Unfortunately, my long-term archives are in storage, but I can at least describe the nonsense I wrote.

Not long before I started my career path at an Internet Provider in 2000, I was more of an unscrupulous individual with low ethics and had a full-blown wifi hacking setup in my vehicle that I'd use to scan and crack into networks in the Bay St, Toronto, Canada area.

At this time, I was using FreeBSD as my Operating System, with ipfw as my firewall on my "war-driving" equipment.

A few weeks after starting at the ISP, I came across a "Learn Perl in 21 days" book, and having known basic C/C++ at the time, I picked that up quick and figured 'man, this scripting thing would make it easy to automate stuff'.

What'd I do? Wrote an exceptionally hacky wrapper around the ipfw binary so that I could use quick-keys on my keyboard to automate rule sets within the firewall in an instant. It was filled with stuff like:

# do not change these lines unless you know what you're doing!!!
[download]

...even though the lines (looking back) did nothing of real importance, and even a low-level intermediate Perl hacker would laugh at.

I also remember using C-style for() loops, using long lists of global variables, and as I'm sure everyone has, tried to use variables as variable names.

Good times. I'll forever be appreciative for that odd book on the shelf I picked up. I'm thankful for the lessons I've learned, the things I've picked up, and the mistakes that I'll still make that I'll inevitably learn from.

Congratulations on the kick up to Chancellor, haukex. It's very well deserved.

-stevieb