diff --git a/.sass-cache/084094f6ba4d002e33353f27b81e2b5ee4e0ba28/main.scssc b/.sass-cache/084094f6ba4d002e33353f27b81e2b5ee4e0ba28/main.scssc
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1655622
Binary files /dev/null and b/.sass-cache/084094f6ba4d002e33353f27b81e2b5ee4e0ba28/main.scssc differ
diff --git a/_data/nav.yml b/_data/nav.yml
index 59c1eb5..f35ece4 100644
--- a/_data/nav.yml
+++ b/_data/nav.yml
@@ -2,12 +2,14 @@
link: /
#- name: Tutoring
# link: /tutoring
+#- name: About
+# link: /about/
- name: Blog
link: /blog/
#- name: Podcast
# link: /podcast.html
-- name: Links
- link: /links/
-- name: Code
+#- name: Links
+# link: /links/
+- name: Github
new_tab: true
link: https://github.com/TTWNO/
diff --git a/_includes/introduction.md b/_includes/introduction.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a018c0b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/_includes/introduction.md
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+---
+---
+# Tait Hoyem
diff --git a/_posts/#2020-04-21-rfi.md# b/_posts/#2020-04-21-rfi.md#
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bdb5c00
--- /dev/null
+++ b/_posts/#2020-04-21-rfi.md#
@@ -0,0 +1,22 @@
+---
+title: "rfi: A Simple Linux utility to get a random file from a directory"
+layout: post
+---
+
+I made a [little video](https://lbry.tv/@tait:7/rfi:5) about this script I wrote:
+
+
+$ rfi
+
+
+This program gets a random file from your current directory
+if you do not specify one;
+it gets a random file from the specified directory if you give it one like so:
+
+
+# rfi /etc/wireguard
+
+
+Which is very useful if you want to start a random VPN configuration :)
+
+The code, comments, etc. are on the [Github](https://github.com/TTWNO/scripts).
diff --git a/_posts/2020-10-26-curiosity.md b/_posts/2020-10-26-curiosity.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..93da6e1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/_posts/2020-10-26-curiosity.md
@@ -0,0 +1,71 @@
+---
+title: "Curiosity"
+layout: post
+---
+
+Curiosity is fundamental to a deep understanding of any subject.
+Masters, Ph.Ds, and other fancy name suffixes will never help you
+if you don't have the spirit of curiosity burning inside of you.
+
+I was speaking to someone from a journalism major at my school when the subject of hacking arose.
+I expected her to know nothing about it, being a journalism student and all, but surprisingly she had something to say about it:
+
+> "The best hackers are the ones who are curious."
+
+That struck a cord with me.
+It seems to me she has nailed down the difference between the students who care about grades,
+and those who want to learn.
+These are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but in my experience they often are due to the way education is structured.
+
+## My Anecdote
+
+In my second semester at SAIT Polytechnic, I took a class entitled *Emerging Trends In Technology*.
+This class was probably the best class I have ever taken.
+We had to combine two things:
+
+* **Hard skills**: learning a new hard skill like Angular, Django, or GPG encryption.
+* **Soft skills**: public speaking and presentation of our ideas.
+
+Soft skills are not usually my area, but I can do public speaking.
+I grew up quite religious, so public speaking was drilled into me young.
+I liked to go off script and talk about interesting things I found along the way to the actual point.
+My creativity was not usually encouraged.
+That said, going off script is useful when teaching and presenting ideas;
+it gives a natural air to your breath and an unquestionable confidence in your speech.
+
+This is how we learn: in relationships.
+Try explaining ancient Japanese history to a computer science major, or UNIX sockets to an English major and you'll see what I mean.
+If there is nothing for us to connect the knowledge to, it dissipates.
+
+So why did I do so well in this class?
+
+Our task for the semester was as follows:
+
+1. Learn a new subject (any *emerging trend in technology*) which you find fascinating.
+2. Give a one minute introduction by week three.
+3. Give a 10 minute non-technical overview by week 8.
+4. Give a 20 minute technical explaination and demo by week 13.
+
+This is the only course I have ever taken which lets students' imagination run wild.
+Their presentation, their rules.
+They treated the students like adults who know what they are doing.
+What happened? Everyone stopped coming because "Oh no! Presentations!"?
+
+No, exactly the opposite.
+There was never more than one student missing.
+Every single presentation was at least moderately interesting,
+and most students were excited to come to that class.
+You could see it in their faces, the way they carried themselves.
+Every student picked something unique to their tastes, leaving every student more educated than before.
+
+This class, unlike many others, encouraged the curiosity of the students.
+It rewarded those who had unique interests and an ability to sell others on their ideas.
+
+The curiosity and the grades were one.
+
+## Conclusion
+
+Although it's nice to have a course where these goals align here and there, anyone who has been to collage or university can tell you that is far from the norm.
+
+On the other hand, I never would have started this site if it wasn't for that class alone.
+So I thank you, Kitty Wong, for getting me started running my own "research blog" (?)
diff --git a/_site/2020-04-27-quiz-your-friends-xss.html b/_site/2020-04-27-quiz-your-friends-xss.html
index 6d0d442..9850186 100644
--- a/_site/2020-04-27-quiz-your-friends-xss.html
+++ b/_site/2020-04-27-quiz-your-friends-xss.html
@@ -1 +1 @@
- The "Quiz Your Friends" XSS Exploit | tait.tech
The "Quiz Your Friends" XSS Exploit
TODO write intro
How I Found This Exploit
While filling in one of my friend’s surveys I thought it would be funny for them to know it is me without anyone else knowing. We were young and had Inspect Elemented a few things together, so it was a safe bet that an HTML joke would let them know.
I decided to write my name like so: <b>Steve</b>. Steve is in reference to the main character in the video game Minecraft.
Me typing in my name as <b>Steve</b>.
Now in theory this should have shown in in the leaderboard as: “<b>Steve</b>” However, to my horror and excitement, I saw this in the leaderboard:
<b>Steve</b> displaying in the leaderboard as bold text: Steve
The text “Steve” showed up in bold on the leaderboard. This told me all I needed to know. How did this happen? You might wonder.
Server-Side Validation
Here is a great demonstration why you should do most of your validation on the server side. As a user, I can edit any of the HTML, CSS, or Javascript your server serves to me.
Quiz your friends uses the maxlength=20 HTML attribute on the name input field. Imagine trying to fit in a script tag doing anything useful with 20 characters! Don’t forget that includes the <script> tag. That would leave 13 characters for Javascript. Although I’m sure a genius would be able to code golf that, I know I couldn’t.
Now obviously I can edit any HTML that a server has sent to me. If I open up my inspect element window, I can go ahead and change that maxlength attribute to anything I want. Let’s change it to 100!
Manually changing the maxlength attribute.
In theory, there is a way that a site can stop people from just putting in their name of any length: server-side validation. The server could check to see if the input is too long and reject it if it is. The Quiz My Friends server has no such checks in place. Therefore, I can send an almost arbitrary load to them. Being able to send something potentially very large (more than a few megabytes) is a vulnerability of its own. Imagine being able to send entire executable programs as your “name” in one of these quizzes?
Hacking:
So I went on my merry way thinking about ways to use malicious javascript. Then, I thought that might be mean, so I decided to warn users instead. I filled in the name with a script tag and a call to alert() to warn the user about this site.
JAVASCRIPT_NAME.JPG
I ran out of room before I could finish it. Hmmm. What if I do “Inspect Element” and manually override the max-length attribute?
The unfortunate truth is: this worked as well!
Not only could I manually set the max-length by changing it in the HTML, but there were no client-side OR server-side checks to make sure the name I was sending was less than or equal to 20 characters.
If Javascript checked it, it would have stopped me (although maybe not a professional). If the server checked it, it could have stopped almost anyone.
Executing An Exploit
Suppose we’re on a vulnerable site like Quiz Your Friends and you decide you want to hack your friend’s quiz! How can this be done?
Creating A Quiz
Here is my quiz below:
CREATING_QUIZ.IMG
Setting A Name With an HTML Tag
Just like the image above, about how I found out about this vulnerability: go ahead and use an HTML tag in your name to test this out.
BOLD_ITALIC_STEVE.JPG
\ No newline at end of file
+ The "Quiz Your Friends" XSS Exploit | tait.tech
The "Quiz Your Friends" XSS Exploit
TODO write intro
How I Found This Exploit
While filling in one of my friend’s surveys I thought it would be funny for them to know it is me without anyone else knowing. We were young and had Inspect Elemented a few things together, so it was a safe bet that an HTML joke would let them know.
I decided to write my name like so: <b>Steve</b>. Steve is in reference to the main character in the video game Minecraft.
Me typing in my name as <b>Steve</b>.
Now in theory this should have shown in in the leaderboard as: “<b>Steve</b>” However, to my horror and excitement, I saw this in the leaderboard:
<b>Steve</b> displaying in the leaderboard as bold text: Steve
The text “Steve” showed up in bold on the leaderboard. This told me all I needed to know. How did this happen? You might wonder.
Server-Side Validation
Here is a great demonstration why you should do most of your validation on the server side. As a user, I can edit any of the HTML, CSS, or Javascript your server serves to me.
Quiz your friends uses the maxlength=20 HTML attribute on the name input field. Imagine trying to fit in a script tag doing anything useful with 20 characters! Don’t forget that includes the <script> tag. That would leave 13 characters for Javascript. Although I’m sure a genius would be able to code golf that, I know I couldn’t.
Now obviously I can edit any HTML that a server has sent to me. If I open up my inspect element window, I can go ahead and change that maxlength attribute to anything I want. Let’s change it to 100!
Manually changing the maxlength attribute.
In theory, there is a way that a site can stop people from just putting in their name of any length: server-side validation. The server could check to see if the input is too long and reject it if it is. The Quiz My Friends server has no such checks in place. Therefore, I can send an almost arbitrary load to them. Being able to send something potentially very large (more than a few megabytes) is a vulnerability of its own. Imagine being able to send entire executable programs as your “name” in one of these quizzes?
Hacking:
So I went on my merry way thinking about ways to use malicious javascript. Then, I thought that might be mean, so I decided to warn users instead. I filled in the name with a script tag and a call to alert() to warn the user about this site.
JAVASCRIPT_NAME.JPG
I ran out of room before I could finish it. Hmmm. What if I do “Inspect Element” and manually override the max-length attribute?
The unfortunate truth is: this worked as well!
Not only could I manually set the max-length by changing it in the HTML, but there were no client-side OR server-side checks to make sure the name I was sending was less than or equal to 20 characters.
If Javascript checked it, it would have stopped me (although maybe not a professional). If the server checked it, it could have stopped almost anyone.
Executing An Exploit
Suppose we’re on a vulnerable site like Quiz Your Friends and you decide you want to hack your friend’s quiz! How can this be done?
Creating A Quiz
Here is my quiz below:
CREATING_QUIZ.IMG
Setting A Name With an HTML Tag
Just like the image above, about how I found out about this vulnerability: go ahead and use an HTML tag in your name to test this out.
BOLD_ITALIC_STEVE.JPG
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/_site/2020/01/22/padding-and-margin.html b/_site/2020/01/22/padding-and-margin.html
index 7b07400..52f3061 100644
--- a/_site/2020/01/22/padding-and-margin.html
+++ b/_site/2020/01/22/padding-and-margin.html
@@ -1 +1 @@
- Padding And Margin | tait.tech
Padding And Margin
Many people have expressed confusion over how padding and margins work in HTML/CSS. I have been one of those people. In this short article I will explain what the differences are between the two, and how it may affect the functionality of your site.
Here is an image from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) who sets the standards for the web.
Now although this image shows all the different types of spacing as equal, the majority of the time these will mostly be padding (inner) and margin (outer). Padding is the inner space between the element and its border; margin is the outer space between two different elements.
Within the margin the user is unable to press any links or execute any javascript code. It is empty space. If each <link> on your navigation bar has 10 pixels of margin, then there would be 20 pixels in between each <link> that would not be clickable by the user.
If you have <link>s on your navigation bar with padding set to 20 pixels, however, then there will be 20 pixels on each side of the <link> text where the user is able to click.
If that part is confusing, try thinking about it in terms of whether background-color would apply.
Attribute
Padding
Margin
Spacing
within element
between elements
background-color applies
Yes
No
In summary:
Padding: the space within a tag which is still part of the same tag. background-color applies.
Margin: the space in between two seperate tags. background-color does not apply; it is empty space.
Border: the space in between the two; it surrounds the padding, but is not the margin. It looks nice somtimes, but it has no non-visual function. background-color does not apply.
I hope this covers the basics of margin and padding! Happy coding!
\ No newline at end of file
+ Padding And Margin | tait.tech
Padding And Margin
Many people have expressed confusion over how padding and margins work in HTML/CSS. I have been one of those people. In this short article I will explain what the differences are between the two, and how it may affect the functionality of your site.
Here is an image from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) who sets the standards for the web.
Now although this image shows all the different types of spacing as equal, the majority of the time these will mostly be padding (inner) and margin (outer). Padding is the inner space between the element and its border; margin is the outer space between two different elements.
Within the margin the user is unable to press any links or execute any javascript code. It is empty space. If each <link> on your navigation bar has 10 pixels of margin, then there would be 20 pixels in between each <link> that would not be clickable by the user.
If you have <link>s on your navigation bar with padding set to 20 pixels, however, then there will be 20 pixels on each side of the <link> text where the user is able to click.
If that part is confusing, try thinking about it in terms of whether background-color would apply.
Attribute
Padding
Margin
Spacing
within element
between elements
background-color applies
Yes
No
In summary:
Padding: the space within a tag which is still part of the same tag. background-color applies.
Margin: the space in between two seperate tags. background-color does not apply; it is empty space.
Border: the space in between the two; it surrounds the padding, but is not the margin. It looks nice somtimes, but it has no non-visual function. background-color does not apply.
I hope this covers the basics of margin and padding! Happy coding!
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/_site/2020/01/26/rsa1.html b/_site/2020/01/26/rsa1.html
index 363b7bd..2cf2c33 100644
--- a/_site/2020/01/26/rsa1.html
+++ b/_site/2020/01/26/rsa1.html
@@ -1 +1 @@
- Is Encryption Worth It? | tait.tech
Is Encryption Worth It?
What is the most embarassing thing you have typed into Google search? What is the most personal secret you told a friend in confidence? What is your bank password? What is your business’s secret to stay ahead of the competition?
Now at first these questions may seem not completely related. There is a point though: You likely sent all of this information over the internet.
When you send that messege to your friend or business partner, why is it that any person can’t just listen to the signals coming from your phone or laptop and know what you sent to your friend or colleague? The answer: encryption.
First, some background about internet privacy. You can’t have a conversation about internet encryption and privacy without discussing the man himself:
Snowden
Edward Joseph Snowden is an ex-NSA, ex-CIA employee who felt the United State’s 4th Ammendment was being violated by their programs of msas survailence. Snowden was raised a staunch establishmentarian conservative; his girlfriend Lisndey however, slowly started changing his mind. Snowden became very influenced by the ideology of populism. His populist thinking is shown very clearly when he explains his reasoning for his disclosure of humongous troves of NSA documents.
“My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them.” —Edward Snowden
Snowden’s first set of leaks went public in The Gaurdian, The New York Times, and ProPublica in late 2013; people started to realize that their governments and internet service providers (ISPs) are listening. People understood there might be more sinister motives than “national security” at play.
Personally, I have seen a lot of non-tech-savy individuals using security-conscious software when I am helping them fix a problem. In fact, there was one time I saw a collage student from rural Alberta who had a VPN running on her phone. This impressed me!
Encryption on The Web
The type of encryption used on the web is called: HyperText Transfer Protocol–Secure (HTTPS). This kind of encryption stops two things from happening: A) it stops the information you are sending and recieving online from being seen by easvesdroppers and criminals, and B) stops those same third-parties from tampering with the data.
Without HTTPS it is possible for sombody to listen in and change the data being sent between you and a server.
Only in recent years has HTTPS become near-universal across the web. It is used even on the simplest sites these days: this one included. After 2013, people became weary of government, criminal, and ISP interference with their web traffic. This can be backed up by statistics: The level of encrypted web traffic around the time of the Snowden leaks was around 30 percent. It was mostly used by banks, email providers, government, and journalists. At the turn of the 2020s however, this has risen to nearly 90 percent among U.S. users of Firefox. Japan lags slightly behind with 80 percent encrypted traffic.
This is just the data we know of. You can disable the telemetry settings in Firefox, and it is very likely that hardcore privacy advocates would disable this data collection, so perhaps the amount of encrypted web traffic is slightly higher.
What about RSA?
RSA is an encryption method named after the initials of the inventors’ sir names: Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman. It uses the mathematical “factoring problem” to secure communication. The details of this specific type of encryption will be discussed in an article soon to come.
\ No newline at end of file
+ Is Encryption Worth It? | tait.tech
Is Encryption Worth It?
What is the most embarassing thing you have typed into Google search? What is the most personal secret you told a friend in confidence? What is your bank password? What is your business’s secret to stay ahead of the competition?
Now at first these questions may seem not completely related. There is a point though: You likely sent all of this information over the internet.
When you send that messege to your friend or business partner, why is it that any person can’t just listen to the signals coming from your phone or laptop and know what you sent to your friend or colleague? The answer: encryption.
First, some background about internet privacy. You can’t have a conversation about internet encryption and privacy without discussing the man himself:
Snowden
Edward Joseph Snowden is an ex-NSA, ex-CIA employee who felt the United State’s 4th Ammendment was being violated by their programs of msas survailence. Snowden was raised a staunch establishmentarian conservative; his girlfriend Lisndey however, slowly started changing his mind. Snowden became very influenced by the ideology of populism. His populist thinking is shown very clearly when he explains his reasoning for his disclosure of humongous troves of NSA documents.
“My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them.” —Edward Snowden
Snowden’s first set of leaks went public in The Gaurdian, The New York Times, and ProPublica in late 2013; people started to realize that their governments and internet service providers (ISPs) are listening. People understood there might be more sinister motives than “national security” at play.
Personally, I have seen a lot of non-tech-savy individuals using security-conscious software when I am helping them fix a problem. In fact, there was one time I saw a collage student from rural Alberta who had a VPN running on her phone. This impressed me!
Encryption on The Web
The type of encryption used on the web is called: HyperText Transfer Protocol–Secure (HTTPS). This kind of encryption stops two things from happening: A) it stops the information you are sending and recieving online from being seen by easvesdroppers and criminals, and B) stops those same third-parties from tampering with the data.
Without HTTPS it is possible for sombody to listen in and change the data being sent between you and a server.
Only in recent years has HTTPS become near-universal across the web. It is used even on the simplest sites these days: this one included. After 2013, people became weary of government, criminal, and ISP interference with their web traffic. This can be backed up by statistics: The level of encrypted web traffic around the time of the Snowden leaks was around 30 percent. It was mostly used by banks, email providers, government, and journalists. At the turn of the 2020s however, this has risen to nearly 90 percent among U.S. users of Firefox. Japan lags slightly behind with 80 percent encrypted traffic.
This is just the data we know of. You can disable the telemetry settings in Firefox, and it is very likely that hardcore privacy advocates would disable this data collection, so perhaps the amount of encrypted web traffic is slightly higher.
