Side projects. Sometimes hacked. And sometimes with a hammer.

I'm late to the party again, but I just discovered ConEmu . For the last year or so, I've been using Git Bash (and prior to that, I used cygwin). I can't remember why exactly I switched away from cygwin, but I vaguely recall that something funky happened when I was trying to develop something while using cygwin, and then I told myself never to use it again because I was so annoyed. Git Bash seemed to be the most straightforward and simplistic thing to use for <whatever I was trying to do>, so there I went. I just couldn't get myself to like it the way I liked cygwin, though. You know how sometimes when you have to use the mouse to copy and paste stuff into your terminal? Yeah. It was so annoying in Git Bash and no, I really didn't want to google for a hack to make it work. Out of frustration, I asked Google if there was a "better terminal for Windows". The first link was a StackOverflow page where the author of ConEmu replied. "Why not", ...

From time to time, I pull up the CS class homepages from Cal so I can brush up on stuff I learned/should have learned. It's kind of crazy to see what they're learning now, even in a lower division 3rd semester class (neural nets? MapReduce? Parallelism? We spent several lectures on Verilog and CPU design!). On a somewhat unrelated note -- why do CS professors/lecturers use Comic Sans in their PowerPoints?! One specific reason I stalk these CS homepages is to read the lecture notes and materials on assembly. I've always had an irrational fear of assembly, ever since taking one of those CS classes and not doing so well... However, I always have to keep coming back to it for one reason or another -- usually by way of a CTF. After banging my head against the different problems from picoCTF (both 2013 and 2014) and slowly trying to figure out how to use gdb effectively, I finally understood how to get through the tutorial and level 1 of Microcorruption. This is both a sad an...

I am learning ReactJS, so I did a quick project to implement a very basic vim. http://carise.github.io/reactjsvim/ The github repo is kinda messy... I'll put the actual app js code into its own file in master and then move the index.html and other stuff into the gh-pages branch.

xfreerdp /u:<username> /p:<password> /d:<domainname> /g:<gateway_hostname> /v:<machinename>:<port> gave me 401 error. xfreerdp /u:<username> /d:<domainname> /g:<gateway_hostname> /v:<machinename>:<port>  /p:<password>   worked (I just moved the password to the end).

Ingredients: Canon SD1000 SD card > 4GB (in our case, we have an 8GB microSD) A Linux computer First, figure out the firmware. I created a file, ver.req and put it in the root of the SD card. Turn on the camera and press FUNCSET and DISP simultaneously. In our case, we have 1.02A firmware, so get that version of CHDK. Unpack CHDK. Now, to set up the SD card. Refer to: http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/Prepare_your_SD_card . The SD1000 was released before 2011, it seems, so it needs a FAT16 bootable partition. Since we have an 8GB card, we thus need to configure it to have 2 partitions. I tried to set up the card with the STICK utility, but failed. So I used Linux to set up the card manually. Refer to: http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK_and_SD_cards_greater_than_4GB_%288GB,_16GB,_32GB,_64GB%29 I'm just going down the line of instructions and adding notes where necessary. 1. Find where the SD card is mounted (on my system, it was /dev/mmcblk0)  sudo fdisk -l 2. Modi...

I've usually been afraid to do anything drastic with the underlying filesystem because of how many times I've messed up the filesystem to begin with, and also because of how much time it takes to reinstall everything. This time, I decided that it was ok to go ahead and take a little risk here. My Linux machine is an old X61s, and its purpose is for me to experiment and learn more about Linux. I started getting a message that I was running low on space on root. Sure enough, the 300MB was all used up. I was hoping that GPartEd could help me with resizing the partitions. I couldn't see the partitions because it was all under an lvm. My plan was to shrink /opt slightly, then grow root. Thankfully, the formula isn't too bad, but there are a few steps. The first link I resorted to was this one: http://blog.shadypixel.com/how-to-shrink-an-lvm-volume-safely/. I didn't reboot to resize /opt; I just resized it after unmounting it. Unmount /opt:   # umount /dev/chrono...

I knew that Kaltura had an API that could be used for trimming and clipping a media entry, but it was quite nice to have found the Kaltura clipApp, which packages a Javascript timeline stepper as well as a Flash app for setting the in/out points for the media entry. You can find it here: https://github.com/kaltura/clipapp. Also, they have a demo page: http://showcase.kaltura.com/ (select Clipping Tool from the dropdown). Additionally, here is my writeup/explanation of how to use the Clipper Tool. (FWIW, I am using the Clipper Tool in my company's software and interfacing with Kaltura SaaS platform, not the Community Edition.) https://github.com/kaltura/platform-install-packages/blob/Jupiter-10.3.0/doc/KalturaClipApp_Howto.md