Brian Wigginton

spacetraders.io client

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 12:11:26 -0500

spacetraders.io has been an on-and-off obsession of mine for years. Every time I return, it pulls me into a months-long spiral of automation and systems tinkering. It’s one of the most satisfying playgrounds for exploration, creativity, and code-driven strategy I’ve found. Through this game I’ve gotten to play with good coding design API rate limiting mitigation object oriented-like modeling behavior trees/GOAP for coding ship behavior and mission execution 2d game programming with ebitengine djikstra’s algorithm for efficient waypoint navigation Unlike most games, there’s no flashy client, no install button, no graphical interface at all.

reMarkable 2 Tablet

Fri, 19 Jan 2024 10:29:20 -0600

For about a year now I’ve had a reMarkable 2 e-ink tablet, and I have to say I love it! For me, it’s the perfect replacement for paper notebooks and bullet journals. I wanted to share my thoughts and pro-tips on how I use it. From Analog to Digital I’m a big fan of taking analog notes on paper. The tactile experience of pen on paper helps me to remember things better than if I typed them down.

OS Business Models

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 09:09:44 -0500

Notes from Open Source does not win by being cheaper by Anh-Tho Chuong. profit is important even for open source projects to grow: it enabled hiring, running services and sustaining product development. don’t cater to the people looking for the cheapest option. They typically will just run your free/self hosted version. big companies don’t have an issue with SaaS as another line item, but you will have to earn a right to their budget and as long as you aren’t a top 3 line item, contract negotiation is not going to be a huge challenge.

Building a Second Brain

Sat, 09 Sep 2023 14:43:36 -0500

Summary Notes from “Building a Second Brain” by Tiago Forte. Lean towards creating through expressing knowledge rather than collecting information which isn’t put to use. By creating (expressing through distillment) content you will gain a better understanding of it. Use a currators perspective. This is similar to the cultivation mentality for Zettelkastens. Favorite Quotes creativity is always a remix of exisiting parts. Engineer Luck by cultivating the second brain.

Gestalt Visual Principles

Sat, 02 Sep 2023 06:39:07 -0500

Gestalt Psychology from germany in 1912, researched how we perceive pattern, form and organization. We can use these patterns in our designs, layout, and visualizations to guide the brain to make immediate inferences about data. proximity similarity enclosure closure continuity connection

Hacking in Color

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 18:02:01 -0600

Lately, I’ve been reading about information design and one area that I think is especially interesting is how best to use color to convey information. Which reminded me of a time when adding a little color to a problem made all the difference. At DEFCON 30 I participated in the Mayhem Industries CTF. One of the challenges was to find a flag given a file full of seemingly random bytes. file returned nothing.

Information Dashboard Design

Wed, 30 Aug 2023 18:49:57 -0600

A dashboard is a visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives, consolidated and arranged on a single screen so the information can be monitored at a glance. – Few, Stephen (2013) Information Dashboard Design (pp 26) Analytics Press Purpose Visual display Important information To achieve objective(s) On a single screen At a glance What they are not for data exploration/analysis portals or scorecards reports to look up specific facts Dashboards are not for keeping up with information.

Colormaps

Tue, 22 Aug 2023 18:02:01 -0600

A poorly chosen colormap between values and colors can fool the human eyes to, e.g., pick out non-existing features, or to hide important features. https://github.com/liamedeiros/ehtplot/blob/docs/docs/COLORMAPS.ipynb Considerations Accessibility/CVD Perceptual Uniformity Printing in B/W 3d surfaces and light shading Accessibility/CVD Some colormaps (rainbow colormaps in particular) do not scale well for people with CVD (color blindness). Perceptual Uniformity the lightness of the color in an image is a fair representation of its scalar values

Procedural Terrain Generation

Sun, 13 Aug 2023 12:02:01 -0600

Noise Let’s start out with noise. You’ve probably seen noise on your tv, when you’ve tuned to a channel that doesn’t have a signal. This sort of noise isn’t great for creating organic visuals. We need something that’s random in its vectors over time, but not random from data point to data point. Sort of like the gentle rise and fall of a stock price over many years. To generate natural looking rises and dips, we need to use a specialized random noise generator.

Robot Personality

Mon, 26 Dec 2022 12:02:01 -0600

ANKI Cozmo/Vector I personally think that Anki’s Cozmo was an absolutely incredible feat in both mechanical engineering and creative design. Specifically, I found it amazing the lengths the company went through to build out Cozmo’s personality. First, they hired some amazingly talented designers and animators from the likes of Pixar to help bring life to Cozmo’s personality. Then, borrowing from the world of psychology, they leveraged research around the big 5 personality traits.

