Tom's Forensics

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A Forensics Blog hosted on Google AppEngine.

I am not very active here!

It is quite obvious that my attention has drifted elsewhere. You can find way more activity on my company Blog at http://oswco.com You will see that I have become an active Google Reseller. 


Google has announced that they are discontinuing the basic datastore that this site is running on, and although it should be pretty simple to update this code, I'm more interested in getting a new company site up on a plain old webserver like WebFaction (which hosts the Oswco.com site) . As of now it will most probably be based on Mezzanine, a neat new Django project.

So it is likely that at some time in the no so distant future that this will simply stop working. I learned a lot from this project and I really appreciate the help I got from Nick Johnson, who first got me started trying to pull stuff from his Git repo, I went on to use git a lot more! I also got to know several other people quite well through the App-engine community. 

At some point I do hope to get something more comprehensive going on App-Engine, most likely with the SQL store so I can use a mostly standard Django. I'll most likely do that once I have the new stuff running on Webfaction.


We Were Off The Air For A While

Apparently the original code for Bloog was using some undocumented features that have been removed in a recent update to App-engine,, I guess that is why it is a beta, right ;-) !!

Big thanks to the Bloog group for posting the patches needed. (see the Google Groups) I hope to post a bit more actively here and may even change things up a bit, and point one of my domains here. This site is primarily a tech experiment for me on using App-Engine. You can find a bit more about me and open software at http://oswco.com

Updated Site, Search works!

Well with a lot of help the site is now updated with a number of new features, and now I can post long blog posts. As to whether I should post long ones that may be another argument!

Well somehow, and I'm not exactly sure how the search has started to work, just as I had about given up. someone in the Google clouds kicked something, as I have made no changes for some time now!

There are a number of other things to attend to other than this blog, and then I also plan to add to the Blog, both features and writing, but there may be some wait as I handle a few other things. Further I intend to update my documentation of The Bloog process on My Tech site.

Learning Computer Forensics

I've been in computers about since they were invented. I've worked as a computer "operator" , programmer and most every other role there is up to Head of Information Systems at two major banks. So forensics is simply a chance to fill in a lot of details I may have previously glossed over and make use of the knowledge in new ways.

I plan to use this blog to document what I learn and how I go about it.

A good friend with similar experience to mine suggested the following 4 books as a primer in the overall field. I've read the first and am working on the second. The links below take you to Amazon with reviews.

1. Computer Forensics, Incident Response Essentials by Warren G. Kruse II and JayG. Heiser. isbn 0-201-70719-5 copyright 2002

2. EnCE, The Official EnCase Certified Examiner Study Guide, by Steve Bunting, isbn 978-0-470--18145-4 copyright 2008

3. File System Forensic Analysis br Brian Carrier, isbn 0-321-26817-2, copyright 2005

4. Windows Forensic Analysis by Harlan Carvey, isbn 978-1-59749-156-3 copyright 2007

At this point I'm not yet ready to provide useful commentary but it will come.

Mail, contact me and comments now working!

It turns out that the mail address in the code file was case sensitive, it wants all lower case now it works! It is always those small details! There are of course other things to check out and fix but it looks like the bulk of the framework is now working! Thanks to the great people on the net who produced this and then helped me get it started. I'm documenting that part over at http://tombrander.wordpress.com for those who are interested in doing the same.

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