digip : sailing the high seas of the internet

Today was my last day at work. 12 years of dedication and hard work, long hours, working nights since my first day on the job, has come to an end. Strange but its both a joyful departure and a stressful one at the same time. I’m glad to be done with work because I can now concentrate on school full time, but finding a new job will also be hard in todays market. That is one reason I need to finish school as quickly as possible. Switching form nights to days will also be a problem, because I am an insomniac and am usually up all night and most of the day. It will be hard to adjust to fit in with the rest of the “day walkers” out there in the world.

Right now I am just trying to relax and keep the blood pressure down. I’m in school full time, so hopefully by the time severance kicks in, I can finish up my classes and find a new job so I don’t have to spend all of my severance money. Unemployment is an option, but I will make less than half of what I make now for the entire month. There is just no way I can survive on such little money, so that is where the severance will come in handy, but I would much rather have a job by the time it kicks in.

My goal is to finish my MCSA and CCNA by January. I have my Net+ and CCENT, but the other two will be pretty much a requirement to get my foot in the door at a decent place paying close to what I was already making. Once I start at a new job, I will then finish up my other classes I want to take, like the Offsec Security courses, and possibly some CIW/web design and Adobe Flash classes to supplement my side job as a web designer.

My other goal, which i sprobably more important than anythign else, is to get healthy. My blood pressure is out fo control, and my weight is really a large factor in that problem. In the past year I have gained about 25 pounds, and I was already over weight to begin with. Im hoping to get down to around 180-190 pounds, but that will be easier said than done. I have about 80 pounds to lose at this point, and with the stress, it seems like that will only compund the issue.

Rush Limbaugh blasted his removal from a group trying to buy the St. Louis Rams on his radio show today. He was quoted as saying the group was an example of – “Obama’s America on full display.”

To that I say, Mr. Limbaugh, the people have spoken! Maybe you should start listening, because you don’t seem to be getting the message. It is OUR America as well. Not just Obama’s and not only yours.

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I love how he used the old paddle buttons to pull this one off. Looks great, although, might be nicer with a slightly larger screen, I guess there really isn’t a whole lot more room to work with here.

What would be cool though, is if he could combine it with rca out to tv video for when you want to see it on the big screen. Thumbs up to the guy who made this though!

It has become well known that High Gluten Diets are the main cause Celiac Disease. What isn’t well known to most people is that a lot of us suffer from the symptoms of Celiac Disease for most of our lives, without proper diagnosis or full blown side effects.

Foods like breakfast cereals are one of the leading causes of the disease. So much for cereal in the morning, kids. Like 99.9% of Americans live on foods and drinks that contain Gluten. It is nearly unavoidable in our diets unless we try not to eat ALL wheat based foods. Thats almost impossible in todays American food markets. Unless you eat nothing but home grown food, what other choices will you have?

It doesn’t surprise me that with all the problems people face with their health, food is the #1 source of their suffering. Like the cliche, “you are what you eat”, it goes without saying that its an epidemic of epic proportions, we have a problem on our hands, and its not just Celiac Disease that you have to worry about. Most food you buy at the grocery store will contain some form of wheat filler, from dried boxed foods to precooked meats and tv dinner meals.

The “Whole Foods” grocery store is an option, but they are very expensive, and we can’t afford to buy from there all the time. We do try to avoid the normal commercial products on the shelves, but its not always easy to maintain when funds are limited.

Have you ever wondered why a grocery store is laid out the way it is? There is a reason the grocery store is designed the way it is. People will walk up and down isles of the store like trained rats in a maze looking for the cheese. Its almost subconscious in its manifestation, that we would unwittingly walk up and down each isle, like as if we were supposed to. (Was this some sort of socially engineered marketing ploy by the stores and food suppliers? Probably not, but it does make one think, what other ways can a store organize its products without the parallel shelving.)

Because of this store design, if you were to stick to the outer parts of the store, you would notice that most of these foods are deli, produce, breads, dairy and meats. Almost all whole foods in their fresh forms aside from the deli, although they do offer fresh dairy products and ground meats(avoid cold cuts, almost 90% water and salt, and contain thing such as wheat filler – gluten). Now, if you go up and down the center isles of the stores and frozen food sections, most of this is precooked, preprocessed foods with tons of additives, preservatives and things such as food colorings, starches/thickeners, wheat filled(think pasta, crackers, cookies, dried foods in a box, even frozen meatballs), bleached white flower, etc type products.

A lot of grocery stores do little to keep the outer parts of the store up to date with the proper needs of produce storage and fresh foods. Our local grocery store only recently updated their stores produce section with better storage and diversity of products. This has changed somewhat because of the rise of organic foods in popularity, and some grocery stores are being forced to steps to modernize their stores and produce sections to add more diversity to their fresh, whole foods sections just to stay competitive with the other stores. This is a good thing for the consumer, because it offers us better prices and drives the competition to work harder to please their shoppers.

