Hak5 will be LIVE at Virginia Tech this Saturday, November 7th. Join us at 7:00 PM for the best of networking, hacking and homebrew and Q&A. We’ll be in Torgersen 2150 on the Virginia Tech campus in Blackburg, VA. Then later at 9:00 we’ll be for the first time experiencing Bar Golf, a VT tradition that we would love to see you at. So lock down your firewalls and get ready for some Technolust as Hak5 begins the campus invasion. See you there!

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The first meeting will be held on Monday, September 28th at 8:00 PM Eastern Time (-5 GMT) in our Dimdim meeting room.

We’ll be broadcasting live via Dimdim, sharing segment ideas, answering questions and developing killer new projects.

We encourage you to join us for this first of many future Hak5 Lab events.

See you there!

See this post on the forums.

Little did I know… Four years, tens of thousands in equipment, two mortgages, 10 terabytes of footage and 10 or so million downloads later Hak5 is kickin’ stronger than ever — doing what we love when we’re not slaving 9-5.

This is a thank you to the fans and freaks who’ve supported us over the years. To everyone who has shook our hand at a hacker con, tipped a frosty one with us, bought a t-shirt, emailed, posted in the forums, retweeted and downloaded.

And lets not forget everyone who’s sailed the USS Technolust, past and present. You are all insane for sacrificing your weekends to research, write and perform into the wee hours of the night.

And Revision3, you’ve made us a better podcast. We’ve done more shows in the past year than the three before it combined. What a thrill teaming up with the 1st name in Internet television.

So to everyone, stay cool. Stay subscribed, and stay tuned for a nerdcore montage next week followed by the premiere of Season 6 on August 19th.

And if you’re in the area and want to meetup on August 15th at Busch Gardens Williamsburg we’d love to have ya. Check out the details.

Here’s to four more fantastic years of Hak5!

–Darren

On a personal note, I’m done playing with e-commerce packages for a while. Everything I’ve played with from ZenCart to Prestacart to Megento and many many more are all fine pieces of software with just one shortcoming or another.

The current store is the result of good ol’ fashioned wordpress, html, css and a little bit of elbow grease. And until we get a dozen more items in, I’m fine with it.

Thanks for your patience, and your continued support!

So yesterday I was up until 6am putting together the sweet new HakShop based on Prestashop. I love how modern this package is. The back-end is really sweet too. Not too complicated but powerful enough to do what’s really important. Read: Make sure we don’t sell more than we have and charge the proper shipping rate for your country.

You can see what I’m talking about here, but don’t check out — you won’t receive your goodies.

Anyway, lesson learned here is this: Don’t spend all night making a new system pretty before testing out the actual payment gateway bit. *sigh* There’s no real way to make Prestashop allow checkout without registering an account, and more importantly the paypal payment module is severely broken. Checkout only sorta works. Payment is processed by paypal but Prestashop doesn’t notice, leaving items in the cart. There are a bunch of other quirks too. I’ve searched high and low and it seems this is a show stopper. None of the community hacks and tweaks remedy the issue.

So my apologies on the HakShop downtime. I’ll be burning the midnight oil once again to bring it back online — hopefully much prettier and functional.

Cheers,
Darren

Make your entries in the 5×19 release thread.

Your creation should be submitted to the forums contest gallery.

Think you’ve got a hardcore LAN? Show us! Our latest contest is all about mapping your *home* network.

Map your network using an online diagram application like Gliffy, Dia on Linux or jNetMap — a cross-platform network mapping app developed by Hak5 fan Rakudave!

Then submit your entries as an image and description over in the new Hak5 forums Contest Submission gallery.

Entries will be judges on network creativity. Feel free to be as detailed as you’d like. No business or university networks please. If you have a site to site VPN between home and office that’s cool but no need to map past the initial link.

Entries are due by Friday May 29th. The winning network will be featured on episode 516. The winner will receive some cozy Hak5 gear from the HakShop.