What about RSA?
RSA is an encryption method named after the initials of the inventors’ sir names: Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman. It uses the mathematical “factoring problem” to secure communication. The details of this specific type of encryption will be discussed in an article soon to come.
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/_site/2020/02/19/rsa2.html b/_site/2020/02/19/rsa2.html
index 3ae8a29..7d172a9 100644
--- a/_site/2020/02/19/rsa2.html
+++ b/_site/2020/02/19/rsa2.html
@@ -1 +1 @@
- How Does Encryption Work, in Theory? | tait.tech
How Does Encryption Work, in Theory?
There are many kinds of encryption used in our everyday communication. Online and offline, over the internet and in person. In this article, I will explain the basics of how encryption should work in theory. I explain in this article why encryption is important, and why you should care about it.
We will start by looking at in-person, offline encryption.
Cryptography We Do Everyday
We encrypt things all the time without even thinking about it. If you spend a significant amount of time with the same group of friends, you will tend to develop common codes that may not make sense to others outside the group. For example: for years, my family called sombody falling from a sitting position “doing a Don”. There is a story of course—We knew a guy named Don who fell from his plastic beach chair in a rather hilarious way; “doing a Don” was born.
These types of minor dialects in speech are cryptographic in their own way. The truth is though, that we use cryptography much more than that!
“Is cryptography any different than talking? We say something other than what we mean, and then expect everyone is able to decipher the true meaning behind the words. Only, I never do…” — Adapted from a scene in The Imitation Game (p. 39-40)
How many times have you hinted, flirted, and innuendoed to try to say “I find you very physically attractive”? Have you told your friend that always stinks to wear more deodorant? Have you ever had someone say the words “I’m fine” when you know for certain that they are indeed not okay?
Words Said
Meaning
What can you do?
I don’t want to talk about this anymore.
I don’t want to overstay my welcome.
I want to go home now.
I don’t like them and don’t know why.
They threaten my ego.
Creepy
Unattractive and friendly
All of these scenarios are perfect examples of lies encryption! If we have the key to these codes, we can start to understand what people really mean. Hopefully I have convinced you that you use deceit cryptography on a regular basis in your life, so let us consider what a basic encryption method might be:
Grade-School Encryption
Back when I was in middle school I used to pass notes like these:
The kind of message I would have sent in middle school. A ROT5 Ceasar cipher.
This is a message encrypted using the Caesar cipher. This encryption technique was used by Julius Caesar during the reign of the Roman Empire to “encrypt messages of military significance.”[1] This is one of the oldest and simplest methods of encryption known to us today.
A diagram of a ROT13 Ceasar shift algorithm. A <-> N, B <-> O, et cetera.
You can try this out yourself by moving some letters forward in the alphabet. An ‘A’ turns into a ‘B’, ‘B’ into ‘C’, ‘C’ into ‘D’, et cetera. In this case, “Hello!” would become “Ifmmp!” That is just using a shift of one. You can use a shift of seven, for example, and then you would shift letters like so:
A -> +7 -> H
Q -> +7 -> X
T -> +7 -> A
When you reach the end of the alphabet, wrap around to the beginning to find the encrypted letter.
Example of a Caesar Cipher
Let’s setup a little story to illustrate the problems of encryption. We will have three characters:
Alice, young lady with feelings for Bob
Bob, a young lad with an addiction to pancakes
Eve, a wee jealous girl scout who sits between Bob and Alice
Alice really likes Bob and wants to tell Bob her feelings, so she writes “I love you, Bob! Please eat healthier!” on a sticky note. She passes it to Eve, so Eve can pass it to Alice’s love interest. However, in an unfortunate turn of events Eve reads the note herself, and decides not to give it to Bob.
Oh the horror! Alice is without young love! How could she remedy this so that Bob can read her message, but evil Eve can not? Let’s use the Caesar cipher to fix this problem.
Let us assume that Alice and Bob already have a shared key, 7 for example. To encrypt this message, she should shift her letters seven letters forward in the alphabet—just like the example above.
A longer Ceasar cipher encrypted message using ROT2.
Now, when Alice sends her Romeo a little note, all he has to do is decrypt the text by shifting the letters down by 7. Here is a site which can do longer pieces of text for you instead of doing it manually.
Problems
Before the two love-birds start smooching on the branch of a big pine tree in the schoolyard, perhaps we should consider some problems with the Ceasar cipher.
It is Very Easy to Break
Even Eve with her measly grade 4 math skills could easily start going through this message with pen and paper and figure out any combination in a couple hours at maximum. Imagine how easy this is for a computer? This could be broken in a few microseconds even on an older processor like the Intel Core 2 Duo.
No Secure Way of Sharing Keys
We assumed in our previous example that Bob and Alice already have a shared key (seven) to encrypt and decrypt all of their messages. If Bob and Alice did not have a previous friendship and time to share secrets of this sort, there is no way to share their key with eachother without Eve also knowing. This would defeat the entire purpose of obscuring the message in the first place.
Universal Vulnerability of Messages
Every message sent between the two parties uses the same code to encrypt and decrypt. If someone finds out the code once, all previous communications are comprimised.
Better Encryption Methods
To combat the issues with easily breakable, shared-key cryptography, we can turn to the beautiful beast that is Asymetric Cryptography. I will discuss this more in another article, but for the technically inclined:
RSA/EC provides very large cryptographic keys. It would be impossible for a human to encrypt or decrypt a message manually.
Asymetric cryptography provides four keys, instead of just one; stopping evesdroppers from listening in on your secret conversations—even if you do not have the chance to exchange keys in advance.
\ No newline at end of file
+ How Does Encryption Work, in Theory? | tait.tech
How Does Encryption Work, in Theory?
There are many kinds of encryption used in our everyday communication. Online and offline, over the internet and in person. In this article, I will explain the basics of how encryption should work in theory. I explain in this article why encryption is important, and why you should care about it.
We will start by looking at in-person, offline encryption.
Cryptography We Do Everyday
We encrypt things all the time without even thinking about it. If you spend a significant amount of time with the same group of friends, you will tend to develop common codes that may not make sense to others outside the group. For example: for years, my family called sombody falling from a sitting position “doing a Don”. There is a story of course—We knew a guy named Don who fell from his plastic beach chair in a rather hilarious way; “doing a Don” was born.
These types of minor dialects in speech are cryptographic in their own way. The truth is though, that we use cryptography much more than that!
“Is cryptography any different than talking? We say something other than what we mean, and then expect everyone is able to decipher the true meaning behind the words. Only, I never do…” — Adapted from a scene in The Imitation Game (p. 39-40)
How many times have you hinted, flirted, and innuendoed to try to say “I find you very physically attractive”? Have you told your friend that always stinks to wear more deodorant? Have you ever had someone say the words “I’m fine” when you know for certain that they are indeed not okay?
Words Said
Meaning
What can you do?
I don’t want to talk about this anymore.
I don’t want to overstay my welcome.
I want to go home now.
I don’t like them and don’t know why.
They threaten my ego.
Creepy
Unattractive and friendly
All of these scenarios are perfect examples of lies encryption! If we have the key to these codes, we can start to understand what people really mean. Hopefully I have convinced you that you use deceit cryptography on a regular basis in your life, so let us consider what a basic encryption method might be:
Grade-School Encryption
Back when I was in middle school I used to pass notes like these:
The kind of message I would have sent in middle school. A ROT5 Ceasar cipher.
This is a message encrypted using the Caesar cipher. This encryption technique was used by Julius Caesar during the reign of the Roman Empire to “encrypt messages of military significance.”[1] This is one of the oldest and simplest methods of encryption known to us today.
A diagram of a ROT13 Ceasar shift algorithm. A <-> N, B <-> O, et cetera.
You can try this out yourself by moving some letters forward in the alphabet. An ‘A’ turns into a ‘B’, ‘B’ into ‘C’, ‘C’ into ‘D’, et cetera. In this case, “Hello!” would become “Ifmmp!” That is just using a shift of one. You can use a shift of seven, for example, and then you would shift letters like so:
A -> +7 -> H
Q -> +7 -> X
T -> +7 -> A
When you reach the end of the alphabet, wrap around to the beginning to find the encrypted letter.
Example of a Caesar Cipher
Let’s setup a little story to illustrate the problems of encryption. We will have three characters:
Alice, young lady with feelings for Bob
Bob, a young lad with an addiction to pancakes
Eve, a wee jealous girl scout who sits between Bob and Alice
Alice really likes Bob and wants to tell Bob her feelings, so she writes “I love you, Bob! Please eat healthier!” on a sticky note. She passes it to Eve, so Eve can pass it to Alice’s love interest. However, in an unfortunate turn of events Eve reads the note herself, and decides not to give it to Bob.
Oh the horror! Alice is without young love! How could she remedy this so that Bob can read her message, but evil Eve can not? Let’s use the Caesar cipher to fix this problem.
Let us assume that Alice and Bob already have a shared key, 7 for example. To encrypt this message, she should shift her letters seven letters forward in the alphabet—just like the example above.
A longer Ceasar cipher encrypted message using ROT2.
Now, when Alice sends her Romeo a little note, all he has to do is decrypt the text by shifting the letters down by 7. Here is a site which can do longer pieces of text for you instead of doing it manually.
Problems
Before the two love-birds start smooching on the branch of a big pine tree in the schoolyard, perhaps we should consider some problems with the Ceasar cipher.
It is Very Easy to Break
Even Eve with her measly grade 4 math skills could easily start going through this message with pen and paper and figure out any combination in a couple hours at maximum. Imagine how easy this is for a computer? This could be broken in a few microseconds even on an older processor like the Intel Core 2 Duo.
No Secure Way of Sharing Keys
We assumed in our previous example that Bob and Alice already have a shared key (seven) to encrypt and decrypt all of their messages. If Bob and Alice did not have a previous friendship and time to share secrets of this sort, there is no way to share their key with eachother without Eve also knowing. This would defeat the entire purpose of obscuring the message in the first place.
Universal Vulnerability of Messages
Every message sent between the two parties uses the same code to encrypt and decrypt. If someone finds out the code once, all previous communications are comprimised.
Better Encryption Methods
To combat the issues with easily breakable, shared-key cryptography, we can turn to the beautiful beast that is Asymetric Cryptography. I will discuss this more in another article, but for the technically inclined:
RSA/EC provides very large cryptographic keys. It would be impossible for a human to encrypt or decrypt a message manually.
Asymetric cryptography provides four keys, instead of just one; stopping evesdroppers from listening in on your secret conversations—even if you do not have the chance to exchange keys in advance.
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/_site/2020/04/02/rsa3.html b/_site/2020/04/02/rsa3.html
index 2b38f4c..cf3a47c 100644
--- a/_site/2020/04/02/rsa3.html
+++ b/_site/2020/04/02/rsa3.html
@@ -1 +1 @@
- How Asymetric Encryption Works | tait.tech
Previously, we talked about how symetric encryption works. This is by having a shared key that both parties use to simultaniously encrypt, and decrypt the data. (See Ceasar Cipher for example).
Public-key, or Asymetric Encryption
Asymetric encryption is based on the idea of having multiple keys instead of only one shared key. For example: instead of encrypting with one key, and decrypting with that same key (like our ROT ciphers we talked about previously), we can use one key to encrypt the information, and a different key to decrypt the information.
Alice sending her message to Bob using Bob's public key. Bob decrypts the message with his private key.
In the picture above, see how Alice uses Bob’s public key to encrypt some data, then sends it to Bob for him to decrypt with his private key? That is the essense of public-key encryption.
The great thing about public-key encryption is that your public key is public! There is no need to be afraid of sending this everywhere! You can attach it at the end of all your emails, the end of your forum posts, a link to it on your low-power webserver (wink). There are even things called keyservers that will save your public key on them for retrival in case somebody wants to verify your public key.
Anything encrypted with your public key can only be decrypted with your private key. Provided you never, NEVER share your private key with anyone ever, we can assume that all messages sent to you encrypted with your public key will never be read by anyone else.
Asymetric encryption, however, often contains four keys instead of two. Why is this?
Verification of Author
One interesting thing about keys pairs is that not only can the private key decrypt anything the public key encrypts, but the public key can decrypt anything the private key encrypts.
Now why would one want to encrypt a message that can be decrypted by anyone?
Alice sending a message to bob which is 'signed' with her private key. This allows Bob to know only Alice could have sent it!
Note: Although the picture shows otherwise, the text is not sent in the plain. It is encrypted with Alice's private key.
This is how you can verify that the person who says they wrote the message really did indeed write the message! If their private key was never shared with anyone else, then the message must have come from them!
For maximum security, these methods are often layered. First, signing with the sender’s private key, ensuring only they could have sent it— then encrypted with the recipient’s pulbic key, making sure only the reciever can read it.
Note that both sides must first have eachother’s public keys to do this. This is easy if they communicate often, but when first contacting somebody, people will generally send their encrypted message along with the their own pulbic key attached in a seperate file.
What This Means
Notice neither Alice nor Bob had to share any comprimsing information over the network? This is why public-key encryption is so powerful!
Alice and Bob can both safely send their public keys in the open. They can even send them over the insecure HTTP, or FTP protocols.
Whilst not sending any encryption-breaking messages, Alice and Bob now have a way to communicate securely. If you trust nothing and no one, this is your perfered method of security.
The two biggest “implementations” of public-key cryptography vary only in the mathamatical equations used to generate the numbers, and how the numbers are “trapdoored” to decrypt if you have the correct key.
I will discuss the differences in approach here. If you want to skip to the next article where I show you how to encrypt your own documents using RSA, see this link.
RSA
The mathamatic center of the RSA system was developed over the course of a year or so. Three men were involved. Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Aldeman. They worked as a kind of “team”: Each idea by Rivest and Shamir were critisized by the mathamatician on their team: Mr. Aldeman.
One night, after consuming “liberal quantities of Manischewitz wine” Rivest had trouble sleeping. After taking long gazes into the abyss of his math textbook, he came up with an idea which would change cryptography forever. By the next morning, an academic mathamatical paper was nearly finished. He named it after himself and the two others that had been helping him along this whole time. Rivest, Shamir, Aldeman.
Key sizes of RSA range from 1024-bit to 4096-bit. 1024-bit keys are considered somewhat insecure. However, it should be noted that every bit doubles the complexity of the key, so 2048 is 2^1024 times more complex than 1024.
Eliptic-Curve (EC)
Eliptic-Curve (EC) is a family of algorithms that use the Eliptic curve mathamatical structure to generate the numbers for the keys. EC can effectivly provide the security of an RSA key one order of magnitude larger than an RSA key.
An eliptic curve structure.
It’s fast; it’s secure! Perfect right?
Of course not!
One problem is that due to the smaller key size, it can more easily be broken by brute-force. This is why EC is mostly used for temporary communication (like HTTPS), not permenant communication (like having an encrypted email conversation with a journalist).
The other problem is that a certain EC algrorithm called P-256 is suspected to be introduced with malice to National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) by the NSA. Supposedly, the NSA is able to crack anything encrypted with this algorithm. I will let the experts argure about that.
Other well-known EC algorithms that are more-or-less trusted as secure do exist though. The premeire one being Curve25519. The reference implementation of this algrorithm is also public-domain, so it is easy for devlopers to work into their own applications without worrying about copywrite.
Conslusion
In this article we went over some basic points:
Public-key encryption enables secure communication over insecure networks.
RSA is considered the standard for extra-seure communication.
EC is a newer, faster, more transient encryption method.
Previously, we talked about how symetric encryption works. This is by having a shared key that both parties use to simultaniously encrypt, and decrypt the data. (See Ceasar Cipher for example).
Public-key, or Asymetric Encryption
Asymetric encryption is based on the idea of having multiple keys instead of only one shared key. For example: instead of encrypting with one key, and decrypting with that same key (like our ROT ciphers we talked about previously), we can use one key to encrypt the information, and a different key to decrypt the information.
Alice sending her message to Bob using Bob's public key. Bob decrypts the message with his private key.
In the picture above, see how Alice uses Bob’s public key to encrypt some data, then sends it to Bob for him to decrypt with his private key? That is the essense of public-key encryption.
The great thing about public-key encryption is that your public key is public! There is no need to be afraid of sending this everywhere! You can attach it at the end of all your emails, the end of your forum posts, a link to it on your low-power webserver (wink). There are even things called keyservers that will save your public key on them for retrival in case somebody wants to verify your public key.
Anything encrypted with your public key can only be decrypted with your private key. Provided you never, NEVER share your private key with anyone ever, we can assume that all messages sent to you encrypted with your public key will never be read by anyone else.
Asymetric encryption, however, often contains four keys instead of two. Why is this?
Verification of Author
One interesting thing about keys pairs is that not only can the private key decrypt anything the public key encrypts, but the public key can decrypt anything the private key encrypts.
Now why would one want to encrypt a message that can be decrypted by anyone?
Alice sending a message to bob which is 'signed' with her private key. This allows Bob to know only Alice could have sent it!
Note: Although the picture shows otherwise, the text is not sent in the plain. It is encrypted with Alice's private key.
This is how you can verify that the person who says they wrote the message really did indeed write the message! If their private key was never shared with anyone else, then the message must have come from them!
For maximum security, these methods are often layered. First, signing with the sender’s private key, ensuring only they could have sent it— then encrypted with the recipient’s pulbic key, making sure only the reciever can read it.
Note that both sides must first have eachother’s public keys to do this. This is easy if they communicate often, but when first contacting somebody, people will generally send their encrypted message along with the their own pulbic key attached in a seperate file.
What This Means
Notice neither Alice nor Bob had to share any comprimsing information over the network? This is why public-key encryption is so powerful!
Alice and Bob can both safely send their public keys in the open. They can even send them over the insecure HTTP, or FTP protocols.
Whilst not sending any encryption-breaking messages, Alice and Bob now have a way to communicate securely. If you trust nothing and no one, this is your perfered method of security.
The two biggest “implementations” of public-key cryptography vary only in the mathamatical equations used to generate the numbers, and how the numbers are “trapdoored” to decrypt if you have the correct key.
I will discuss the differences in approach here. If you want to skip to the next article where I show you how to encrypt your own documents using RSA, see this link.
RSA
The mathamatic center of the RSA system was developed over the course of a year or so. Three men were involved. Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Aldeman. They worked as a kind of “team”: Each idea by Rivest and Shamir were critisized by the mathamatician on their team: Mr. Aldeman.
One night, after consuming “liberal quantities of Manischewitz wine” Rivest had trouble sleeping. After taking long gazes into the abyss of his math textbook, he came up with an idea which would change cryptography forever. By the next morning, an academic mathamatical paper was nearly finished. He named it after himself and the two others that had been helping him along this whole time. Rivest, Shamir, Aldeman.
Key sizes of RSA range from 1024-bit to 4096-bit. 1024-bit keys are considered somewhat insecure. However, it should be noted that every bit doubles the complexity of the key, so 2048 is 2^1024 times more complex than 1024.
Eliptic-Curve (EC)
Eliptic-Curve (EC) is a family of algorithms that use the Eliptic curve mathamatical structure to generate the numbers for the keys. EC can effectivly provide the security of an RSA key one order of magnitude larger than an RSA key.
