Stopped in Yoho national park recently, and managed to catch a train passing through the lower spiral tunnel heading uphill. About halfway through the video you’ll see me surprised by the loopback, and zooming out to catch the same train coming back across the near side of the valley.
Want to see something terribly old from my past? This is “Chopstix” a restaurant order entry and management system. It puts the curse in libcurses, and shows why dot matrix printers are both fantastic (run forever) and awful (vendor specific control codes). It also taught me a lot about user experience, designing for stability and extensibility. I’m releasing it as-is – it was last built against OpenBSD 4.2 which is long since deprecated.
https://github.com/OWASP/Security-Principles/blob/master/Principles.md
Great reading on security principles for system design. 70+ simple statements to ponder when designing systems.
Blog post I wrote for code.hootsuite.com on how we moved the Ow.ly server infrastructure from coast to coast.
More from my code attic, this is “libpigeon” – the (carrier) pigeon for messaging in a nomadic filesystem I built between 2002-2007. In hindsight this should have been 2 separate libraries, isolating the communication transport from the messaging. The entire API generated here utilizes state machines and callbacks to avoid any blocking network or disk operations outside of the initialization.
Here are some highlights:
This is the entire specification for the over-the-wire message format. Implementing in ASN.1 allowed the use of automatic code generation to handle all wire traffic, and automatically created structures for use in code that exactly matched the specification. Inside are definitions for locking behaviour, rights & permissions, crypto tokens, data protection, and much more.
The heavy lifting of setting up the GSSAPI security context, ensuring both client and server are valid principals, and enabling encryption & signatures. It uses the libevent bufferevent API to handle network IO. Connection principals are surfaced for access control by the caller.
Fully asynchronous DNS resolver capable of handling SRV records in addition to standard queries. From an age when libc resolvers blocked and suffered race conditions.
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That’s all for today, hope you enjoy!
Digging up old code from old projects. This is a Kerberos password change CGI that was originally built for a security product. Updated to run on OpenBSD 5.3.
WrathOfChris 