Homelab: Hot Aisle Temp Sensor and Dashboard

Wed, 23 Nov 2022 22:02:01 -0600

Today I decided to blow the dust off an unused WeMos D1 Mini (ESP8266 ESP-12F) and BMP280 tmep sensor to build a Hot Aisle Temperature Grafana Dashboard for my Homelab closet. In a Data Center, racks alternate between hot and cold aisles for better ventilation. In our house, it’s also known as “the back of the closet”. Turns out, this closet actually runs pretty hot. With the door closed, temps can get close to 100°F, which is probably a bit too warm for the equipment.

Tailscale: Homelab VPN Access

Mon, 21 Nov 2022 22:28:24 -0600

This is how I setup a remote access VPN to my Homelab via Tailscale. This uses Tailscale’s Subnet routers and traffic relay nodes, so you don’t have to install the Tailscale Client on each and every machine in your lab in order to connect to it. Route Advertising I have a Linux VM in my Homelab that’s running the Tailscale client as an Exit Node. I also want this machine to provide routing to the rest of my lab.

Antisiphon Flash CTF #3 2022 Writeup

Sun, 18 Sep 2022 13:12:09 -0500

Unfortunately I didn’t make it through all these challenges, but I did want to share my answers to the one’s I did complete, share my thought process, and initial thoughts on the challenges I didn’t get. Dauntless Defacement (Forensics) We are given a PCAP file. Open this in wireshark and start tracing TCP messages. Eventually you’ll find the message where the attacker was playing with one of the dns lookup endpoints.

Tailscale: Homelab Exit Node

Tue, 30 Aug 2022 23:03:14 -0500

While at DEFCON 30 this year, I used my PIA vpn subscription. A lot. But it would have been great to be able to click a button and connect back to my house to gain access to some services, and also use that as a secure tunnel to the open internet. Well I think I’ve finally got a great solution going using Tailscale. Tailscale is a VPN service that makes the devices and applications you own accessible anywhere in the world, securely and effortlessly.

DEFCON 30

Mon, 15 Aug 2022 22:02:01 -0600

I was finally able to make it out to DEFCON, which has been on my bucket list for a loooong time. Thank you runZero for covering travel and badge fees for this trip, it was a blast! Highlights The Badge Social Engineering Village Incredible what some people are able to do with a phone and some pre-compiled research. Mayhem Industries - Oil Rig CTF A group of us from runZero decided to take a stab at the Mayhem Industries, Oil Rig CTF.

Stock Market Dashboard with Vue.js

Wed, 22 Jun 2022 12:02:01 -0600

Overview I built this to both help visualize market data and play with the vue3 composition api and deployment using Docker on AWS’s App Runner and Container Registry services. Unfortunately, in May 2023, Yahoo Finance disabled anonymous usage of most of their useful api endpoints which broke this app. Gallery A green day on wallstreet showing the top 100 stocks by market sectors A mixed day on wallstreet showing the top 100 stocks by market sectors Visualizing P/E market data for the SP500 Visualizing Volume data for the SP500 using the Helix color scheme.

HTB: Pandora Writeup

Sun, 01 May 2022 21:38:58 -0500

Overview Writeup for the Pandora machine on hackthebox.com. I tried to format this document as a journal of sorts, documenting progress, thoughts and discoveries as I uncovered them. This challenge took me a few days, and I got stuck more than a few times along the way. I cheated by reading some other writeups to get unstuck. Don’t get discouraged, this was fun and challenging. The goal is to learn!

Kitty Terminal

Thu, 14 Apr 2022 15:09:28 -0500

My good friend Ryan Gibbons introduced me to Kitty, an alternative terminal application. As a long time iterm2 user, I’ve come to love some of the features it provides, specifically, vertical split panes, quake like dropdown access, and other customizations. Here’s how I moved to Kitty and hacked those same features. Config TLDR: Here’s my config file, with comments removed for brevity. font_family Hack font_size 13.0 enable_audio_bell no visual_bell_duration 0.

CliftonStrengths

Mon, 24 Jan 2022 15:23:21 -0600

My personal results from the CliftonStrengths test I took back in 2014. That’s nearly 8 years ago! (I wonder how my results would match if I took the test today.) In some cases I think the results were pretty accrate and in some others I think it was way off. 1. Relator People who are especially talented in the Relator theme enjoy close relationships with others. They find deep satisfaction in working hard with friends to achieve a goal.

Cocktail Genius

Sat, 08 Jan 2022 15:14:47 -0600

I thought it would be cool to have a Cocktail app that would recommend me cocktails based on my flavor preferences. So I built it. Uses vue.js, working on making it an installabled PWA or maybe a mobile app if people like it. Here it is! ==> http://bar.bwiggs.com Goals ✔ Pretty Cocktail List Cocktail database that I can filter based on what I have in my bar. Would love some categories such as classics, new age, tiki… Collections based on Cocktail Codex categories?

