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33 days ago
I got the following query in one of my Google hits today: "pipeline.Invoke() "Read-Host" Cannot invoke this function because the current host does not implement it." I believe that this query was in reference to the lack of host functionality in the default settings for a runspace in Windows Powershell. I don't recall ever actually taking much about this, yet I am known for having abstracted the runspace API for use as a multi threading interface in Powershell. Now is a good time to talk some about this. A runspace in Powershell is a big blob of information that pertains to a particular shell within Powershell. The runspace has several components within it, such as the cmdlets, aliases, functions, providers, etc. The host component specificly is ment to be used as an abstract interface to the console. The default host object used by a runspace doesn't have much functionality, so you may encounter error messages like the one above when you are using a generic host ...
36 days ago
I finally added support for GnuPG to Library-StringCrypto. The previous functionality to encrypt strings in process is still present and continues to work as expected. Not a couple more parameters have been added to support symmetric and asymmetric encryption using GnuPG. The new parameters are 'gnupg', to enable use of gpg.exe, and 'recipient', to identify the person the encrypted message is for. When using GnuPG passwords/passphrases may be supplied in 'password' parameter or via the console to the gpg.exe process. To use symmetric encryption, with GnuPG just add the gnupg switch parameter. Write-EncryptedString message secret -gnupg You can also omit the password from the command line and enter it interactivly. Write-EncryptedString message -gnupg To use asymmetric encryption, omit the password and use the recipient parameter. Write-EncryptedString message -gnupg -recipient 'John Doe' Write-EncryptedString returns the ASCII armored version of the ciphertext. ...
43 days ago
Every time I hear about ACTA I become violently sick. The fact that it continues to be "negotiated" in secret makes it a violation of the sovereignty of any government that would sign it. I dearly hope that it never goes into effect.
92 days ago
I recently decided to spend the money to buy a home server. (I got an Atom 330 and a 64GB SSD in case you were wondering.) In the name of security I decided to use Xen to separate the applications that would be running on it. So I installed OpenSSH to control it remotely. Then, I installed Xen. Finally, I initialized a new block device and installed an operating system to act as the first guest OS on the machine. I booted up the guest OS and everything was working fine. That is, until after crond (the equivalent of the task scheduler if you only know Windows) started up. I saw the crond boot message and that was the last of it. Nothing after that. Not even the login prompt. While the reason to this seems obvious to me now, I became quite confused at that time. So I asked Google to find a solution for me. It would appear that quite a number of people had the same problem. I read a few questions about it on forums but not many responses gave a working solution. I then found a couple of ...
157 days ago
The hit counter for my blog has just the 10,000 hit milestone today. I had planed to release a comedic themed encryption library for Powershell that shows how some of the functions of GPG can be imitated in Powershell. However, I have not yet finished that library. Instead, I have decided I would release a virtual memory management library I wrote in C#. One of the projects I'm working on right now required a better understanding of the CPU architectures used today. This inevitably lead me to want to be able to use ASM in C# code. So I decided to start studying NASM and ASM in general, and then found that the .NET heap has execution protection. I then found that I can control the protection bits by calling the virtual memory management functions in the kernel32.dll library. This library is a .NET wrapper for those functions. The library is documented, but I don't have any example uses that I can release at this time. While I don't have any examples to release today I can say that ...
