To whoever visits this page as result of me handing out my resumé on the Colorado School of Mines Spring 2011 Career Day, greetings! To other potential employers who found this page in another manner, I extend the same greeting. You can find my contact information on my About page. You can also download my single-page resumé, or view my Google profile for a more in-depth description of myself.
A couple of cool VPS tips
May 30
So I’m transferring VPS hosts, as of less than an hour ago. Not that there was anything to transfer (I store important stuff on local systems, backed up to BackBlaze, and host this blog and my other personal stuff on MDDHosting) but I’ll be ending my stint at Virpus Networks with the end of my billing cycle. Not that they’re bad or anything, but with my new provider, QuickWeb, I’ll be utilizing what’s arguably the world’s best data center network (SoftLayer) and spending less money while I’m at it ($25 every three months instead of $12 every month).
The server also seems to be more snappy; not sure whether it’s because the Virpus server is packing more VPSes onto a machine stocked with four dual-core Pentium 4 based Xeon chips (at 3 GHz) versus the QuickWeb Xeon 3220 VPS count or what, but the QuickWeb server feels…well…quicker. Sure, I’ll be limited to 1TB of transfer (yeah I know, *limited*) per month (versus 1500GB for $7 or 3000GB for $12 at Virpus) but that 1TB can be transferred over a fire hose of a connection: a gigabit port, to be exact. Needless to say, if I need to deliver some files quickly to a bunch of folks they’re going on this server.
But back to the title of this post…here are some quick VPS-related tips…key words will be linked…eventually… Read the rest of this entry »
I just finished writing my final report for Intro to Modern Cryptography. The topic: a light, home-brewed, C++, library-asisted OpenPGP equivalent for encrypting files. The basic concept is as follows for OpenPGP:
- Symmetric encryption (AES etc.) is fast but you have to get the key from point A to point B securely
- Asymmetric encryption (RSA etc.) negates the key sharing requirement but is slow
- Asymmetrically encrypt a symmetric “session” key, then use the session key to encrypt the file/message you’re trying to send and you get the best of both worlds!
So I made a command line utility, using the Chilkat Visual C++ library set, that did the above for file encryption, with automatic signing built in so the recipient knows who sent the file. The application is rather basic, but it works very well (and pretty quickly for encryption/decryption…my IdeaPad took about seven seconds each to encrypt and decrypt a 100MB file) and is easy to dissect for anyone who wants to do that sort of thing.
For more information, download the package below Read the rest of this entry »
So I finally updated my About page and my Google profile to reflect where I am now, rather than where I was six-plus months ago. Or thereabouts.
I should also note that I ran for Student Body President here at Mines. This isn’t the first time I’ve run for such a position; I ran last year for Junior Class Treasurer (a friend was running for Junior Class President and I didn’t want to split the ticket), and in fall 2007 I ran for Freshman Class President. This is the first time I was soundly defeated; the other two positions were won by a handful of votes by my opponent. Read the rest of this entry »
UPDATE 4: Added a Kerrville Daily Times link for a new article on how 911 is handled. Lots of good information there.
UPDATE 3: Added another news source. Swamped by homework so tweets will have to wait, but other than those I think I’ve got all the online info on the outage linked from here.
UPDATE 2: Added another couple of news sources, corrected one of my usual typos…some how I forgot to add a “not” into the paragraph about Wal-Mart taking credit card transactions. Sorry for the confusion. Also modified information based on an article from the Fredericksburg Standard Radio-Post. The link below takes you to the subscriber-only version of the article; the non-subscriber snippet just makes the paper look bad (very little info).
UPDATE: Added some more news articles, (still) working on collecting all tweets about the incident, revised some information for accuracy (originally wasn’t sure about CricKet and Pocket, but they too were taken down by the outage…DSL was also apparently iffy in Kerrville).
Granted, I wasn’t in the area when it happened, but since I have plenty of family and friends down there I’m certainly going to talk about it! Read the rest of this entry »
