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!

Recent posts (Page 23 of 74)

A CLI Tool for Bulk Processing Github Dependabot Alerts (with GraphQL!)

2022-02-03 in Programming

Dependabot is … somewhat useful. When it comes to letting you know that there are critical issues in your dependencies that can be fixed simply by upgrading the package (they did all the work for you*). The biggest problem is that it can just be insanely noisy. In a busy repo with multiple Node.JS codebases (especially), you can get dozens to even hundreds of reports a week. And for each one, you optimally would update the code… but sometimes it’s just not practical. So you have to decide which updates you actually apply.

So. How do we do it?

Well the traditional rest based Github APIs don’t expose the dependabot data, but the newer GraphQL one does! I’ll admit, I haven’t used as much GraphQL as I probably should, it’s… a bit more complicated than REST. But it does expose what I need.

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A simple Flask Logging/Echo Server

2022-02-01 in Programming

A very simple server that can be used to catch all incoming HTTP requests and just echo them back + log their contents. I needed it to test what a webhook actually returned to me, but I’m sure that there are a number of other things it could be dropped in for.

It will take in any GET/POST/PATCH/DELETE HTTP request with any path/params/data (optionally JSON), pack that data into a JSON object, and both log that to a file (with a UUID1 based name) plus return this object to the request.

Warning: Off hand, there is already a potential security problem in this regarding DoS. It will happily try to log anything you throw at it, no matter how big and will store those in memory first. So long running requests / large requests / many requests will quickly eat up your RAM/disk. So… don’t leave this running unattended? At least not without additional configuration.

That’s it! Hope it’s helpful.

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Pulling more than 5000 logs from datadog

2022-01-25 in Programming

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!

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AoC 2021 Day 25: Cucumbinator

AoC 2021 Day 25: Cucumbinator

2021-12-25 in Programming

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?

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AoC 2021 Day 23: Amphipodinator

2021-12-23 in Programming

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:

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AoC 2021 Day 19: Point Matchinator

2021-12-19 in Programming

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).

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