HakHouse Network as mapped by jNetMap

As you all know I’ve been struggling with a few e-commerce platforms. Eventually I settled on the Shopp plugin for Wordpress. I really like how simple the system is. It’s just what I need (inventory management, weight rate shipping) and not what I don’t. Once I got past the first bug or two I really warmed up to it.

A big thanks to everyone who has offered their help setting this up and making recommendations. I still have zen-cart and oscommerce in the back of my mind if this doesn’t work out — but for now I’m giving this a go.

I’ve spent a few days getting intimately familiar with the code and hacking together the templates. I really like how well it integrates with the site. It’s not finished by any stretch of the imagination but I believe the core functionality is there.

I’m looking for feedback on the store. If you can offer any comments on usability, features, or otherwise please sound off in the comments. I’ll be continuing to add new stuff (user gallery, specifications, more products) as time goes on.

If all goes well over the next few days I’ll be sure to make a much better announcement for our grand opening. In the mean time, consider the HakShop open for beta testing.

www.hak5.org/hakshop (Please report any bug to darren@hak5.org)

–Darren

The first Code Challenge for Hak5 Season 5 — the Gmail Procrastination Badge. What started as a tongue in cheek comment on twitter about needing to declare email bankruptcy lead to proof of concept Gmail Unread Badge code.

The code

<?php

$mbox = imap_open ("{imap.googlemail.com:993/imap/ssl}INBOX",
"gmailusername", "gmailpassword", OP_READONLY)
or die("can't connect: " . imap_last_error());

$check = imap_mailboxmsginfo($mbox);
?>

<?php
if ($check) {
   print $check->Unread; //. "/" . $check->Nmsgs;
} else {
   print "Failed";
}

/*
Special thanks to our friend Robin Wood aka Digininja
at http://www.digininja.org for the code snippet
*/

?>

It works. Not very quickly because I have 80 unread and 8000 read in my inbox, but it works. If you execute it from terminal it’ll take a minute and return unread messages. Edit: See code below for MUCH faster inbox reading.

<?php


$mbox = imap_open ("{imap.googlemail.com:993/imap/ssl}INBOX",
"gmailuser", "gmailpassword", OP_READONLY)
or die("can't connect: " . imap_last_error());

$status = imap_status($mbox, "{imap.googlemail.com:993/imap/ssl}INBOX", SA_ALL);
if ($status) {
  echo "Messages:   " . $status->messages    . "\n";
  echo "Recent:     " . $status->recent      . "\n";
  echo "Unseen:     " . $status->unseen      . "\n";
  echo "UIDnext:    " . $status->uidnext     . "\n";
  echo "UIDvalidity:" . $status->uidvalidity . "\n";
} else {
  echo "imap_status failed: " . imap_last_error() . "\n";
}

imap_close($mbox);

/* Thanks to Emeryth for pointing out imap_status
http://us.php.net/function.imap_status */

?>

The Rules

This code inspired my to start the first code challenge of the season so here are the rules:

• Must be PHP (Maybe we’ll do perl/python/whitespace next time)
• Must be a badge (for your blog, forum signature) of some sort that displays unread messages in a Gmail inbox
• Does not need to store or display anything other than unread count. Caching preferred but not necessary.
• May use additional libraries and other resources as long as they’re included with the submission
• Entries will be judged on creativity (Think imagemagick, ajax, wordpress plugin, twitter integration, emacs replacement)
• Submit entries to darren@hak5.org with “Code Challenge” in subject line. I’ll accept code in body, attached archive, or link to your hosted files.
• All entries are due by April 30th

The Prize

The winning entry will be demoed on a future episode of Hak5. Winner will receive deluxe Hak5 HakPack as well as Mario Lurig’s PHP Book PHP Reference: Beginner to Intermediate PHP5.

All entries will be posted for your enjoyment at the end of the contest.