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!

All posts

Recent posts

Genuary 2023.31: Break a previous image

2023-03-03

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!

31) Deliberately break one of your previous images, take one of your previous works and ruin it. Alternatively, remix one of your previous works.

read more...

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:

read more...

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!

read more...

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

read more...