Slowly starting to get a bit of a handle on this whole computer security thing. Bit different than what I am use to working on. So a lot of learning is needed.... But Have been working through some stuff on Webgoat to get a handle on things, and playing a bit with javascript. Just hoping a big aha moment comes soonish.

Also got a little Blade mcx. So much fun to fly. Even made a couple of precise landings. Hopefully next summer will even manage to pick up a plane or two and fly regularly.

And ML and I got the scratch holograms working the other day. Have tons of lexan so should be able to do some really cool things with that.

Have been so lazy about posting anything lately. Have gotten into a routine with work mostly. And got a copy of COD4 for the ps3, so have been 'busy'. On the other end of things though I am in a new adventure of web application security. Kind of complex since I haven't done any before. Starting to make sense though. Also a little system level security. Setting up a snort server in a virtual machine with freeBSD. Could be interesting. An excuse to play around with BSD Jails. Haven't really used that yet much. Similar to solaris containers. Concept is easy to understand, and likely not that hard to use regularly once I use it a lot.

Also ordered a book on rootkits and another on honeypots. Could be interesting to build my own security test network. See how things work at a finer level. Kind of a shift in direction for me, but still interesting. And can use the number crunching stuff to deal with brute force decryption.....

http://library.transparent.com/test_spp/flashcards/login?continue=/test_spp/flashcards/

test

library.transparent.com/testspp/flashcards

Have to leave soon for work. But want to still get a quick post up as I am not doing many during the week. Hung out with ML over the weekend and we played around with scratch holograms. Pretty cool stuff. Fairly crazy that it works.

Other than that just working on some programming stuff. Truing to get better with openGL and the such. Need to rewrite the graphics engine for Game of life so that it uses vector buffer objects instead of the depricated immediate vertex display mode. Won't be terribly difficult, but will take a little thought. Think the easiest way is instead of changing the verticies based on the state of the board, will change the display color. The only thing is that means that each cell will actually be drawn, while right now some are and some aren't. Think that will be easier than rewriting both the vertex and color vectors each tick/cycle of the 'game'. Especially since that will involve destroying a dynamically allocated array, and creating a new one each time. With changing the colors it just means changing the contents of the color vector. Will have to see. Probably start working on that and a few other little ones after work.

Ok, the simple toroidal board version also works now...... Think the cool interface is where it actually looks like a torus will take a long long time to do.

Wrote an implementation today of John Conway's Game of Life with openGL for the display. It is pretty cool Right now it uses a simple flat board. I want to add the option to choice a toroidal board. Also would be cool if that board could also be displayed as a torus and the viewpoint in space could be navigated with the mouse. That however will be much more difficult; I am going to need much more graphics programming experience before that takes place. Though this is pretty cool. A vast improvement compared to the one I wrote back in high school that used ASCII art to display the state of the board and the such. Think this one might even be shorter. Wish I still had the code somewhere from my old version. I know I had printed out the source way back when, but I doubt it is still around. Have a bunch of things I want to do to enhance this though. Everything from the data structure (using a simple set of 2x 2D arrays right now), graphics, options, and add some openMP segments as well to utilize multicore processors. Not that it really needs to go faster. I had to add in a 'do nothing' type function to slow it down a bit so that it is a bit less of a blur on the screen. I want to do something better with that though. So the original idea of using this as a practice project for CUDA is sort of being scrapped. Can't even imagine the size board I would need to require that much multithreaded performance.