Austin Riba 21 Oct 2012 && [ ] && 0 comments

Sunday, Oct 21st, 2012. I have not ridden my bike. I can feel my sanity slipping away.

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Austin Riba 1 Oct 2012 && [ Cycling ] && 0 comments

6 months. 11 races. Countless rivers, towns,  mountains and hours listing to Metallica in the car. A few too many tight corners and occasionally, one too many beers. The 2012 season was the kind of stuff that you live for, and today was my last day. After graduating from SOU last year I moved to Fairfax, CA where I lived until April when I decided a summer in the PNW was just too good to give up. And it was. The main focus of my time here consisted of racing bikes and good stuff that goes along with that.

Racing is amazing. Pushing myself  so hard definitely puts me in a place that I rarely find myself in otherwise. It is an intense, raw feeling that I haven’t been able to find doing anything else. But the reason I really fell in love with racing was the whole lifestyle, which I didn’t know about until I participated in a few. I suppose I got a hint at my first race, the Cascade Chainbreaker, 3 years ago in Bend, OR:  I woke up the morning of the race in the back of my car on the side of some dirt road in the middle of the desert outside of town. Cereal in a water bottle with some soy milk poured in, and shaken, was what was for breakfast. I then proceed to ride my bike as hard as possible for 3 hours for no real reason, at a far too early hour in the morning, and finish in so much pain I could barely stand.  And we were in some cool town that I had never been to before surrounded by a bunch of cool people with cool bikes. The end result was the kind of weekend you talk about until the next one.

Fast forward 2 years and its that first race every weekend for the last 5 months. Except this time around school was not an issue for any of us, so the “weekend” races usually started sometime on Thursday, and ended on Sunday (but usually the wee hours of the morning, Monday)  Although I started of the season strong with some XC races, the focus shifted mainly to Enduro and All Mountain races in which practice is crucial.  I don’t think there was a single race we did not preride at least a day for. Some races we prerode for 2 or 3 days. All in different places, all with amazing trails, cool towns and cold water to jump in to. Hood River had the best food. Portland involved some firsts. Bend, the best locals. Downieville, also the best locals. Nevada City is home to the best river. And Ashland was home to me, I guess. But looking back, I didn’t really spend too much time there. When I was in Ashland, I worked. But that’s ok. I couldn’t think of a better place to call home base - you can even find some world class riding here!

I  want to express how thankful I am for all the hardworking people that put on these races, and all the amazing and talented riders I met at them. It was great riding with ya’ll. I want to thank the BLM for providing most of my sleeping areas and taquerias everywhere for providing most of my meals. Most of all, thanks those couple of dudes I know for putting up with me through all of it. You know who you are. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone again next season.

Summer : Success. Come visit me in California!

Goodnight Oregon!

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Austin Riba 23 Jan 2012 && [ Cycling ] && 0 comments

Ben and I putting the beast together:

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Austin Riba 19 Oct 2011 && [ Linux, Technology ] && 4 comments

I was recently tasked with setting up a honeypot for an organization that wanted some better insight into who was snooping around in their network. For those of you too lazy to read, what is a honeypot? Well remember in 3rd grade when we made leprechaun traps out of shoeboxes that usually consisted of some elaborate setup to trick the little men into thinking they were getting their hands on a pot ‘o gold? Well think of it like that, except with computers. And networks. And hackers, espionage, subterfuge… etc. Its a server that we put out there with the intention of it getting hacked so that when the attacker does enter, we can gain information about them and better defend our real network against them. Basically:

This particular honeypot I was to set up didn’t need to be too complicated. Really all we wanted was to be able to listen on SSH and get notified if anyone connected - that’s enough because there would be no reason for any of use to ever connect to this server. That’s when I found Kippo. Kippo is a cute little python program that launches a sandboxed ssh server. It is semi interactive, meaning that to anyone who connects it would appear (at least for a while) that they have actually connected to a real server. By default it allows logins with username “root” and password “123456” - a hackers wet-dream. What can kippo do once an attacker has connected?