An eliptic curve structure.
It’s fast; it’s secure! Perfect right?
Of course not!
One problem is that due to the smaller key size, it can more easily be broken by brute-force. This is why EC is mostly used for temporary communication (like HTTPS), not permenant communication (like having an encrypted email conversation with a journalist).
The other problem is that a certain EC algrorithm called P-256 is suspected to be introduced with malice to National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) by the NSA. Supposedly, the NSA is able to crack anything encrypted with this algorithm. I will let the experts argure about that.
Other well-known EC algorithms that are more-or-less trusted as secure do exist though. The premeire one being Curve25519. The reference implementation of this algrorithm is also public-domain, so it is easy for devlopers to work into their own applications without worrying about copywrite.
Conslusion
In this article we went over some basic points:
Public-key encryption enables secure communication over insecure networks.
RSA is considered the standard for extra-seure communication.
EC is a newer, faster, more transient encryption method.
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/_site/2020/04/06/rsa4.html b/_site/2020/04/06/rsa4.html
index ae97c7b..37b5d65 100644
--- a/_site/2020/04/06/rsa4.html
+++ b/_site/2020/04/06/rsa4.html
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
- How To Encrypt Your Own Documents Using gpg | tait.tech
How To Encrypt Your Own Documents Using gpg
If you have ever wanted to garuntee the utmost security of your emails and documents, then this is the guide for you! It should be noted that in some circles the tools used are more common than in others. These are the everyday tools of many privacy advocates and computer nerds.
If you have never used Linux however, then the method of doing this will be rather unfamiliar. This tutorial will be done on an Arch Linux machine, but it should be the same on Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, Debian, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, MacOSX, etc. The only operating system that does not include these tools by default (or easily accessible) is Windows.
This tutorial makes heavy use of the terminal. You have been warned.
Let us…begin!
Glossary
ASCII armour — A way to encode OpenPGP documents so they are readable by humans. These files end in .asc
(Open)PGP — An open standard for encoding pulbic keys and encrypted documents.
GPG — GNUPrivacyGaurd is an implementation of OpenPGP. It is installed by default on most Linux distrobutions.
Step 0: Setup
We will be using the utility gpg for this tutorial.
The other thing to note: The character ‘$’ (dollar sign) is usually not typed when shown in a command. It simply indicates that you do not need administrative privilages to run these commands.
Test to see if you get this output in your terminal.
+ How To Encrypt Your Own Documents Using gpg | tait.tech
How To Encrypt Your Own Documents Using gpg
If you have ever wanted to garuntee the utmost security of your emails and documents, then this is the guide for you! It should be noted that in some circles the tools used are more common than in others. These are the everyday tools of many privacy advocates and computer nerds.
If you have never used Linux however, then the method of doing this will be rather unfamiliar. This tutorial will be done on an Arch Linux machine, but it should be the same on Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, Debian, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, MacOSX, etc. The only operating system that does not include these tools by default (or easily accessible) is Windows.
This tutorial makes heavy use of the terminal. You have been warned.
Let us…begin!
Glossary
ASCII armour — A way to encode OpenPGP documents so they are readable by humans. These files end in .asc
(Open)PGP — An open standard for encoding pulbic keys and encrypted documents.
GPG — GNUPrivacyGaurd is an implementation of OpenPGP. It is installed by default on most Linux distrobutions.
Step 0: Setup
We will be using the utility gpg for this tutorial.
The other thing to note: The character ‘$’ (dollar sign) is usually not typed when shown in a command. It simply indicates that you do not need administrative privilages to run these commands.
Test to see if you get this output in your terminal.
$ gpg --version
gpg (GnuPG) 2.2.20
diff --git a/_site/2020/04/12/nas1.html b/_site/2020/04/12/nas1.html
index 4f6d526..5c0b040 100644
--- a/_site/2020/04/12/nas1.html
+++ b/_site/2020/04/12/nas1.html
@@ -1 +1 @@
- NAS Part 1: Theorize | tait.tech
NAS Part 1: Theorize
New Project, phase one: Theorize.
I want to build a NAS server to store a bunch of data on. Current problem is lack of a computer to accept multiple SATA connections.
Problem 1: SATA connectors
This can be solved by an HBE card. Although they tend to be quite expensive (250+). One decent model that isn’t that much is the LSI 9211-8I. This is ideal for future expansion.
A cheaper option is a PCIe multi-SATA connector like this.
Either work, but one is cheaper and the other is more expandable. The 9211-8I uses two SAS ports, which can be expanded indefinetely. SAS supports splitting. SATA can be connected in a 4:1 ratio to SAS connectors with some cheap cables.
Problem 2: Drives
I do not have enough drives to make this work right now. For the setup I want it would require 5 or 6 drives. I will get 4-5 drives worth of space as one drive worth of space is dedicated to “parity”, making you able to:
Verify data integrity. If anything goes wrong with a write, it will be fixed automatically.
If one drive dies, the system can stay online with no problem. Two drives and I’m eff-you-see-kay-ed-dee.
My other option is to use two drives worth of space for partiy. This would only have me 3-4 drives of space, but this system can withstand the failure of two drives.
Problem 3: Computer System
I currently have 5 computers.
Celery Stick. An old grey HP laptop with a Braille stickered keyboard. Does not work right now; bad thermal paste job.
A Dell laptop lent to me by my school during my studies.
Houston. A 21-inch 2011 iMac for which the screen does not work under Linux (excep with the nomodeset kernel option enabled).
An Old Toshiba laptop (circa 2010) that I got for $50 to test with OpenBSD (works….sometimes).
Main Rig. My main laptop is an ASUS-705 TUF gaming laptop.
None of these have PCIe expansion slots with a case that can handle the new drives.
I think it’s reasonable to say that for hard-drives and low-end tower PCs, I will likely have luck on a place like Kijiji (Canadian Craigslist).
The search continues :)
I’m in for a fun ride…. and a few monnies.
\ No newline at end of file
+ NAS Part 1: Theorize | tait.tech
NAS Part 1: Theorize
New Project, phase one: Theorize.
I want to build a NAS server to store a bunch of data on. Current problem is lack of a computer to accept multiple SATA connections.
Problem 1: SATA connectors
This can be solved by an HBE card. Although they tend to be quite expensive (250+). One decent model that isn’t that much is the LSI 9211-8I. This is ideal for future expansion.
A cheaper option is a PCIe multi-SATA connector like this.
Either work, but one is cheaper and the other is more expandable. The 9211-8I uses two SAS ports, which can be expanded indefinetely. SAS supports splitting. SATA can be connected in a 4:1 ratio to SAS connectors with some cheap cables.
Problem 2: Drives
I do not have enough drives to make this work right now. For the setup I want it would require 5 or 6 drives. I will get 4-5 drives worth of space as one drive worth of space is dedicated to “parity”, making you able to:
Verify data integrity. If anything goes wrong with a write, it will be fixed automatically.
If one drive dies, the system can stay online with no problem. Two drives and I’m eff-you-see-kay-ed-dee.
My other option is to use two drives worth of space for partiy. This would only have me 3-4 drives of space, but this system can withstand the failure of two drives.
Problem 3: Computer System
I currently have 5 computers.
Celery Stick. An old grey HP laptop with a Braille stickered keyboard. Does not work right now; bad thermal paste job.
A Dell laptop lent to me by my school during my studies.
Houston. A 21-inch 2011 iMac for which the screen does not work under Linux (excep with the nomodeset kernel option enabled).
An Old Toshiba laptop (circa 2010) that I got for $50 to test with OpenBSD (works….sometimes).
Main Rig. My main laptop is an ASUS-705 TUF gaming laptop.
None of these have PCIe expansion slots with a case that can handle the new drives.
I think it’s reasonable to say that for hard-drives and low-end tower PCs, I will likely have luck on a place like Kijiji (Canadian Craigslist).
The search continues :)
I’m in for a fun ride…. and a few monnies.
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/_site/2020/04/21/rfi.html b/_site/2020/04/21/rfi.html
index c1cb0bf..b5029ae 100644
--- a/_site/2020/04/21/rfi.html
+++ b/_site/2020/04/21/rfi.html
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
- rfi: A Simple Linux utility to get a random file from a directory | tait.tech
rfi: A Simple Linux utility to get a random file from a directory
This program gets a random file from your current directory if you do not specify one; it gets a random file from the specified directory if you give it one like so:
# rfi /etc/wireguard
diff --git a/_site/2020/04/25/xss.html b/_site/2020/04/25/xss.html
index 38c31f1..a32bf51 100644
--- a/_site/2020/04/25/xss.html
+++ b/_site/2020/04/25/xss.html
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
- What is XSS? | tait.tech
What is XSS?
I found a cross-site scripting (XSS) attack in a well-known quiz hosting website. I disclosed the vulnerability to them years ago, so I thought now might be a good time to write about it.
In this first article I will explain what XSS is.
In the next article I will explain how I found this attack.
What is cross-site scripting (XSS)
Cross-site scripting, XSS for short, is a technique to execute arbitrary Javascript code on a user visiting a website by linking to Javascript code stored on another server.
So for example:
I have a file on my website called hacked.js. If I was able to run this javascript file on anybody visiting a certain website that is not mine, this would be called cross-site scripting.
Click the above hacked.js link to view the code I use to “hack” this website. It’s safe, I promise ;)
Now, how can we get this code to execute when a user visits this site? To explain, I will start with some of the underlying technologies.
Escape Characters!
No, this is not a Sherlock Holmes novel!
If we suppose that a website is built with sequences like these (called “tags”): <body>, <p> (for paragraph), <link> and <b> for bold, then why can you see the left and right angle bracket characters? Don’t they mean something? Shouldn’t they be telling the browser: “Hey! Make me bold!”? Why doesn’t everything after me typing <b> turn bold?
The answer is:
There are special characters in HTML to type a visible left (<) and visible right angle bracket (>) in a website. If I use the left and right brackets on my keyboard however, things will indeed show up bold.
This is the code for the sentence I wrote above:
+ What is XSS? | tait.tech
What is XSS?
I found a cross-site scripting (XSS) attack in a well-known quiz hosting website. I disclosed the vulnerability to them years ago, so I thought now might be a good time to write about it.
In this first article I will explain what XSS is.
In the next article I will explain how I found this attack.
What is cross-site scripting (XSS)
Cross-site scripting, XSS for short, is a technique to execute arbitrary Javascript code on a user visiting a website by linking to Javascript code stored on another server.
So for example:
I have a file on my website called hacked.js. If I was able to run this javascript file on anybody visiting a certain website that is not mine, this would be called cross-site scripting.
Click the above hacked.js link to view the code I use to “hack” this website. It’s safe, I promise ;)
Now, how can we get this code to execute when a user visits this site? To explain, I will start with some of the underlying technologies.
Escape Characters!
No, this is not a Sherlock Holmes novel!
If we suppose that a website is built with sequences like these (called “tags”): <body>, <p> (for paragraph), <link> and <b> for bold, then why can you see the left and right angle bracket characters? Don’t they mean something? Shouldn’t they be telling the browser: “Hey! Make me bold!”? Why doesn’t everything after me typing <b> turn bold?
The answer is:
There are special characters in HTML to type a visible left (<) and visible right angle bracket (>) in a website. If I use the left and right brackets on my keyboard however, things will indeed show up bold.
This is the code for the sentence I wrote above:
There are special characters in HTML to type a visible left (<)
and visible right angle bracket (>) in a website.
If I use the left and right brackets on my keyboard however,
diff --git a/_site/2020/05/01/nginx-socket-io-projects.html b/_site/2020/05/01/nginx-socket-io-projects.html
index 73e3969..25a6f95 100644
--- a/_site/2020/05/01/nginx-socket-io-projects.html
+++ b/_site/2020/05/01/nginx-socket-io-projects.html
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
- How to use NGINX as a reverse-proxy server for a Node.js application using socket.io | tait.tech
How to use NGINX as a reverse-proxy server for a Node.js application using socket.io
Despite the long name of the article, I have a feeling this may apply to more people than I might think. If you have a Node.js application which needs socket.io connections that you want to pass throgh nginx’s reverse_proxy directive then this is the article for you!
You must seperate the socket.io sockets and the static resources.
The socket connections can be routed through the default $host/socket.io if you want to ease modifications to the source code.
The connections to your main npm Node.js application can be routed through the relevant directory.
Here is the relevant part of my projects.tait.tech.conf file:
+ How to use NGINX as a reverse-proxy server for a Node.js application using socket.io | tait.tech
How to use NGINX as a reverse-proxy server for a Node.js application using socket.io
Despite the long name of the article, I have a feeling this may apply to more people than I might think. If you have a Node.js application which needs socket.io connections that you want to pass throgh nginx’s reverse_proxy directive then this is the article for you!
You must seperate the socket.io sockets and the static resources.
The socket connections can be routed through the default $host/socket.io if you want to ease modifications to the source code.
The connections to your main npm Node.js application can be routed through the relevant directory.
Here is the relevant part of my projects.tait.tech.conf file:
It will be licensed under the BSD-3 license, meaning it can be used for any reason—even commercially and without source-code disclosure—without prior authorization, but it must acknowledge that I helped build the end product.
Once the project is live, it will be located at: Lame Games (currently a dead link).
\ No newline at end of file
+ New Game: Clue (coming soon) | tait.tech
New Game: Clue (coming soon)
Ooo! Exciting! Today I want to announce a new project I’ll be working on which should be live within the month of May: Clue.
The original board game, implemented in an accessible format via the web.
It uses a Node.js backend and standard Javascript/HTML frontend. Nothing fancy.
It will be licensed under the BSD-3 license, meaning it can be used for any reason—even commercially and without source-code disclosure—without prior authorization, but it must acknowledge that I helped build the end product.
Once the project is live, it will be located at: Lame Games (currently a dead link).
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/_site/2020/06/04/site-update.html b/_site/2020/06/04/site-update.html
index 7f8565d..c6db86f 100644
--- a/_site/2020/06/04/site-update.html
+++ b/_site/2020/06/04/site-update.html
@@ -1 +1 @@
- Site Update | tait.tech
Site Update
I updated the site with some easier to identify information about me and my projects :)
Also, Clue has been delayed due to my partner in crime on the project wokring too many hours.
I also posted a new project called Caesar Cipher in C. It will be an intermediate example of how to use build systems like make.
\ No newline at end of file
+ Site Update | tait.tech
Site Update
I updated the site with some easier to identify information about me and my projects :)
Also, Clue has been delayed due to my partner in crime on the project wokring too many hours.
I also posted a new project called Caesar Cipher in C. It will be an intermediate example of how to use build systems like make.
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/_site/2020/06/25/tmux-minecraft.html b/_site/2020/06/25/tmux-minecraft.html
index 95e4e00..7fdda5a 100644
--- a/_site/2020/06/25/tmux-minecraft.html
+++ b/_site/2020/06/25/tmux-minecraft.html
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
- How to use tmux to send and receive things from your Minecraft server | tait.tech
How to use tmux to send and receive things from your Minecraft server
So recently I had problem. I run a Minecraft server on a big Linux computer I have running in my room. Now, as a system administrator it is very helpful to be able to run some simple commands without needing to login with my key, password, TFA, etc. It is, frankly, a lot of work. Especially when I really just want to be playing games but I just need to check something quickly.
So for simple things like finding out of the network, CPU, memory or disk usage is my bottleneck, I wrote this really nifty script to connect the world of Minecraft and the Linux shell.
If you want some of the implementation details, stick around.
Solution
So to solve this interesting problem, I decided to use tmux. tmux is a tterminal multiplexer. This allows you to run a terminal session, then detach fromc it while it still runs in the background.
This is very valuable when running command line applications that need to have an active console connection, like a Minecraft server.
So first I looked at the tmux command send-keys.
send-keys
send-keys allows you to send text, and key presses to a tmux session. Now assuming this tmux session is attached to a Minecraft server, there is no reason you could not run a command like this:
+ How to use tmux to send and receive things from your Minecraft server | tait.tech
How to use tmux to send and receive things from your Minecraft server
So recently I had problem. I run a Minecraft server on a big Linux computer I have running in my room. Now, as a system administrator it is very helpful to be able to run some simple commands without needing to login with my key, password, TFA, etc. It is, frankly, a lot of work. Especially when I really just want to be playing games but I just need to check something quickly.
So for simple things like finding out of the network, CPU, memory or disk usage is my bottleneck, I wrote this really nifty script to connect the world of Minecraft and the Linux shell.
If you want some of the implementation details, stick around.
Solution
So to solve this interesting problem, I decided to use tmux. tmux is a tterminal multiplexer. This allows you to run a terminal session, then detach fromc it while it still runs in the background.
This is very valuable when running command line applications that need to have an active console connection, like a Minecraft server.
So first I looked at the tmux command send-keys.
send-keys
send-keys allows you to send text, and key presses to a tmux session. Now assuming this tmux session is attached to a Minecraft server, there is no reason you could not run a command like this:
$ tmux send-keys "tell @a This is a Test" Enter
This will send the text “tell @a This is a Test” to the Minecraft server. Then, it will hit the newline character, this will execute the command.
So now we can send information to the server and have it tell the users something.
But how do we get information about who is typing what in the Minecraft chat?
tmux’s capture-pane is painful
So in the manual page for tmux I can see a section recorded below for options I can give to the capture-pane subcommand.
-S and -E specify the starting and ending line numbers,
diff --git a/_site/2020/07/12/independence.html b/_site/2020/07/12/independence.html
index fab92e6..4fba69c 100644
--- a/_site/2020/07/12/independence.html
+++ b/_site/2020/07/12/independence.html
@@ -1 +1 @@
- Independence | tait.tech
Independence
“When given a choice between independence and dependence, always choose independence; you will never regret that choice!”—Luke Smith
Whatever you may believe about the YouTube personality Luke Smith, the quote above summarizes a core principle of mine. Much like many people have religious principles, I have Independence.
My choice to use Linux as my primary operating system, host my own website, own my own domain name—all of these are directly related to this core principle of independence.
I never want a man, or a company to have too much power over my life. Just like I would not trust just any person to be able to read my emails, know where I live, where I am going, who are my friends, what do I believe; in the same way, I do not trust a company with that same information.
“If you want to find out what a man is to the bottom, give him power. Any man can stand adversity — only a great man can stand prosperity.”—Robert Ingersoll
Take control of your own digital life:
Own your own domain.
Hookup an email and a website to that.
That’s it!
Without this, any of your internet privileges can be revoked at any time by Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, or even an angry Twitter Mob. Maybe because they hate your skin colour, maybe they hate your religious/political views, or maybe you got caught on a technicality.
If you own your own domain, however:
Your email provider goes down/bans you: change your provider; keep the email.
Your website is pulled for controversial views: switch hosts.
Protect yourself; give yourself choices. Why give others that power when you could have it for yourself?
\ No newline at end of file
+ Independence | tait.tech
Independence
“When given a choice between independence and dependence, always choose independence; you will never regret that choice!”—Luke Smith
Whatever you may believe about the YouTube personality Luke Smith, the quote above summarizes a core principle of mine. Much like many people have religious principles, I have Independence.
My choice to use Linux as my primary operating system, host my own website, own my own domain name—all of these are directly related to this core principle of independence.
