Writings from a Philadelphia Software Engineer…
Hey software engineers! Do you manage servers? Lots of servers? Hate copying and pasting hostnames and IP addresses? Need a way to execute a command on each of a group of servers that you manage?
I developed an app which can help with those things, and my employer has graciously given me permission to open source it.
First, here’s the link:
https://github.com/comcast/ssh-to
And here’s how to download a copy:
git clone https://github.com/Comcast/ssh-to.git
At my day job, I get to write a bit of code. I’m fortunate that my employer is pretty cool about letting us open source what we write, so I’m happy to announce that two of my projects have been open sourced!
The first project is an app which I wrote in PHP, it can be used to compare an arbitrary number of .ini files on a logical basis. What this means is that if you have ini files with similar contents, but the stanzas and key/value pairs are all mixed up, this utility will read in all of the .ini files that you specify, put the stanzas and their keys and values into well defined data structures, perform comparisons, and let you know what the differences are. (if any) In production, we used this to compare configuration files for Splunk from several different installations that we wanted to consolidate. Given that we had dozens of files, some having hundreds of lines, this utility saved us hours of effort and eliminated the possibility of human error. It can be found at:
https://github.com/Comcast/compare-ini-files
Continue reading “Two New Open Source Projects”While waiting for a train at Ardmore station yesterday, I decided to check it out on SEPTA Stats to see just how late it was, and where it was. This is what I saw:
Well… that can’t be right. It’s an inbound train, and I had been standing at Ardmore station for the last 10 minutes. No trains came through in that time. What’s going on?
Continue reading “Found Buggy Train Data In SEPTA’s API”…and 2 new API endpionts, too. But more on those later.
I’m proud to say that there is now a dashboard for the entire Regional Rail system. It is present on both the front page and the “SEPTA System Stats” page:
This new dashboard makes it straightforward to determine the status of the entire Regional Rail system at a glance.
Continue reading “Introducing the SEPTA Regional Rail System Dashboard!”On the heels of yesterday’s post, I’ve introduced dashboards for train lines.
The dashboard will provide a snapshot of the current status of the line, namely the number of trains, average lateness, and how many trains are over 5 minutes late.
I’m pleased to announce that dashboards are now available on train views.
Prior to the introduction of the dashboard, it was difficult to tell if a train was running, what route it was on, and what station it was at. This new dashboard makes use of the “latest” API endpoint described in the previous post to provide a snapshot of the current status of the train.
Work is sending me to a conference that just happens to be hosted in Las Vegas, a city where there are a few casinos. I’m not much for gambling, so I figured I should learn a little about it before I even think of doing such a thing. I read that craps is a fun game that has some pretty safe bets, so I decided to learn more about that. To that end, I wrote a craps simulator.
Continue reading “So I Wrote A Craps Simulator”I got this voicemail the other day from “Rachel at cardholder services”:
(If the embedded player doesn’t work, here’s the direct link)
This one is kinda clever, that rather than a human using high-pressure tactics to get you to enter your credit card number, what you hear instead is a recorded message which asks you to “press 1 to get a lower interest rate”. Had I pressed 1, I suspect I’d be transferred to a nice sounding human operator who would try to coax me into giving them my credit card number.
There’s two takeaways from this:
Stay safe.
In general, the longer the password, and the more random it is, the more secure it is. This is because if a password file is stolen, the passwords are stored there are stored in encrypted format, where each password is encrypted with… itself. This means that in order to determine what an account
‘s password is, an attack must try encrypting every random possible string and see if it matches the encrypted password.
Naturally, this means that all possible 2-character strings can be tried quicker than 3-character strings, and 4 character strings will take even longer. Unfortunately, thanks to Moore’s Law, “longer” means “a few milliseconds”. 8 character passwords are usually the minimum, but by some estimates, even that is not sufficient. To make for an even bigger challenge, us humans tend to have a hard time remembering random letters and numbers. This leads to bad habits such as using the same password on multiple sites, and that can cause its own problems.
Continue reading “Introducing Diceware: Secure Passwords You Can Remember!”The Streisand Effect, for those not aware, is where an attempt to remove, hide, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing that information more widely by way of drawing attention to it. It is named after Barbara Streisand, who once filed a lawsuit to have an arial image of her home removed from the Internet. In her case, it resulted in a flood of publicity and thousands of people viewing that image.
An individual took issue with a post that I wrote 8 years ago. The identity of the person and the content of the post aren’t relevant to this post, but what is important is that prior to this event, the post was sitting by itself, pretty much left alone except for for the occasional web crawler visiting it. The post would have stayed that way, except that the person who had an issue with my post decided to complain in a heavily trafficked forum. This resulted in the post receiving more traffic than the previous several months combined. Additionally, many more people were made aware of the contents of the post, which I’m fairly sure the person complaining did not want to see happen.
Here’s a graph of HTTP requests to that page over time:
Note the huge spike, when is when the post in question was mentioned. Approximately one thousand separate people visited the post in question during the spike in traffic.
Now, what did we learn?