Fuzz Testing and Being a Dick
I really couldn't help myself with this one. Someone gave me the privledge to play around with their pet project, and the first thing I thought of was to read the HTML, and write a bash loop to spew all over it. We both got a kick out of it.
my $perl;
My first exposure to Perl was near the end of high school when I was working as a computer assistant at the USDA Forest Service. I really can't recall the exact gut feeling Perl gave me at the time, but I imagine it was a mixture of disgust and delight. A few years later, near the end of my undergrad career, Perl came back into my life. Only instead of a few simplistic scripts, Perl was now the core language for my job.
Kernel Designs
I really enjoyed my introductory operating systems class at Berkeley. The class focused on classic high level OS concepts like process models, virtual memory, concurrency, and more. To go along with the material, teams of 4 formed to implement components in a toy OS called Nachos. The purpose of this was to keep students focused on the concepts rather than wade through the quagmire that is x86 assembly.
Emacs Tips
Earlier, I wrote a quick into of how to customize your emacs, but then I realized that I had no running list of cool emacs tricks. This article sets out to remedy that with a list of my favorite commands. It's by no means complete, so I'll keep adding on to when when I learn more stuff. The Gnu Emacs Manual is a good reference to flip through from time to time to learn new tricks.
Rails Tips
I have started, abandoned, and restarted many pet rails projects. All hype aside, I've collected a fair amount of rails idioms. Whenever I come across a problem I know I've dealt with in the past, I usually run a few greps through my past projects to look for an answer. The following pages are disorganized tips of things I have done that are useful.