Nginx With Https for Local Development
Testing HTTPs locally is always hard, but I’m against testing on production or even on a remote server. Things are also complicated by developing in linux as a subsystem on windows via WSL2. I was able to use mkcert to get ssl to work locally. While I would love to Continue Reading
Organize Images
I deleted and recovered a large number of photos (thanks foremost). However, a large number of images from a browser cache was messing up my photo library. Who wants to keep 10,000 of these images stored on my harddrive? I used the number of unique colors to filter them out Continue Reading
DEFCON 25 Writeup
Nothing delivers the fear of missing out like DEFCON. So much to learn and so little time. Too busy hacking in the IOT village or catching up with old friends to sit in on the talks? Read below to find out what you missed in my talk writeups below. They Continue Reading
Common Mathmatical Libraries: Computation, History, and Trust
A common complaint among engineers is that modern computers obscure the details of the complicated math they produce. We cringe when children are exalted as “knowing computers” from a young age. Bill Gosper and Richard Greenblatt had perhaps the maximum benefit to “learn computers”. They didn’t have wolfram alpha or Continue Reading
Satisfiability modulo theories and their relevance to cyber-security
Cybersecurity and cryptoanalysis is a field filled with logic puzzles, math and numerical techniques. One of the most interesting technical areas I’ve worked goes by the name of satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) and their associated solvers. This post provides a layman’s introduction to SMT and its applications to computer science and Continue Reading
Kids Lego table: Case study in Automation for Design
Motivation I had to upgrade the Lego table I made when my kids were much smaller. It needed to be higher and include storage options. Since I’m short on time, I used several existing automation tools to both teach my daughter the power of programming and explore our decision space. Continue Reading
Some tax-time automation
I often struggle to find the right balance between automation and manual work. As it is tax time, and Chase bank only gives you 90 days of statements, I find myself every year going back through our statements to find any business expenses and do our overall financial review for Continue Reading
A basic square root function in assembly
Why learn assembly? It is painful, and nearly useless to know. But once you understand it, you now know how a computer “works”. It is impossible to understand the hardware/software interface without an knowledge of assembly. In particular, if you are in the computer security field, you have to understand Continue Reading
Provenance (in Computer Science)
Provenance is the ability to record the history of data and its place of origin. In general, it is the ability to determine the chronology of the ownership, custody or location of any object. The primary purpose of tracing the provenance of an object or entity is often to provide Continue Reading
Halt!
You can’t work long in computer science until you have to understand the halting problem. The halting problem is concerned with determining whether a program will finish running or continue to run forever. It has a storied history. In 1936, Alan Turing proved that a general algorithm to solve the Continue Reading