• Understands most unix commands. mkdir, ls, tar, cat, etc.
• Has a fake filesystem you can actually read/write to.
• Allows use of wget (!) and stores any files downloaded this way in a folder accessible by us.
• Of course, logs all commands.
• Cool tricks:  You can create commands that do nothing but output text. This can make an attacker very confused. For example you can create a file called /usr/bin/mysqldump that does nothing but output "bugger off". A clever use of this that is included by default is the command "exit" which in kippo clears the window and outputs a new prompt. This makes it appear that you have disconnected from the server back to your machine when in reality you are still connected to kippo and it is logging all your commands!
• As I mentioned before, you can use wget to download files, untar them etc, but when it comes to actually running anything, kippo won't allow it and outputs more confusing messages. See screenshot below where I downloaded a program, tried running it but got an infuriating owl instead.

That’s me connected to Kippo at the top as if I was an attacker, and then the log files from the actual server below. Good stuff. My only concern with this program is its security. Its a honeypot, but how secure is it? Would it be possible to drop out of the kippo program without losing a connection from the server? Or somehow execute commands from within kippo that can make it out of the sandbox? From what I can tell, it seems pretty secure, but it is hard to tell.

Damn funny though. So far I recommend it, and I’m thinking of setting one of these up in amazon open to the world just to see what kind of people wander in. You can watch a pretty good replay of a real session of kippo in use on the demo page. Grab the popcorn.

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Austin Riba 14 Aug 2011 && [ Cool, Cycling ] && 1 comments

I’ve finally found my bum-ass a place to live! Fairfax, CA in beautiful Marin County. Im going to give you all some good reasons to visit:

1. Fog, what fog?

2. My street turns to dirt in 1/4 of a mile from my house with several trailheads.

3. We have a hottub.

4. Good mountain biking trails.

5. Good people

6. Close to S.F

Great place, hardly as many yuppies as the rest of Marin co.  I’m pretty exciting to finally have  a place to rest my head, get some momentum, and become established. See ya out there!

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Austin Riba 23 Jul 2011 && [ ] && 1 comments

1988 was a good year and last weekend brought 23 years since then of me walking this planet. As my friend Matt told me, growing old is a privilege and I’m happy to have made it this far.

Age 22 was probably one of my best. It brought my last year of college in which getting all my classes out of the way early finally paid off - I got to mostly float through and have some fun. Socially it was a rollercoaster, both being gone every weekend for bike races and meeting new people in town.

How could I not miss the Haus? Living at the Bike Haus had its ups and downs, but mostly it was rad. I got to meet and hang out with so many people (hippies) just because I lived there, it almost seemed like cheating. The place truly was a community center for better or worse. Smelled like one too. I learned some important things here: how to clean insanely dirty dishes, to ignore the smell of body odour  and to not let your roomates practice drums at 11:00 at night when you have anal retentive neighbours! Seriously though - clear communication. When your roomates do something that you perceive as wrong or annoying its better just tome come forward about it. Even if it is one against the herd and may cause an awkward living situation for a while. Especially important in precarious situations such as living in the Bike Haus. I haven’t heard anything about the place since I left, but I hope its getting used. R.I.P.

Racing mountain bikes was the best thing I could have done with my weekends in college and my only regret was not getting into it sooner or going harder. It was amazing for so many reasons. First of all, I never really had a competitive outlet in college - unless you consider pissing matches between comp sci nerds competition (which it is, but in a really obnoxious, annoying I-dont-even-want-to-participate kind of way) so it was great to get out there, lay the smack down and feel good about coming out on top - some of the time. I only got 2 podiums the whole season but it was all worth it. There is much to be learned in humility and defeat as well. It was also extremely physically demanding. While most people I knew were out every weekend getting drunk and feeling like shit - my racing friends and I were doing 9am bedtimes in order to wake up at 6:00am on race day. Everything changed - diet, sleeping habits, physical physique and attitude. I think I may have even considered myself an athlete and damn if I didn’t feel really good too  - probably in the second best shape of my life just behind my tour in New Zealand.  It was almost impossible not to feel slightly elitist when returning to school after a weekend of racing knowing that you just put yourself through more pain and suffering than most people in class sitting around you would in a year - and you liked it too. But everyone needs a bit of an ego and confidence boost every once and  a while so I don’t feel bad. It definitely worked in my favour at the party and social scene too. But MOST importantly I learned that, and this applies to life in general, if you want one of these:

You have to go through a bit of this:

[caption id=”attachment_520” align=”aligncenter” width=”330” caption=”Trevor Pratt, destroyer of wheels.”][/caption]

And that just all there is to it.

