About Me and This Blog

(Image from WikiMedia, Author Foto by MB Custom)

I’m long past due for getting some of my scripting and tech tools online. It will be mostly Bash and Perl, though some occasional JavaScript is possible. The thing that’s motivating me was some colorization code that I tried to turn into an article, but it ended up too big, with each of four chapters worthy of it’s own article.

I’m going to try to use a documentation style that I’ve come to prefer. I will first post code and the add only the descriptions necessary to get it going. This will ensure that the one section everyone wants to jump to will be able to stand on its own. Then if needed, there will be an explanation section, and it will be placed ahead of or around (before and after) the code as needed. Introductory sections explaining background and motivation will be added ahead of everything, but only after the other sections reasonably stand alone.

Since this mostly about the tools I reuse and need to have documented for me, though I do want it available to others—because sharing is good, most of it won’t be beginner material. But, I do believe in starting with simple/minimal examples (tip of the hat to Stack Overflow). I do best with these tools, myself, when I can play with them, before I try to adapt them to what I need at the time. I expect others will want to do the same.

As hinted above, the first stuff I plan to post will be about colorization. This will first include a post on generating ANSI color codes in a terminal (where I do most of my work). It will not be a full explanation of the ANSI terminal standard. It’ll just be the samples I find most useful—when I’m trying to remember how I did it last time. This is not an everyday thing.

Next will come three or four articles, maybe more, on using colorization to facilitate developing the more complex regular expressions (regex, regexes). It will not be a beginner tutorial on writing regexes, though I do have a cookbook article for writing basic regexes for matching URL patterns. The target audience for that is beginner SOC personnel (Security Operating Center), who need to be able to write safe, efficient, and effective patterns in response to security needs. The colorization technique I’ll be describing is something that I use for working with HTTP User-Agents, which by their nature are exceedingly messy. Hopefully you don’t find yourself working some place has a policy that requires security controls around these, which is a practice that very limited in it’s effectiveness.

Generally, there will be almost nothing outside of the Linux/UNIX world, except when posting about Java script, HTTP, or maybe PowerShell. There’s not much I’ll be saying about politics or religion (that happens elsewhere under a different pseudonym).

So, I hope this turns out to be useful.

Enjoy