People often say, “organic food has no more nutritional value than regular foods”. This is true to some extent. And although we know this, we will still buy organics when we can. Why? because organic foods are free from all the other things you can’t see, touch, taste or even smell half the time, (like added hormones and thickening agents such as corn starch in our milk). Organic foods are free of pesticides and fertilizers that are bad for the environment as well as our digestive system. Organics also make for better tasting foods in most cases. You won’t be able to tell the difference at first, but after switching to organic milk for a few months, you won’t switch back to the normal milk you buy in stores. Organic milk is a little more expensive, yes, but it also doesn’t have all the side effect people complain from like stomach issues, diarrhea, lactose intolerance, etc. My wife used to not be able to drink regular milk without it making her sick. Organic milk has changed all that for her, and she does not have any of the stomach prblems she used to get with regular milk. Don’t believe me, try it for yourself. Oh, and by the way, organic milk in tetra packs last about a month on the shelf, not a week or two like most other milk! That makes up for value in prices, because I can guarantee you a lot of people end up throwing out old milk because it goes bad too quickly compared to organic milk.

While we try to buy more organic, whole foods, and shop more from the outer rim of the stores, sticking to produce, fresh foods and organics, the nature of the beast is that at some point, you will spend more on your grocery bill to maintain this sort of diet if you want to avoid isle hell, where all the pre-processed foods live. If you have any kind of auto-immune issues or just general feeling of bad health, try switching the foods you eat for one week to all fresh whole foods. If you don’t notice any kind of difference by the end of the week, well, its probably more psychological than it is physical.

https://www.google.com/health/ref/Celiac+disease+-+sprue

“…when she tried to switch from the family’s expensive individual insurance to a Blue Shield group plan that’s more affordable, she said, she and her oldest daughter were denied coverage. She said neither of them has the medical conditions that were listed as reasons for being denied – bronchitis and a skin ailment.” – Read More: Mom: Health insurance denied over condition she doesn’t have

I don’t claim to be any expert when to comes to computers, nor do I know a whole lot about Wireshark and different protocols, but while capturing some data I was trying to go through, I noticed that a lot of the packets were unreadable due to content encoding being chunked and gzipped. This may seem trivial to decode for some people, but I was having a hard enough time trying to see the underlying code because of this.

One thing that people commonly do is right click a packet and then select follow tcp stream. This is usually where you can see the flow between two nodes and their conversation. Normally all the data sent back from a web server would be there in plain text, such as the html, javascript, css, etc. But because the data is using content encoding “chunked” and “gzip”, all the data is unreadable to the naked eye. Or so I thought. I realized a little trick from playing around with it long enough to pull most of my hair out(and google was of no help in figuring this out, believe me I spent a good 30 minutes looking for answers on how to decode this stuff), I found that Wireshark has already decoded the stream for me. If you already knew this, stop reading now…

In the packet details, there is a tree feature where you can expand items for each part of the packets and frames on the wire. In the bytes box there are also tabs across the bottom that say things like [frame/reassembled/dechunked/uncompressed]. Any packet that has the tab for uncompressed will show you the default data in plain text, but is deifficult to read from this view. From the packet details pane, find the tree item named “Line-based text data: text/html”. This item only shows up in certain packets, and usually will have an “HTTP/1.1 200 OK (text/html)” response in he info area of the packet list.

Ok, now for the easy part that only took me like an hour to figure out. If all you wanted was to filter out these “Line-based text data: text/html” items so you could read the decompressed data, you can apply a display filter using the following string:

“data-text-lines”

Now all you should see are packets for anything chunked/gzip’ed or deflated from gzip encoding. To read just the plain text, in the packet details pane, select the tree node for “Line-based text data: text/html”, then right click and select “Copy-> Bytes (Printable Text Only”. You can then paste the data into any text editor for further reading and parsing for important data, such as rouge scripts and iframes, bugs, etc.

Why would one need to do this? Well, lets say you are on a site that has LOTS of scripts, ads and iframes, and every time you visit that page it either causes you problems such as network lag/pc slowdown, lock ups, or even crashes of the browser or applications. For example, I have been seeing a lot of iPhone users unhappy with Facebooks chat program and pidgin chat clients crashing and not restarting – this is one of those types of scenarios where you can’t see what is causing it, but with wireshark, you can analyze that data offline and see what you can find. You will now be able to go to these pages of code, and then have something to look at offline after the crash, since you wouldn’t otherwise be able to view source when this event takes place, or track down what url is sending bad data which is causing the issue.

In other words, if you wanted to debug something you can’t look at normally from your browser due to lock ups, you can capture and decode all the traffic for offline reading, and hopefully figure out what the hell is going on behind the scenes.