Ryan
Chasing greatness

So I don’t really have a whole lot to report in this entry.  I’ll just write some stuff thats going on.

First off, my dear friend Courtney is writing quite a lot about how she misses Japan.  That makes me feel like we were able to help her and Jason have a better trip.

Also, a lot of the differences between Japanese and Americans that I have written about somewhat bitterly have mostly faded away.  Sure, the facts of the matter haven’t changed, but you learn to just accept it or ignore it and go on with your life.  When that happens, the country opens up and becomes a pretty neat place.

This morning I wrote  a new template for our lessons and presented it to the boss and some others.  I didn’t make the new template to insinuate that things are bad, and I don’t think that is how it was received, but it could certainly be taken that way.  I don’t know how I would feel if I had been doing a job for 15 years and then someone shows up with 6 months of experience and proposes a completely different way of doing things.

Still, this is one of the first jobs I have had near complete autonomy in.  That is a great thing.  It allows you to put yourself in the situation where you can have an honest moment to take pride in the good work you have done, and fix the gross failures along the way.  There is nobody looking over my shoulder except me, and that pushes me harder.  That is what drives me to make new things.

In other things I have started reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne.  I’m about half way through and nothing has happened.  Good stuff.

I have almost finished my Login Tracker program that will securely store your user names and passwords.  I have come to find out that when you wish to authenticate a user in MacOS you are encouraged to use C instead of their own Objective-C due to the fact that Objective-C is full of security holes.  I’m really pleased that Apple admits it, but I’d like them to get on the ball and handle that.

I’ve also been seriously thinking about my next project.  A zombie game.  Completely done by procedural generation.  My biggest obstacles so far is that it is a huge undertaking, and I lack confidence that I can produce a game that will actually be fun and worth the effort.  I have a million ideas, but are the ideas of high enough quality to warrant the work?

I guess we’ll see.  I was told the biggest thing game companies look for when they hire is that they want to see that you have moved from a dreamer to a doer.  Thats he goal.

Couple of things.  For all you millions that love to read my dribble, I’m sorry I didn’t notice that my RSS feed is hosed.  This is some weird glitch with WordPress and Permalinks.  There don’t seem to be any solutions to the problem and I don’t really feel like playing with it.

Second, for my pam_quiz login security project I still need to study its effectiveness.  Essentially I have to set up some VMs, one as an attacker, and one as a victim with my pam_quiz on it.  The attacker will simply brute force its way in and I will find out if it succeeds or not.  Then, after that I can hopefully put this on a real honeypot that is exposed and see how it works.

For now, I have moved onto another project.  I’m riding high on the fact that I finished a project and I’m not wasting time.  This time my project is a Cocoa (MacOS 10.x) project that will manage your various online accounts.

Essentially it will be a like a little spreadsheet to keep track of all of your user names, passwords, sites they correspond to, and some other little features.  I want this little application to give a good consolidating solution to the myriad of online accounts people keep now.

Some future features:

• Password/Passphrase generation
• Automatic login to websites.
• Encrypted/dencrypted password view

For now though I’m just getting my hands dirty learning to make a Cocoa app in XCode.  I’ve never used any of that stuff before, so it is a challenge.  I’m hoping I can get a lot done over break, but that is pretty unrealistic I think.

Well, I have finally written a PAM module.  It is very simple and I had to cut lots of corners just to make it work.  I’m sad about that, but I have something that I can build off of now.

Originally I wrote this whole thing in C++ because I wanted it to grow in time.  Unfortunately I think it got so large in size as a shared object that PAM simply couldn’t load it, even though it ran fine as  a program.

So I knocked half of the functionality out and rewrote it in C.  Big deal you might say, but going from the beauty of OO to simple procedural isn’t always fun.  Anyway, I’ve tested it some and it works pretty well.  I had to cut division out of my arithmetic questions because it is too hard to compare floating point strings, and nobody really wants to pull out a calculator for 7/8.

If you are interested in playing with it, its in the software tabs at the top.

On to the funny story.

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Friday the 12th or Saturday the 12th depending on where you are, was Megan’s birthday.

We took her out to to eat, got her a cake, and she got lots of presents from everyone at work too.  Essentially she’ll be a diabetic by the end of the week.

So, happy late birthday Megan!

Unfortunately I got sick on Saturday and pretty much killed that day’s event’s.

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So I was pretty happy with how my project was going, but I’ve hit a pretty impassible wall.

I’ve been trying to link my program in with the PAM system, but PAM hates it and isn’t debuggable.  That is wicked awesome.

I have another option that I don’t feel up to exploring, and that is to rewrite it in C instead of C++.  Mostly because PAM only likes C and I’m not sure if it isn’t C++ that is causing the problems.