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!

Automatic self-signed HTTPS for local development

2018-02-15

From time to time when doing web development, you need to test something related to HTTPS. In some cases, the application you’re writing already supports HTTPS natively and that’s no problem. But more often (and probably better, in my opinion) is the case when you have another service (be it an AWS ELB or an nginx layer) that will terminate the HTTPS connection for you so your application doesn’t have to know how to speak HTTPS.

In those cases, how can you test functionality that specifically interacts with HTTPS?

Today I will show you autohttps, a thin nginx proxy using Docker and a self signed certificate to automatically create an HTTPS proxy in front of your application.

Making Fish Shell Smile

2018-01-12

When working in a shell, from time to time, I need to know if a command succeeded or failed. Sometimes, it’s easy:

$ make noise

make: *** No rule to make target `noise'.  Stop.

Sometimes, less so:

$ grep frog podcasts.json > podcasts-about-frogs.txt

Since, alas, I don’t have any podcasts about frogs, that command would fail silently. But that’s fixable!

$ grep frog podcasts.json > podcasts-about-frogs.txt

$ # Bash/Zsh
$ echo $?
1

$ # Fish
$ echo $status
1

Advent of Code 2017

2018-01-08

As I did with last year / yesterday, I’ve written up a series of posts for the Advent of Code 2017 problems. Again, I didn’t manage to write them up as I did them, but this time around I least I finished mostly on time.

Advent of Code 2016

2018-01-03

As I did last year, I’m going to solve the Advent of Code problems again this year.

Or that was the plan. It turns out that instead I put down my blog for almost a year and a half and never quite got around to doing these problems. So I’m actually backdating these posts from the early days of 2018 to where they would have been had I solved them on time. They’re still interesting problems, so give them a read.

AoC 2017 Day 25: Turing

2017-12-25

Source: The Halting Problem

Part 1: Implement a Turing machine defined as such:

Begin in state A. Perform a diagnostic checksum after 6 steps.

In state A: If the current value is 0: - Write the value 1. - Move one slot to the right. - Continue with state B. If the current value is 1: - Write the value 0. - Move one slot to the left. - Continue with state B.

…

AoC 2017 Day 24: Maker Of Bridges

2017-12-24

Source: Electromagnetic Moat

Part 1: Given a series of reversible components of the form 3/4 (can connect a 3 on one end to a 4 on the other), form a bridge of components. The bridge’s strength is equal to the sum of component values. So 0/3, 3/7, and 7/4 has a strength of 0+3 + 3+7 + 7+4 = 24.

What is the strongest possible bridge?

AoC 2017 Day 23: Duetvmc

2017-12-23

Source: Coprocessor Conflagration

Part 1: Create a variation of the previous DuetVM with only the following four instructions:

set X Y sets register X to Y
sub X Y set register X to X - Y
mul X Y sets register X to X * Y
jnz X Y jumps with an offset of the value of Y, iff X is not equal to zero

If you run the given program, how many times is mul invoked?

AoC 2017 Day 22: Langton's Ant

2017-12-22

Source: Sporifica Virus

Part 1: Implement a cellular automaton on an infinite grid of . and # pixels such that:

Start at (0, 0), facing Up
Repeat:
If the cursor is on . swap it to # and turn Left
If the cursor is on # swap it to . and turn Right
Either way, after turning, move forward once

After 10,000 iterations, how many pixels were turned from . to #?

AoC 2017 Day 21: Fractal Expander

2017-12-21

Source: Fractal Art

Part 1: Start with an input image made of . and # pixels. For n iterations, break the image into blocks:
If the current size is even, break the image into 2x2 chunks and replace each with a 3x3 chunk
If the current size is odd, break the image into 3x3 chunks and replace each with a 4x4 chunk
The replacement rules will be specified in the following format (example is a 3x3 -> 4x4 rule):
.#./..#/### => #..#/..../..../#..#  
In that example, replace this:
.#.
..#
###
With this:
#..#
....
....
#..#
Any rotation or reflection of a chunk can be used to match the input of a replacement rule.
After n = 18 iterations, how many # pixels are there?

AoC 2017 Day 20: Miniature Universe Simulator

2017-12-20

Source: Particle Swarm

Part 1: Given the initial position, velocity, and acceleration of a large number of particles, which particle will stay the closet to the origin as the simulation runs to infinity?