Generating Random Unique IDs

Fri, 06 Aug 2021 21:59:30 -0500

While looking at the Aftership API, I noticed their public tracking IDs looked interesting. Example h4qys6mtkkhnkkjvco35a017 This led me down a path of trying to understand what those values could be and how to make them on my own. Considerations Do these IDs need to be sortable by time? roughly time sortable? Firebase uses a modified base64 alphabet so that sorting still works lexigraphically. and they do this on the client side!

Plotting Big-O with gnuplot

Thu, 05 Aug 2021 14:42:21 -0500

Use gnuplot command to run a plt file and ouput a png file. gnuplot bigo.plt # File: bigo.plt set title "Big-O Complexity Chart" set output "bigo.png" # output file name set term png # output as PNG set grid # show a grid set xlabel "Elements" set ylabel "Operations" set format xy "" # hide axis ranges set xrange [1:1000000000] set yrange [0:1000000000] set logscale xy # logarithmic scale for x and y set style line 1 lw 5 plot\ gamma(x+1) title "O(n!

Hugo Chroma Syntax Highlighting Dark/Light Mode

Tue, 03 Aug 2021 14:39:23 -0500

I love a good dark mode theme, but in bright light settings sometimes I want something lighter. For my blog I strive to support both dark and light mode themes depending on the user’s settings. Hugo uses Chroma for syntax highlighting. Since it renders the highlighted syntax at build time, it’s not immediately able to provide a dynamic dark/light style based on the user’s system settings. However, it is possible do this using media queries and css inlining.

My Journey into Computing

Mon, 02 Aug 2021 20:38:25 -0500

First PC The first family computer we had was a 50MHz Gateway 2000. I remember waiting for it every day after school hoping the huge cow shipping boxes had arrived. I copied the Lion King album and nearly filled the harddisk! This was around the time when Napster came out, which I was a fan of, but didn’t really know how to use it. I would play around on AOL, and download punters to see what those did.

Linux Login with your face using Howdy

Mon, 02 Aug 2021 15:32:26 -0500

I’ve been using fingerprint authentication ever since I started using my X1 Carbon 6 laptop as my daily driver. However, when I’m hooked up to my external monitor/hub, reaching across my desk to login is annoying! Fortunately, there’s a great project called Howdy that providess “Windows Hello™ style facial authentication for Linux”. This is how I setup Howdy on my X1 Carbon Gen 6 running Mint Linux Uma with multiple cameras.

Custom X1 Carbon 6 BIOS Logo Image

Sun, 01 Aug 2021 23:42:20 -0500

Proceed at your own risk. There be dragons. This article requires you to mess with your bios, which could lead to you having a bricked machine. Be careful! I’ve spent a stupid amount of time trying to replace the default lenovo bios splash image on my x1 Carbon 6, and I still can’t get it to work! It does seem like there are at least a few others out there also struggling with this on reddit and on the lenovo forums.

Cyberdefenders Hacked Challenge EWF Mounts

Sun, 25 Jul 2021 03:35:24 -0500

CyberDefenders is a training platform focused on the defensive side of cybersecurity, aiming to provide a place for blue teams to practice, validate the skills they have, and acquire the ones they need. CyberDefenders provides a bunch of hands on practice challenges for people to test out their forensics chops. Each challenge has a downloadable disk image that you’ll need to mount locally in order to snoop aroud and answer the challenge questions.

Linux GTK Stock Screener

Sat, 27 Feb 2021 00:00:00 -0500

Earlier this year, I was playing around with stock trading. I wanted a way to quickly pick stocks that were performing according to some Technical Analysis signal. During the great Texas Freeze and Power Crisis I began building my first linux desktop app using GJS, GTK3, Gnome Builder. Over the following weeks I kept adding features and it became a great little tool to monitor what was going on in the market.

Linux Mint on Thinkpad x1 Carbon Gen 6

Fri, 18 Dec 2020 22:07:45 -0600

After futzing around with the x230 over the years, I finally decided it was time for an upgrade. I found a great deal on this X1C6 on reddit and decided to pull the trigger. Everything went smooth, but shipping took forever as the world was in the middle of a pandemic and the machine had to be shipped out of Canada. So far I’m really happy with this machine! I’ll update this page as I make changes or workaround issues.

Ubiquiti UDM Pro bypass 5268ac

Mon, 30 Nov 2020 20:49:20 +0000

I started experiencing issues after configuring my Pace 5268ac modem from ATT for DMZ+ mode to my Ubiquiti UDM Pro router. Git Checkouts and pulls would hang at times Blocks NTP packets! Docker container downloads would hang. There are a few ways to bypass the ATT RG: Plug in the RG and let it handle the cert negotiation. Spoof the RG mac address on the UDMP, unplug the RG and plug in the UDMP.

