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

Goals, goals, goals. Where have you gone? Since I last wrote about goals, I've started working on a new team and have been working on a ton of new things. I totally missed these goals by miles: 1. Android? I've done some stuff in Java, but definitely not Android. 2. C? Nope, unfortunately. 3. Golang? Sadly, none. But, I've gotten to do a lot of other things that I thought I'd only dream of doing, including (and not limited to): 1. Running several times a week. Max mileage has been about 6.5 mi in one session at Lake Chabot! This is a BIG BIG BIG thing for me because I've never pushed myself harder than now in running. 2. Learning reverse engineering. I will try to start blogging about it. Probably in another blog. 3. Still reading, slowly going through "The Looming Tower". 4. Contributing to open source with actual code. :) So, apparently I'm really bad at setting and achieving goals. In the next month, I plan to: 1. Finish my curren...

I think this is a manifestation of my lifelong fear^H^H^H^H journey to understand algorithms better. I had a dream that I was talking to my nephew about algorithms and he called NP-hard problems "NP-sad". Needless to say, I was thoroughly amused and proud of him, and I kept reminding myself in the dream to remember the content of our conversation. Then I woke up to my alarm clock, and the only thing I could remember was what I just chronicled. I feel NP-sad.

I wanted to grab some variables from an xml and parse them into environment variables. After some googling around, I found my answer: Use xmlstarlet to pull the name/value pairs Then use sed to combine them into "name=value" format Then use a while loop with process substitution It ended up being something like #!/bin/bash while read -r line; do   # do some stuff to parse the line   # ...   printf -v $varname "$varval"   export $varname done <<< "$(xmlstarlet sel -t -m "[xml selections here]" -v . -n <[xml file]  | sed 'N;s/\n/=/')" Yay so cool.

August and September were weird months due to some things happening at work. It's pretty much settled down now, and I will be working on some exciting new things. First off, I didn't hit any of my goals for C or golang projects. However, I did continue working on my small Android project (simple todo list). I'm making really slow progress on it since I spend just one evening per week (or something like it) on it. I've also been making really slow progress on my image processing online class. I've only been spending about an evening per week on it as well. In August and September, I've finished Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World  (Adam Grant) and Outliers: The Story of Success  (Malcolm Gladwell). I just started Alice's Adventures in Wonderland  for some lighter reading. I also started a class on binary exploitation with a colleague. Kind of going slowly through it, but I am getting more comfortable reading assembly and using gdb. In the m...

I've used Clonezilla to try and clone failing hard drives, but I can't recall if I was ever successful with it. A family member's laptop was running slow and we determined it was due to a failing hard drive (can you guess... it was a Seagate drive). There was a bit of a dilemma, though. I had a replacement SSD, but it was smaller than the failing hard drive. Originally, I was going to try this: http://www.seanwingert.com/blogs/clonezilla-clone-bigger-smaller-drive-eg-ssd, but I totally forgot about it because I was entirely thrown off by the extra partitions (the recovery partitions). So what I ended up doing was: 1. Shrink the main Windows partition with gparted 2. Copy the partitions from the source hard drive to the target drive 3. Set the proper flags (e.g. "boot" and "diag") on the target drive's partitions 4. In Clonezilla, do a part-to-local-part clone for each of the partitions It was mostly success except for the recovery partitio...

I promised to ramble/write about "Creativity, Inc." a couple posts back, so I'll do that here. "Creativity, Inc." is a book written by one of the cofounders of Pixar, Ed Catmull. Catmull dreamed of doing computer graphic animation -- the book chronicles how he made it reality. I enjoyed reading this book because it's really fascinating how the execs at Pixar love their company, so much to the point where they make their decisions for the benefit of their employees and because of how much they love their films. Pixar faced a lot of challenges over the years since their beginnings as a hardware company. One might call those challenges "failures". Things like how they almost ran out of money. Or when they were almost sold to another company because they were short of money. Or the time when someone typed "rm -rf /" and lost 90% of "Toy Story 2" (one guy saw Woody slowly disappearing, then called the systems team and told them t...

Here's a recap of my July goals in the previous post: Goal for July: 1. Finish "The Master Algorithm" and start "Superintelligence". 2. Start my own Android app side project. Or 2. 3. Finish "The Hobbit", start "Fellowship of the Ring". 4. Start a golang project. 5. Start a C project: simple shell. Reading goals: I just finished reading "The Master Algorithm". I will need to read it again since I was in a bit of a rush to finish it before it was due, but it was a really great book! It gives a pretty decent layman's overview of machine learning (starting with Naive Bayes, Markov chains, etc. to nearest-neighbor, SVM) while reading like a sci-fi book. It took me awhile to get started with the book (kind of like how it's taking me awhile to get started with learning about ML...) but once I got a few chapters in, I couldn't put the book down. Also, it gives a pretty good history of the development of ML over the last...