VirtualBox is a (mostly) open source virtualization stack designed to run on desktop machines. While you can run it in a "serious" fashion (such as using VMs to implement your network infrastructure) it really shines if you use it as part of your development effort.

If you want to get under the hood the VBoxManage utility is the first place to start. It lets you do things like convert and manipulate disk images, something that I do from time to time at work these days. Until I ran into the following problem when trying to convert a VMDK virtual disk …

Kali Linux (formerly Backtrack) is a distribution of Linux designed for penetration testers and information security professionals. I'll spare you the details - that's what Wikipedia is for - but I did want to post about a problem that I've been wrestling with for a couple of hours.

Kali Linux can be installed and operated like any other distribution of Linux, which means that you get all of the nifty and handy tools that you'd expect to have, like AIDE for monitoring the file system for unauthorized changes. Unfortunately, because Kali is based upon Debian, and Debian over-engineers a lot of things …