In the last 8 months, I’ve captured and analyzed 4.4 billion network packets from my home internet connection, representing 3833 GiB of data. Life basically occurs via the internet when you’re stuck at home. Facetime calls, streaming anime, browsing reddit, and even video conferencing for my job — all of it gets funneled into my custom network monitoring software for decoding, logging, and analysis. Needless to say, most internet communication uses encrypted TLS tunnels, which are opaque to passive network observers. However, there’s a ton of interesting details exposed in the metadata — as network engineers and application programmers, we’ve repeated this adage to ourselves countless times. However, few people have actually inspected their own internet traffic to confirm exactly what kind of data they’re exposing this way. Developing my own network traffic analysis software has helped me solidify my… more →

I buy stuff when I’m bored. Sometimes, I buy random computer parts to spark project ideas. This usually works really well, but when I bought a 2TB external hard drive the week before thanksgiving, I wasn’t really sure what to do with it. At the time, I was in college, and two terabytes was way more storage than I had in my laptop, but I knew that hard drives weren’t the most reliable, so I wasn’t about to put anything important on it. There just wasn’t that much I could do with only one hard drive. I ended up writing a multithreaded file checksum program designed to max out the hard drive’s sequential throughput, and that was that. Years later, after having written a few custom file backup and archival tools, I decided it’d be nice to have an “air… more →

Last year, I sold my laptop. I owned it for about 15 months, and in that time, I took it outside on maybe three occasions. The laptop hardly left my desk. I didn’t even open the lid, because most of the time, it was just plugged into an external monitor, speakers, keyboard, and mouse. So, I decided to ditch the laptop on craigslist and get a Mac mini instead. My first Mac mini broke, so I ordered another. The process was really simple. There’s three different Apple Stores within 15 minutes driving distance of my apartment, and all of them stock my base model Core i5 Mac mini. There’s even a courier service where Postmates will hand-deliver Apple products right to your door within 2 hours if you live close enough. I liked the extra processor cores, the extra I/O… more →

One of the biggest solo projects I’ve ever completed is Ef, my custom data backup system. I’ve written about data loss before, but that post glazed over the software I actually use to create backups. Up until a year ago, I used duplicity to back up my data. I still think duplicity is an excellent piece of software. Custom backup software had been on my to-do list for years, but I kept postponing the project because of how good my existing solution was already. I didn’t feel confident that I could produce something just as sophisticated and reliable on my own. But as time passed, I decided that until I dropped third-party solutions and wrote my own backup system, I’d never fully understand the inner workings of this critical piece of my personal infrastructure. So last June, I started writing… more →

I don’t cut my own hair. I can’t change my own engine oil. At the grocery store, I always pick Tide and Skippy, even though the generic brand is probably cheaper and just as good. “Well, that’s dumb,” you say. “Don’t you know you could save a lot of money?”, you say. But that isn’t the point. Sure, my haircut is simple. I could buy some hair clippers, and I’d love to save a trip to the dealership every year. But there are people who are professionals at cutting hair and fixing cars, and I wouldn’t trust them to program their own computers. So why should they trust me to evaluate different brands of peanut butter? Fortunately, they’ve made the choice really simple, even for amateurs like me. In fact, everyone relies on modern convenience to some extent. Even if you… more →

I don’t know a single person who actually supports the FCC’s recent proposal to deregulate broadband internet access by reclassifying it as an information service. However, I also never did meet a single person who unironically supported last year’s President-elect, but that doesn’t seem to have made any difference. There were certainly a lot of memes in last year’s U.S. election cycle, but I remember first seeing memes about net neutrality when I was in high school. That was before all the Comcast-Verizon-YouTube-Netflix hubbub and before net neutrality was at the forefront of anyone’s mind. So naturally, net neutrality got tossed out and ignored along with other shocking but “purely theoretical” future problems like climate change and creepy invasive advertising1. But I’ve seen some of those exact same net neutrality infographics resurface in the last couple weeks, and in retrospect,… more →

