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!

Performance problems with Flask and Docker

2015-04-03

I had an interesting problem recently on a project I was working on. It’s a simple Flask-based webapp, designed to be deployed to AWS using Docker. The application worked just fine when I was running it locally, but as soon as I pushed the docker container…

Latency spikes. Bad enough that the application was failing AWS’s healthy host checks, cycling in and out of existence¹:

Parsing AWS instance data with jq

2015-04-01

Semi-random amusing code snippet of the day:

aws ec2 describe-instances | jq << EOF
    .[][].Instances[]
    | select(.Tags[]?.Value == "production")
    | .PrivateIpAddress
EOF

gif shrinkage with ImageMagick

2015-03-05

I have a gif collection now. :)

ts: Timestamping stdout

2015-02-26

Loving data as much as I do, I like to optimize things. To make sure I’m actually going the right way, it’s useful to time things. While it’s trivial in most languages to add timing, it’s even easier if you don’t have to.

update-dotfiles encryption

2015-02-11

I do like having my dotfiles on GitHub. For one, it means that they’re always available when I set up a new machine. For two, others can see them and take whatever is interesting for their own dotfiles. But all that has a disadvantage: what if I want to store my SSH configs?

docker-bash and docker-stop-all

2015-02-04

I’ve been using Docker a fair bit at work, so I’ve added a few quick aliases to my dotfiles make that a little bit easier:

docker-bash - attach a bash shell to the first available docker instance
docker-stop-all - stop all running docker instances

iOS Backups in Racket: Apps

2015-01-29

So far we’ve read backup files, parsed contacts, and parsed messages. Today we’re going to dig a little deeper and start parsing apps specifically.

iOS Backups in Racket: Messages

2015-01-27

So far we’ve laid the groundwork, loading local iOS backups and parsed out contacts. Today let’s take another step down the rabbit hole and figure out how messages are stored.

iOS Backups in Racket: Contacts

2015-01-23

After yesterday’s post laying the groundwork for looking into iOS Backups, today why don’t we actually start digging into one of the more interesting files: your list of contacts.

iOS Backups in Racket: Groundwork

2015-01-22

For the last little while, I’ve been spending my spare programming time working on a slightly larger project than I normally do: a Racket library for reading iOS backups.

Basically, I want to take the mess that is an iOS backup (not particularly designed to be easy to read by other programs) and extract some information from it, backing it up in a more easily readable format.

Specifically, I would like to be able to backup:

Contact information: Even thought they’re mostly from Facebook, it will be useful for the other parts
Messages: These are taking up a large portion of my phone’s hard drive, mostly due to attachments. Back them up just in case¹²
Photos: I’m already backing these up, but it would be nice to have it in the same process
Application data:
List of applications over time
Moves: GPS location
Downcast: List of current podcasts
Sleep Cycle: Sleep data
Boardgame Scorer: High scores for board games