Archive of posts from
2022
-
Computing Most Chatty People in IRC
03 May 2022
Recently I was trying to figure out who was most active on the IRC
server I frequent. IRC by it’s very nature leaves log files so that you
have a record of your conversations in your control. So you can perform
some processing on them to determine various statistics. This is a one
liner to compute that.
-
2D Metaballs Demo using Marching Squares
04 April 2022
Metaballs are organic looking blob like balls that merge and split
apart based on their distances from each other. They can be defined as a
single function or a summation of functions across the x and y plane. By
computing the contours, a very cool picture can be produced in real time
as shown below. However, computing the entirety of the function plane to
a high degree of precision is very expensive. To make it less expensive
and produce a good high quality contour marching squares can be
used. It samples 4 points of a function and interpolates where a
threshold value occurs to draw the outline. I was inspired by
Reducible’s video on how computers can draw weird shapes.
-
Superman - Man of Tomorrow
02 April 2022
It’s been awhile since I’ve done a movie review, but I just finished yet
another DC animated movie, that I think deserves another chance from
critics. It’s “Superman: Man of Tomorrow”. You might think it’s another
generic superman movie, and you would be right, however I need to
applaud the use of Lobo and Parasite, two of my favorite rogues in
Superman’s gallery. Both are really fitting villains for him to face.
-
Interactive Encryption and Decryption using RSA
14 March 2022
I had a bit of inspiration recently with Fermat’s Attack on RSA and
decided to make an RSA demonstrator. It shows all the steps in
performing an RSA encryption using 2 known primes. It might be useful
during a CTF when trying to determine small RSA keys by hand. I’ll
eventually post a follow up for implementing that attack for small p
and q.
-
POV-ray Dice
22 February 2022
I saw a captcha with dice thread on hacker news. The general idea
of the captcha was to find the picture of dice with the right sum on it.
I was wondering how hard it would be to generate several thousand of
these dice images, and how long it would take using POV-ray.
POV-ray is the Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer. It takes a text based
description of the scene built using various primitives like spheres and
boxes to produce a ray traced image. The POV-ray language is Turing
complete and allows some really advanced programming features, such as
macros, loops and conditionals, which I take full advantage of for this
scene. The dice are even transparent.
-
Implementing a Table Create & View Update in Athena using AWS Lambda
01 February 2022
I have a DynamoDB table that is automatically exported as JSON to
compute some reports. I wanted to automate the table creation process
and load steps. Amazon Athena allows querying from raw files stored on
S3, which allows reporting when a full database would be too expensive
to run because it’s reports are only needed a low percentage of the time
or a full database is not required. It’s billed by the amount of data
scanned, which makes it relatively cheap for my use case.
-
My notes on what packages I absolutely need to install to maintain this site.
27 January 2022
I recently got a new laptop and decided to move to Manjaro, an Arch
Linux derivative. I had some frustration with setting it up, and getting
the tools I need to maintain this website installed. Documented below
are the steps I took to solve it.