If you go by



I have configured some forums to put out corrections and extras for the book.

Posted on Monday 21 of February, 2005 [14:38:27 UTC]

According some very reputable sources, the encryption algorithm, SHA1, has been broken.
BruceSchneier Blog

If in fact this is true, this will provide many security folks serious heartburn.

Posted on Wednesday 16 of February, 2005 [16:20:27 UTC]

All chapters are edited and reviewed now. So finally, I have completed the book. I have added bookmarks to the PDF version. There will be future enhancements to the PDF version with hyperlinks and other features.

Posted on Saturday 22 of January, 2005 [05:27:22 UTC]

The book is pretty finished at this point with only chapter 8 needing proofreading. There will be an ISO image available to download that will have the various files and patches used in the book.

Building the index is a real pain. The tool in OO for building the index is pretty marginal at best for a technical book like this with a few bazillion terms. But, I found a cool hack in O'Reillys PDF Hacks. You use a couple of DOS (you remember that dont you?) or Linux programs to rip the data out of the completed PDF, covert the PDF to text, run a frequency counting program and then combine it all back together. It sounds messy but it really does work well. The time-sink is taking the raw text and making it into an index that looks nice.



Read PDF hacks 19, 62 and 79

Mike S.

Posted on Thursday 20 of January, 2005 [02:51:18 UTC]

How about that. I actually have content posted now. It's only taken five months of hard work to get this book written. For the geeks reading this, I did real installations of everything in the book including building the passive tap. I tried to detail the installations as well as I could given the differences between the flavors of Linux.

Posted on Monday 17 of January, 2005 [18:40:21 UTC]

Just when you think you are there, the editor drops the package back on your desk with an evil grin. In this case, the editor is my wife who was a real editor in a past life and has not lost her sharp pen. So on with the edits.

GOOD NEWS!! I gave up on the custom cover for now and will just use a canned cover : There are just not enough hours in a day.

OpenOffice is working out well. I've adjusted to many of the "quirks" after so long of using Office. I also have been testing the new 2.0 and managed to find a rather nasty bug for them. Like it would not save my file... oops!! Apparently it has something to do with the size and that it was imported from MS Office initally.

My skill with Acrobat is increasing with more experimentation. I have renumbering and bookmarking down pat. But, bookmarks with Adobe sucks For something that is so needed, they made it so hard. I've been playing with other PDF creation software but I keep coming back to Adobe.

Posted on Sunday 16 of January, 2005 [16:56:00 UTC]

Bonjour~~

It is just amazing what one can pick up when one is trying something new. With the advent of self publishing my book, I had planned to offer a PDF version. At the time I had not really thought too much about PDFs other than they are handy to have around.

But, with working with Adobe Acrobat in depth for the first time and some reading on my part, it's amazing just what you can do with PDFs and it is glaringly obvious how lazy some publishers are when they release a PDF version of a book. Bookmarks, indexes, hyperlink to full size images and much more is available with the PDF. It is a hidden world out there that many folks just are not using.

I have some ideas for my PDF now and it is apparent that while it will be the same book textwise, the PDF has some advantages to over the book. I can have all the code samples available embedded in the PDF, full size screen shots in colour and more. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the marketplace.

On the plus side, I did get my book site up and running last night. www.packetpress.net and alive and well...mostly :)

Moi

Posted on Saturday 08 of January, 2005 [21:07:52 UTC]

Well.. after much struggling I'm just about ready to publish my book. After being strung along by a publisher and then to be told after three chapters "dear John", I decided to regroup and go at it on my own.

Of course, this required dumping MS Word in favor of OpenOffice and other open source tools such as Ghostwriter. But, in the end I had to bow to the gods of PDF creation and use Adobe's overpriced product to get the fonts inserted correctly into the PDF. Such a pain.

Today I have put my preview together and got my domain name registered. I noticed on the web that someone else is using the name I choose but they do not own any of the websites so all's fair

Posted on Thursday 23 of December, 2004 [16:45:33 UTC]