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!

StackLang Part IX: Better Testing

2023-08-12

Two posts in two days? Madness! Posts in StackLang: StackLang Part I: The Idea StackLang Part II: The Lexer StackLang Part III: The Parser StackLang Part IV: An Interpreter StackLang Part V: Compiling to C StackLang Part VI: Some Examples StackLang Part VII: New CLI and Datatypes StackLang Part VIII: Compiler Stacks StackLang Part IX: Better Testing But really, it got a bit late yesterday so I figured I’d split this into two different posts.

StackLang Part VIII: Compiler Stacks

2023-08-11

Let’s continue StackLang Part VII: New CLI and Datatypes and implement lists stacks in the compiler! Posts in StackLang: StackLang Part I: The Idea StackLang Part II: The Lexer StackLang Part III: The Parser StackLang Part IV: An Interpreter StackLang Part V: Compiling to C StackLang Part VI: Some Examples StackLang Part VII: New CLI and Datatypes StackLang Part VIII: Compiler Stacks StackLang Part IX: Better Testing In this post:

StackLang Part VII: New CLI and Datatypes

2023-08-05

Another day, another Stacklang! Posts in StackLang: StackLang Part I: The Idea StackLang Part II: The Lexer StackLang Part III: The Parser StackLang Part IV: An Interpreter StackLang Part V: Compiling to C StackLang Part VI: Some Examples StackLang Part VII: New CLI and Datatypes StackLang Part VIII: Compiler Stacks StackLang Part IX: Better Testing Today, we’ve got two main parts to work on: A new CLI New datatypes (VM only; so far!

StackLang Part VI: Some Examples

2023-07-16

We’ve gone through all sorts of things building up the StackLang language so far: Posts in StackLang: StackLang Part I: The Idea StackLang Part II: The Lexer StackLang Part III: The Parser StackLang Part IV: An Interpreter StackLang Part V: Compiling to C StackLang Part VI: Some Examples StackLang Part VII: New CLI and Datatypes StackLang Part VIII: Compiler Stacks StackLang Part IX: Better Testing But what can we actually do with it?

StackLang Part V: Compiling to C

2023-07-12

It’s been a bit, but I hope it’s worth it. StackLang, part 5: compiling to C!

StackLang Part IV: An Interpreter

2023-05-01

StackLang, part 4: an interpreter. Here we go again!

This time, the goal is to actually get code running

StackLang Part III: The Parser

2023-04-24

StackLang, part 3: parsing. This is going to be the most complicated one thus far! Onward.

StackLang Part II: The Lexer

2023-04-16

StackLang, part 2: lexing.

It’s quite often the simplest part of implementing a programming language (although parsers for s-expression based languages come close), but it’s still something that needs done. So here we go!

StackLang Part I: The Idea

2023-04-14

I enjoy writing programming languages. Example: Tiny. Let’s do that again.

This time, StackLang:

{
  @[n fact]
  1
  { n 1 - $fact fact n * }
  N 1 <= if
} @fact

5 $fact fact writeln

Bit of gibberish there, I suppose, but the goal is to write everything in a postfix/stack based model. So n 1 - $fact fact n * is equivalent to fact(fact, n - 1) * n in a more traditional language.

Over the next few posts, I hope to write up where I am thus far and what’s next.

Wildcard Let's Encrypt certificates with Nginx Proxy Manager and Cloudflare

2023-03-27

Another quick snippet that I figured out this weekend. It’s not hard, but it’s something that I really wanted to do and had to look up where it was, so perhaps it will help you.

Problem statement:

I run a bunch of local services in my network. They aren’t exposed publicly (I use Wireguard to access them when out and about), so I really don’t need HTTPS. But (rightfully) a number of services behave better when they’re behind HTTPS + if there’s ever a service that’s running amuck (Internet of Things devices?) that’s listening, I don’t want them to see anything.

Options

Option 1: Use Nginx Proxy Manager to request certificates for each subdomain. It works quickly and well. Problem: All certificates are published to Certificate Transparency Logs. I don’t immediately mind exposing what I’m running… but I’d still rather now.

Option 2: Set up wildcard certificates. This requires integration with your DNS provider (since wildcards need a DNS challenge, not TCP).

Of course (based on the title), we’re going with option 2. 😄