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 30 of 74)

LD46: Squishy squishy

LD46: Squishy squishy

2020-04-18 in Programming

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!

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Ludum Dare 46: Tetris Sand

Ludum Dare 46: Tetris Sand

2020-04-17 in Programming

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!

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Command line AES with openssl (and tar)

Command line AES with openssl (and tar)

2020-04-09 in Programming

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.

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Get kitten

Get kitten

2020-04-01 in Programming

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.

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Split a file with headers

2020-03-30 in Programming

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!

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Wrapping xattr as a racket module

2020-01-29 in Programming

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.

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