OpenBSD 6.7 on a Thinkpad x230

Sat, 25 Jul 2020 21:15:14 -0500

Overview Since setting up my homelab, I’ve been able to reclaim my now idle Thinkpad x230. One thing that I have never done, is run BSD. So this page is all about my experience running OpenBSD 6.7 on the x230, and lesson I learned along the way. Lessons Installation is FAST Like, real fast. I went from booting the installer to a login screen in around 10 minutes. OpenBSD docs are awesome.

Subnet Calculator with vue.js

Mon, 25 Feb 2019 23:28:04 -0600

A simple subnet calculator I built to gain familiarity with vue.js and IPv4 CIDR calculations. https://bwiggs.github.io/subnet-calculator/

Message Authentication Codes

Sat, 02 Feb 2019 23:11:45 -0600

If I send you a message, how can you be sure that the message is from me and the that message’s contents haven’t been altered? Phrased another way, how can you be sure that the message is authentic? A message that is authentic guarantees: Data Integrity: The message is unaltered. Someone didn’t tamper with the message as it was on its way to you. Sender Authenticity: The message is from someone you trust.

WTFreon

Thu, 13 Sep 2018 08:20:00 -0500

Did you know “Freon” is being phased out? I didn’t, I found out from my HVAC service technician. By January 1, 2020, it will be illegal for companies to produce or import Freon in the United States. Not believeing it at first, I decided to do some research. TLDR: The refigerant (R-22) used in AC systems before 2010, will no longer be produced or imported starting on January 1, 2020. You’ll still be able to purchase R-22 to top off your system, but it will only come from R-22 recycling processes, meaning prices will be going up!

cat without comments

Fri, 31 Aug 2018 21:53:57 -0500

Here’s how to print a file to stdout and remove all the comments vie the cli: awk '!/^ *#/ && NF' ~/.datadog-agent/datadog.yaml

Golang 2 Draft Designs

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 08:40:33 -0500

Some exciting news came out of GopherCon 2018 this week, Go 2 Draft Designs! These draft designs are the first steps in defining how these new features might work in the future version of GoLang. The main purpose is to generate discussion within the community so the best possible solution to the problem is implemented. Here are the 3 drafted features: Error Handling Error Values Generics! Error Handling In Go 2, the Go team wants to the way gophers write code to handle errors, specifically making it less verbose.

We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.

Thu, 23 Aug 2018 17:52:30 -0600

Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure... than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.

Thu, 23 Aug 2018 17:51:20 -0600

Humility is a knowledge of our weaknesses, confidence is a knowledge of our strengths, and ego is something dangerous with none of the former and a skewed sense of the latter.

Thu, 23 Aug 2018 17:43:37 -0600

Images Fast & Cheap - Generating Low Quality Images with Imagemagick

Sat, 10 Feb 2018 22:46:58 -0600

I needed a way to generate low quality blurry images for use with progressively.js on this blog. The images need to be only a few 10k max. These images are just placeholders to be used until the larger one can be pulled in. Imagemagick to the rescue! You can use the following commands to convert images into low quality ones. # resive image.png to 800px wide and jpg format convert image.

iptables Cheatsheet

Sat, 10 Feb 2018 01:30:02 -0600

Here’s a quick reference for configuring iptables firewall rules. I don’t use this enough to have it all memorized, so this post will hopefully come in useful for the next time I need to configure a firewall. # show basic filters iptables -L # show filters with rules numbers an packet counts, using ips. iptables -nvL --line-numbers # zero out bytes in verbose listing iptables -Z # dump current rules in iptables-save format # (useful for formatting new rules) iptables -S # drop/reject all inbound packets by default iptables -P INPUT DROP iptables -P INPUT REJECT # add a rule to the end of a chain allow all http traffic iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT # insert a rule into a chain # use the --line-numbers flag from above to get $RULE iptables -I INPUT $RULE -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT # allow all local traffic iptables -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT iptables -A OUTPUT -o lo -j ACCEPT # delete a rule from a chain iptables -D INPUT $RULE # delete all rules from a chain iptables -F INPUT $RULE # delete all chains from the firewall table iptables -X # create a new chain called $CHAIN iptables -N $CHAIN # allowing incoming and established traffic iptables -I INPUT 1 -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT # block an ip completely iptables -A INPUT -s X.

go-nexrad

Mon, 20 Nov 2017 20:15:16 -0600

August 25, 2017, the weekend Hurricane Harvey hit Texas I was up all hours monitoring the storm and relevant news feeds. One tool I found was Radarscope, a superb radar app that has both desktop and mobile applications. Curious as to how weather radar imaging worked, I decided to try and figure out how to render my own weather radar images. Here’s a sample screenshot from Radarscope of Harvey showing multiple radar products.

