Programming

The earliest memory I have of ‘programming’ is in the early/mid 90s when my father brought home a computer from work. We could play games on it … so of course I took the spreadsheet program he used (LOTUS 123, did I date myself with that?) and tried to modify it to print out a helpful message for him. It … halfway worked? At least I could undo it so he could get back to work…

After that, I picked up programming for real in QBASIC (I still have a few of those programs lying around), got my own (junky) Linux desktop from my cousin, tried to learn VBasic (without a Windows machine), and eventually made it to high school… In college, I studied computer science and mathematics, mostly programming in Java/.NET, although with a bit of everything in the mix. A few of my oldest programming posts on this blog are from that time.

After that, on to grad school! Originally, I was going to study computational linguistics, but that fell through. Then programming languages (the school’s specialty). And finally I ended up studying censorship and computer security… before taking a hard turn into the private sector to follow my PhD advisor.

Since then, I’ve worked in the computer security space at a couple of different companies. Some don’t exist any more, some you’ve probably heard of. I still program for fun too, and not just in security.

But really, I still have a habit of doing a little bit of everything. Whatever seems interesting at the time!

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Genuary 2023.30: Minimalism

2023-03-02

Genuary!

Spend a month making one beautiful thing per day, given a bunch of prompts. A month late, but as they say, ’the second best time is now'.

Let’s do it!

30) Minimalism


let gui;
let params = {
  lineWidth: 10,
  minWidth: 50,
  maxWidth: 100, maxWidthMax: 400,
  minHeight: 50,
  maxHeight: 100, maxHeightMax: 400,
  colorChance: 0.1, colorChanceMin: 0, colorChanceMax: 1, colorChanceStep: 0.01,
}

let box;
let colors = [
  "red",
  "blue",
  "yellow",
]

function setup() {
  createCanvas(400, 400);
  
  box = {
    x: -params.lineWidth,
    y: -params.lineWidth,
    width: random(params.minWidth, params.maxWidth),
    height: random(params.minHeight, params.maxHeight),
  }

  gui = createGuiPanel('params');
  gui.addObject(params);
  gui.setPosition(420, 0);
}

function draw() {
  strokeWeight(params.lineWidth);
  stroke("black");
  
  if (random() < params.colorChance) {
    fill(random(colors));
  } else {
    fill("white");
  }
  
  rect(box.x, box.y, box.width, box.height);
  
  box.y += box.height;
  box.height = random(params.minHeight, params.maxHeight);
  
  if (box.y > height) {
    box.x += box.width;
    box.y = -params.lineWidth;
    box.width = random(params.minWidth, params.maxWidth);
    box.height = random(params.minHeight, params.maxHeight);
  }
  
  if (box.x > width) {
    noLoop();
  }
}

I did have a sketch before that that ended up getting a little un-minimal:

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Redis in Rust: Testing redis-cli + GET/SET support

2023-02-28

And I’m back. It’s been a busy month with the Genuary 2023 series and life in general, but I’m still thinking about Redis in general 😄.

Up this time, let’s see what the official redis-cli app does when talking to our client and actually start handling some commands. Specifically, the very basic commands: SET and GET. With that, we would actually have a (very very basic) keystore up and running!

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Genuary 2023.24: Textile

2023-02-24

Genuary!

Spend a month making one beautiful thing per day, given a bunch of prompts. A month late, but as they say, ’the second best time is now'.

Let’s do it!

24) Textile

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Genuary 2023.22: Shadows

2023-02-22

Genuary!

Spend a month making one beautiful thing per day, given a bunch of prompts. A month late, but as they say, ’the second best time is now'.

Let’s do it!

22) Shadows

read more...