Extreme Tech Fun!

Well, if I wasn't a tech already, I'm definitely heading down that slippery slope now!  Just recently, I got a recommendation from a friend to get VirtualBox, an awesomely powerful virtual machine suite.  I got it and  installed Debian 6.0.6 and Ubuntu 12.04 on virtual hard drives.  Then, for some extremely geeky fun, I played around with SSH on the virtual machines.  I had to configure the virtual network settings a bit, but that was pretty easy.  I SSHed as root into the Debian machine, which was already running a web server, then was able to play around with my knowledge of Unix and command-line operation.  I used the super-cool command-line tool nano to edit the index.html file of the /var/www folder.  Then, on my Windows 7 OS, I was able to view the website without any difficulty!  Should you ever feel the need to play around with SSH, Unix-based systems have it built in, and on Windows, you can download the program PuTTY, which is a standalone SSH client.  Have fun!

Educational Password Cracker!

It all started like this.  I got bored, couldn't think of a program to write, and so I decided to write a purely educational password cracker.  First, I made a ridiculously simple password generator algorithm that wrote all the four-character combinations of the numbers and letters to a file.  Then, I created another program that takes your MD5 password hash and set it to a variable.  It then reads a line from the file, hashes it, and compares it with your hash.  If they are the same, it tells you what the line from the file (the password) was.  If not, it reads the next line and does the process all over again.  Somehow, I just can't believe how simple that was.  And it works beautifully!  Check out the app development section to get the program and take over the world!