Blog
Lego Set Database
February 16, 2013 As part of my Lego hobby, I've been looking for a way to create a Lego part/color histogram. In order to do this, I needed a data set containing inventories for the majority of sets that Lego has produced. A number of sites around the net have this...
A simple vector library in C++
August 31, 2011 I should start off by saying that if you are planning to do any serious work which requires vector mathematics, you should probably just use one of the many open source libraries or packages: Boost Basic Linear Algebra Eigen library GLM - API similar to GLSL Vectors are really a solved problem....
Taylor University Wikipedia Vandalism
May 06, 2011 As part of a recent project to better understand the culture of the university that I'm studying and working at, I decided to look at the instances of anonymous Wikipedia vandalism coming from school-owned IP addresses. While a lot of the vandalism was simply boring and offensive, there...
Basic Server Security
August 06, 2010 I stumbled across a presentation on HN today which detailed a vulnerability on several sites which allowed the contents of memcaches to be viewed. It's a pretty interesting scenario. Sites use caches to speed up all kinds of things from profile information, tweets, and evidently even login credentials. These...
Uploading to Dropbox with Python
July 21, 2010 I've been searching for an easy way to backup some files that are located on my web server. I use Dropbox to backup lots of important files on my computer, but I don't want to have this software running on my web server for security and performance reasons....
Experiments with HTML5 Canvas
April 13, 2010 I've been playing around recently with the HTML5 canvas element. For those of you not familiar with the canvas element, it is very similar to the img element as far as the DOM is concerned, but it can be drawn on using API calls from JavaScript. In simple...
Analyzing the Astalavista Hack
June 08, 2009 Several days ago, astalavista.com was torn down by an anti-security group. If you are not familiar with it, astalavista is a "security" community that discusses and hosts vulnerability information and exploits. The site appears to have been completely destroyed by attackers. The attackers posted a text document detailing what...
Sniffing the CAN Bus
May 20, 2009 My final project for embedded systems required us to connect to and analyze the CAN bus of a Ford 500. Our requirement was to simply create an LED that would be lit only if the vehicle was in park. This ended up being quite an interesting project which...
Netcat for Windows
April 10, 2009 Netcat is a simple networking utility which reads and writes data across network connections using the TCP/IP protocol. It's a wonderful tool for debugging all kinds of network problems. It allows you to read and write data over a network socket just as simply as you can read...
Django and memcached Interface
January 25, 2009 I've had memcached running on my server for a while now, but I haven't really been keeping track of what it is doing. Other than monitoring its memory and CPU usage, I didn't know of anything fun to look at. I did some looking around and found this...
Performance Boost from memcached
January 22, 2009 The server that I am currently hosting this site on is not a very powerful box, which is why I have been putting a lot of effort into getting things configured on it as efficiently as possible. One of the things that I am using to achieve quick...
FastCGI, CGI, and mod_python
January 20, 2009 As I began looking at deployment options for Django and Python in general, I was faced with some choices about what method the web server should use to process the requests. I'm relatively new to the server side of things, and I didn't find a lot of good...
Lighttpd + Django + SQLite
January 20, 2009 I just finished rewriting my entire site again. I switched out virtually every element of my former stack, so I thought that it might be worth mentioning how I have things working now. I did a lot of custom configuration, so I will probably post more details of...