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Reflections: Progress on OpenSSL, and Greybeard Wisdom

Posted 02-01-2014 at 03:01 PM by ttk (Unpopular Positions: One Geek's Take)
Updated 02-01-2014 at 03:03 PM by ttk

I'm finally pulling out of a months-long depressive funk, and touched my openssl patch again. On one hand openssl isn't exactly pleasant to work with (hardly any comments, bizarre formatting, obscure internal interfaces), but it felt good to be writing some C and making progress on my #1 project.

In addition to writing the code, I really should be documenting the whys and hows of the changes, like I promised my friend Chris. I didn't remember that until just now. Perhaps enumerating...

ttk

Senior Member

Posted in Reflection

Views 1363 Comments 0 ttk is offline

Some Observations Regarding NSA Surveillance

Posted 10-26-2013 at 01:43 PM by ttk (Unpopular Positions: One Geek's Take)
Updated 10-26-2013 at 01:44 PM by ttk (Adding categories)

Some things to keep in mind regarding the mass hoovering of data communications a la Room 641A:

Communication lines transport packets of data, each of which contains metadata (including identifiers for the origin of the packet and its destination) and data (voice, video, internet traffic, etc). Collection software would inspect each packet and append entries to its own data store, including at least the source, destination, and time the packet was inspected (and possibly additional...

ttk

Senior Member

Posted in Technology, Politics

Views 1391 Comments 0 ttk is offline

ZACL Changes Afoot

Posted 07-17-2013 at 07:52 PM by ttk (Unpopular Positions: One Geek's Take)

Lately, when working on Zacl (Zacl's A Concurrency Language), I've been trying to implement a parser for the language with Lemon.

I've despised lex and yacc (and their successors, flex and bison) since 1988, and most of the other compiler-compilers out there looked to me like remakes of lex and yacc, using different implementation languages and different syntactic sugar. But not Lemon -- Lemon is different. It inverts the relationship between the lexer and the parser, and uses nice-looking...

ttk

Senior Member

Posted in Technology

Views 1341 Comments 0 ttk is offline

Headcrab, and $NEWJOB

Posted 06-12-2013 at 11:38 PM by ttk (Unpopular Positions: One Geek's Take)

I haven't had time or energy to do much lately, because I started a new job. The first week or so will keep me tired and relatively inactive on my personal projects.

On the other hand, I may be allocating some hours to Headcrab development. Mutt is having a hell of a time with my new employer's IMAPS server. It keeps getting TLS packets with "wrong length" and falling into a craptastic state, requiring me to periodically quit mutt and restart it.

I could...

ttk

Senior Member

Posted in Technology

Views 675 Comments 2 ttk is offline

Oddmuse Musings

Posted 06-09-2013 at 04:17 PM by ttk (Unpopular Positions: One Geek's Take)
Updated 06-09-2013 at 04:36 PM by ttk

After a brief battle with OddMuse spambots, I found 33 regular expressions which seem to block spamming attempts .. for now. I'm glad OddMuse makes it so easy to revert updates and block spam via regular expressions.

Blocking the IP addresses of the spambots can't hurt either. I've got a little over a hundred blocked now (via "reject" rules in routing table).

This weekend I changed some things that bugged me: Instead of putting the name of the page in a...

ttk

Senior Member

Posted in Technology

Views 1291 Comments 0 ttk is offline

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