A Simple Script to Get Top Passwords Cracked

Several days ago, I took a break from doing my work. I did an exercise to sharpened my “rusty” scripting skills. My goal was to develop a simple script using Ruby to get the top passwords cracked from MD5 Statistics page. This should be an interesting exercise for my brain. :D

Unfortunately, my scripting skills was so rusty, so it took me a while to code this simple script.

Install CPAN’s Perl Module in openSUSE 11.x

Several days ago I had a chance to work with a Perl application again. Luckily, this application needs several Perl modules to be able to work.

The easiest way to install Perl modules is through CPAN. Fortunately there are several software packages that are available to help you working with CPAN. In openSUSE, the helper packages are :

• cpanm
• perl-App-cpanminus

After downloading them, I went to install those packages using the rpm :

# rpm -Uvh cpanm-1.5002-1.1.noarch.rpm perl-App-cpanminus-1.5002-1.1.x86_64.rpm
warning: cpanm-1.5002-1.1.noarch.rpm: Header V3 DSA/SHA1 Signature, key ID dcef338c: NOKEY

Preparing... ########################################### [100%]

1:perl-App-cpanminus ########################################### [ 50%]
2:cpanm ########################################### [100%]

Next, to install a Perl module, just use the following command (you need to run this command as “root“) :

cpanm <module_name>

For example, if I want to install a Perl module named Excel::Writer::XLSX here is the command to do it :

cpanm Excel::Writer::XLSX

--> Working on Excel::Writer::XLSX
Fetching http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/J/JM/JMCNAMARA/Excel-Writer-XLSX-0.34.tar.gz ... OK

Configuring Excel-Writer-XLSX-0.34 ... OK
Building and testing Excel-Writer-XLSX-0.34 ... OK
Successfully installed Excel-Writer-XLSX-0.34
1 distribution installed

That’s it for today’s article. See you and take care.

LAME’s options for best quality/size ratio

Recently I need to convert several WAV files to MP3 format. I found the lame program can be used for this purpose. But due to my little knowledge in LAM I have difficulties to use the right options.

Thanksfully after reading the manual page and an article on the Internet, I found the following options generate the best quality and size ratio :

lame -V2 --vbr-new -q 2 -b 112  --lowpass 17 <WAV_file.wav>

And here is the picture of lame in action :

It took around 19 seconds to convert a 58 MB WAV file to MP3 format. Quite fast.