I never want a man, or a company to have too much power over my life. Just like I would not trust just any person to be able to read my emails, know where I live, where I am going, who are my friends, what do I believe; in the same way, I do not trust a company with that same information.
“If you want to find out what a man is to the bottom, give him power. Any man can stand adversity — only a great man can stand prosperity.”—Robert Ingersoll
Take control of your own digital life:
Own your own domain.
Hookup an email and a website to that.
That’s it!
Without this, any of your internet privileges can be revoked at any time by Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, or even an angry Twitter Mob. Maybe because they hate your skin colour, maybe they hate your religious/political views, or maybe you got caught on a technicality.
If you own your own domain, however:
Your email provider goes down/bans you: change your provider; keep the email.
Your website is pulled for controversial views: switch hosts.
Protect yourself; give yourself choices. Why give others that power when you could have it for yourself?
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/_site/2020/07/19/multicraft-php-gentoo.html b/_site/2020/07/19/multicraft-php-gentoo.html
index f1601bf..6194460 100644
--- a/_site/2020/07/19/multicraft-php-gentoo.html
+++ b/_site/2020/07/19/multicraft-php-gentoo.html
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
- Installing MultiCraft on Gentoo Linux | tait.tech
Installing MultiCraft on Gentoo Linux
In a very odd combination of requirements, I needed to install MultiCraft on a Gentoo Linux system. The PHP USE flags are important so you don’t have to recompile it three times like I did.
Here are some useful tips I came across:
PHP USE flags
In /etc/portage/package.use/php I placed the following line:
+ Installing MultiCraft on Gentoo Linux | tait.tech
Installing MultiCraft on Gentoo Linux
In a very odd combination of requirements, I needed to install MultiCraft on a Gentoo Linux system. The PHP USE flags are important so you don’t have to recompile it three times like I did.
Here are some useful tips I came across:
PHP USE flags
In /etc/portage/package.use/php I placed the following line:
dev-lang/php cgi mysql mysqli fpm pdo gd truetype
This should give you enough for a mysql backended MultiCraft installation. The cgi option may not be required as fpm stands for FastCGI Process Managment. I don’t know for sure though.
Paper
This will grab the latest version of the Paper jar file using YivesMirror. I’m not sure how reputable it is, but my buddy who works with this stuff more often than me seemed to recognize it.
## See the default craftbukkit.jar.conf for a detailed documentation of the
diff --git a/_site/2020/07/30/canadian-parliament.html b/_site/2020/07/30/canadian-parliament.html
index b640bad..af38ee2 100644
--- a/_site/2020/07/30/canadian-parliament.html
+++ b/_site/2020/07/30/canadian-parliament.html
@@ -1 +1 @@
- Know How Your Representative Votes In Parliament | tait.tech
Know How Your Representative Votes In Parliament
As an advocate for openness, I had an idea to make a project out of the government of Canada’s Open Data initiative to take a look at how my local MP voted on various pieces of legislation. It turns out though that this was not necessary due to how easy it was to find this information on the government’s own website. In this article, I will explain how you can do the same.
1. Find Your Representative
The first step in this process is to find who your representative is. To do so, go to the government’s own website ourcommons.ca’s search tool.
Simply type in your postal code in the search box to find out who your MP is.
2. Their Voting Record
Every MP’s voting record is public knowledge, and it is available nice and simple in a table on that MP’s page. For example, this is a link to Pierre Poilievre’s voting record.
To find your MP’s voting record, do step one, then: After the Overview, and Seat in The House sections, there are three tabs, Roles, Work, and Contact. Click on work. At the bottom of that tab is a link which says Chamber Votes. This will open a small window with some recent votes by this politician. If you want to see all their votes, there is a button at the bottom named All Votes by This Member.
Tada! You can now keep your local MP accountable for anything you do or do not support.
3. Bill Details
If you want to get into the nitty gritty, once you open a specific bill, you can actually find out the status of said bill, or read the actual text by clicking the View this Bill on LEGISinfo button.
Both the status of the bill, and a link to a PDF document containing the bilingual text of the bill are visible in the main body of the page.
Conclusion
I thought this was pretty cool! It was way simpler than I thought it would be.
Thanks, Canada!
\ No newline at end of file
+ Know How Your Representative Votes In Parliament | tait.tech
Know How Your Representative Votes In Parliament
As an advocate for openness, I had an idea to make a project out of the government of Canada’s Open Data initiative to take a look at how my local MP voted on various pieces of legislation. It turns out though that this was not necessary due to how easy it was to find this information on the government’s own website. In this article, I will explain how you can do the same.
1. Find Your Representative
The first step in this process is to find who your representative is. To do so, go to the government’s own website ourcommons.ca’s search tool.
Simply type in your postal code in the search box to find out who your MP is.
2. Their Voting Record
Every MP’s voting record is public knowledge, and it is available nice and simple in a table on that MP’s page. For example, this is a link to Pierre Poilievre’s voting record.
To find your MP’s voting record, do step one, then: After the Overview, and Seat in The House sections, there are three tabs, Roles, Work, and Contact. Click on work. At the bottom of that tab is a link which says Chamber Votes. This will open a small window with some recent votes by this politician. If you want to see all their votes, there is a button at the bottom named All Votes by This Member.
Tada! You can now keep your local MP accountable for anything you do or do not support.
3. Bill Details
If you want to get into the nitty gritty, once you open a specific bill, you can actually find out the status of said bill, or read the actual text by clicking the View this Bill on LEGISinfo button.
Both the status of the bill, and a link to a PDF document containing the bilingual text of the bill are visible in the main body of the page.
Conclusion
I thought this was pretty cool! It was way simpler than I thought it would be.
Thanks, Canada!
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/_site/2020/08/15/openbsd1.html b/_site/2020/08/15/openbsd1.html
index 543f498..a63f75d 100644
--- a/_site/2020/08/15/openbsd1.html
+++ b/_site/2020/08/15/openbsd1.html
@@ -1 +1 @@
- BSD Journey, Part 1 | tait.tech
BSD Journey, Part 1
As Linux becomes controlled by corporate sponsors and becomes more full of proprietary blobs, drivers, and even closed-source software like Steam, One may wonder if there are other options out there. For me, somebody that is intensely interested in security, there is one option: OpenBSD.
Now, my interest in OpenBSD has been going on for a long time. I started poking around for Linux alternatives way back a few years ago when Linus Torvalds decided to leave after he got in trouble for some unprofessional behaviour. That said, Linus did come back to Linux development, but I knew that his abrasive style is what brought good code to the Linux kernel. I also knew that his ability to be critical would be hurt by the new code of conduct. It would become a tool for the SJW types to hammer on Linus for being a “white male, et al.”; It would become a tool for the easily offended to use to get their dumb code into Linux; It would become a tool for the corporatization, the HR-ification of Linux. Frankly, this does not interest me.
Now I’m sure that OpenBSD has its own internal policies that I disagree with. That said, Theo De Raadt is still at least known for calling Firefox an “amorphous peace of garbage” due to its lack of privilege separation. And, in their project goals page, they specifically mention:
Be as politics-free as possible; solutions should be decided on the basis of technical merit.
Now that’s something I can get behind! Bet you that’s not in the Linux COC?
He also went to university in my hometown, so that’s pretty cool! I can support a local madman who thinks he can make a better operating system than all those corporations. Maybe he was right, maybe not. What I know is I am excited to find out!
Wish my luck on my OpenBSD journey. I will post updates here along the way.
Happy hacking!
\ No newline at end of file
+ BSD Journey, Part 1 | tait.tech
BSD Journey, Part 1
As Linux becomes controlled by corporate sponsors and becomes more full of proprietary blobs, drivers, and even closed-source software like Steam, One may wonder if there are other options out there. For me, somebody that is intensely interested in security, there is one option: OpenBSD.
Now, my interest in OpenBSD has been going on for a long time. I started poking around for Linux alternatives way back a few years ago when Linus Torvalds decided to leave after he got in trouble for some unprofessional behaviour. That said, Linus did come back to Linux development, but I knew that his abrasive style is what brought good code to the Linux kernel. I also knew that his ability to be critical would be hurt by the new code of conduct. It would become a tool for the SJW types to hammer on Linus for being a “white male, et al.”; It would become a tool for the easily offended to use to get their dumb code into Linux; It would become a tool for the corporatization, the HR-ification of Linux. Frankly, this does not interest me.
Now I’m sure that OpenBSD has its own internal policies that I disagree with. That said, Theo De Raadt is still at least known for calling Firefox an “amorphous peace of garbage” due to its lack of privilege separation. And, in their project goals page, they specifically mention:
Be as politics-free as possible; solutions should be decided on the basis of technical merit.
Now that’s something I can get behind! Bet you that’s not in the Linux COC?
He also went to university in my hometown, so that’s pretty cool! I can support a local madman who thinks he can make a better operating system than all those corporations. Maybe he was right, maybe not. What I know is I am excited to find out!
Wish my luck on my OpenBSD journey. I will post updates here along the way.
Happy hacking!
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/_site/2020/08/18/django-deployment.html b/_site/2020/08/18/django-deployment.html
index fb8180a..9dc2611 100644
--- a/_site/2020/08/18/django-deployment.html
+++ b/_site/2020/08/18/django-deployment.html
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
- How to Solve The Django Deployment Puzzle | tait.tech
How to Solve The Django Deployment Puzzle
A few days ago I had a Django project I wanted to put on a real server. This project is still in its infancy, but I thought it would be nice to put it on my resume and show my friends. Little did I know the headache coming my way. Here are some tips to help you not make the same mistakes as me.
ASGI Servers
Because my project used the ASGI (Asynchronous webServer Gateway Interface), I needed to find a good production ASGI server to handle all the incoming requests. The best thing I found was uvicorn. It focuses on speed, which is a priority, especially when using the ASGI protocol.
To run uvicorn on the command line for testing purposes, use something like the following:
+ How to Solve The Django Deployment Puzzle | tait.tech
How to Solve The Django Deployment Puzzle
A few days ago I had a Django project I wanted to put on a real server. This project is still in its infancy, but I thought it would be nice to put it on my resume and show my friends. Little did I know the headache coming my way. Here are some tips to help you not make the same mistakes as me.
ASGI Servers
Because my project used the ASGI (Asynchronous webServer Gateway Interface), I needed to find a good production ASGI server to handle all the incoming requests. The best thing I found was uvicorn. It focuses on speed, which is a priority, especially when using the ASGI protocol.
To run uvicorn on the command line for testing purposes, use something like the following:
$ uvicorn --reload myapp.asgi:application
The --reload option says to reload the server if any of the files get updated. This is not recommended in production. Sadly, I thought this meant I would need to do a hard shutdown of the server process every time I wanted to update. This turned out to not be the case.
Workload Managers
There is another equine-named program called gunicorn which can hold a number of processes under its control. An interesting feature of gunicorn is that it will gracefully switch from an old to a new deployment, replacing the subprocesses one-by-one and eventually having only the new deployment active on all subprocesses. The greatest part? Zero down time. The server keeps any old processes open if there is communication with them, then shift and new connections to the new deployment. This was a very cool feature I wanted to take advantage of.
“Now hold on!” you might protest. “gunicorn is a WSGI server!” … oh you got me there! Yes, that’s right, gunicorn is paired with uvicorn to serve my files.
systemd
Love it or hate it, the majority of Linux distributions use the systemd init system. I decided it would be very convenient to have a .service file for my Django application to run automatically at boot. Systemd allows me to do this with a file like the following one I stored in /lib/systemd/system/lamegames.service.
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/_site/2020/09/12/minesweeper.html b/_site/2020/09/12/minesweeper.html
index 01445f2..fbb2366 100644
--- a/_site/2020/09/12/minesweeper.html
+++ b/_site/2020/09/12/minesweeper.html
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
- Minesweeper Bomb Generation And Tile Revealing | tait.tech
Minesweeper Bomb Generation And Tile Revealing
When I was creating a little Minesweeper game, I got confused at some points. My bomb generation didn’t look quite right, and I for sure didn’t quite get the whole cascading tile reveal thing. With a bit of internet research, I found what I was looking for. I’ll explain it all in one place for my own research purposes.
Bomb Generation
When I started this project I attempted to use a random bomb generator. By this I mean on each square, before it gets generated, give it a one in 15 change of being a bomb. Personally, I’m not sure why this never looked right. Something about the layout of the bombs did not mimic the classic Minesweeper game.
After looking at some open source Minesweeper examples, I started to get the idea. I wrote some mathematical statements describing the generation of bombs and how to get their x,y position from an appropriate number. For those non-mathy people, don’t leave just yet; there will be code equivalents to the math.
W and H are the width and height of the board respectively.
0≤r≤W×Hx=rmodWy=⌊Hr⌋
The code equivalent to this in Python is below:
importrandom
+ Minesweeper Bomb Generation And Tile Revealing | tait.tech
Minesweeper Bomb Generation And Tile Revealing
When I was creating a little Minesweeper game, I got confused at some points. My bomb generation didn’t look quite right, and I for sure didn’t quite get the whole cascading tile reveal thing. With a bit of internet research, I found what I was looking for. I’ll explain it all in one place for my own research purposes.
Bomb Generation
When I started this project I attempted to use a random bomb generator. By this I mean on each square, before it gets generated, give it a one in 15 change of being a bomb. Personally, I’m not sure why this never looked right. Something about the layout of the bombs did not mimic the classic Minesweeper game.
After looking at some open source Minesweeper examples, I started to get the idea. I wrote some mathematical statements describing the generation of bombs and how to get their x,y position from an appropriate number. For those non-mathy people, don’t leave just yet; there will be code equivalents to the math.
W and H are the width and height of the board respectively.
0≤r≤W×Hx=rmodWy=⌊Hr⌋
The code equivalent to this in Python is below:
importrandom# r <= 0 <= W*H
r=random.randint(1,W*H)-1
diff --git a/_site/2020/10/26/curiosity.html b/_site/2020/10/26/curiosity.html
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d98629b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/_site/2020/10/26/curiosity.html
@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+ Curiosity | tait.tech
Curiosity
Curiosity is fundamental to a deep understanding of any subject. Masters, Ph.Ds, and other fancy name suffixes will never help you if you don’t have the spirit of curiosity burning inside of you.
I was speaking to someone from a journalism major at my school when the subject of hacking arose. I expected her to know nothing about it, being a journalism student and all, but surprisingly she had something to say about it:
“The best hackers are the ones who are curious.”
That struck a cord with me. It seems to me she has nailed down the difference between the students who care about grades, and those who want to learn. These are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but in my experience they often are due to the way education is structured.
My Anecdote
In my second semester at SAIT Polytechnic, I took a class entitled Emerging Trends In Technology. This class was probably the best class I have ever taken. We had to combine two things:
Hard skills: learning a new hard skill like Angular, Django, or GPG encryption.
Soft skills: public speaking and presentation of our ideas.
Soft skills are not usually my area, but I can do public speaking. I grew up quite religious, so public speaking was drilled into me young. I liked to go off script and talk about interesting things I found along the way to the actual point. My creativity was not usually encouraged. That said, going off script is useful when teaching and presenting ideas; it gives a natural air to your breath and an unquestionable confidence in your speech.
This is how we learn: in relationships. Try explaining ancient Japanese history to a computer science major, or UNIX sockets to an English major and you’ll see what I mean. If there is nothing for us to connect the knowledge to, it dissipates.
So why did I do so well in this class?
Our task for the semester was as follows:
Learn a new subject (any emerging trend in technology) which you find fascinating.
Give a one minute introduction by week three.
Give a 10 minute non-technical overview by week 8.
Give a 20 minute technical explaination and demo by week 13.
This is the only course I have ever taken which lets students’ imagination run wild. Their presentation, their rules. They treated the students like adults who know what they are doing. What happened? Everyone stopped coming because “Oh no! Presentations!”?
No, exactly the opposite. There was never more than one student missing. Every single presentation was at least moderately interesting, and most students were excited to come to that class. You could see it in their faces, the way they carried themselves. Every student picked something unique to their tastes, leaving every student more educated than before.
This class, unlike many others, encouraged the curiosity of the students. It rewarded those who had unique interests and an ability to sell others on their ideas.
The curiosity and the grades were one.
Conclusion
Although it’s nice to have a course where these goals align here and there, anyone who has been to collage or university can tell you that is far from the norm.
On the other hand, I never would have started this site if it wasn’t for that class alone. So I thank you, Kitty Wong, for getting me started running my own “research blog” (?)
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/_site/about/index.html b/_site/about/index.html
index 4711515..a789542 100644
--- a/_site/about/index.html
+++ b/_site/about/index.html
@@ -1 +1 @@
- Home | tait.tech
My fascination lies primarily with operating system internals and systems-level tools. My goal is to bring the everyday computing environment of Linux/BSD nerds to visually impaired users, and to ensure the saftey, privacy and security of the internet. Some of my projects reflect this.
I have all of my code projects hosted on my Github.
Projects
epub-with-pinyin — I wrote a program to add Pinyin above Chinese characters in .epub files to assist myself and others learning Mandarin Chinese.
chess — I wrote a command-line chess game in C++. It is compileable on almost any system.
tait.tech — All the code for my website is open source.
Napolean — A work-in-progress suite of tools to be used in conjunction with a Raspberry Pi and camera to produce text files from scanned books.
subnetting — A one-night write of a tool to automatically calculate network subnet masks based on required hosts and base IP.
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/_site/blog/index.html b/_site/blog/index.html
index 9d1ba51..ea9e551 100644
--- a/_site/blog/index.html
+++ b/_site/blog/index.html
@@ -1 +1 @@
- Blog | tait.tech
When I was creating a little Minesweeper game, I got confused at some points. My bomb generation didn’t look quite right, and I for sure didn’t quite get the whole cascading tile reveal thing. With a bit of internet research, I found what I was looking for. I’ll explain it all in one place for my own research purposes.
A few days ago I had a Django project I wanted to put on a real server. This project is still in its infancy, but I thought it would be nice to put it on my resume and show my friends. Little did I know the headache coming my way. Here are some tips to help you not make the same mistakes as me.
As Linux becomes controlled by corporate sponsors and becomes more full of proprietary blobs, drivers, and even closed-source software like Steam, One may wonder if there are other options out there. For me, somebody that is intensely interested in security, there is one option: OpenBSD.
As an advocate for openness, I had an idea to make a project out of the government of Canada’s Open Data initiative to take a look at how my local MP voted on various pieces of legislation. It turns out though that this was not necessary due to how easy it was to find this information on the government’s own website. In this article, I will explain how you can do the same.
In a very odd combination of requirements, I needed to install MultiCraft on a Gentoo Linux system. The PHP USE flags are important so you don’t have to recompile it three times like I did.
So recently I had problem. I run a Minecraft server on a big Linux computer I have running in my room. Now, as a system administrator it is very helpful to be able to run some simple commands without needing to login with my key, password, TFA, etc. It is, frankly, a lot of work. Especially when I really just want to be playing games but I just need to check something quickly.
Despite the long name of the article, I have a feeling this may apply to more people than I might think. If you have a Node.js application which needs socket.io connections that you want to pass throgh nginx’s reverse_proxy directive then this is the article for you!
