Archive for category General

…and we’re back

After attempting to install Drupal 8 and use that as my personal website, I relented. This site is primarily a blog, so WordPress ends up being the best fi, until such time as I (or someone else) builds something better.

I’ve (finally) updated my About and Work pages (though the latter is a placeholder for the time being), so the information there is now current. If there’s something you’d like to know, I can’t guarantee an answer, but feel free to ask!

I’ll be posting something later tonight, but I should grab something to eat before everything closes first…

Three Reasons I Like Frontier Airlines

Some people don’t like Denver’s hometown airline, which has seen its share of hardtimes. However I’m happy they are still around, even if I’m flying a competitor (typically United or Southwest) on a given day. Here are a couple reasons why I appreciate them, despite checked-bag charges and a rewards program that doesn’t fit my needs very well… Read the rest of this entry »

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Halfway Through Grad School

I haven’t posted here nearly enough lately, and (more importantly) I want to be semi-productive without actually being productive this evening. So adding a post to my personal blog (rather than updating my Facebook status or tweeting) seemed like a good idea at the time…  Read the rest of this entry »

Hello Industry Representatives!

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

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 »

MASC: Miniature/Modifiable Asymmetric-Symmetric Cryptosystem

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:

  1. Symmetric encryption (AES etc.) is fast but you have to get the key from point A to point B securely
  2. Asymmetric encryption (RSA etc.) negates the key sharing requirement but is slow
  3. 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 »

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Page Updates, Class Elections

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 »

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