nick has a blog!

If you haven’t heard already, Gawker Media has been hacked! Long story short: The Gnosis crew has taken credit for breaking into Gawker Media’s servers and downloaded a database of roughly 1.3 million user records. One of the big stories here was that Gawker stored user passwords using the block cipher DES (Data Encryption Standard). [...]

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Nmap is one of those programs that I can’t live without.  Whether I’m using it to learn more about my own network, or somebody else’s network, it really gives me a better picture of what other devices are on the network without actually having to actually physically see the device. Scanning your network One of [...]

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I love programming competitions.  In the past two years I’ve participated in both my school’s programming competition and the ACM Southern California regional competition.  Recently I’ve been turned onto http://projecteuler.net which is a competition-like site that gives you a series of math questions which you need to solve by writing a program.  I saw this [...]

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This past weekend I spent writing an application using the CodeIgniter framework for my programming languages class.  Sunday night I finally got it working and it was time to move it to production on bluehost.  After I made created the database and made some configuration changes I checked it out and I got nothing.  It [...]

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Say we want to pre-fill out a form with data retrieved from an XML file.  Once we parse the XML, we need to update the form.  If you know the jQuery library, using the val() and attr() methods are trivial for most inputs.  What about select drop-downs?  There’s no easy way to add the “selected” [...]

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So I pretty much have not updated whatsoever this semester.  Between school, work, homework and trying to maintain a social life, I haven’t had time for anything else.  With school over with in a week I’ll have free time again!  What will I be doing with this time?  This is what I got so far: [...]

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I have started the third week of school and already I feel like I need to do homework every day to catch up. Taking Calculus and Physics at Cuesta and two online classes at Cal State Channel Islands has taken its toll on my available free time.  There are some things I’ve given up during [...]

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