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. That’s about where I am today!

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

Pulling more than 5000 logs from datadog

2022-01-25

Datadog is pretty awesome. I wish I had it at my previous job, but better late than never. In particular, I’ve used it a lot for digging through recent logs to try to construct various events for various (security related) reasons.

One of the problems I’ve come into though is that eventually you’re going to hit the limits of what datadog can do. In particular, I was trying to reconstruct user’s sessions and then check if they made one specific sequence of calls or another one. So far as I know, that isn’t directly possible, so instead, I wanted to download a subset of the datadog logs and process them locally.

Easy enough, yes? Well: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/67281698/datadog-export-logs-more-than-5-000

Turns out, you just can’t export more than 5000 logs directly. But… they have an API with pagination!

AoC 2021 Day 25: Cucumbinator

2021-12-25

Source: Sea Cucumber

Part 1: Load a grid of empty cells (`.`), east movers (`>`), and south movers (`v`). Each step, move all east movers than all south movers (only if they can this iteration). Wrap east/west and north/south. How many steps does it take the movers to get stuck?

AoC 2021 Day 24: Aluinator

2021-12-24

Source: Arithmetic Logic Unit

Part 1: Simulate an ALU with 4 registers (`w`, `x`, `y`, and `z`) and instructions defined below. Find the largest 14 digit number with no 0 digits which result in `z=0`.

AoC 2021 Day 23: Amphipodinator

2021-12-23

Source: Amphipod

Part 1: Given 4 rooms full of amphipods with various energy costs for movement (a=1, b=10, c=100, d=1000) and a hallway, how much energy does it take (at minimum) to sort the amphipods into their own rooms with the following conditions:

AoC 2021 Day 22: Cubinator

2021-12-22

Source: Reactor Reboot

Part 1: Given a series of 3D cubes that either turn ON all or turn OFF all points in their region, calculate how many points in the region (-50..50,-50..50,-50..50) are ON at the end.

AoC 2021 Day 21: Dicinator

2021-12-21

Source: Dirac Dice

Part 1: Play a simple game (describe below) with a loaded D100 (that always rolls 1, 2, 3, … 99, 100, 1, …). Return the score of the losing player times the number of times the die was rolled.

AoC 2021 Day 20: Enhancinator

2021-12-20

Source: Trench Map

Part 1: Given a 9->1 cellular automota update function (take the pixel and 8 surrounding pixels as a 9-bit index into the function) and a binary image, apply the function twice and count the number of ’lit’ pixels. Assume that the canvas is infinite.

AoC 2021 Day 19: Point Matchinator

2021-12-19

Source: Snailfish

Part 1: You will be given a series of Scanners, each of which will tell you the location (from their point of view) of a series of Beacons. Each Scanner may be flipped or rotated in increments of 90 degrees in any direction. Determine where each Scanner and Beacon is by overlaying the maps (with at least pairwise 12 matches).

AoC 2021 Day 18: Pairs of Pairs

2021-12-18

Source: Snailfish

Part 1: Given the following definition of Snailfish numbers, add a series of Snailfish numbers and return the magnitude of the result.

AoC 2021 Day 17: Pew-Pewinator

2021-12-17

Source: Trick Shot

Part 1: Simulate a projectile with an integer initial velocity (x, y), air resistance that tries to reduce x-velocity to 0, and gravity that increases y-velocity by 1 each time. Given a target range, find the highest point reached by a projectile that ends a tick (not one that crosses over) within the target area.

Source: Sea Cucumber

Part 1: Load a grid of empty cells (.), east movers (>), and south movers (v). Each step, move all east movers than all south movers (only if they can this iteration). Wrap east/west and north/south. How many steps does it take the movers to get stuck?

Source: Arithmetic Logic Unit

Part 1: Simulate an ALU with 4 registers (w, x, y, and z) and instructions defined below. Find the largest 14 digit number with no 0 digits which result in z=0.

Source: Amphipod

Part 1: Given 4 rooms full of amphipods with various energy costs for movement (a=1, b=10, c=100, d=1000) and a hallway, how much energy does it take (at minimum) to sort the amphipods into their own rooms with the following conditions:

Source: Reactor Reboot

Part 1: Given a series of 3D cubes that either turn ON all or turn OFF all points in their region, calculate how many points in the region (-50..50,-50..50,-50..50) are ON at the end.

Source: Dirac Dice

Part 1: Play a simple game (describe below) with a loaded D100 (that always rolls 1, 2, 3, … 99, 100, 1, …). Return the score of the losing player times the number of times the die was rolled.

Source: Trench Map

Part 1: Given a 9->1 cellular automota update function (take the pixel and 8 surrounding pixels as a 9-bit index into the function) and a binary image, apply the function twice and count the number of ’lit’ pixels. Assume that the canvas is infinite.

Source: Snailfish

Source: Snailfish

Part 1: Given the following definition of Snailfish numbers, add a series of Snailfish numbers and return the magnitude of the result.

Source: Trick Shot

Part 1: Load a grid of empty cells (`.`), east movers (`>`), and south movers (`v`). Each step, move all east movers than all south movers (only if they can this iteration). Wrap east/west and north/south. How many steps does it take the movers to get stuck?

Part 1: Simulate an ALU with 4 registers (`w`, `x`, `y`, and `z`) and instructions defined below. Find the largest 14 digit number with no 0 digits which result in `z=0`.