This game sucks!

Here at the ANML we make fairly heavy (although not exclusive) use of Linux-based operating systems. We've also been known to indulge in the occasional video game. Mario Kart Double Dash on the Nintendo Gamecube (yes, we know it's not the latest technology) is a perennial favourite, but a couple of lab staff members are known to possess a Nintendo DS. Naturally, we could not resist combining Linux and the DS. The entire distribution fits in a few megabytes of flash memory. It's got wireless networking support, an ssh client, perl (it might not be clear in the picture there, but that's a perl "hello world" being run... what more could one need? Okay so the user input method leaves something to be desired, and if we're honest, we admit that this probably won't be pressed into service as anyone's desktop workstation, but it's a neat proof of concept sort of thing. Sometimes it's fun to do things just because you can.

Fundamentals of Logic

Every good geek should know what a logic gate is. If you dig down through the layers of software and hardware, they're one of the building blocks of every modern computer. Now, you can learn all about them with the help of logic goats.Never again will you have to refer to a boring old truth table! (One lab member suggests cross-coupling two of the NAND goats - instant perpetual motion machine!)

Passin' the time, passphrasing

Ok, so what did we do at the Indiana State Fair? We built the passphrase-o-meter! What the heck is that? It's a machine that rates how good a passphrase you made.

What's a passphrase? It's like sliced bread, only MUCH better! You remember passwords, right? Easy-to-remember things like sn00k!14

Well a passphrase is like a password except that: 1) It's a phrase, several words. And 2) It's much easier to remember, while also being much more secure, than a password.

What's a good passphrase? Something like "We built a passphrase-o-meter at the fair!" Or "My dog, fluffles, has fleas!"

You see, those are easy to remember, but it's not likely that someone is going to guess what they are, either!

All hail the coming of the new kingdom of passphrases. Passwords are dead! Long live the passphrase!

(We wrote short article about passphrases recently that was included in IU's Living Well pages, and also got picked up by a couple of other places, including Science Daily and even John Tesh's site. Does this mean we're famous?)

Polishing up some ANML software packages...

Processing gi-normous data sets like we often do at the ANML has required writing quite a bit of custom code, and we're getting ready to make some of that software available to a wider audience. One of the first bits will be a set of libraries for searching very large collections of Netflow data with boolean queries and pretty-printing the output in the format of your choice.

The "flowseek" system doesn't offer quite the flexibility of SQL, but it's nice to be able to quickly select, say, all the flows with a total size between 15,000 and 20,000 bytes, from a particular prefix, destined to either port 9001 or 9002, but not from that one host you already know about. And it's nice and fast, since it actually writes out your query as C code, compiles it, and imports it again as a shared object module!

More details later...

porting from 32bit to 64bit architectures

Besides making sure you are using the right interger size when using interoperable files, this week we 'rediscovered' the dangers of the NULL pointer in x84_64.

When using a c function with ellipses, the compiler does not 'know' the size of the null pointer and convers the appareance on 'NULL' into a 0(zero). Thus, making some functions not work correctly unless the NULL pointer is casted to an 'appropiate pointer'. (Why this? this is already a pointer..)