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!

LD46: IT'S WORKING!

2020-04-18

IT’S WORKING!

The performance is terrible (sub 10 FPS on a pretty decent desktop and I want to try to run it in a browser…), but it’s working.

LD46: Particles!

2020-04-18

I’ve got particles working!

It’s probably not nearly as efficient as it’s going to have to be, but it’s a start?

LD46: Squishy squishy

2020-04-18

It’s so squish!

That is not at all what I intended, but I kind of love it, so for the moment, it stays in.

To get this far, I had a heck of a time trying to figure out Godot’s physics engine, but I’m learning quickly!

LD46: Tetris is working! (sort of)

2020-04-18

Update!

I have basic blocks that fall by themselves and that I can move around with left/right on the keyboard. They will collide with each other and the walls/floor, and once they stick, a new block will spawn.

Ludum Dare 46: Tetris Sand

2020-04-17

It’s been a while since I’ve last done a Ludum Dare. I felt the itch though, so let’s do it again.

Ludum Dare is an online event where games are made from scratch in a weekend. Check us out every April and October!

The theme this time: Keep it alive

I don’t know if I’ll make it all the way through or actually finish a game. But I’m going to give it a try!

Command line AES with openssl (and tar)

2020-04-09

I had a script that would take a file and a passphrase and either encrypt it or, if already encrypted, decrypt it. It worked well enough and I got to play with the struct library. But it was home grown–so not compatible with anything–and didn’t properly validate anything. It worked well enough, but perhaps I could do something better.

Get kitten

2020-04-01

I upload a lot of images when testing for various things. And of course, I don’t want to use any of my own images. So what would I do instead?

Kittens!

$ get-kitten

Downloading a 640 x 480 kitten
Downloading to kitten-1.jpg

$ open kitten-1.jpg

Perfect.

Split a file with headers

2020-03-30

I have a bunch of files with Arabic content that I need to split into chunks so they can be better run in parallel¹. But by default, when I open them in a text editor, the encoding changes from windows-1256 to utf-8². I could use the Unix split command to break them into chunks, but I need to preserve the headers. So… how do I fix all this?

Write a script!

Wrapping xattr as a racket module

2020-01-29

I recently came across a question: how do you read extended file attributes in Racket. Not being actually that familiar with extended file attributes, I searched online. Nothing seems to currently exist (other than in the FUSE module, but that’s specific to FUSE), but there is a system level exectuable that one could wrap to do this. I haven’t done much¹ with Racket’s system or system* function before, so let’s give it a whirl.

Rack::Cors Configuration Tricks

2020-01-16

cyu’s Rack::Cors middleware is rather handy if want to control your CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) settings in a Ruby-on-Rails project. Previously, there was a fairly major issue where :credentials => true was the default (which you generally do not want), but there were also some more complicated tweaks that I wanted to make.

One problem I recently had to deal with was wanting to:

Allow CORS connections from arbitrary domains (this site functions as an API)
Do not allow CORS from http domains at all
Only allow cookies (Access-Control-Allow-Credentials) to be sent for sibling subdomains
Prevent cookies from being sent from specific sibling subdomains (that are actually run by a third party)
On development (non-production) versions of the site, allow credentials from localhost