loud bell, so that'll be a good notification).

Last night I started taking the cash register apart. I started documenting my progress and took some dark pictures as well. I'll add more pictures and pages as I go along. I also dumped this file out on to a page there so I can continue to scribble stuff down in a coherent place.

I went to Phoenix last weekend for three reasons:

• to see my parents and brothers
• to get a haircut
• to go to a political fundraiser dinner being held at my folks' house.

I love seeing my parents. I could easily go to PHX for a week and do nothing but stay at their house and have the best time imaginable. My brothers... well, let's say that we're closer than "normal" brothers. I feel safe saying that. We were/are a close family. Maybe too close, as far as SO's are concerned. Maybe. Life is best when tempered with moderation. A little of everything certainly sounds fine by me. Anyway, back to the point: I wanted to see my family, I needed a haircut, badly (I'm the guy on the right), and I wanted to see Sheriff Joe and The Candidate.

An aside: I also heard that Joe Foss was to be there, and I've always wanted to meet him. I was a big Marine warplane fan as a kid. Seriously. I was an avid Baa Baa Black Sheep fan (I even have -- somewhere -- an autographed picture of Dirk Blocker), and built every warplane model I could find. I once got to sit in a Corsair, a Zero, a Hellcat, a Helldiver, a P-38, a P-51, and many other WWII aircraft at an airshow when I was 14. My grandfather (himself a Korean War 82^nd Airborne veteran) got all of us kids "backstage passes". I even met Maj. Boyington and the man who shot him down (whose name I have very regrettably forgotten). They had a little airshow mock battle going on. I liked those planes more than girls, you know? But anyway, Gen. Foss and my dad are bird hunting buddies, yet I've never met the man. Bummer for me. I wanted to ask him things. Politely, of course. But I also wanted to see everyone, including The Candidate.

The Candidate is an unnamed person who is running for an unnamed office. A big office, though. If he wins, he'll be the kind of guy who could seriously reduce the sentence of a grand theft verdict, you know? Good to at least have met. And my parents had all these Republican bigwigs at their house. And I'm generally unkempt. I was the Libertarian in the Midst. It was fun. I ought to make a movie.

So I've made the short story very long. Brevity is not my strong point. So then the issue at hand:

[wee@lazlo wee]$ sudo nmap -P0 -O XX.XX.XXX.XX

Password:


Starting nmap V. 2.54BETA22 ( www.insecure.org/nmap/ )

Interesting ports on  (XX.XXX.XXX.XX):

(The 1527 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: closed)

Port       State       Service

21/tcp     open        ftp

80/tcp     open        http

135/tcp    filtered    loc-srv

137/tcp    filtered    netbios-ns

138/tcp    filtered    netbios-dgm

139/tcp    filtered    netbios-ssn

161/tcp    open        snmp

162/tcp    open        snmptrap

443/tcp    open        https

1025/tcp   open        listen

1026/tcp   open        nterm

1032/tcp   open        iad3

5631/tcp   open        pcanywheredata

5800/tcp   open        vnc

5900/tcp   open        vnc


Remote OS guesses: Windows Me or Windows 2000 RC1


Nmap run completed -- 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 19 seconds

That's what I found about 90 seconds after The Candidate announce what his web site's URL was and I ran in and booted Colin off my mom's PC. Why so soon? Well, one of the people there was a guy who did John McCain's website for the presidential thing. The Candidate announced that this guy "invented political campaign websites" and was "a genius". I thought he was fairly snobby. I mean, candidates have had web sites before this smug arsehole, right? Sure! Then it dawned on me that this guy was basking in the limelight of a guy who does artwork for a living, not network/host security. He should no more be worried about the physical server his web-art is on than Rafael would have been worried that someone might steal his paints. He deals with the content -- not the medium, not the transport layer.

But the fact remains: someone, somewhere set up a Windows 2000 HTTP server. They downloaded no patches nor close any holes. They installed VNC. They installed PCAnywhere. (I wonder if maybe one doesn't work and why?) They have other stuff running. They plugged in a CAT5 cable. It's all bad.

(For the laypeople in the audience: The Candidate's web server is the kind of box that 14 year old script kiddies cream their pants over. Left alone, that machine will eventually -- and very shortly -- be cracked into. Automatic scanning tools will find it and the kiddie will get admin privileges. It is an eventuality.)

So I bring this up while everyone is leaving my parent's house. I do it quietly. See, that web dude they love is on loan. And if he leaves because I say that his site sucks and is going to get hacked, then he'll leave. The Candidate knows that he only does content, but he's worried about embarrassment. I say "Well, someone should worry about security. It's very common for teenaged (and other) crackers to take over a machine and use it for hosting pornography downloads. Would The Candidate like it if the papers ran a story that started: "While graphically and contextually appealing, the real draw to The Candidate's website is the illegal pornography downloads placed there by crackers of every nationality..."?

Safe to say that The Candidate freaked. Badly. I was seriously trying to play it down, too. It's not like I can make money off him by claiming he'll get hacked or anything. Shit, if I thought there was money to be made, I'd send him to The Grout. I don't need the headache. Nor the support issue. I don't like people calling me at all hours asking for work help. There's a reason I never became an admin.

I mailed off the results to the campaign manager. I actually told him to install Tiny Personal Firewall. I first mentioned a Cisco-based hardware solution, but then realized that I would always have to support it (and couldn't). Not good. Anyone can work with a software firewall, right? It works, right? Point and click: "deny all except web". It works enough, anyway. I did my part to save The Candidate some money and hassle. Likely he won't get hacked.

Although I really wanted to tell Grout what The Candidate's IP address was. It would have been funny to show The Candidate a directory listing of C: before he left my parents' house... :-)