I found a cross-site scripting (XSS) attack in a well-known quiz hosting website. I disclosed the vulnerability to them years ago, so I thought now might be a good time to write about it.
If you have ever wanted to garuntee the utmost security of your emails and documents, then this is the guide for you! It should be noted that in some circles the tools used are more common than in others. These are the everyday tools of many privacy advocates and computer nerds.
There are many kinds of encryption used in our everyday communication. Online and offline, over the internet and in person. In this article, I will explain the basics of how encryption should work in theory. I explain in this article why encryption is important, and why you should care about it.
What is the most embarassing thing you have typed into Google search? What is the most personal secret you told a friend in confidence? What is your bank password? What is your business’s secret to stay ahead of the competition?
Many people have expressed confusion over how padding and margins work in HTML/CSS. I have been one of those people. In this short article I will explain what the differences are between the two, and how it may affect the functionality of your site.
Curiosity is fundamental to a deep understanding of any subject. Masters, Ph.Ds, and other fancy name suffixes will never help you if you don’t have the spirit of curiosity burning inside of you.
When I was creating a little Minesweeper game, I got confused at some points. My bomb generation didn’t look quite right, and I for sure didn’t quite get the whole cascading tile reveal thing. With a bit of internet research, I found what I was looking for. I’ll explain it all in one place for my own research purposes.
A few days ago I had a Django project I wanted to put on a real server. This project is still in its infancy, but I thought it would be nice to put it on my resume and show my friends. Little did I know the headache coming my way. Here are some tips to help you not make the same mistakes as me.
As Linux becomes controlled by corporate sponsors and becomes more full of proprietary blobs, drivers, and even closed-source software like Steam, One may wonder if there are other options out there. For me, somebody that is intensely interested in security, there is one option: OpenBSD.
As an advocate for openness, I had an idea to make a project out of the government of Canada’s Open Data initiative to take a look at how my local MP voted on various pieces of legislation. It turns out though that this was not necessary due to how easy it was to find this information on the government’s own website. In this article, I will explain how you can do the same.
In a very odd combination of requirements, I needed to install MultiCraft on a Gentoo Linux system. The PHP USE flags are important so you don’t have to recompile it three times like I did.
So recently I had problem. I run a Minecraft server on a big Linux computer I have running in my room. Now, as a system administrator it is very helpful to be able to run some simple commands without needing to login with my key, password, TFA, etc. It is, frankly, a lot of work. Especially when I really just want to be playing games but I just need to check something quickly.
Despite the long name of the article, I have a feeling this may apply to more people than I might think. If you have a Node.js application which needs socket.io connections that you want to pass throgh nginx’s reverse_proxy directive then this is the article for you!
I found a cross-site scripting (XSS) attack in a well-known quiz hosting website. I disclosed the vulnerability to them years ago, so I thought now might be a good time to write about it.
If you have ever wanted to garuntee the utmost security of your emails and documents, then this is the guide for you! It should be noted that in some circles the tools used are more common than in others. These are the everyday tools of many privacy advocates and computer nerds.
There are many kinds of encryption used in our everyday communication. Online and offline, over the internet and in person. In this article, I will explain the basics of how encryption should work in theory. I explain in this article why encryption is important, and why you should care about it.
What is the most embarassing thing you have typed into Google search? What is the most personal secret you told a friend in confidence? What is your bank password? What is your business’s secret to stay ahead of the competition?
Many people have expressed confusion over how padding and margins work in HTML/CSS. I have been one of those people. In this short article I will explain what the differences are between the two, and how it may affect the functionality of your site.
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/_site/contact/index.html b/_site/contact/index.html
index ad17362..32eb37b 100644
--- a/_site/contact/index.html
+++ b/_site/contact/index.html
@@ -1 +1 @@
- | tait.tech
Here are my contact details if you would like to contact me professionally or personally.
Personal Email - tait.hoyem@protonmail.com
Work Email - tait@tait.tech
School Email - tait.hoyem@edu.sait.ca
Phone - +1 (403) 771-4754
\ No newline at end of file
+ | tait.tech
Here are my contact details if you would like to contact me professionally or personally.
Personal Email - tait.hoyem@protonmail.com
Work Email - tait@tait.tech
School Email - tait.hoyem@edu.sait.ca
Phone - +1 (403) 771-4754
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/_site/feed.xml b/_site/feed.xml
index 3a3aefc..9e6dbf5 100644
--- a/_site/feed.xml
+++ b/_site/feed.xml
@@ -1 +1 @@
-Jekyll2020-10-06T16:13:15+00:00/feed.xmlMinesweeper Bomb Generation And Tile Revealing2020-09-12T00:00:00+00:002020-09-12T00:00:00+00:00/2020/09/12/minesweeper<p>When I was creating a little Minesweeper game, I got confused at some points. My bomb generation didn’t look quite right, and I for sure didn’t quite get the whole cascading tile reveal thing. With a bit of internet research, I found what I was looking for. I’ll explain it all in one place for my own research purposes.</p> <h2 id="bomb-generation">Bomb Generation</h2> <p>When I started this project I attempted to use a random bomb generator. By this I mean on each square, before it gets generated, give it a one in 15 change of being a bomb. Personally, I’m not sure why this never looked right. Something about the layout of the bombs did not mimic the classic Minesweeper game.</p> <p>After looking at some open source Minesweeper examples, I started to get the idea. I wrote some mathematical statements describing the generation of bombs and how to get their x,y position from an appropriate number. For those non-mathy people, don’t leave just yet; there will be code equivalents to the math.</p> <p>W and H are the width and height of the board respectively.</p> <p><span class="katex-display"><span class="katex"><span class="katex-mathml"><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><semantics><mrow><mn mathvariant="italic">0</mn><mo>≤</mo><mi>r</mi><mo>≤</mo><mtext>W</mtext><mo>×</mo><mtext>H</mtext></mrow><annotation encoding="application/x-tex"> \it 0 \leq r \leq \text W \times \text H </annotation></semantics></math></span><span class="katex-html" aria-hidden="true"><span class="base"><span class="strut" style="height:0.8193em;vertical-align:-0.13597em;"></span><span class="mord"><span class="mord mathit">0</span><span class="mspace" style="margin-right:0.2777777777777778em;"></span><span class="mrel">≤</span><span class="mspace" style="margin-right:0.2777777777777778em;"></span><span class="mord mathit">r</span><span class="mspace" style="margin-right:0.2777777777777778em;"></span><span class="mrel">≤</span><span class="mspace" style="margin-right:0.2777777777777778em;"></span><span class="mord text"><span class="mord">W</span></span><span class="mspace" style="margin-right:0.2222222222222222em;"></span><span class="mbin">×</span><span class="mspace" style="margin-right:0.2222222222222222em;"></span><span class="mord text"><span class="mord">H</span></span></span></span></span></span></span> <span class="katex-display"><span class="katex"><span class="katex-mathml"><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><semantics><mrow><mi>x</mi><mo>=</mo><mi>r</mi><mtext> </mtext><mo lspace="0.22em" rspace="0.22em"><mrow><mi mathvariant="normal">m</mi><mi mathvariant="normal">o</mi><mi mathvariant="normal">d</mi></mrow></mo><mtext> </mtext><mtext>W</mtext></mrow><annotation encoding="application/x-tex"> \it x = r \bmod \text W </annotation></semantics></math></span><span class="katex-html" aria-hidden="true"><span class="base"><span class="strut" style="height:0.69444em;vertical-align:0em;"></span><span class="mord"><span class="mord mathit">x</span><span class="mspace" style="margin-right:0.2777777777777778em;"></span><span class="mrel">=</span><span class="mspace" style="margin-right:0.2777777777777778em;"></span><span class="mord mathit">r</span><span class="mspace" style="margin-right:0.2222222222222222em;"></span><span class="mspace" style="margin-right:0.05555555555555555em;"></span><span class="mbin"><span class="mord"><span class="mord mathrm">m</span><span class="mord mathrm">o</span><span class="mord mathrm">d</span></span></span><span class="mspace" style="margin-right:0.2222222222222222em;"></span><span class="mspace" style="margin-right:0.05555555555555555em;"></span><span class="mord text"><span class="mord">W</span></span></span></span></span></span></span> <span class="katex-display"><span class="katex"><span class="katex-mathml"><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><semantics><mrow><mi>y</mi><mo>=</mo><mrow><mo fence="true">⌊</mo><mfrac><mi>r</mi><mtext>H</mtext></mfrac><mo fence="true">⌋</mo></mrow></mrow><annotation encoding="application/x-tex"> \it y = \left\lfloor\frac{r}{\text H}\right\rfloor </annotation></semantics></math></span><span class="katex-html" aria-hidden="true"><span class="base"><span class="strut" style="height:1.8359999999999999em;vertical-align:-0.686em;"></span><span class="mord"><span class="mord mathit">y</span><span class="mspace" style="margin-right:0.2777777777777778em;"></span><span class="mrel">=</span><span class="mspace" style="margin-right:0.2777777777777778em;"></span><span class="minner"><span class="mopen delimcenter" style="top:0em;"><span class="delimsizing size2">⌊</span></span><span class="mord"><span class="mopen nulldelimiter"></span><span class="mfrac"><span class="vlist-t vlist-t2"><span class="vlist-r"><span class="vlist" style="height:1.10756em;"><span style="top:-2.314em;"><span class="pstrut" style="height:3em;"></span><span class="mord"><span class="mord text"><span class="mord">H</span></span></span></span><span style="top:-3.23em;"><span class="pstrut" style="height:3em;"></span><span class="frac-line" style="border-bottom-width:0.04em;"></span></span><span style="top:-3.677em;"><span class="pstrut" style="height:3em;"></span><span class="mord"><span class="mord mathit">r</span></span></span></span><span class="vlist-s"></span></span><span class="vlist-r"><span class="vlist" style="height:0.686em;"><span></span></span></span></span></span><span class="mclose nulldelimiter"></span></span><span class="mclose delimcenter" style="top:0em;"><span class="delimsizing size2">⌋</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p> <p>The code equivalent to this in Python is below:</p> <div class="language-python highlighter-rouge"><div class="highlight"><pre class="highlight"><code><span class="kn">import</span> <span class="nn">random</span> <span class="c1"># r <= 0 <= W*H </span><span class="n">r</span> <span class="o">=</span> <span class="n">random</span><span class="p">.</span><span class="n">randint</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="mi">1</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">W</span><span class="o">*</span><span class="n">H</span><span class="p">)</span><span class="o">-</span><span class="mi">1</span> <span class="c1"># x = r mod W </span><span class="n">x</span> <span class="o">=</span> <span class="n">r</span> <span class="o">%</span> <span class="n">W</span> <span class="c1"># y = floor(r/H); note the special syntax python has for this operation </span><span class="n">y</span> <span class="o">=</span> <span class="n">r</span> <span class="o">//</span> <span class="n">H</span> </code></pre></div></div> <p>So that’s that, we can put this in a big ‘ol for loop and generate an arbitrary <em>n</em> number of bombs given a width and height of a Minesweeper board.</p> <h2 id="cascading-tile-revealing">Cascading Tile Revealing</h2> <p>This one is hard to describe; I am adapting this from <a href="https://leetcode.com/problems/minesweeper/">leetcode.com</a>. Whenever a player clicks a tile, the following logic should be used:</p> <ol> <li>If a mine is revealed, the game is over. (obviously)</li> <li>If a tile with <em>no</em> adjacent mines is revealed, recursively reveal all eight adjacent tiles.</li> <li>If a tile with one or more adjacent mines is revealed, display the number of mines next to it.</li> </ol> <p>Here is the code in Python for this algorithm.</p> <div class="language-python highlighter-rouge"><div class="highlight"><pre class="highlight"><code><span class="k">def</span> <span class="nf">reveal_square</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="n">x</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">y</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">board</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">alread_revealed</span><span class="p">):</span> <span class="c1"># if already checked </span> <span class="k">if</span> <span class="p">(</span><span class="n">x</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">y</span><span class="p">)</span> <span class="ow">in</span> <span class="n">already_revealed</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="k">return</span> <span class="c1"># if it's a bomb </span> <span class="k">if</span> <span class="n">board</span><span class="p">[</span><span class="n">x</span><span class="p">][</span><span class="n">y</span><span class="p">]</span> <span class="o">==</span> <span class="s">'B'</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="n">you_lose</span><span class="p">()</span> <span class="k">return</span> <span class="c1"># if the bomb number is more than 0 </span> <span class="n">already_revealed</span><span class="p">.</span><span class="n">append</span><span class="p">((</span><span class="n">nx</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">ny</span><span class="p">))</span> <span class="c1"># from -1 to 1 </span> <span class="k">for</span> <span class="n">xd</span> <span class="ow">in</span> <span class="nb">range</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="o">-</span><span class="mi">1</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="mi">2</span><span class="p">):</span> <span class="k">for</span> <span class="n">yd</span> <span class="ow">in</span> <span class="nb">range</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="o">-</span><span class="mi">1</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="mi">2</span><span class="p">):</span> <span class="c1"># skip if it is this the center tile </span> <span class="k">if</span> <span class="n">x</span><span class="o">+</span><span class="n">xd</span> <span class="o">==</span> <span class="n">x</span> <span class="ow">and</span> <span class="n">y</span><span class="o">+</span><span class="n">yd</span> <span class="o">==</span> <span class="n">y</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="k">continue</span> <span class="c1"># recursively check the adjacent square </span> <span class="n">reveal</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="n">x</span><span class="o">+</span><span class="n">xd</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">y</span><span class="o">+</span><span class="n">yd</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">board</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">already_revealed</span><span class="p">)</span> <span class="k">return</span> <span class="n">already_revealed</span> </code></pre></div></div> <p>This has no checks for valid squares, but it’s the general idea. This function returns an array of tile coordinates which should be revealed.</p> <h2 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h2> <p>I wrote this because in the first place because I was writing my own Minesweeper game. I hope that this helps you with getting the general idea of a Minesweeper game. The completed version of this game is available on my <a href="https://lamegames.tait.tech/">lamegames</a> site. Let me know what you think!</p> <p>Happy hacking!</p>When I was creating a little Minesweeper game, I got confused at some points. My bomb generation didn’t look quite right, and I for sure didn’t quite get the whole cascading tile reveal thing. With a bit of internet research, I found what I was looking for. I’ll explain it all in one place for my own research purposes.lamegames.tait.tech2020-09-09T00:00:00+00:002020-09-09T00:00:00+00:00/2020/09/09/lamegames<p>This is an announcement for a new project of mine: <a href="https://lamegames.tait.tech">lamegames.tait.tech</a>.</p> <p>This is something I’m really excited to work on!</p> <p>Right now, I’ve just got a rock-paper-scissors game. A chat function, and a few simple card games to come.</p> <p>Check out the repository on my <a href="https://github.com/TTWNO/lamegames.io">Github</a>.</p>This is an announcement for a new project of mine: lamegames.tait.tech.How to Solve The Django Deployment Puzzle2020-08-18T00:00:00+00:002020-08-18T00:00:00+00:00/2020/08/18/django-deployment<p>A few days ago I had a Django project I wanted to put on a real server. This project is still in its infancy, but I thought it would be nice to put it on my resume and show my friends. Little did I know the headache coming my way. Here are some tips to help you not make the same mistakes as me.</p> <h3 id="asgi-servers">ASGI Servers</h3> <p>Because my project used the ASGI (Asynchronous webServer Gateway Interface), I needed to find a good production ASGI server to handle all the incoming requests. The best thing I found was <a href="http://www.uvicorn.org/">uvicorn</a>. It focuses on speed, which is a priority, especially when using the ASGI protocol.</p> <p>To run uvicorn on the command line for testing purposes, use something like the following:</p> <pre class="terminal"> $ uvicorn --reload myapp.asgi:application </pre> <p>The <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">--reload</code> option says to reload the server if any of the files get updated. This is not recommended in production. Sadly, I thought this meant I would need to do a hard shutdown of the server process every time I wanted to update. This turned out to not be the case.</p> <h3 id="workload-managers">Workload Managers</h3> <p>There is another equine-named program called <a href="https://gunicorn.org/">gunicorn</a> which can hold a number of processes under its control. An interesting feature of <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">gunicorn</code> is that it will gracefully switch from an old to a new deployment, replacing the subprocesses one-by-one and eventually having only the new deployment active on all subprocesses. The greatest part? Zero down time. The server keeps any old processes open if there is communication with them, then shift and new connections to the new deployment. This was a very cool feature I wanted to take advantage of.</p> <p>“Now hold on!” you might protest. “gunicorn is a WSGI server!” … oh you got me there! Yes, that’s right, <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">gunicorn</code> is paired with <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">uvicorn</code> to serve my files.</p> <h3 id="systemd">systemd</h3> <p>Love it or hate it, the majority of Linux distributions use the <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">systemd</code> init system. I decided it would be very convenient to have a .service file for my Django application to run automatically at boot. <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">Systemd</code> allows me to do this with a file like the following one I stored in <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">/lib/systemd/system/lamegames.service</code>.</p> <pre class="file"> [Unit] Description=Gunicorn/Uvicorn (lamegames.io) [Service] WorkingDirectory=/home/lame/lamegames.io Type=simple RemainAfterExit=yes ExecStart=/home/lame/lamegames.io/env/bin/gunicorn lamegames.asgi:application -w 2 -k uvicorn.workers.UvicornWorker ExecStop=/bin/kill -HUP $MAINPID Restart=always [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target </pre> <h3 id="nginx">nginx</h3> <p>NGINX (pronounced engine-X) is a performance web server designed for speed and simplicity. For the front facing side of the site, I do need a production web server like nginx. Gunicorn simply doesn’t need all the features that nginx provides, but I do. To configure my nginx installation, I used the following few directives to:</p> <ol> <li>Redirect most traffic towards the gunicorn server.</li> <li>Redirect statically served files (CSS, JS, images) to the directory specified in the STATIC_ROOT variable of my <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">settings.py</code> file.</li> <li>Use TLS to enable https://</li> </ol> <p>Serving the static files from nginx as opposed to the <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">gunicorn</code> server is necessary. Gunicorn and other production A/WSGI web server will not set the proper MIME type over TLS. This will cause your browser to not load the Javascript/CSS.</p> <p>This is the important part of my nginx config.