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!

Clock drift in Docker containers

2017-11-15

I was working on a docker container which uses the aws cli to mess around with some autoscaling groups when I got a somewhat strange error:

A client error (SignatureDoesNotMatch) occurred when calling the DescribeAutoScalingGroups operation: Signature not yet current: 20171115T012426Z is still later than 20171115T012420Z (20171115T011920Z + 5 min.)

Hmm.

Are the clocks off?

AoC 2016 Day 25: Assembunny3

2016-12-25

Source: Clock Signal

Part 1: Take the assembunny interpreter from day 12 and add one new instruction (out x) which transmits the value x (either an integer or register). Find the lowest value we can initialize a to so that the output signals form an infinite repeating pattern of 0, 1, 0, 1, …

AoC 2016 Day 24: Venti

2016-12-24

Source: Air Duct Spelunking

Part 1: Given a map of the form:

########### #0.1…..2# #.#######.# #4…….3# ###########

AoC 2016 Day 23: Assembunny2

2016-12-23

Source: Safe Cracking

Part 1: Take the assembunny interpreter from day 12 and add an instruction (tgl X) that modifies the code at an offset of X instructions.

inc becomes dec; any other one argument instruction (including tgl) becomes inc
jnz becomes cpy; any other two argument instructions become jnz
Toggling an instruction outside of the program does nothing (it does not halt execution)
If toggling produces an invalid instruction, ignore it

Run the given program with the initial register of a = 7. What is the final value in register a?

AoC 2016 Day 22: Data Mover

2016-12-22

Source: Grid Computing

Part 1: You are given a grid of nodes and the output of the df command telling you how much space is on each. How many pairs of nodes are there where the data from some node A would fit entirely on B?

AoC 2016 Day 21: Scrambler

2016-12-21

Source: Scrambled Letters and Hash

Part 1: Another virtual machine, of sorts. Start with the string abcdefgh and apply a sequence of the following commands to it:

swap position X with position Y = swap two positions
swap letter X with letter Y = swap to letters, no matter where they are
rotate (left|right) X steps = rotate forward or backward
rotate based on position of letter X = find X, rotate right based on its position; if the original position was >= 4, rotate one more¹
reverse positions X through Y = reverse a subset of the string
move position X to position Y = take a character at a position out of the string and put it somewhere else specific

AoC 2016 Day 20: Filter Table

2016-12-20

Source: Firewall Rules

Part 1: Given a list of integer ranges (a la 5-8), what is the first value not in any given range?

AoC 2016 Day 19: Blist Table

2016-12-19

Source: An Elephant Named Joseph

Part 1: Create a circular list of the numbers 1 through n. Going around the list, each currently remaining number removes the number after it. What is the last remaining number?

AoC 2016 Day 18: Its A Trap

2016-12-18

Source: Like a Rogue

Part 1: Starting with a sequence of . and ^, generate additional rows using the rules based on the three characters above the new position.

^^. -> ^
.^^ -> ^
^.. -> ^
..^ -> ^
Otherwise -> .

How many safe tiles (.) are there after 40 generations?

AoC 2016 Day 17: Md5 Maze

2016-12-17

Source: Two Steps Forward

Part 1: Create a 4x4 grid of rooms with doors Up, Down, Left, and Right from each location. To determine if a door is currently open:

Calculate MD5(salt + sequence) where sequence is a string containing any combination of UDLR depending on how you got to this room
The first four hex values represent the doors Up, Down, Left, and Right respectively: bcdef means open; anything else is closed

Find the shortest path from (0, 0) to (3, 3).