No Testing Required

"Our code craft is so good we do not require testing."

Have you ever heard such a load of crap? If you ever hear this in your software development organization don't walk away. Run!

This indicates a few problems:

1. Management. Has Failed. Full stop. Either management has taken leave of their senses or they do not care anymore and are looking for work elsewhere because the children they manage has worn them down.

2. Upper Management. Has also failed. They do not realize that the team will be producing shit and that only developer egos are driving the production. They need to fire people but they are too scared.

3. Education. Is allowing people to enter the workforce without the appropriate humility to solve problems.

So run. You will not be able to fix this problem as it has rotted the entire management chain. Eventually the product and probably the company will fail. Then, and only then will Karma be a bitch. But they will be able to blame others.

Win10 Host, Virtualbox, Kali Guest, and Virtualbox Guest Addition Foo

What a pain. I received a new disk from work and so I decided to reinstall virtualbox and guest additions and start a new Kali guest VM. A fresh start.

I add the guest additions so I can have an adjustable screen size for the VM. I am a visual learner so deal with it.

So when I install Virtualbox it asks if I want the updated guest additions and I say yes which causes it to install in c:\Program Files\Oracle\Virtualbox\VBoxGuestAdditions.iso.

My Kali virtual box needs two things at this point:

1. A cd-rom device enabled. So it can insert the guest additions into it from the Devices menu.
2. No images associated with that CD rom otherwise when you attempt to insert the guest additions it will error as busy.

Once your VM boots, and you select Devices->Insert Guest Additions CD image... you should see a VBOXADDITIONS... CD icon on your desktop.

But your quest has a few pitfalls remaining.

So crack open a bash terminal in Kali and change directory /media/cdrom.

Then attempt to run (as root) VBoxLinuxAdditions.run. It will fail with a you do not have permissions. The image has been mounted without the ability to run anything.

To fix this:

• cd /etc
• vi fstab
• change the line for /media/cdrom0 and replace "noauto" with exec

The line should now look like:

/dev/sr0        /media/cdrom0   udf,iso9660 user,exec     0       0

Then perform a:

umount /media/cdrom0
mount /media/cdrom0

You should now be able to run VBoxLinuxAdditions.run

However that in itself might fail with:

Building the main Guest Additions module ...fail!
(Look at /var/log/vboxadd-install.log to find out what went wrong)

The reason for this is that it is attempting to compile something and it does not have headers to compile with.

apt-get update

apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`

Then try again with VBoxLinuxAdditions.run

References:

1. https://forums.kali.org/showthread.php?18973-Issues-installing-VirtualBox-Guest-Additions
2. https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=58799

Google Site Verification with Wordpress

As with all sites that wish to be found praying to the google gods of horrible user interfaces is required. In that there are several meta tags that your site needs to cough up so that the google bot understands this is a site worthy of its consideration.

There is a list of tags as identified in [1] but this post if going to focus on getting the verification code and planting it in a Wordpress site so that it presents it.

First, the meta tag we want to use is google-site-verification. And as with all things Google finding out how to get one varies, is hard to find, and the documentation is contradictory and confusing. This post is a result of the usual Google misinformation so the next time I need this I can .... well....consult with myself. In this case I finally found that the link at [2] helped. And already having a google analytics account allowed me to generate the verification code.

Essentially I did this:

1. Go to Webmaster Central and click Add a site. Enter the URL of your site. https://www.google.com/webmasters/verification/home
2. Choose alternate methods tab.
3. Select HTML Tag

This generates a tag like this:
<meta name="google-site-verification" content="z0TcgvjhJgg3FArBc8j8CAKMMFRpcW6uFBebbHYKRoE" />

Next I installed a Wordpress plugin called "Meta Tag Manager" [3] and entered the tag information there.

Once this was live in my site and every page was providing the meta tag I could click verify in the Wemaster Central page.

Another page will involve the setup for Google Analytics in my Wordpress site.




References:

1. Meta tags that Google understands, https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812?hl=en
2. Verify site ownership on Google Search Console, https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1142414?hl=en
3. Meta Tag Manager, https://en-ca.wordpress.org/plugins/meta-tag-manager/