</p> <pre class="file"> server { location / { proxy_set_header Host $http_host; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme; # these two lines ensure that WebSocket, and HTTP2 connection are forwarded correctly proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade; proxy_set_header Connection "Upgrade"; proxy_redirect off; proxy_buffering off; # this forwards all traffic to the local server on port 8000 proxy_pass http://localhost:8000; } # This forwards all static requests to Django's STATIC_ROOT set in settings.py; it is generated using the collectstatic command. location /static { autoindex on; alias /home/lame/lamegames.io/static_generated; } } </pre> <h3 id="setup">Setup</h3> <p>After all that, I was able to do the following:</p> <pre class="terminal"> # systemctl enable lamegames </pre> <p>This enabled my <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">gunicorn</code> server to run once the server started. NGINX is that way be default.</p> <p>And tada! You now have a working Django project on a production server!</p> <h4 id="notes">Notes</h4> <ul> <li>If using ws:// websockets, change them to wss:// for secure web sockets.</li> <li>Make sure to use channels.routing.get_default_application() instead of django.get_asgi_application() if your’re wanting to use channels/redis WebSockets.</li> </ul>A few days ago I had a Django project I wanted to put on a real server. This project is still in its infancy, but I thought it would be nice to put it on my resume and show my friends. Little did I know the headache coming my way. Here are some tips to help you not make the same mistakes as me.BSD Journey, Part 12020-08-15T00:00:00+00:002020-08-15T00:00:00+00:00/2020/08/15/openbsd1<p>As Linux becomes controlled by corporate sponsors and becomes more full of proprietary blobs, drivers, and even closed-source software like Steam, One may wonder if there are other options out there. For me, somebody that is intensely interested in security, there is one option: OpenBSD.</p> <p>Now, my interest in OpenBSD has been going on for a long time. I started poking around for Linux alternatives way back a few years ago when Linus Torvalds decided to leave after he got in trouble for some <a href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/linus-torvalds-defends-his-right-to-shame-linux-kernel-developers/">unprofessional behaviour</a>. That said, Linus did come back to Linux development, but I knew that his abrasive style is what brought good code to the Linux kernel. I also knew that his ability to be critical would be hurt by the new <a href="https://itsfoss.com/linux-code-of-conduct/">code of conduct</a>. It would become a tool for the SJW types to hammer on Linus for being a “white male, et al.”; It would become a tool for the easily offended to use to get their dumb code into Linux; It would become a tool for the corporatization, the HR-ification of Linux. Frankly, this does not interest me.</p> <p>Now I’m sure that OpenBSD has its own internal policies that I disagree with. That said, Theo De Raadt is still at least known for calling Firefox an “amorphous peace of garbage” due to its lack of privilege separation. And, in their <a href="https://openbsd.org/goals.html">project goals</a> page, they specifically mention:</p> <blockquote> <p>Be as politics-free as possible; solutions should be decided on the basis of technical merit.</p> </blockquote> <p>Now that’s something I can get behind! Bet you that’s not in the Linux COC?</p> <p>He also went to university in my hometown, so that’s pretty cool! I can support a local madman who thinks he can make a better operating system than all those corporations. Maybe he was right, maybe not. What I know is I am excited to find out!</p> <p>Wish my luck on my OpenBSD journey. I will post updates here along the way.</p> <p>Happy hacking!</p>As Linux becomes controlled by corporate sponsors and becomes more full of proprietary blobs, drivers, and even closed-source software like Steam, One may wonder if there are other options out there. For me, somebody that is intensely interested in security, there is one option: OpenBSD.Know How Your Representative Votes In Parliament2020-07-30T00:00:00+00:002020-07-30T00:00:00+00:00/2020/07/30/canadian-parliament<p>As an advocate for openness, I had an idea to make a project out of the government of Canada’s <a href="https://open.canada.ca/en/open-data">Open Data</a> initiative to take a look at how my local MP voted on various pieces of legislation. It turns out though that this was not necessary due to how easy it was to find this information on the government’s own website. In this article, I will explain how you can do the same.</p> <h3 id="1-find-your-representative">1. Find Your Representative</h3> <p>The first step in this process is to find who your representative is. To do so, go to the government’s own website <a href="https://www.ourcommons.ca/Members/en">ourcommons.ca’s search tool</a>.</p> <p>Simply type in your postal code in the search box to find out who your MP is.</p> <h3 id="2-their-voting-record">2. Their Voting Record</h3> <p>Every MP’s voting record is public knowledge, and it is available nice and simple in a table on that MP’s page. For example, this is a link to <a href="https://www.ourcommons.ca/Members/en/pierre-poilievre(25524)/votes">Pierre Poilievre’s voting record</a>.</p> <p>To find your MP’s voting record, do step one, then: After the <strong>Overview</strong>, and <strong>Seat in The House</strong> sections, there are three tabs, <strong>Roles</strong>, <strong>Work</strong>, and <strong>Contact</strong>. Click on work. At the bottom of that tab is a link which says <strong>Chamber Votes</strong>. This will open a small window with some recent votes by this politician. If you want to see all their votes, there is a button at the bottom named <strong>All Votes by This Member</strong>.</p> <p>Tada! You can now keep your local MP accountable for anything you do or do not support.</p> <h3 id="3-bill-details">3. Bill Details</h3> <p>If you want to get into the nitty gritty, once you open a specific bill, you can actually find out the status of said bill, or read the actual text by clicking the <strong>View this Bill on LEGISinfo</strong> button.</p> <p>Both the status of the bill, and a link to a PDF document containing the bilingual text of the bill are visible in the main body of the page.</p> <h4 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h4> <p>I thought this was pretty cool! It was <em>way</em> simpler than I thought it would be.</p> <p>Thanks, Canada!</p>As an advocate for openness, I had an idea to make a project out of the government of Canada’s Open Data initiative to take a look at how my local MP voted on various pieces of legislation. It turns out though that this was not necessary due to how easy it was to find this information on the government’s own website. In this article, I will explain how you can do the same.Installing MultiCraft on Gentoo Linux2020-07-19T00:00:00+00:002020-07-19T00:00:00+00:00/2020/07/19/multicraft-php-gentoo<p>In a very odd combination of requirements, I needed to install <a href="https://multicraft.org">MultiCraft</a> on a Gentoo Linux system. The PHP <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">USE</code> flags are important so you don’t have to recompile it three times like I did.</p> <p>Here are some useful tips I came across:</p> <h3 id="php-use-flags">PHP <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">USE</code> flags</h3> <p>In <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">/etc/portage/package.use/php</code> I placed the following line:</p> <pre class="terminal"> dev-lang/php cgi mysql mysqli fpm pdo gd truetype </pre> <p>This should give you enough for a mysql backended MultiCraft installation. The <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">cgi</code> option may not be required as <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">fpm</code> stands for <em>FastCGI Process Managment</em>. I don’t know for sure though.</p> <h3 id="paper">Paper</h3> <p>This will grab the latest version of the Paper jar file using <a href="https://yivesmirror.com">YivesMirror</a>. I’m not sure how reputable it is, but my buddy who works with this stuff more often than me seemed to recognize it.</p> <pre class="terminal"> ## See the default craftbukkit.jar.conf for a detailed documentation of the ## format of this file. [config] name = Paper 1.16.1 Latest source = https://yivesmirror.com/files/paper/Paper-1.16.1-latest.jar category = Mods [encoding] #encode = system #decode = system #fileEncoding = latin-1 [start] command = "{JAVA}" -Xmx{MAX_MEMORY}M -Xms{START_MEMORY}M -XX:MaxPermSize=128M -Djline.terminal=jline.UnsupportedTerminal -jar "{JAR}" nogui </pre> <h3 id="other-tips">Other Tips</h3> <p>Do not use the option to setup a separate user for each server. This completely stalled any work getting done with a ton of ‘permission denied’ errors.</p> <h4 id="security">Security</h4> <p>If the panel is in the root directory of your NGINX web server, use the following in your server block to deny access to the <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">/protected</code> directory.</p> <pre class="terminal"> location /protected { deny all; return 404; } </pre> <h5 id="mysql">MySQL</h5> <p>It is always good practice to separate privileges. The MultiCraft daemon should have one SQL login, with one database allocated to it. The MultiCraft panel should have a separate SQL login, with a separate database allocated to it.</p> <p>You can do this with the following commands in your MySQL prompt:</p> <pre class="terminal"> sql> CREATE DATABASE multicraft_daemon_database; Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec) sql> CREATE DATABASE multicraft_panel_database; Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec) sql> CREATE USER 'muilticraft_daemon'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'strong password here'; Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec) sql> CREATE USER 'multicraft_panel'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'different strong password here'; Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec) sql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON multicraft_daemon_database . * TO 'multicraft_daemon'@'localhost'; Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec) sql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON multicraft_panel_database . * TO 'mutlicraft_panel'@'localhost'; Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec) </pre> <p>During setup, make sure the proper credentials are used for each step. Database 1 is the panel database. Database 2 is the daemon database.</p> <p>Happy hacking :)</p>In a very odd combination of requirements, I needed to install MultiCraft on a Gentoo Linux system. The PHP USE flags are important so you don’t have to recompile it three times like I did.Independence2020-07-12T00:00:00+00:002020-07-12T00:00:00+00:00/2020/07/12/independence<blockquote> <p>“When given a choice between independence and dependence, always choose independence; you will never regret that choice!”—Luke Smith</p> </blockquote> <p>Whatever you may believe about the YouTube personality Luke Smith, the quote above summarizes a core principle of mine. Much like many people have religious principles, I have <em>Independence</em>.</p> <p>My choice to use Linux as my primary operating system, host my own website, own my own domain name—all of these are directly related to this core principle of independence.</p> <p>I never want a man, or a company to have too much power over my life. Just like I would not trust just any person to be able to read my emails, know where I live, where I am going, who are my friends, what do I believe; in the same way, I do not trust a company with that same information.</p> <blockquote> <p>“If you want to find out what a man is to the bottom, give him power. Any man can stand adversity — only a great man can stand prosperity.”—Robert Ingersoll</p> </blockquote> <p>Take control of your own digital life:</p> <ol> <li>Own your own domain.</li> <li>Hookup an email and a website to that.</li> </ol> <p>That’s it!</p> <p>Without this, any of your internet privileges can be revoked at any time by Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, or even an angry Twitter Mob. Maybe because they hate your skin colour, maybe they hate your religious/political views, or maybe you got caught on a technicality.</p> <p>If you own your own domain, however:</p> <p>Your email provider goes down/bans you: change your provider; keep the email.</p> <p>Your website is pulled for controversial views: switch hosts.</p> <p>Protect yourself; give yourself choices. Why give others that power when you could have it for yourself?</p>“When given a choice between independence and dependence, always choose independence; you will never regret that choice!”—Luke SmithHow to use tmux to send and receive things from your Minecraft server2020-06-25T00:00:00+00:002020-06-25T00:00:00+00:00/2020/06/25/tmux-minecraft<p>So recently I had problem. I run a Minecraft server on a big Linux computer I have running in my room. Now, as a system administrator it is very helpful to be able to run some simple commands without needing to login with my key, password, TFA, etc. It is, frankly, a lot of work. Especially when I really just want to be playing games but I just need to check something quickly.</p> <p>So for simple things like finding out of the network, CPU, memory or disk usage is my bottleneck, I wrote this really nifty script to connect the world of Minecraft and the Linux shell.</p> <p>My completed solution for what I needed can be found at <a href="https://github.com/TTWNO/termcraft/">https://github.com/TTWNO/termcraft</a>.</p> <p>If you want some of the implementation details, stick around.</p> <h2 id="solution">Solution</h2> <p>So to solve this interesting problem, I decided to use <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">tmux</code>. <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">tmux</code> is a <strong>t</strong>terminal <strong>mu</strong>ltiple<strong>x</strong>er. This allows you to run a terminal session, then detach fromc it while it still runs in the background.</p> <p>This is very valuable when running command line applications that need to have an active console connection, like a Minecraft server.</p> <p>So first I looked at the <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">tmux</code> command <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">send-keys</code>.</p> <h4 id="send-keys"><code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">send-keys</code></h4> <p><code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">send-keys</code> allows you to send text, and key presses to a <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">tmux</code> session. Now assuming this <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">tmux</code> session is attached to a Minecraft server, there is no reason you could not run a command like this:</p> <pre class="terminal"> $ tmux send-keys "tell @a This is a Test" Enter </pre> <p>This will send the text “tell @a This is a Test” to the Minecraft server. Then, it will hit the newline character, this will execute the command.</p> <p>So now we can send information to the server and have it tell the users something.</p> <p>But how do we get information about who is typing what in the Minecraft chat?</p> <h3 id="tmuxs-capture-pane-is-painful"><code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">tmux</code>’s <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">capture-pane</code> is painful</h3> <p>So in the manual page for <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">tmux</code> I can see a section recorded below for options I can give to the <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">capture-pane</code> subcommand.</p> <pre class="terminal"> -S and -E specify the starting and ending line numbers, zero is the first line of the visible pane and negative numbers are lines in the history. ‘-’ to -S is the start of the history and to -E the end of the visible pane. The default is to capture only the visible contents of the pane. </pre> <p>What it seems to be saying is I can start at line <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">-S n</code> and end at line <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">-E n</code>. Negative numbers start from the bottom, so <em>in theory</em> I can do the following: <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">tmux capture-pane -S -1</code> should capture only the last line, because I’m starting from the last line. Right?</p> <p>No. It just doesn’t work. Negative numbers do <em>not</em> work with the <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">tmux capture-pane</code> subcommand.</p> <p>So I did some simple UNIX piping, like so, to get just the last thing in the chat.</p> <pre class="terminal"> $ tmux capture-pane -p -t steve | tail -n1 [SERVER] [ExtraDebuggingInfoHere]: <TaterTheTot> MY_MESSAGE </pre> <p>TaterTheTot is my Minecraft username :)</p> <p><code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">-p</code> prints the result to the terminal/stdout.</p> <p><code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">steve</code> is the name of the tmux session I’m trying to pull form.</p> <p>So that’s done! Beauty!</p> <p>Now that we have that, how can we extract the username and the message from the latest line?</p> <h3 id="grep"><code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">grep</code></h3> <p><code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">grep</code> is a command to find patterns of text. <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">grep</code> has an option to only show a matching pattern of text. This option is <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">-o</code>.</p> <p>Let’s see how we can use this in conjunction with our latest line of server output to get our results.</p> <pre class="terminal"> $ echo "[DEBUG] [SERVER] blah blah: <TaterTheTot> MY_MESAGE" | grep -o "<.*>" <TaterTheTot> </pre> <p>Now, that’s my name with the < and > attached. Not bad! We can use the <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">sed</code> command to clean it up a bit.</p> <p>The syntax is like so: <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">select/somepattern/replacewith/global</code></p> <p>So the following command is: <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">s/[<>]//g</code></p> <p>Select any characters that are either < or >. Replace with nothing. Do so globally (as in, don’t stop after you replace only one character).</p> <p>Take two!</p> <pre class="terminal"> $ echo "[DEBUG] [SERVER] blah blah: <TaterTheTot> MY_MESAGE" | grep -o "<.*>" | sed 's/[<>]//g' TaterTheTot </pre> <p>Beautiful!</p> <p>Now what about that pesky message?</p> <h3 id="more-grep-more-sed">more <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">grep</code>; more <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">sed</code></h3> <p>Simple: capture everything after the >. Leaving the user’s message entirely in tact.</p> <pre class="terminal"> $ echo "[DEBUG] [SERVER] blah blah: <TaterTheTot> MY_MESAGE" | grep -o ">.*$" | sed 's/> //' MY_MESSAGE </pre> <p>So now we have a way to get the username of someone typing in the Minecraft server chat. We have a way to find out what they said. And, we have a way to respond.</p> <p>You can imagine how these might go together for your own use case.</p> <h3 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h3> <p>This shows some pretty fun stuff you can do with a few simple Linux commands and a Minecraft server.</p> <p>I hope you learned something and found my explanations not horrific haha!</p> <p>Remember to checkout the git repository to see what I did with it: <a href="https://github.com/TTWNO/termcraft">https://github.com/TTWNO/termcraft</a>.</p> <p>Happy hacking!</p>So recently I had problem. I run a Minecraft server on a big Linux computer I have running in my room. Now, as a system administrator it is very helpful to be able to run some simple commands without needing to login with my key, password, TFA, etc. It is, frankly, a lot of work. Especially when I really just want to be playing games but I just need to check something quickly.Site Update2020-06-04T00:00:00+00:002020-06-04T00:00:00+00:00/2020/06/04/site-update<p>I updated the site with some easier to identify information about me and my projects :)</p> <p>Also, Clue has been delayed due to my partner in crime on the project wokring too many hours.</p> <p>I also posted a new project called <em><a href="https://github.com/TTWNO/caesar-cipher">Caesar Cipher</a></em> in C. It will be an intermediate example of how to use build systems like <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">make</code>.</p>I updated the site with some easier to identify information about me and my projects :)New Game: Clue (coming soon)2020-05-19T00:00:00+00:002020-05-19T00:00:00+00:00/2020/05/19/clue-announcement<p>Ooo! Exciting! Today I want to announce a new project I’ll be working on which should be live within the month of May: Clue.</p> <p>The original board game, implemented in an accessible format via the web.</p> <p>It uses a Node.js backend and standard Javascript/HTML frontend. Nothing fancy.</p> <p>All the code will be hosted here: <a href="https://github.com/TTWNO/clue">https://github.com/TTWNO/clue</a></p> <p>It will be licensed under the BSD-3 license, meaning it can be used for any reason—even commercially and without source-code disclosure—without prior authorization, but it <em>must</em> acknowledge that I helped build the end product.</p> <p>Once the project is live, it will be located at: <a href="">Lame Games</a> (currently a dead link).</p>Ooo! Exciting! Today I want to announce a new project I’ll be working on which should be live within the month of May: Clue.
