Why would a network admin, security admin or a network developer be concerned with packet tracing software like Wireshark or Snort? To some that answer might be extremely clear, but others maybe not so much. The basic premises is that a packet tracing program like Wireshark or my own sniff is that it can read all the traffic that is coming in on the network adapter.

Going through a few of my archives of various what nots I came across this bit of C++ code, it was the first program I wrote after the typical hello world program. Very simple C++ program just generates a random number between 1 and 100 and gives the user a couple of tries to guess it. Guess even back then I used a fair amount of shorthand at least not to the point that I can't look at it myself and see what is going on.

Figured I could share the C# code that I used to listen on a network adapter in promiscuous mode for the packet sniffing program. Really not a whole lot to it, but it does have a flaw in the form that it can not read any packet off the network adapter that isn't an IP Packet. So really it is an IP packet sniffer instead of a general network sniffer (last time I checked). The code was written for .Net 2.0 and I haven't really updated or ran the program with any version of .net later than 2.0 or on windows 7.

In the last couple of days I somehow got turned towards Mercurial as a Versioning system, and after a pretty in depth look decided that it would be the better of the versioning system. At least significantly better than Subversion at any rate not sure about the other versioning systems but I decided to go with this one in particular. Some of the things that I gathered that make it better than Subversion is that it is a distributed system and the way these particular ones work is that the whole repository is cloned instead of a revision being checked out.

Figured I would talk a bit about what tools I use under what circumstances for Development. Primarily I am a whatever shoe fits best kind of developer so I use a very broad range of tools to accomplish a variety of tasks. Very much dependent on what I am working on at that particular time.
Computers

• My primary daily use/development box is an iMac 24" intel based machine. I have Vmware fusion and use bootcamp for windows and a variety of *nix flavors.
• Amd 3300+ that is running vista
• an older dell gx110 that is being used as a router

So finally after about 6 months or so I got around to updating my World of Warcraft mod xcalc. Originally this mod I was using to learn a bit about lua and such, but as it turned out a fair amount of people wanted a calculator in wow and such. The update was not much more than some bug fixes I really didn't add any features to the bill, there is only so many things that I can do at this point with it that might be useful like maybe a history of the last several calculations performed, and some better control on what kind of calculations can be performed.

So this was an interesting article here at: javaworld about if a company was likely to find the most brilliant programmers by including a requirement for a bachelors degree to help filter out candidates for a particular job. For the most part I would agree with what he is saying, but I think some finer points may have been missed over the whole of the article.