Quadtree Pixel Art

Thu, 29 Jun 2017 21:28:14 -0600

Quadtrees Quadtrees are a tree like data structure where each node has 0 or 4 children. Quads have a few use cases including collision detection, spatial indexing, and image processing. Wikipedia’s Quadtree entry has a decent overview. If you’re looking for a more interactive introduction, definitely check out Jim Kang’s - An interactive explanation of quadtrees. See more of my sample images below Generating Quadtree Art The basic idea is that you recursively divide an image into 4 quadrants.

Postgres Insert row with only an auto increment column

Wed, 03 Jun 2015 18:55:54 +0000

How do you insert a record into a postgres table that has a single auto incrementing primary key field? There weren’t many hits on google with the solution, so hopefully this helps someone else: INSERT INTO [table] (id) values (default); I originally tried using null and 0 as the values, but null throws a primary key constraint error and 0 actually gets inserted as 0.

The Productivity Technique You’ve Been Missing

Fri, 27 Mar 2015 01:59:50 +0000

I’ve been crushing it. I’ve gotten more done in my spare time over the last few weeks than in the last few months. If you’re anything like me, you’re easily distracted. Hacker News, Reddit, Twitter and Netflix all are available with fresh new content at any hour of the day. I can’t count how many hours I’ve lost consuming information that I rarely retained. For the past month I’ve been using the Pomodoro Technique to focus on stuff I need to get done at work, as well as around the house.

The fruit of your work grows on other people's trees.

Mon, 02 Mar 2015 06:09:57 +0000

DalliError: No server available – Using Rails, AWS EC2 and Elasticache

Fri, 28 Feb 2014 23:08:31 +0000

We deployed our Rails application today and found that one of our AWS EC2 servers wasn’t able to connect to our Elasticache instance using the Ruby dalli gem. DalliError: No server available Fortunately this isn’t a ruby/rails problem, it’s a permissions issue. In order to allow an Amazon EC2 instance to access your cache cluster, you will need to grant the EC2 security group associated with the instance access to your cache security group.

Setting Default HTTP Cache Headers in Rails

Fri, 25 Oct 2013 00:53:28 +0000

We’re working on putting our current product behind Amazon Cloudfront. With Cloudfront, if you don’t set a Cache-Control header with an expiry time, Cloudfront will cache the content for 24 hours by default. Instead of littering all my controller actions with cache settings, I wanted to add a default value then be able to override on and action by action basis. First, here’s how you actually set a cache-control header. This would go in a controller action.

jQuery’s Advanced Attribute Selectors

Thu, 17 Oct 2013 07:43:57 +0000

TIL that jQuery has some pretty cool attribute querying capability. I knew you could select element by attributes by simple adding them with brackets: $('a[rel]') And that you can also match against content inside the attributes. $('a[rel="nofollow"]') $('a[rel!="nofollow"]') But this is where is gets cool. You’re not just limited to equal or not equal. You can also provide other operators for more advanced matching scenarios: $('a[rel|="nofollow"]') // prefix search: "nofollow-" $('a[rel*="

Array-like objects in JavaScript

Sun, 29 Sep 2013 16:13:52 +0000

I learned something interesting in John Resig’s book Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja. How could you add Array like properties to your objects? At first thought, or at least my first thought, I would add an array to the object and then just use it internally as a collection, or maybe set the prototype to Array.prototype. However, John points out a much simpler way. You can simply use Array’s prototype methods on your object using call.

The Art of Electronics – International Edition

Sat, 28 Sep 2013 00:26:26 +0000

I’ver recently begun diving into Electronics and Circuitry and wanted to pick up a book to become more acquainted with the concepts. The internet seems to be an agreement that “The Art of Electronics (2nd Edition)” by Paul Horowitz and Winfield Hill is the authoritative book on the subject, but a brand new hardcover copy from Amazon will set you back close to $100 USD. I found a lot of overseas booksellers on EBAY who claimed to have the same book for around $30.

RSpec AssetNotPrecompiledError

Wed, 25 Sep 2013 20:04:21 +0000

I was writing a spec for a method that used a built-in Rails helper method, image_path. Now my method worked on my development environment, but did not work when my tests ran, and instead threw a: Sprockets::Helpers::RailsHelper::AssetPaths::AssetNotPrecompiledError: path/to/asset.png isn't precompiled Solution It took me more than a few minutes to remember that I needed to change a setting in the test.rb envoronment file. # change config.assets.compile = false # to config.

Autotest Repeatedly Runs

Wed, 25 Sep 2013 19:11:12 +0000

While using the autotest gem on a project, I found that my tests would run regardless of if a file was saved or not. After some googling, Steve Walker pointed me in the right direction. Turns out, rcov and the test.log file were being updated after each test causing autotest to trigger again. The fix was to add the following to the .autotest file within my project, ignoring certain files.