\ No newline at end of file
+Jekyll2020-10-26T16:17:29+00:00/feed.xmlCuriosity2020-10-26T00:00:00+00:002020-10-26T00:00:00+00:00/2020/10/26/curiosity<p>Curiosity is fundamental to a deep understanding of any subject. Masters, Ph.Ds, and other fancy name suffixes will never help you if you don’t have the spirit of curiosity burning inside of you.</p> <p>I was speaking to someone from a journalism major at my school when the subject of hacking arose. I expected her to know nothing about it, being a journalism student and all, but surprisingly she had something to say about it:</p> <blockquote> <p>“The best hackers are the ones who are curious.”</p> </blockquote> <p>That struck a cord with me. It seems to me she has nailed down the difference between the students who care about grades, and those who want to learn. These are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but in my experience they often are due to the way education is structured.</p> <h2 id="my-anecdote">My Anecdote</h2> <p>In my second semester at SAIT Polytechnic, I took a class entitled <em>Emerging Trends In Technology</em>. This class was probably the best class I have ever taken. We had to combine two things:</p> <ul> <li><strong>Hard skills</strong>: learning a new hard skill like Angular, Django, or GPG encryption.</li> <li><strong>Soft skills</strong>: public speaking and presentation of our ideas.</li> </ul> <p>Soft skills are not usually my area, but I can do public speaking. I grew up quite religious, so public speaking was drilled into me young. I liked to go off script and talk about interesting things I found along the way to the actual point. My creativity was not usually encouraged. That said, going off script is useful when teaching and presenting ideas; it gives a natural air to your breath and an unquestionable confidence in your speech.</p> <p>This is how we learn: in relationships. Try explaining ancient Japanese history to a computer science major, or UNIX sockets to an English major and you’ll see what I mean. If there is nothing for us to connect the knowledge to, it dissipates.</p> <p>So why did I do so well in this class?</p> <p>Our task for the semester was as follows:</p> <ol> <li>Learn a new subject (any <em>emerging trend in technology</em>) which you find fascinating.</li> <li>Give a one minute introduction by week three.</li> <li>Give a 10 minute non-technical overview by week 8.</li> <li>Give a 20 minute technical explaination and demo by week 13.</li> </ol> <p>This is the only course I have ever taken which lets students’ imagination run wild. Their presentation, their rules. They treated the students like adults who know what they are doing. What happened? Everyone stopped coming because “Oh no! Presentations!”?</p> <p>No, exactly the opposite. There was never more than one student missing. Every single presentation was at least moderately interesting, and most students were excited to come to that class. You could see it in their faces, the way they carried themselves. Every student picked something unique to their tastes, leaving every student more educated than before.</p> <p>This class, unlike many others, encouraged the curiosity of the students. It rewarded those who had unique interests and an ability to sell others on their ideas.</p> <p>The curiosity and the grades were one.</p> <h2 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h2> <p>Although it’s nice to have a course where these goals align here and there, anyone who has been to collage or university can tell you that is far from the norm.</p> <p>On the other hand, I never would have started this site if it wasn’t for that class alone. So I thank you, Kitty Wong, for getting me started running my own “research blog” (?)</p>Curiosity is fundamental to a deep understanding of any subject. Masters, Ph.Ds, and other fancy name suffixes will never help you if you don’t have the spirit of curiosity burning inside of you.Minesweeper Bomb Generation And Tile Revealing2020-09-12T00:00:00+00:002020-09-12T00:00:00+00:00/2020/09/12/minesweeper<p>When I was creating a little Minesweeper game, I got confused at some points. My bomb generation didn’t look quite right, and I for sure didn’t quite get the whole cascading tile reveal thing. With a bit of internet research, I found what I was looking for. I’ll explain it all in one place for my own research purposes.</p> <h2 id="bomb-generation">Bomb Generation</h2> <p>When I started this project I attempted to use a random bomb generator. By this I mean on each square, before it gets generated, give it a one in 15 change of being a bomb. Personally, I’m not sure why this never looked right. Something about the layout of the bombs did not mimic the classic Minesweeper game.</p> <p>After looking at some open source Minesweeper examples, I started to get the idea. I wrote some mathematical statements describing the generation of bombs and how to get their x,y position from an appropriate number. For those non-mathy people, don’t leave just yet; there will be code equivalents to the math.</p> <p>W and H are the width and height of the board respectively.</p> <p><span class="katex-display"><span class="katex"><span class="katex-mathml"><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><semantics><mrow><mn mathvariant="italic">0</mn><mo>≤</mo><mi>r</mi><mo>≤</mo><mtext>W</mtext><mo>×</mo><mtext>H</mtext></mrow><annotation encoding="application/x-tex"> \it 0 \leq r \leq \text W \times \text H </annotation></semantics></math></span><span class="katex-html" aria-hidden="true"><span class="base"><span class="strut" style="height:0.8193em;vertical-align:-0.13597em;"></span><span class="mord"><span class="mord mathit">0</span><span class="mspace" style="margin-right:0.2777777777777778em;"></span><span class="mrel">≤</span><span class="mspace" style="margin-right:0.2777777777777778em;"></span><span class="mord mathit">r</span><span class="mspace" style="margin-right:0.2777777777777778em;"></span><span class="mrel">≤</span><span class="mspace" style="margin-right:0.2777777777777778em;"></span><span class="mord text"><span class="mord">W</span></span><span class="mspace" style="margin-right:0.2222222222222222em;"></span><span class="mbin">×</span><span class="mspace" style="margin-right:0.2222222222222222em;"></span><span class="mord text"><span class="mord">H</span></span></span></span></span></span></span> <span class="katex-display"><span class="katex"><span class="katex-mathml"><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><semantics><mrow><mi>x</mi><mo>=</mo><mi>r</mi><mtext> </mtext><mo lspace="0.22em" rspace="0.22em"><mrow><mi mathvariant="normal">m</mi><mi mathvariant="normal">o</mi><mi mathvariant="normal">d</mi></mrow></mo><mtext> </mtext><mtext>W</mtext></mrow><annotation encoding="application/x-tex"> \it x = r \bmod \text W </annotation></semantics></math></span><span class="katex-html" aria-hidden="true"><span class="base"><span class="strut" style="height:0.69444em;vertical-align:0em;"></span><span class="mord"><span class="mord mathit">x</span><span class="mspace" style="margin-right:0.2777777777777778em;"></span><span class="mrel">=</span><span class="mspace" style="margin-right:0.2777777777777778em;"></span><span class="mord mathit">r</span><span class="mspace" style="margin-right:0.2222222222222222em;"></span><span class="mspace" style="margin-right:0.05555555555555555em;"></span><span class="mbin"><span class="mord"><span class="mord mathrm">m</span><span class="mord mathrm">o</span><span class="mord mathrm">d</span></span></span><span class="mspace" style="margin-right:0.2222222222222222em;"></span><span class="mspace" style="margin-right:0.05555555555555555em;"></span><span class="mord text"><span class="mord">W</span></span></span></span></span></span></span> <span class="katex-display"><span class="katex"><span class="katex-mathml"><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><semantics><mrow><mi>y</mi><mo>=</mo><mrow><mo fence="true">⌊</mo><mfrac><mi>r</mi><mtext>H</mtext></mfrac><mo fence="true">⌋</mo></mrow></mrow><annotation encoding="application/x-tex"> \it y = \left\lfloor\frac{r}{\text H}\right\rfloor </annotation></semantics></math></span><span class="katex-html" aria-hidden="true"><span class="base"><span class="strut" style="height:1.8359999999999999em;vertical-align:-0.686em;"></span><span class="mord"><span class="mord mathit">y</span><span class="mspace" style="margin-right:0.2777777777777778em;"></span><span class="mrel">=</span><span class="mspace" style="margin-right:0.2777777777777778em;"></span><span class="minner"><span class="mopen delimcenter" style="top:0em;"><span class="delimsizing size2">⌊</span></span><span class="mord"><span class="mopen nulldelimiter"></span><span class="mfrac"><span class="vlist-t vlist-t2"><span class="vlist-r"><span class="vlist" style="height:1.10756em;"><span style="top:-2.314em;"><span class="pstrut" style="height:3em;"></span><span class="mord"><span class="mord text"><span class="mord">H</span></span></span></span><span style="top:-3.23em;"><span class="pstrut" style="height:3em;"></span><span class="frac-line" style="border-bottom-width:0.04em;"></span></span><span style="top:-3.677em;"><span class="pstrut" style="height:3em;"></span><span class="mord"><span class="mord mathit">r</span></span></span></span><span class="vlist-s"></span></span><span class="vlist-r"><span class="vlist" style="height:0.686em;"><span></span></span></span></span></span><span class="mclose nulldelimiter"></span></span><span class="mclose delimcenter" style="top:0em;"><span class="delimsizing size2">⌋</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p> <p>The code equivalent to this in Python is below:</p> <div class="language-python highlighter-rouge"><div class="highlight"><pre class="highlight"><code><span class="kn">import</span> <span class="nn">random</span> <span class="c1"># r <= 0 <= W*H </span><span class="n">r</span> <span class="o">=</span> <span class="n">random</span><span class="p">.</span><span class="n">randint</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="mi">1</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">W</span><span class="o">*</span><span class="n">H</span><span class="p">)</span><span class="o">-</span><span class="mi">1</span> <span class="c1"># x = r mod W </span><span class="n">x</span> <span class="o">=</span> <span class="n">r</span> <span class="o">%</span> <span class="n">W</span> <span class="c1"># y = floor(r/H); note the special syntax python has for this operation </span><span class="n">y</span> <span class="o">=</span> <span class="n">r</span> <span class="o">//</span> <span class="n">H</span> </code></pre></div></div> <p>So that’s that, we can put this in a big ‘ol for loop and generate an arbitrary <em>n</em> number of bombs given a width and height of a Minesweeper board.</p> <h2 id="cascading-tile-revealing">Cascading Tile Revealing</h2> <p>This one is hard to describe; I am adapting this from <a href="https://leetcode.com/problems/minesweeper/">leetcode.com</a>. Whenever a player clicks a tile, the following logic should be used:</p> <ol> <li>If a mine is revealed, the game is over. (obviously)</li> <li>If a tile with <em>no</em> adjacent mines is revealed, recursively reveal all eight adjacent tiles.</li> <li>If a tile with one or more adjacent mines is revealed, display the number of mines next to it.</li> </ol> <p>Here is the code in Python for this algorithm.</p> <div class="language-python highlighter-rouge"><div class="highlight"><pre class="highlight"><code><span class="k">def</span> <span class="nf">reveal_square</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="n">x</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">y</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">board</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">alread_revealed</span><span class="p">):</span> <span class="c1"># if already checked </span> <span class="k">if</span> <span class="p">(</span><span class="n">x</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">y</span><span class="p">)</span> <span class="ow">in</span> <span class="n">already_revealed</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="k">return</span> <span class="c1"># if it's a bomb </span> <span class="k">if</span> <span class="n">board</span><span class="p">[</span><span class="n">x</span><span class="p">][</span><span class="n">y</span><span class="p">]</span> <span class="o">==</span> <span class="s">'B'</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="n">you_lose</span><span class="p">()</span> <span class="k">return</span> <span class="c1"># if the bomb number is more than 0 </span> <span class="n">already_revealed</span><span class="p">.</span><span class="n">append</span><span class="p">((</span><span class="n">nx</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">ny</span><span class="p">))</span> <span class="c1"># from -1 to 1 </span> <span class="k">for</span> <span class="n">xd</span> <span class="ow">in</span> <span class="nb">range</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="o">-</span><span class="mi">1</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="mi">2</span><span class="p">):</span> <span class="k">for</span> <span class="n">yd</span> <span class="ow">in</span> <span class="nb">range</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="o">-</span><span class="mi">1</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="mi">2</span><span class="p">):</span> <span class="c1"># skip if it is this the center tile </span> <span class="k">if</span> <span class="n">x</span><span class="o">+</span><span class="n">xd</span> <span class="o">==</span> <span class="n">x</span> <span class="ow">and</span> <span class="n">y</span><span class="o">+</span><span class="n">yd</span> <span class="o">==</span> <span class="n">y</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="k">continue</span> <span class="c1"># recursively check the adjacent square </span> <span class="n">reveal</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="n">x</span><span class="o">+</span><span class="n">xd</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">y</span><span class="o">+</span><span class="n">yd</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">board</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">already_revealed</span><span class="p">)</span> <span class="k">return</span> <span class="n">already_revealed</span> </code></pre></div></div> <p>This has no checks for valid squares, but it’s the general idea. This function returns an array of tile coordinates which should be revealed.</p> <h2 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h2> <p>I wrote this because in the first place because I was writing my own Minesweeper game. I hope that this helps you with getting the general idea of a Minesweeper game. The completed version of this game is available on my <a href="https://lamegames.tait.tech/">lamegames</a> site. Let me know what you think!</p> <p>Happy hacking!</p>When I was creating a little Minesweeper game, I got confused at some points. My bomb generation didn’t look quite right, and I for sure didn’t quite get the whole cascading tile reveal thing. With a bit of internet research, I found what I was looking for. I’ll explain it all in one place for my own research purposes.lamegames.tait.tech2020-09-09T00:00:00+00:002020-09-09T00:00:00+00:00/2020/09/09/lamegames<p>This is an announcement for a new project of mine: <a href="https://lamegames.tait.tech">lamegames.tait.tech</a>.</p> <p>This is something I’m really excited to work on!</p> <p>Right now, I’ve just got a rock-paper-scissors game. A chat function, and a few simple card games to come.</p> <p>Check out the repository on my <a href="https://github.com/TTWNO/lamegames.io">Github</a>.</p>This is an announcement for a new project of mine: lamegames.tait.tech.How to Solve The Django Deployment Puzzle2020-08-18T00:00:00+00:002020-08-18T00:00:00+00:00/2020/08/18/django-deployment<p>A few days ago I had a Django project I wanted to put on a real server. This project is still in its infancy, but I thought it would be nice to put it on my resume and show my friends. Little did I know the headache coming my way. Here are some tips to help you not make the same mistakes as me.</p> <h3 id="asgi-servers">ASGI Servers</h3> <p>Because my project used the ASGI (Asynchronous webServer Gateway Interface), I needed to find a good production ASGI server to handle all the incoming requests. The best thing I found was <a href="http://www.uvicorn.org/">uvicorn</a>. It focuses on speed, which is a priority, especially when using the ASGI protocol.</p> <p>To run uvicorn on the command line for testing purposes, use something like the following:</p> <pre class="terminal"> $ uvicorn --reload myapp.asgi:application </pre> <p>The <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">--reload</code> option says to reload the server if any of the files get updated. This is not recommended in production. Sadly, I thought this meant I would need to do a hard shutdown of the server process every time I wanted to update. This turned out to not be the case.</p> <h3 id="workload-managers">Workload Managers</h3> <p>There is another equine-named program called <a href="https://gunicorn.org/">gunicorn</a> which can hold a number of processes under its control. An interesting feature of <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">gunicorn</code> is that it will gracefully switch from an old to a new deployment, replacing the subprocesses one-by-one and eventually having only the new deployment active on all subprocesses. The greatest part? Zero down time. The server keeps any old processes open if there is communication with them, then shift and new connections to the new deployment. This was a very cool feature I wanted to take advantage of.</p> <p>“Now hold on!” you might protest. “gunicorn is a WSGI server!” … oh you got me there! Yes, that’s right, <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">gunicorn</code> is paired with <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">uvicorn</code> to serve my files.</p> <h3 id="systemd">systemd</h3> <p>Love it or hate it, the majority of Linux distributions use the <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">systemd</code> init system. I decided it would be very convenient to have a .service file for my Django application to run automatically at boot. <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">Systemd</code> allows me to do this with a file like the following one I stored in <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">/lib/systemd/system/lamegames.service</code>.</p> <pre class="file"> [Unit] Description=Gunicorn/Uvicorn (lamegames.io) [Service] WorkingDirectory=/home/lame/lamegames.io Type=simple RemainAfterExit=yes ExecStart=/home/lame/lamegames.io/env/bin/gunicorn lamegames.asgi:application -w 2 -k uvicorn.workers.UvicornWorker ExecStop=/bin/kill -HUP $MAINPID Restart=always [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target </pre> <h3 id="nginx">nginx</h3> <p>NGINX (pronounced engine-X) is a performance web server designed for speed and simplicity. For the front facing side of the site, I do need a production web server like nginx. Gunicorn simply doesn’t need all the features that nginx provides, but I do. To configure my nginx installation, I used the following few directives to:</p> <ol> <li>Redirect most traffic towards the gunicorn server.</li> <li>Redirect statically served files (CSS, JS, images) to the directory specified in the STATIC_ROOT variable of my <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">settings.py</code> file.</li> <li>Use TLS to enable https://</li> </ol> <p>Serving the static files from nginx as opposed to the <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">gunicorn</code> server is necessary. Gunicorn and other production A/WSGI web server will not set the proper MIME type over TLS. This will cause your browser to not load the Javascript/CSS.</p> <p>This is the important part of my nginx config.</p> <pre class="file"> server { location / { proxy_set_header Host $http_host; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme; # these two lines ensure that WebSocket, and HTTP2 connection are forwarded correctly proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade; proxy_set_header Connection "Upgrade"; proxy_redirect off; proxy_buffering off; # this forwards all traffic to the local server on port 8000 proxy_pass http://localhost:8000; } # This forwards all static requests to Django's STATIC_ROOT set in settings.py; it is generated using the collectstatic command. location /static { autoindex on; alias /home/lame/lamegames.io/static_generated; } } </pre> <h3 id="setup">Setup</h3> <p>After all that, I was able to do the following:</p> <pre class="terminal"> # systemctl enable lamegames </pre> <p>This enabled my <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">gunicorn</code> server to run once the server started. NGINX is that way be default.</p> <p>And tada! You now have a working Django project on a production server!</p> <h4 id="notes">Notes</h4> <ul> <li>If using ws:// websockets, change them to wss:// for secure web sockets.</li> <li>Make sure to use channels.routing.get_default_application() instead of django.get_asgi_application() if your’re wanting to use channels/redis WebSockets.</li> </ul>A few days ago I had a Django project I wanted to put on a real server. This project is still in its infancy, but I thought it would be nice to put it on my resume and show my friends. Little did I know the headache coming my way. Here are some tips to help you not make the same mistakes as me.BSD Journey, Part 12020-08-15T00:00:00+00:002020-08-15T00:00:00+00:00/2020/08/15/openbsd1<p>As Linux becomes controlled by corporate sponsors and becomes more full of proprietary blobs, drivers, and even closed-source software like Steam, One may wonder if there are other options out there. For me, somebody that is intensely interested in security, there is one option: OpenBSD.</p> <p>Now, my interest in OpenBSD has been going on for a long time. I started poking around for Linux alternatives way back a few years ago when Linus Torvalds decided to leave after he got in trouble for some <a href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/linus-torvalds-defends-his-right-to-shame-linux-kernel-developers/">unprofessional behaviour</a>. That said, Linus did come back to Linux development, but I knew that his abrasive style is what brought good code to the Linux kernel. I also knew that his ability to be critical would be hurt by the new <a href="https://itsfoss.com/linux-code-of-conduct/">code of conduct</a>. It would become a tool for the SJW types to hammer on Linus for being a “white male, et al.”; It would become a tool for the easily offended to use to get their dumb code into Linux; It would become a tool for the corporatization, the HR-ification of Linux. Frankly, this does not interest me.</p> <p>Now I’m sure that OpenBSD has its own internal policies that I disagree with. That said, Theo De Raadt is still at least known for calling Firefox an “amorphous peace of garbage” due to its lack of privilege separation. And, in their <a href="https://openbsd.org/goals.html">project goals</a> page, they specifically mention:</p> <blockquote> <p>Be as politics-free as possible; solutions should be decided on the basis of technical merit.