It’s been 5 years since I published my blog’s visitors’ browser statistics. Chrome did not exist back then, Firefox was leading. It looks like Firefox is still leading, IE shrank about half and Firefox shrank about 1/3. All those are now using Chrome. Safari usage almost quadrupled and Opera users almost doubled. 
For a long while I wasn’t able to pinpoint this really stupid issue where my extensions couldn’t call each other however my trunk calls were OK. It first surfaced by not being able to point my BV to my internal extension, but I brushed it out since I had a shitty Comcast router. I first thought that was the culprit.
Then when I was fixing my parents’ extensions in Turkey I realized that I cannot make any extension to extension calls but I still can use outbound routes. After hours of troubleshooting I realized that dialparties.agi script would always return: “Returned from dialparties with no extensions to call and DIALSTATUS:”
I manually ran the script and found out that it was spitting out this error message: “PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_GOTO, expecting T_STRING in /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin/phpagi.php on line 1234″
Then I found this bug in freepbx Trac. I ended up changing the name of the goto function in line 1234 of phpagi.agi to go_to and things started to work fine. 
Apparently this started to happen when I upgraded my ubuntu which upgraded the php to version 5.3.2.
My buddies just opened their art shop. They have a great water marble (Ebru) art web page where you can purchase them imprinted on iPhone/iPad cases, mugs and greeting cards.
If you want something unique and beautiful for the approaching Valentine’s Day or any other occasion, I recommend you to take a look at their page.
Oh hai!
Happy new year!
Sometimes you need to see what’s inside of that pkg file. But you also don’t want to install it. You just want to take a look at the files in it before installing it. Well, here is how to do it:
PKG files usually come in a DMG image. First mount that file by double clicking on it. Then open a Terminal window and go to the folder where it’s mounted. (Look under /Volumes)
Once you are in that folder you will see a file with a .pkg extension. Let’s say it is called Foo.pkg. Copy that file in a folder, I’ll copy it to /tmp.
cp Foo.pkg /tmp
cd /tmp
Mac OS X has a utility called pkgutil. You can do a ton of stuff with it, so check the manual page. (man pkgutil) But for our exercise we will just use it to expand the pkg file.
pkgutil --expand Foo.pkg /tmp/foo_package
cd /tmp/foo_package
This will open the pkg file to a flat structure. You will see some files and folders like Distribution, Resources, Foo.pkg. Go ahead and cd in the directory Foo.pkg:
cd Foo.pkg
In there you will several files. The important ones are Bom, Payload and PackageInfo:
This file is called Bill of Materials. It describes what is in this pkg file and where they will be written to. If you will not do file/binary analysis of the contents of the pkg file and you want only to see which files will be written where, this is your file. You can also use this file’s contents to remove the package completely. (I leave this exercise up to you)
Bom is a binary file and there is a tool to list its contents: lsbom. (man lsbom for usage) Basic usage would be:
lsbom Bom
This will print file/directory structure of the contents on the screen.
This is the file that contains all the files and directories in this pkg file. It’s a gzipped archive file.
$ file Payload
Payload: gzip compressed data, from Unix
$ mv Payload foo.gz
$ gunzip foo.gz
$ ls
foo
This will give you a file called foo. Now you need to use cpio to extract that archive.
$ cpio -iv < foo
.
./System
./System/Library
./usr
./System/Library/LaunchAgents
./usr/bin
......files files files.......
50002 blocks
$ ls
System foo usr
In my case it unarchived two folders called System and usr.
No you can go and browse these directory to find files you are looking for. Have fun 
My blog changed 4-5 times over the years. A facelift was long overdue. For the last 4 years I’ve been using dfBlog as my theme and the latest release is brilliant.
Enjoy the new look. Hope to be more active in the future!!
Some weekend scooter fun.
I spent some time on analyzing password usage using the data that leaked from couple of Sony hacks few days ago. The results are pretty scary.
The data size: 38698 users on 2 sites.
Top ten most used passwords are:
So if you have a password that is listed above, you better change it pretty soon.
I also compared how many people were using the same password on two different hacked Sony sites. There were 2421 users who used the same email to register and out of those only 168 users were using different passwords (about 6.5%).
And who wins the email war? Based on the same data, most of the users were using emails from the following providers:
| # of users | Provider |
|---|---|
| 11281 | yahoo.com |
| 7250 | other email providers |
| 5077 | hotmail.com |
| 4876 | aol.com |
| 4837 | gmail.com |
| 1600 | comcast.net |
| 1263 | msn.com |
| 920 | sbcglobal.net |
| 676 | verizon.net |
| 478 | bellsouth.net |
| 440 | cox.net |
It’s beach time!
Netresec released a new Windows network sniffer tool that looks promising: RawCap. It has no winpcap dependencies and with its small 17kB foot print it does not require installing. (Having said that you still need .NET Framework libraries and DLLs.)
Here are the properties of RawCap from their webpage:
For downloading and some screenshots and more information click here.