Stubbing the request object with RSpec

Tue, 24 Sep 2013 23:59:06 +0000

I have some decorator logic that needs to generate a url using the request object. However, when running specs a request object isn’t created, so you have to stub one out. The key was to use any_instance on the decorator to ensure all instances received the stub. Here’s the code I came up with: describe 'ArticleDecorator' describe '#opengraph_image_url' do it 'should provide the default image as a fallback' do request = stub(host: 'local.

Slides: Leadership Without Management: Scaling Organizations by Scaling Engineers

Mon, 16 Sep 2013 05:36:40 +0000

Lot’s of great stuff in this terrific set of slides by Bryan Cantrill at Joyent presenting how to scale up your engineering teams without bringing in a bunch of extraneous process and middle management. I’ve always had questions on what the best way to build engineering teams is. Bryan seems to hit the nail on the head with his deck. Some of my favorite quotes: “Hierarchical titles are not uplifting, they’re corrosive”

Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Distributed Dependable Systems

Wed, 11 Sep 2013 04:39:04 +0000

Ross Anderson has released the Second Edition of his book Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Distributed Dependable Systems and it’s free to read online, each chapter is released seperately in PDF format. Here’s the chapter list from the Table of Contents: What is Security Engineering Usability and Psychology Protocols Access Control Cryptography Distributed Systems Economics Multilevel Security Multilateral Security Banking and Bookkeeping Physical Protection Monitoring and Metering Nuclear Command and Control Security Printing and Seals Biometrics Physical Tamper Resistance Emission Security API Security Electronic and Information Warfare Telecom System Security Network Attack and Defence Copyright and DRM The Bleeding Edge Terror, Justice and Freedom Managing the Development of Secure Systems System Evaluation and Assurance Conclusions

Share localhost with SSH & Apache

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 07:11:34 +0000

There’s been a lot of services released lately that aim to assist developers share their local development environments over the internet. localtunnel, showoff.io and pagekite come to mind, just to name a few. However, you can roll your own forwarding service if you have SSH access to a server running Apache fairly easily. The Big Picture First, setup a webserver to listen for connections to demo.example.com. When a user connects to the webserver, it will attempt to proxy their request to port 1337 (demo.

npm jshint – command not found after install

Sun, 21 Oct 2012 05:06:27 +0000

I was getting a new machine up and running and decided to play with zsh. Later that evening I was going to write some JavaScript and wanted to lint my code with the handy jshint tool. So I installed it with NPM: $ npm install jshint -g And was then greeted with a command not found error: $ jshint zsh: correct jslint to slit [nyae]? n zsh: command not found: jslint Turns out I needed to add the npm bin directory to my PATH, as it didn’t get added there automatically since I installed zsh after node/npm.

Jenkins & JSHint – Integrating with Checkstyles and Violations

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 01:41:40 +0000

Prerequisite You need to have some form of jshint installed on your server. Instructions of how to do that are out of scope for this post, and should be able to be easily found on the internet. I used the version that installed with npm. Jenkins Build Tasks This is a very simple setup that uses 2 Build > Execute Shell tasks. In the first shell task I created the checkstyle output:

SVN Remove & Ignore Causing Tree Conflict

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 18:27:35 +0000

We has some files that were being tracked in SVN that we needed to be untracked and ignored, specifically a web.config file, which was being dynamically generated. We removed and ignored the file in a feature branch. We then merged the feature branch into trunk. Then ran svn update on our servers, which caused a tree conflict. After some googling, the resolution was the following command on the server: svn resolve --accept working -R .

Filename Cache Busting with CakePHP

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 02:38:14 +0000

This assumes you’re using CakePHP 2.x CakePHP let’s you use timestamp based cache busting on your assets by enabling Asset.timestamp in your core.php file. By enabling this and using the builtin HtmlHelper::css and HtmlHelper::script methods, your assets will have a timestamp appended to them as a query string. For example: /app.js?123456789 However, older squid proxies will not cache anything that has a query string, thus preventing your files from being cached.

Content Switching with HAProxy

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 16:08:07 +0000

Content Switching Content-switching is an OSI layer 7 application switching technique, which in lamans terms means that it has access to the HTTP requests and responses of your application. By inspecting each request and response, it make decision on where to send those requests and how to handle responses. HAProxy is an open source load balancing tool that also has the ability to implement content switching. Proxies & Reverse Proxies You might be familiar with a Proxy, which is basically something that sits between the client and the server.

Web.config User Specific appSettings

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 21:27:51 +0000

On an MVC.NET project at work, we came across the need to be able to override the web.config’s appSettings uniquely on each of our local environments. Turns out there’s a very easy way to do just that inside the web.config file. Just add the file attribute to the node in your web.config, and add a local.config file to the project root.  <configuration> ... <appSettings file="local.config"> ... </appSettings> .

