As a non-native English speaker who reads, writes and reviews lots of English texts, I frequently look up definitions as well as synonyms of words. Of course there are numerous online sources available to do this, but I like to decrease my online 'footprint' due to privacy reasons. It also takes extra time to switch to a browser window and enter a search query.

Fortunately the fine folks at Princeton University compiled WordNet [1], a large lexical database of English, which can be used offline - together with a tool to search that database. Even better, somebody wrote a package to use WordNet inside my favorite editor Emacs [2]. This means that just by hovering the cursor over a word inside Emacs, the definition as well as synonyms can be shown. The source code [3] is kindly provided by Princeton University.

pacman -Sy --noconfirm base-devel mingw-w64-x86_64-tcl mingw-w64-x86_64-tk

Immediately after reading an article on David Allen and his brainchild Getting Things Done, I started with implementing his methodology. I loved it. I still love it - especially the Getting Things Done concepts of inbox ZERO, maintaining lists, and periodic reviews.

Inbox ZERO for me is not so much about having empty email inboxes, as well as making sure that input is collected from multiple locations and stored into one dedicated location. An inbox can also be a notebook, or note taking software like Google Keep.

Electronically stored lists have the benefit of being available on a multitude of devices, the ability to synchronize between them, backups, and their biggest advantage - providing dynamic views.

Both tools that I have been using so far (the open source Java application ThinkingRock [1], and Emacs in Org mode [2]) for maintaining lists of actionable items and projects were great in that perspective. Using those tools for periodic reviews was a different story. After trying numerous configurations I never got the hang of using ThinkingRock and Emacs for that purpose. Items become abstract letters on a screen. Views never fully captured what was important or which project served which goal.

Periodically reviewing projects and …

Researching new vulnerabilities, techniques or concepts can be time-consuming and sometimes chaotic. A streamlined workflow is necessary to make the process as efficient as possible. This article describes the open source tools and well-known standards that I'm currently using for that purpose.

Configuring Emacs (on Windows) to use the zsh shell can be tricky, especially when you use ( oh my zsh) plugins or fancy prompts. Emacs sets an environment variable when running a shell, which can be used to selectively disable plugins and change prompts. Configuring the SSH client and server to set and accept that variable makes ssh-ing inside Emacs to remote servers possible as well.

It seems that the OAuth 2.0 framework is more and more being used by web (and mobile) applications. Great !

Although the protocol itself is not that complex, there are a number of different use-cases, flows and implementations to choose from. As with most things in life, the devil is in the detail.

When reviewing OAuth 2.0 implementations or writing penetration testing reports I like to draw UML diagrams. That makes it easier to understand what's going on, and to spot potential issues. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words.

This can be done extremely easy using the GPL-licensed open source Emacs editor, in conjunction with the GPL-licensed open source tool PlantUML (and optionally using Eclipse Public Licensed Graphviz).

Emacs is worlds' most versatile editor. In this case, it's being used to edit the text, and automatically convert the text to an image. PlantUML is a tool which allows you to write UML in human readable text and does the actual conversion. Graphviz is visualization software, and optionally - in this case, it's used to show certain images.

Download the compiled PlantUML jar file, Emacs and optionally download and install Graphviz.

Once you have Emacs installed and running …

Emacs 25.1 was officially released on September 17th, 2016. The excellent MSYS2 subsystem and the open source gcc compiler make it super-easy to build binaries on/for Windows (7, 8, 10). In three easy steps from source to binaries:

pacman -Syuu

pacman -Sy --noconfirm base-devel git \
mingw-w64-x86_64-{giflib,gnutls,jbigkit,lib{jpeg-turbo,png,rsvg,tiff,xml2},toolchain,xpm-nox}