As far as careers or whatever goes I guess that’s going pretty well too. All those years of being a computer nerd in High School finally paid off, because now I’m that same nerd but getting paid for it. I’m still not sure what to say when people ask me what I do for a living. My answer is usually “computer stuff” but in reality I do a bit of all computer stuff. No Im not making the new Facebook. Mainly programming (which I’ve gotten so much better at in one year) as well as some system admin type work. The jobs are challenging and the pay is good so I can’t complain - but I can’t let that get to my head. I will ALWAYS remember that I do this some of the time:

So that I can do this most of the time:

Because I've seen those commuters honking their horns, crowding on the BART, who have worked all their lives and I can feel the frustration and pain in them. I'll never go there. Money can be a dangerous addiction and I've felt it try and grasp at me already, but when that happens I usually just say f**k it and go for a ride.

Heres to living the dream and looking forward to 23.

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Austin Riba 17 May 2011 && [ ] && 0 comments

I’ve been spending more time you youtube lately, especially on Mondays while I recover from the weekend races. Here are a couple of bike related videos that really had me glued to the screen.

I didn’t even know what a match sprint was before I saw this  video but after watching I want to head up to the Alpenrose velodrome and give it a shot. It’s old school, and I don’t think there are that many track stands in modern competition, but it is still very cool to watch:

Headbutting. I’ve got to try this. From last year’s Tour, Mark Renshaw headbutts the competition:

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Austin Riba 9 Mar 2011 && [ Music ] && 0 comments

I’ve been trapped in the terrible place known as finals week for too long, finally I’ve been let go. This quarter is behind me, for better or for worse. Just wanted to share a song real quick that I thought was really good, Let Me Go by Phantogram.

Phantogram - Let Me Go

I’ll really be going - as fast as I can - in 3 days. First XC race of the season up in Echo, Or. I’m going to need to find some faster music by then. Hello spring break!

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Austin Riba 16 Feb 2011 && [ code ] && 12 comments

Need to automate copying files from one Amazon S3 bucket to another? So did I. Everything I found on google, like this, was useless. Most of the scripts I found required downloading the objects first to the local machine and then reuploading them to the destination bucket. Unacceptable, especially if you are dealing with a large and or many files.

I’ve never written a line of Ruby before, but it seems like there are some great AWS libraries for it, so I decided to give it a shot. There is a cool library out there called right_aws. You can install it using #gem install right_aws. Then simply copy this script: {{< highlight ruby >}}

!/usr/bin/env ruby

require ‘right_aws’

    S3ID = "Your AWS ID Here"
    S3KEY = "Your AWS secret key"
    SRCBUCKET = "Source Bucket"
    DESTBUCKET = "Destination Bucket"

    s3 = RightAws::S3Interface.new(S3ID, S3KEY)
    objects = s3.list_bucket(SRCBUCKET)
    objects.each do |o|
    puts("Copying " +  o[:key])
    s3.copy(SRCBUCKET, o[:key], DESTBUCKET, o[:key])
    end
    puts("Done.")

{{< / highlight >}} Make sure the file is executable and you should be able to run it via command line on any unix system. To make a generic ruby script get rid of the first line.

I know its pretty brutish, probably sucks in more ways than one, but for now it works. And I think I like Ruby :D

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Austin Riba 10 Feb 2011 && [ Music ] && 0 comments

Wow, what a great week on hypem.com. I haven’t been checking in there a lot lately but I did a few days ago and some of the new stuff really blew my mind. Sure, there were the usual hip hop/electronic mashups and Passion Pit wannabe bands, but every once and a while you pick up on a gem.

Like this one from Pretty Lights. I love Pink Floyd, and I like remixes, which probably explains why I’m so into this song:

Pink Floyd Time Remix - Pretty Lights

You can download a ton of this guy's music off his eye popping website. Seriously, who designed that thing? I want to be their friend.

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