Ubuntu 11.10 Blank Screen with underline after boot with VMWare Fusion

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 04:36:23 +0000

After installing the latest version of Ubuntu Server with VMWare Fusion, I wasn’t able to get to a terminal. The machine would boot and then just give me a blank line with a single underscore. Turns out all I needed to do was switch from TTY7. CMD + OPT + CTL + [F1 - F7]

Django Fixtures: JSON Formatting

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 04:25:41 +0000

Came across an issue with Django Fixtures using the JSON format. Here was my fixture: { "pk": 1, "model": "core.wine", "fields": { "name": "Juan Gil", "vintage": 2009 } } Here’s the error I was getting: Problem installing fixture '.../core/fixtures/initial_data.json': Traceback (most recent call last): File ".../python2.6/site-packages/django/core/management/commands/loaddata.py", line 169, in handle for obj in objects: File "...python2.6/site-packages/django/core/serializers/json.py", line 35, in Deserializer for obj in PythonDeserializer(simplejson.load(stream), **options): File "...python2.6/site-packages/django/core/serializers/python.py", line 84, in Deserializer Model = _get_model(d["

JavaScript Closures

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 01:12:19 +0000

Javascript closures can be confusing at first. They’re not, and hopefully this analogy will help drive home the concept. A Man’s Secret – An Analogy A man possess a secret book, which he cannot let anyone else know about. He decides the only way to keep the book truly secret is to memorize the entire thing and then bury the book so no one can find it. Later in his years he bears a son.

AccountManager getAuthToken() authTokenType param

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 08:40:20 +0000

In trying to connect to a Google api using the builtin AccountManager API for android, I could not figure out what values to use for the authTokenType. Then, finally, I found this link… http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/faq.html#clientlogin

Javascript’s new Operator

Sun, 23 Jan 2011 17:54:58 +0000

What is it and how can you use it to create new objects from constructor functions? What’s a constructor function. There’s really no such thing as a constructor function. There are just functions, that’s it, no different than any other function, except that you the programmer has made it so that it initializes a keyword called this with methods and properties. Here’s the constructor function we will use for the rest of this post.

LAMP Stack Optimizations for Small Servers

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 07:07:22 +0000

This WordPress blog is running on a 256MB Slicehost VPS. Here are the settings I have in place to keep Apache and MySQL responsive. Without these settings, the server would often come to a grinding hault and SSH interactions would become very slow and sometimes hang. Apache – httpd.conf – mpm_prefork_module Settings ` StartServers 2 MinSpareServers 2 MaxSpareServers 4 MaxClients 50 MaxRequestsPerChild 500 ` I found that I saved a bunch of memory just by using less apache processes.

2010 Development Toolbox

Sat, 06 Nov 2010 09:02:12 +0000

Here is a quick run down of the tools and applications I user pretty much everyday. As of this time I’m doing a lot of frontend work as well as some backend PHP development. Programming Browsers Safari – I use it for all my general development Firefox – Mostly great for tuning CSS and pixel pushing Google Chrome – Great for debugging and performance testing Textmate – texteditor open in Textmate – utility to put in your Finder that lets you quickly open files in Textmate project plugin – better project handling for Textmate Versions – Very clean SVN client Fluid – great to take web pages you always access and make them their own app.

Gentoo Linux – Wallpapers

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 01:19:43 +0000

For those of you looking for my Gentoo Wallpapers, they can be found here. 1440x900 - Click for More Sizes

Magento Sidebar Categories

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 05:06:37 +0000

The following will display a list of categories in your store in your right sidebar. Layout Alter page.xml so that the default handle’s right block contains the following: <block type="catalog/navigation" name="category.listing" template="catalog/navigation/categories.phtml" /> My final right block looks as follows <block type="core/text_list" name="right" as="right"> <block type="catalog/navigation" name="featured" template="catalog/featured_random.phtml" /> <block type="catalog/navigation" name="category.listing" template="catalog/navigation/categories.phtml" /> </block> Template Create the file template/catalog/navigation/categories.phtml and paste in the following <div class="block block-layered-nav"> <div class="block-title"> <h2>Categories</h2> </div> <div class="

Magento Sidebar Featured Products

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 04:59:18 +0000

This tutorial will explain how to add a featured product to the sidebar. In this example we will add the featured product to the right sidebar. The steps we will follow are as follows. Create a new category in the magento admin area to contain our featured products. Add the block calls to the XML Layout Create the phtml template files to be referenced by the block Category Add a new category to your store to contain your featured products.