I’ve always liked things straight and direct to the point. But I feel a bit silly writing that here, since most of my blog posts from high school used a bunch of long words for no reason. My writing did eventually become more concise, but it happened around the time I also sort of stopped blogging. I stopped writing altogether for a few years, but then in college, I started doing an entirely different kind of writing. I wrote homework assignments and class announcements for the computer science classes as a teaching assistant. Technical writing is different from blogging, but writing for a student audience also has its own unique challenges. The gist of it is that students don’t like reading, which is naturally at odds with the long detailed project specs that some of our projects require. It’s the… more →

My laptop’s hard drive crashed in 2012. I was on campus walking by Evans Hall, when I took my recently-purchased Thinkpad x230 out of my backpack to look up a map (didn’t have a smartphone), only to realize it wouldn’t boot. This wasn’t a disaster by any means. It set me back $200 to rush-order a new 256GB Crucial M4 SSD. But since I regularly backed up my data to an old desktop running at my parent’s house, I was able to restore almost everything once I received it1. I never figured out why my almost-new laptop’s hard drive stopped working out of the blue. The drive still spun up, yet the system didn’t detect it. But whether it was the connector or the circuit board, that isn’t the point. Hardware fails all the time for no reason2, and you should… more →

I got my first computer when I was 8. It was made out of this beige-white plastic and ran a (possibly bootlegged) copy of Windows ME1. Since our house had recently gotten DSL installed, the internet could be on 24 hours a day without tying up the phone line. But I didn’t care about that. I was perfectly content browsing through each of the menus in Control Panel and rearranging the files in My Documents. As long as I was in front of a computer screen, I felt like I was in my element and everything was going to be alright. Computers have come a long way. Today, you can rent jiggabytes of data storage for literally pennies per month (and yet iPhone users still constantly run out of space to save photos). For most people living in advanced capitalist societies,… more →

There’s a new article in the SF Chronicle that says the University of California, Office of the President (UCOP) has been monitoring emails going in and out of the UC system by using computer hardware. I wanted to give my personal opinion, as a computer programmer and somebody who has experience managing mail exchangers1. The quotes in the SF Cron article are very generous with technical details about the email surveillance system. Most of the time, articles about mass surveillance are dumbed down, but this one gives us at least a little something to chew on. Email was not originally designed to be a secure protocol. Over the three (four?) decades that email systems have been used, computer people have created several extensions to the original SMTP2 and 822 envelope protocol to provide enough modern security to make email “good enough” for modern use.… more →

Last December was the biggest month for RogerHub ever. We served over 4 million hits, which consumed over 3 terabytes of bandwidth. By request, we released the 6th calculator mode, “lowest test dropped”, to the public. But during the same month, we experienced the biggest outage that has ever happened on RogerHub, which affected over 60,000 visitors, and the number of total spam comments has nearly doubled. I keep using “we”, even though this is a one-man operation, because these seasonal surges of traffic feel a lot bigger than just me. Toward the end of the month, my hosting provider Linode was targeted by several large DDoS attacks across all their US datacenters. RogerHub is run in 2 Linode locations: Dallas, TX and Fremont, CA. However, only one location is active at any time. The purpose of the inactive location… more →

This is Notes.app, which I use to save rich text and organize ideas. I like it because it’s not a website, it’s a native OS X app. And because it opens in a small window that fits on the side of the screen, I feel creative and comfortable writing notes here. But it doesn’t sync with my Android phone. It only syncs with an iCloud account, and I don’t use iCloud for anything except iTunes purchases and this. It’s also a little buggy with too much rich text. I use vim for all my text editing1, and I wanted to use vim for notes too. But it didn’t work out. Rich text lets me put in checkmarks like ✔︎, and I can start bulleted list with wiki-style syntax. There’s a font color palette, and you can paste images and headings into it directly from… more →