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!

Solving Loop Puzzles

2016-07-14

A quick puzzle from Daily Programmer:

∞ Loop is a mobile game that consists of nm tiles, placed in a nm grid. There are 16 different tiles:

┃, ━, ┏, ┓, ┛, ┗, ┣, ┳, ┫, ┻, ╋, ╹, ╺, ╻, ╸, ' '.

The objective is to create a closed loop: every pipe must have another tile facing it in the adjacent tile — for example if some tile has a pipe going right, its adjacent tile to the right must have a pipe going left.

The most straightforward solution is a hybrid combination of constraints and backtracking, similar to what I did when solving Takuzu and tile puzzles.

Mirror iTunes playlists to Spotify

2016-06-22

At the moment, I have an Apple Music subscription. It’s great to be able to listen to more or less whatever music I want to. I switched from Spotify because they were missing a few artists that I actually did want to listen to. Unfortunately, there are a few things that Apple Music doesn’t do that I would like to have–chief among them the ability to play on a Roku.

One nice thing that Spotify does have though is a fairly powerful API: Spotify Web API. Inspired by a post on Spotify and billboard.py which automatically creates Spotify playlists from the Billboard music ranking charts, I decided to write up a script that can sync my playlists from iTunes to Spotify.

Parsing Motorola Surfboard stats

2016-06-04

A few weeks ago, I was having some pretty bad problems with my internet randomly hanging. Given that I’m now working from home, that wasn’t exactly the most optimal of situations to find myself in, so I decided to dig a bit deeper. After a bit of looking, I found myself at my cable modem’s built in web page:

(This is after I fixed my problem. The values aren’t perfect but they’re much better.)

Automatically uploading files

2016-06-03

Quick post today. I was working on a website where I have a live server running the code on another machine. I wanted to write a quick script that would copy any files I changed to the remote machine. This is something you can do automatically in most IDEs, but I wanted something both a bit lighter weight and to have the excuse to write something myself.

Ensuring docker-machine is running

2016-04-19

When developing using docker on OS X, you’ll currently¹ have to use docker-machine to spin up a virtual machine that is actually running the docker containers. Running a virtual machine takes up a bit more in the way of resources than just the docker containers, so if you’re not actually developing at the moment, it’s helpful to be able to start up the virtual machine only when you need it.

The current way I have to do that:

$ docker-machine start default
$ eval $(docker-machine env default)

What’s worse, the latter command has to be run for every shell that you start up. It’s by no means a hard pair of commands and you could easily wrap them in an alias or put them in your .profile equivalent (which is what I used to do). But unfortunately, I found a completely unrelated bug in tmuxp: if the shell takes too long to start up, tmuxp essentially won’t work. The above eval command took long enough to hit this limit.

Audiobooks to Podcasts

2016-02-26

I’ve recently started to listen to audiobooks again (The Aeronaut’s Windlass). If you buy books through Audible or some other setup that has their own app, it’s a straight forward enough process. On the other hand, if you have them on CD and want to play them on a mobile device… It’s a little more interesting.

I tried a few different apps that purport to do exactly what I wanted: import an audiobook as a folder full of MP3s and play them, but none that quite meet what I wanted. Since I also listen to a lot of podcasts and have more than one podcast app that I really like (I’ve used and liked both Downcast and Pocket Casts), I decided to see if I couldn’t use one of those as an audiobook player.

Duplicating AeroSnap on OSX with Hammerspoon

2016-02-08

Relatively recently, I switched my last Windows machine over to OSX. For the most part, it’s been great. One bit of functionality that I’ve been missing though is AeroSnap. Specifically the ability to use a keyboard shortcut to move windows to the left/right half of a monitor.

Command line unicode search

2016-01-06

Similar to Monday’s post about command line emoji search, I often find myself wanting to look up Unicode characters. I have a custom search engine / bookmark set up in Chrome / Firefox (uni %s maps to http://unicode-search.net/unicode-namesearch.pl?term=%s&.submit=Submit&subs=1). That actually works great, but given how relatively much of my day I spend on the command line, I thought it would be interesting to do something there:

$ uni delta
⍋	apl functional symbol delta stile
⍙	apl functional symbol delta underbar
⍍	apl functional symbol quad delta
≜	delta equal to
Δ	greek capital letter delta
δ	greek small letter delta
ẟ	latin small letter delta
ƍ	latin small letter turned delta
𝚫	mathematical bold capital delta
𝜟	mathematical bold italic capital delta
𝜹	mathematical bold italic small delta
𝛅	mathematical bold small delta
𝛥	mathematical italic capital delta
𝛿	mathematical italic small delta
𝝙	mathematical sans-serif bold capital delta
𝞓	mathematical sans-serif bold italic capital delta
𝞭	mathematical sans-serif bold italic small delta
𝝳	mathematical sans-serif bold small delta
ᵟ	modifier letter small delta

Command line emoji search

2016-01-04

Sometimes, I find myself wanting to communicate in emoji.

🐔

How about this:

$ emoji chicken
🐔

$ emoji "which came first, the 🐔 or the 🥚"
which came first, the 🐔 or the 🍳

Inlining plaintext attachments in Gmail

2016-01-02

When you send a text message to a Gmail email address (at least from an iPhone using AT&T), you get something like this:

It’s vaguely annoying to have to click through every single time just to see what the message is, especially when various extensions (such as uMatrix) break overlay rendering or when you have multiple attachments.

Much better would be to just display the plaintext attachments inline: