Blog — » Henry J Schmale's Blog

My New Picnic Bench is Better Than Any Other Outdoor Furniture 2022 June 06

I bought a picnic bench to really enjoy the outside this summer. Over the last weekend, I picked up an unfinished wooden one from Lowe’s, and finished it myself. I got it for several reasons, and wanted to show it’s empirically better than any other patio furniture. I also just want to show off how good it looks in the yard.

Computing Most Chatty People in IRC 2022 May 03

Recently I was trying to figure out who was most active on the IRC server I frequent. IRC by it’s very nature leaves log files so that you have a record of your conversations in your control. So you can perform some processing on them to determine various statistics. This is a one liner to compute that.

2D Metaballs Demo using Marching Squares 2022 April 04

Metaballs are organic looking blob like balls that merge and split apart based on their distances from each other. They can be defined as a single function or a summation of functions across the x and y plane. By computing the contours, a very cool picture can be produced in real time as shown below. However, computing the entirety of the function plane to a high degree of precision is very expensive. To make it less expensive and produce a good high quality contour marching squares can be used. It samples 4 points of a function and interpolates where a threshold value occurs to draw the outline. I was inspired by Reducible’s video on how computers can draw weird shapes.

Superman - Man of Tomorrow 2022 April 02

It’s been awhile since I’ve done a movie review, but I just finished yet another DC animated movie, that I think deserves another chance from critics. It’s “Superman: Man of Tomorrow”. You might think it’s another generic superman movie, and you would be right, however I need to applaud the use of Lobo and Parasite, two of my favorite rogues in Superman’s gallery. Both are really fitting villains for him to face.

Interactive Encryption and Decryption using RSA 2022 March 14

I had a bit of inspiration recently with Fermat’s Attack on RSA and decided to make an RSA demonstrator. It shows all the steps in performing an RSA encryption using 2 known primes. It might be useful during a CTF when trying to determine small RSA keys by hand. I’ll eventually post a follow up for implementing that attack for small p and q.

POV-ray Dice 2022 February 22

I saw a captcha with dice thread on hacker news. The general idea of the captcha was to find the picture of dice with the right sum on it. I was wondering how hard it would be to generate several thousand of these dice images, and how long it would take using POV-ray. POV-ray is the Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer. It takes a text based description of the scene built using various primitives like spheres and boxes to produce a ray traced image. The POV-ray language is Turing complete and allows some really advanced programming features, such as macros, loops and conditionals, which I take full advantage of for this scene. The dice are even transparent.

Implementing a Table Create & View Update in Athena using AWS Lambda 2022 February 01

I have a DynamoDB table that is automatically exported as JSON to compute some reports. I wanted to automate the table creation process and load steps. Amazon Athena allows querying from raw files stored on S3, which allows reporting when a full database would be too expensive to run because it’s reports are only needed a low percentage of the time or a full database is not required. It’s billed by the amount of data scanned, which makes it relatively cheap for my use case.

My notes on what packages I absolutely need to install to maintain this site. 2022 January 27

I recently got a new laptop and decided to move to Manjaro, an Arch Linux derivative. I had some frustration with setting it up, and getting the tools I need to maintain this website installed. Documented below are the steps I took to solve it.

Humans and Improvised Weapons: A Response to a Writing Prompt 2021 December 25

Humans and safety is a long history, because as they say if you make something idiot proof they will invent a better idiot. Just about any piece of industrial equipment can become a weapon when misused. Most other species in the galaxy weren’t that creative to misuse or find the failure points in their technology. We took a different path than humans did. Finding solutions that were safer from the get go, that a culture of safety was not needed.

Exporting the AWS ReInvent Calendar to iCal 2021 November 23

I went to AWS Reinvent this year, and I wanted my registered events to show up on my personal calendar. I’m honestly surprised they didn’t implement an iCal export for your registered events. So I took these steps to get them.

Programming Practice Sites I Like 2021 November 15

I’m not a huge fan of hacker rank and it’s use in our industry. I find the problems to be boring and repetitive, so I’m listing out some of my preferred practice sites as a couple of alternatives with more fun and more interesting problems. I will concede that hacker rank does have excellent SQL practice though. They are the only ones I found with some really good problems and a variety in engines. Enough of that though, let’s jump into some of the ones I like better.

My Great Granddad's Chicken Recipe 2021 September 26

My great granddad used to make chicken similar to this using a basting mixture. This is his recipe with some modifications by me to get more browning out of it. He poured it over with a whiskey bottle and a speed pour, I use a mug and a brush to be more efficient with the liquid. He did it with chicken quarters, but I prefer using a spatch-cocked chicken. He also used a different vinegar than I do.

TIL my site is a JAMStack site. 2021 September 10

Today I learned that my site which has been basically the same since 2016 is a JAMStack site. Although it was coined in 2015 by Netlify, it seems to have become really popular in the past 2 years as a term. I’m told it’s more of a theoretical framework than anything else. JAMStack stands for JavaScript, APIs, and Markup.

A Review of "Extraterrestrial" by Avi Loeb 2021 September 01

I’ve been listening to “Extraterrestrial” by Avi Loeb published in January 2021. It is a decent book with some flaws in it’s presentation and dialogue. It’s about what is believed to be the first extra solar object found called “Oumuamua” and how it’s weird properties might indicate that was made by intelligent extraterrestrial life. It also covers a fair bit of the author’s academic career which seem to be very successful based on how many committees he’s on, and some of the issues he sees with the academic community and how funding is allocated.

Search Suggestions on My Website 2021 July 27

I previously talked about the search engine I recently added to my blog, and this is an extension to that previous post. Here I will discuss how I added a simple search suggestion option. It works for my website with the limited vocabulary and time to return results, but if I was working on a larger site I might try to make it smarter. So here’s how I implemented it.