</p> </blockquote> <p>Now that’s something I can get behind! Bet you that’s not in the Linux COC?</p> <p>He also went to university in my hometown, so that’s pretty cool! I can support a local madman who thinks he can make a better operating system than all those corporations. Maybe he was right, maybe not. What I know is I am excited to find out!</p> <p>Wish my luck on my OpenBSD journey. I will post updates here along the way.</p> <p>Happy hacking!</p>As Linux becomes controlled by corporate sponsors and becomes more full of proprietary blobs, drivers, and even closed-source software like Steam, One may wonder if there are other options out there. For me, somebody that is intensely interested in security, there is one option: OpenBSD.Know How Your Representative Votes In Parliament2020-07-30T00:00:00+00:002020-07-30T00:00:00+00:00/2020/07/30/canadian-parliament<p>As an advocate for openness, I had an idea to make a project out of the government of Canada’s <a href="https://open.canada.ca/en/open-data">Open Data</a> initiative to take a look at how my local MP voted on various pieces of legislation. It turns out though that this was not necessary due to how easy it was to find this information on the government’s own website. In this article, I will explain how you can do the same.</p> <h3 id="1-find-your-representative">1. Find Your Representative</h3> <p>The first step in this process is to find who your representative is. To do so, go to the government’s own website <a href="https://www.ourcommons.ca/Members/en">ourcommons.ca’s search tool</a>.</p> <p>Simply type in your postal code in the search box to find out who your MP is.</p> <h3 id="2-their-voting-record">2. Their Voting Record</h3> <p>Every MP’s voting record is public knowledge, and it is available nice and simple in a table on that MP’s page. For example, this is a link to <a href="https://www.ourcommons.ca/Members/en/pierre-poilievre(25524)/votes">Pierre Poilievre’s voting record</a>.</p> <p>To find your MP’s voting record, do step one, then: After the <strong>Overview</strong>, and <strong>Seat in The House</strong> sections, there are three tabs, <strong>Roles</strong>, <strong>Work</strong>, and <strong>Contact</strong>. Click on work. At the bottom of that tab is a link which says <strong>Chamber Votes</strong>. This will open a small window with some recent votes by this politician. If you want to see all their votes, there is a button at the bottom named <strong>All Votes by This Member</strong>.</p> <p>Tada! You can now keep your local MP accountable for anything you do or do not support.</p> <h3 id="3-bill-details">3. Bill Details</h3> <p>If you want to get into the nitty gritty, once you open a specific bill, you can actually find out the status of said bill, or read the actual text by clicking the <strong>View this Bill on LEGISinfo</strong> button.</p> <p>Both the status of the bill, and a link to a PDF document containing the bilingual text of the bill are visible in the main body of the page.</p> <h4 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h4> <p>I thought this was pretty cool! It was <em>way</em> simpler than I thought it would be.</p> <p>Thanks, Canada!</p>As an advocate for openness, I had an idea to make a project out of the government of Canada’s Open Data initiative to take a look at how my local MP voted on various pieces of legislation. It turns out though that this was not necessary due to how easy it was to find this information on the government’s own website. In this article, I will explain how you can do the same.Installing MultiCraft on Gentoo Linux2020-07-19T00:00:00+00:002020-07-19T00:00:00+00:00/2020/07/19/multicraft-php-gentoo<p>In a very odd combination of requirements, I needed to install <a href="https://multicraft.org">MultiCraft</a> on a Gentoo Linux system. The PHP <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">USE</code> flags are important so you don’t have to recompile it three times like I did.</p> <p>Here are some useful tips I came across:</p> <h3 id="php-use-flags">PHP <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">USE</code> flags</h3> <p>In <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">/etc/portage/package.use/php</code> I placed the following line:</p> <pre class="terminal"> dev-lang/php cgi mysql mysqli fpm pdo gd truetype </pre> <p>This should give you enough for a mysql backended MultiCraft installation. The <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">cgi</code> option may not be required as <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">fpm</code> stands for <em>FastCGI Process Managment</em>. I don’t know for sure though.</p> <h3 id="paper">Paper</h3> <p>This will grab the latest version of the Paper jar file using <a href="https://yivesmirror.com">YivesMirror</a>. I’m not sure how reputable it is, but my buddy who works with this stuff more often than me seemed to recognize it.</p> <pre class="terminal"> ## See the default craftbukkit.jar.conf for a detailed documentation of the ## format of this file. [config] name = Paper 1.16.1 Latest source = https://yivesmirror.com/files/paper/Paper-1.16.1-latest.jar category = Mods [encoding] #encode = system #decode = system #fileEncoding = latin-1 [start] command = "{JAVA}" -Xmx{MAX_MEMORY}M -Xms{START_MEMORY}M -XX:MaxPermSize=128M -Djline.terminal=jline.UnsupportedTerminal -jar "{JAR}" nogui </pre> <h3 id="other-tips">Other Tips</h3> <p>Do not use the option to setup a separate user for each server. This completely stalled any work getting done with a ton of ‘permission denied’ errors.</p> <h4 id="security">Security</h4> <p>If the panel is in the root directory of your NGINX web server, use the following in your server block to deny access to the <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">/protected</code> directory.</p> <pre class="terminal"> location /protected { deny all; return 404; } </pre> <h5 id="mysql">MySQL</h5> <p>It is always good practice to separate privileges. The MultiCraft daemon should have one SQL login, with one database allocated to it. The MultiCraft panel should have a separate SQL login, with a separate database allocated to it.</p> <p>You can do this with the following commands in your MySQL prompt:</p> <pre class="terminal"> sql> CREATE DATABASE multicraft_daemon_database; Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec) sql> CREATE DATABASE multicraft_panel_database; Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec) sql> CREATE USER 'muilticraft_daemon'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'strong password here'; Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec) sql> CREATE USER 'multicraft_panel'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'different strong password here'; Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec) sql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON multicraft_daemon_database . * TO 'multicraft_daemon'@'localhost'; Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec) sql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON multicraft_panel_database . * TO 'mutlicraft_panel'@'localhost'; Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec) </pre> <p>During setup, make sure the proper credentials are used for each step. Database 1 is the panel database. Database 2 is the daemon database.</p> <p>Happy hacking :)</p>In a very odd combination of requirements, I needed to install MultiCraft on a Gentoo Linux system. The PHP USE flags are important so you don’t have to recompile it three times like I did.Independence2020-07-12T00:00:00+00:002020-07-12T00:00:00+00:00/2020/07/12/independence<blockquote> <p>“When given a choice between independence and dependence, always choose independence; you will never regret that choice!”—Luke Smith</p> </blockquote> <p>Whatever you may believe about the YouTube personality Luke Smith, the quote above summarizes a core principle of mine. Much like many people have religious principles, I have <em>Independence</em>.</p> <p>My choice to use Linux as my primary operating system, host my own website, own my own domain name—all of these are directly related to this core principle of independence.</p> <p>I never want a man, or a company to have too much power over my life. Just like I would not trust just any person to be able to read my emails, know where I live, where I am going, who are my friends, what do I believe; in the same way, I do not trust a company with that same information.</p> <blockquote> <p>“If you want to find out what a man is to the bottom, give him power. Any man can stand adversity — only a great man can stand prosperity.”—Robert Ingersoll</p> </blockquote> <p>Take control of your own digital life:</p> <ol> <li>Own your own domain.</li> <li>Hookup an email and a website to that.</li> </ol> <p>That’s it!</p> <p>Without this, any of your internet privileges can be revoked at any time by Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, or even an angry Twitter Mob. Maybe because they hate your skin colour, maybe they hate your religious/political views, or maybe you got caught on a technicality.</p> <p>If you own your own domain, however:</p> <p>Your email provider goes down/bans you: change your provider; keep the email.</p> <p>Your website is pulled for controversial views: switch hosts.</p> <p>Protect yourself; give yourself choices. Why give others that power when you could have it for yourself?</p>“When given a choice between independence and dependence, always choose independence; you will never regret that choice!”—Luke SmithHow to use tmux to send and receive things from your Minecraft server2020-06-25T00:00:00+00:002020-06-25T00:00:00+00:00/2020/06/25/tmux-minecraft<p>So recently I had problem. I run a Minecraft server on a big Linux computer I have running in my room. Now, as a system administrator it is very helpful to be able to run some simple commands without needing to login with my key, password, TFA, etc. It is, frankly, a lot of work. Especially when I really just want to be playing games but I just need to check something quickly.</p> <p>So for simple things like finding out of the network, CPU, memory or disk usage is my bottleneck, I wrote this really nifty script to connect the world of Minecraft and the Linux shell.</p> <p>My completed solution for what I needed can be found at <a href="https://github.com/TTWNO/termcraft/">https://github.com/TTWNO/termcraft</a>.</p> <p>If you want some of the implementation details, stick around.</p> <h2 id="solution">Solution</h2> <p>So to solve this interesting problem, I decided to use <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">tmux</code>. <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">tmux</code> is a <strong>t</strong>terminal <strong>mu</strong>ltiple<strong>x</strong>er. This allows you to run a terminal session, then detach fromc it while it still runs in the background.</p> <p>This is very valuable when running command line applications that need to have an active console connection, like a Minecraft server.</p> <p>So first I looked at the <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">tmux</code> command <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">send-keys</code>.</p> <h4 id="send-keys"><code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">send-keys</code></h4> <p><code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">send-keys</code> allows you to send text, and key presses to a <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">tmux</code> session. Now assuming this <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">tmux</code> session is attached to a Minecraft server, there is no reason you could not run a command like this:</p> <pre class="terminal"> $ tmux send-keys "tell @a This is a Test" Enter </pre> <p>This will send the text “tell @a This is a Test” to the Minecraft server. Then, it will hit the newline character, this will execute the command.</p> <p>So now we can send information to the server and have it tell the users something.</p> <p>But how do we get information about who is typing what in the Minecraft chat?</p> <h3 id="tmuxs-capture-pane-is-painful"><code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">tmux</code>’s <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">capture-pane</code> is painful</h3> <p>So in the manual page for <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">tmux</code> I can see a section recorded below for options I can give to the <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">capture-pane</code> subcommand.</p> <pre class="terminal"> -S and -E specify the starting and ending line numbers, zero is the first line of the visible pane and negative numbers are lines in the history. ‘-’ to -S is the start of the history and to -E the end of the visible pane. The default is to capture only the visible contents of the pane. </pre> <p>What it seems to be saying is I can start at line <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">-S n</code> and end at line <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">-E n</code>. Negative numbers start from the bottom, so <em>in theory</em> I can do the following: <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">tmux capture-pane -S -1</code> should capture only the last line, because I’m starting from the last line. Right?</p> <p>No. It just doesn’t work. Negative numbers do <em>not</em> work with the <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">tmux capture-pane</code> subcommand.</p> <p>So I did some simple UNIX piping, like so, to get just the last thing in the chat.</p> <pre class="terminal"> $ tmux capture-pane -p -t steve | tail -n1 [SERVER] [ExtraDebuggingInfoHere]: <TaterTheTot> MY_MESSAGE </pre> <p>TaterTheTot is my Minecraft username :)</p> <p><code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">-p</code> prints the result to the terminal/stdout.</p> <p><code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">steve</code> is the name of the tmux session I’m trying to pull form.</p> <p>So that’s done! Beauty!</p> <p>Now that we have that, how can we extract the username and the message from the latest line?</p> <h3 id="grep"><code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">grep</code></h3> <p><code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">grep</code> is a command to find patterns of text. <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">grep</code> has an option to only show a matching pattern of text. This option is <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">-o</code>.</p> <p>Let’s see how we can use this in conjunction with our latest line of server output to get our results.</p> <pre class="terminal"> $ echo "[DEBUG] [SERVER] blah blah: <TaterTheTot> MY_MESAGE" | grep -o "<.*>" <TaterTheTot> </pre> <p>Now, that’s my name with the < and > attached. Not bad! We can use the <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">sed</code> command to clean it up a bit.</p> <p>The syntax is like so: <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">select/somepattern/replacewith/global</code></p> <p>So the following command is: <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">s/[<>]//g</code></p> <p>Select any characters that are either < or >. Replace with nothing. Do so globally (as in, don’t stop after you replace only one character).</p> <p>Take two!</p> <pre class="terminal"> $ echo "[DEBUG] [SERVER] blah blah: <TaterTheTot> MY_MESAGE" | grep -o "<.*>" | sed 's/[<>]//g' TaterTheTot </pre> <p>Beautiful!</p> <p>Now what about that pesky message?</p> <h3 id="more-grep-more-sed">more <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">grep</code>; more <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">sed</code></h3> <p>Simple: capture everything after the >. Leaving the user’s message entirely in tact.</p> <pre class="terminal"> $ echo "[DEBUG] [SERVER] blah blah: <TaterTheTot> MY_MESAGE" | grep -o ">.*$" | sed 's/> //' MY_MESSAGE </pre> <p>So now we have a way to get the username of someone typing in the Minecraft server chat. We have a way to find out what they said. And, we have a way to respond.</p> <p>You can imagine how these might go together for your own use case.</p> <h3 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h3> <p>This shows some pretty fun stuff you can do with a few simple Linux commands and a Minecraft server.</p> <p>I hope you learned something and found my explanations not horrific haha!</p> <p>Remember to checkout the git repository to see what I did with it: <a href="https://github.com/TTWNO/termcraft">https://github.com/TTWNO/termcraft</a>.</p> <p>Happy hacking!</p>So recently I had problem. I run a Minecraft server on a big Linux computer I have running in my room. Now, as a system administrator it is very helpful to be able to run some simple commands without needing to login with my key, password, TFA, etc. It is, frankly, a lot of work. Especially when I really just want to be playing games but I just need to check something quickly.Site Update2020-06-04T00:00:00+00:002020-06-04T00:00:00+00:00/2020/06/04/site-update<p>I updated the site with some easier to identify information about me and my projects :)</p> <p>Also, Clue has been delayed due to my partner in crime on the project wokring too many hours.</p> <p>I also posted a new project called <em><a href="https://github.com/TTWNO/caesar-cipher">Caesar Cipher</a></em> in C. It will be an intermediate example of how to use build systems like <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">make</code>.</p>I updated the site with some easier to identify information about me and my projects :)
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/_site/index.html b/_site/index.html
index fd2303d..4e2cfd4 100644
--- a/_site/index.html
+++ b/_site/index.html
@@ -1 +1 @@
- Home | tait.tech
Tait Hoyem
I have three goals in my software development career:
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/_site/sitemap.xml b/_site/sitemap.xml
index 7cbc4fe..4503334 100644
--- a/_site/sitemap.xml
+++ b/_site/sitemap.xml
@@ -1 +1 @@
- /2020/01/22/padding-and-margin.html2020-01-22T00:00:00+00:00/2020/01/26/rsa1.html2020-01-26T00:00:00+00:00/2020/02/19/rsa2.html2020-02-19T00:00:00+00:00/2020/04/02/rsa3.html2020-04-02T00:00:00+00:00/2020/04/06/rsa4.html2020-04-06T00:00:00+00:00/2020/04/12/nas1.html2020-04-12T00:00:00+00:00/2020/04/21/rfi.html2020-04-21T00:00:00+00:00/2020/04/25/xss.html2020-04-25T00:00:00+00:00/2020/05/01/nginx-socket-io-projects.html2020-05-01T00:00:00+00:00/2020/05/19/clue-announcement.html2020-05-19T00:00:00+00:00/2020/06/04/site-update.html2020-06-04T00:00:00+00:00/2020/06/25/tmux-minecraft.html2020-06-25T00:00:00+00:00/2020/07/12/independence.html2020-07-12T00:00:00+00:00/2020/07/19/multicraft-php-gentoo.html2020-07-19T00:00:00+00:00/2020/07/30/canadian-parliament.html2020-07-30T00:00:00+00:00/2020/08/15/openbsd1.html2020-08-15T00:00:00+00:00/2020/08/18/django-deployment.html2020-08-18T00:00:00+00:00/2020/09/09/lamegames.html2020-09-09T00:00:00+00:00/2020/09/12/minesweeper.html2020-09-12T00:00:00+00:00/2020-04-27-quiz-your-friends-xss.html/blog///tutoring//cover-letters/bloombase//resume//links//cover-letter-vcc//contact//about//scholarships/2020/cnib/
\ No newline at end of file
+ /2020/01/22/padding-and-margin.html2020-01-22T00:00:00+00:00/2020/01/26/rsa1.html2020-01-26T00:00:00+00:00/2020/02/19/rsa2.html2020-02-19T00:00:00+00:00/2020/04/02/rsa3.html2020-04-02T00:00:00+00:00/2020/04/06/rsa4.html2020-04-06T00:00:00+00:00/2020/04/12/nas1.html2020-04-12T00:00:00+00:00/2020/04/21/rfi.html2020-04-21T00:00:00+00:00/2020/04/25/xss.html2020-04-25T00:00:00+00:00/2020/05/01/nginx-socket-io-projects.html2020-05-01T00:00:00+00:00/2020/05/19/clue-announcement.html2020-05-19T00:00:00+00:00/2020/06/04/site-update.html2020-06-04T00:00:00+00:00/2020/06/25/tmux-minecraft.html2020-06-25T00:00:00+00:00/2020/07/12/independence.html2020-07-12T00:00:00+00:00/2020/07/19/multicraft-php-gentoo.html2020-07-19T00:00:00+00:00/2020/07/30/canadian-parliament.html2020-07-30T00:00:00+00:00/2020/08/15/openbsd1.html2020-08-15T00:00:00+00:00/2020/08/18/django-deployment.html2020-08-18T00:00:00+00:00/2020/09/09/lamegames.html2020-09-09T00:00:00+00:00/2020/09/12/minesweeper.html2020-09-12T00:00:00+00:00/2020/10/26/curiosity.html2020-10-26T00:00:00+00:00/2020-04-27-quiz-your-friends-xss.html/blog///tutoring//cover-letters/bloombase//resume//links//cover-letter-vcc//contact//about//scholarships/2020/cnib/
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/_site/tutoring/index.html b/_site/tutoring/index.html
index 58c1229..607f329 100644
--- a/_site/tutoring/index.html
+++ b/_site/tutoring/index.html
@@ -1 +1 @@
- Tutoring | tait.tech
Tutoring
I believe in solving problems. Learn how to solve your own unique computer-related problems by learning how they work underneath all the fancy buttons you see.
\ No newline at end of file
+ Tutoring | tait.tech
Tutoring
I believe in solving problems. Learn how to solve your own unique computer-related problems by learning how they work underneath all the fancy buttons you see.
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/about/index.md b/about/index.md
index c3acc97..2b43ac2 100644
--- a/about/index.md
+++ b/about/index.md
@@ -1,52 +1,8 @@
---
layout: default
-title: "Home"
+title: "About"
---
-## Tait Hoyem
-
-
-
-
-
-### About
-
-I am a student at the Southern Alberta Insitute of Technology (SAIT).
-
-My fascination lies primarily with operating system internals and systems-level tools.
-My goal is to bring the everyday computing environment of Linux/BSD nerds to visually impaired users, and to ensure the saftey, privacy and security of the internet.
-Some of my projects reflect this.
-
-I have all of my code projects hosted on [my Github](https://github.com/TTWNO).
-
-### Projects
-
-**[epub-with-pinyin](https://github.com/TTWNO/epub-with-pinyin)** ---
-I wrote a program to add Pinyin above Chinese characters in .epub files to assist myself and others learning Mandarin Chinese.
-
-**[chess](https://github.com/TTWNO/chess)** ---
-I wrote a command-line chess game in C++. It is compileable on almost any system.
-
-**[tait.tech](https://github.com/TTWNO/tait.tech)** ---
-All the code for my website is open source.
-
-**[Napolean](https://github.com/TTWNO/Napolean)** ---
-A work-in-progress suite of tools to be used in conjunction with a Raspberry Pi
-and camera to produce text files from scanned books.
-
-**[subnetting](https://github.com/TTWNO/subnetting)** ---
-A one-night write of a tool to automatically calculate network subnet masks based on required hosts and base IP.
-
-I also ocassionally put content on my [lbry channel](https://lbry.tv/@tait:7), and the [blog I host on this site](/blog/).
-
-#### Ideas
-
-Sometimes I have ideas that I haven't done anything with yet.
-Those are [here](/ideas/).
-
-### Contact
-
-You can reach me via email at [tait@tait.tech](mailto:tait@tait.tech)
-
-If you use PGP, [this is my public key](/public-key.asc)
+# Tait Hoyem
+I believe in three fundamentals
![A longer Ceasar cipher encrypted message: ROT2: Wpeng Vgf ku dqqogt ogog]](/assets/img/ceasar2.jpg)
