I just made the discovery the other day that I’ve been on co-op for over a month, and time shows no sign of slowing down! For those of you who haven’t had the delight of hearing me expound on how much I love my co-op, I have really found a place where I fit in, am challenged everyday, and don’t have to do any tedious work, just cutting edge security research!

Anyways, now that I’ve gotten that over with, I was up at Clarkson the other week for the career fair, and I went up the night before for the COSI meeting. That evening a new member introduced a new project to add easy to use AI libraries to the Processing language. I thought that is might be a good idea to take a look at AI stuff before I take the class when I return, so I’m excited to dive in and learn what I can! Also, after learning how little I really know about virtualization, and seeing how popular it is, I thought I’d like to jump on the bandwagon and learn about it. Last night I bought Running Xen and its sister book The Definitive Guide to Xen and I proposed (through Zach) that to learn more about it, I’d like to form a rag tag groups of hackers and write our own, open-source virtualization application, whatever that entails. I hope to post soon as I start learning what I’m in for.

Peace and chow,

Ranok

Seeing as I’m going to have no homework for the next semester (!!) I’m hoping to get some more projects underway in my down time. I’m going to use this post as a dump of my current interests and as a road-map for where I want to go in the next few months. I’m sure this will change as time goes on, but I need to start somewhere!

Projects in progress:

• FANG – I’d like to polish the multi-processing system, add namespaces, and tie it into the Erlang stdlib. Also add macros (real macros!) to FANG.
• OSP – I’m going to be using OSP as a basis for LadieBug (mentioned below). This will hopefully give me perspective into what I should work on in OSP to make it more friendly for development.

New projects:

• I’d like to take advantage of LaunchPad’s ‘Personal Package Archive’ system to host a few of my own Ubuntu packages, namely a more up-to-date version of Erlang’s OTP system.
• LadieBug – To take advantage of OSP’s distributed data store, I’d like to implement my own caching, recursive DNS server that would be both DNSSEC and DNSCurve compliant and would share the cache over the entire cluster, making it more scalable and reduce the number of needless queries.

That’s about all I can think of at the moment, if anyone would like to help me on any of these, feel free to comment below and we can get in touch.

Peace and chow,

Ranok

I spent my birthday yesterday polishing up FANG for it’s initial release to the public, after adding some error handling so it would fail more gracefully and adding the ability to parse in files and save the current state of the system to a file for later retrieval. I also did away with the rather hideous use of the process dictionary and moved to an auto balanced tree structure for storing the data.

Over break, I’m hoping to add enough other features to warrant a 0.2 release, which I’d like to have support for soft-processes (ala Erlang), multi-node support and transactional shared memory (using Mnesia). I would also like to add permissions and process jailing for the soft-processes to allow for running untrusted code in a sandbox of sorts.

I’ve started a very simple (and ugly) site to put my progress and releases. You can check it out here and please comment with suggestions or other features you’d think would be a valuable addition. Good luck on everyone’s finals and projects! Have a wonderful break!

Peace and chow,

Ranok

Well, it’s about time for there to be another Lulz of the Day! Today we’ll be lulzing about Ark, my IRC anti-floodbot script. As an IRCop on a network, I am constantly figthing floodbots who join, /msg everyone on the network some spam and then disconnect. I figured that there must be a way to stop them, and so I diligently started working on Ark. Ark is a perlscript that connects to an IRC server as an IRCop and joins the most popular channels (which you specify). It then waits quietly, bidding its time until it gets /msg’d. Once it receives a message, it springs into action, checking the received message against a list of regexs. If any of them match, it will /kill the bot and resume its slumber.

This very simple, yet oddly helpful script can be downloaded from my code site

Peace and chow,

Ranok

While cleaning up my hard drive, I’ve come across many old projects that are pretty interesting, and I thought I’d start a mini-series of these little pearls (perls?) I come across as I find them. Without further ado, lets start with our first Lulz of the Day (LOTD)!

Cesspool

As many of you know, I’m in the systems biology class this semester, and recently we spent a week or so looking at the genetic algorithm and its applications. I immediately began hacking on a genetic algorithm to ‘breed’ a Corewars warrior. The code for this is pretty simple, and still needs much revision, but it’s bred some programs that are pretty good. I’m going to run it a few times and try to put together some statistics in the next few days, but for now, you can download the source and play around with it as you wish. Basically what it does is:

1. Generates some initial warriors with random commands and arguments
2. Pits the warriors against themselves in battle using the corewars-cmd command
3. Ranks them by their scores
4. Cross breeds the best 20% of the population, and mutate the rest (with 5% chance of mutation)
5. Repeat from step 2 for the number of generations.

Todo:

• Modify the cross-breeding algorithm so it doesn’t just append one program to the other, but mixes up the commands of both
• Small bug fixes with the scraper for the corewars-cmd results
• Run a number of times, and then pit the best generated warriors against some made by humans

Peace and lulz,

Ranok