Pragmatic Development

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 03:01:07 +0000

What does it mean to be a pragmatic programmer, or to program pragmatically? Generally speaking, acting pragmatically or being pragmatic means to act practically. Taking things for what they are, don’t make things more difficult then they have to be. Take these ideals and apply them to development and you can be a very efficient, very productive, pragmatic programmer. Andy Hunt and David Thomas have written a terrific book on Pragmatic Programming.

Interviewing Your Future Employer

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 06:28:37 +0000

Going through an interview can be a rather daunting experience, however this is a good time for a candidate to find out more in depth information about the company, it’s culture, processes and many other aspects that may not be immediately realized. This list should serve as a starting ground for job hunters looking to build a dialogue during their interview process. I would first read through this list and break these up into categories that work for you.

Subversion: Continuous Integration with a PHP Application

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 21:13:32 +0000

Abstract This tutorial explains how to update a staging site whenever there is a commit to the SVN repository. This assumes basic knowledge of Subversion, Apache and C and that the staging site is running a working copy checked out from the repository. **Problem & Solution ** When working close with designers or other non-coders it’s often most productive to be able to make quick changes live to the box serving up the dev site, then to commit a change then update the server over and over.

Subversion: Repository on Subdomain

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 18:54:00 +0000

This is a tutorial on how to setup a Subversion repository on a subdomain with Apache. This assumes you have Subversion and Apache already installed on your system. Subversion Setup First you need to create a repository somewhere in your file system. Then grant apache permissions on that directory. svnadmin create /var/svn/repository<br /> sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/svn/repository Controlling Access Access to the repo via the web will be controlled by an htpasswd file located at /var/svn/svn-auth-file.

Subversion: Commit Emails

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 16:29:46 +0000

This is a tutorial on how to setup Subversion to email a team when there is a commit to the repository. Subversion Hooks Hooks are what Subversion executes upon certain events. Within your SVN directory you should see the following items README.txt conf dav db format hooks locks Go into the hooks directory and you will see a bunch of files ending in .tmpl. These are template scripts that are prebaked for you.

Paperclip – Customizing Paths and URLs

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 23:08:35 +0000

To customize the paths and urls of paperclip objects in your rails app you need to modify both the :path and :url options for has_attached_file in your models. Here’s an example… `` ` class SomeModel < ActiveRecord::Base has_attached_file :image_one, :path => "public/system/:class/:id/:filename", :url => "/system/:class/:id/:basename.:extension" has_attached_file :image_two, :path => "public/system/:class/:id/:filename", :url => "/system/:class/:id/:basename.:extension" end ` By default Paperclip will store your files in /system/:attachment/:id/:style/:filename. By passing the :path and :url options to the has_attached_file method in your model you can change where the uploaded files will be stored as well as where they can be accessed.

Ruby Script to Check Site Availability

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 21:18:34 +0000

Recently, I’ve been looking around for scripts to check the availability of websites I’m hosting, then email me a status message if there is anything I should be worrying about. There are many services out there, but none are free. Fortunately this kind of thing can be done with a little ruby script and cron job. Requirements SMTP server. Ruby 1.8.6 – This script uses core classes of Ruby and doesn’t require any rubygems Ability to add cron jobs to your machine Plan

[TIP] Ruby GUI Applications and Empty Console Window

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 20:53:45 +0000

While writing a Ruby GUI app I kept seeing an empty console window. As it turns out there are two ruby executables that you can use to run your Ruby scripts: ruby, which is a CUI (Console User Interface) and rubyw, a GUI (Graphical User Interface) used to launch GUI Apps. Using rubyw will prevent that empty console from showing up. Hope this helps someone! # rubyw myapp.rb Edit – 8/7/08

Strange Rendering of Fonts in Firefox 3

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 03:40:18 +0000

Firefox 3 was having some font rendering issues on my machine. Certain web sites were displaying a wierd bold looking font in place of the default font described in the CSS. After doing some searching around the internet I found out the issue. Early in the year I had installed Adobe Type Manager and added a bunch of Helvetica Postscript Type-1 fonts. These were for some reason being used as Firefox’s default font.

Learning a New Language

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 20:10:53 +0000

Larry O’Brien over at knowing.net has a great series called 15 Exercises to Know a Programming Language, It’s an older article but after going through parts 1-3, theres really nothing in there that changes often enough to warrant any kind of an update. Part 1 gets you used to using some of the more basic features of a language including, calculations, the standard libraries, file i/o, GUI development, and debugging. Part 2 introduces some more advanced data structures, object oriented programming, idioms, memory issues, design patterns, and concurrency.

Linux w/ Mac Scrolling

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 05:38:06 +0000

Is it possible to make it so that I laptop running synaptic drivers can make it so that you can scroll pages with two fingers on the pad? Update: Thanks to okke in the comments, all you have to do is add a line to your xorg.conf file to enable 2 finger scrolling. There’s a wiki entry on the Gentoo Wiki about doing so.