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!

AoC 2017: Library Functions

2017-12-01

As mentioned in the main post, I’m structuring my solutions a bit differently this year. Rather than repeating the same relatively lengthy header in each function, we’re going to have a few shared files that can be imported or used for every problem.

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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?

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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?

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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

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