This one goes to Brian who got me back to climbing after all these years.

I used to rock climb a lot. It’s one of the few sports I cherished for the longest time before I ran out of time to focus on it. There are striking similarities between rock climbing and writing software and analytical thinking to reduce problems to its bare essence. Yes, I’ve climbed the Cathedral Peak and Royal Arches with lots of unexpected happenings, inspite of the training.

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While I like CentOS/RHEL as a distro, it does tend to be out of date for a lot of packages; especially if that software isn’t considered fully stable. One package in particular is Ruby 1.9, which has many critical improvements (real threads!) compared to v1.8. After a lot of searching came up empty, I grabbed the RPM spec file from the OpenPKG project and ported it to CentOS/RHEL4. More »

As I mentioned in a previous post, following is an introduction to monadic computation in JavaScript. The intent of this post is to demonstrate many advantages of monadic abstraction by implementing a concrete example from ground up. The theory behind monads I will leave to other online tutorials.
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After exploring Haskell for some time, I find myself often adopting functional concepts in my daily work. The exposure to functional programming has even affected the set of tools and frameworks I use. For example, having to parse a custom data format I first tend to search for a Parsec clone implemented in the currently used language. This time it was for JavaScript, but a quick Google search did not reveal any relevant projects. Therefore following is the initial attempt to a probably first general purpose parser library for JavaScript, ‘p4js’.
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JSON is far better than XML! Less code to transfer - faster parsing - happy user. Right ? Hold that thought for a minute…

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So we moved a bunch of the css and images (scripts coming soon) to google code and noticed something. pcapr now directly mashes up images and css from svn/trunk on google code to your browser. But…

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If you Google for “denial of service tools” or look in the “VoIP flooding tools“, you’ll find that all of these tools have a very similar pattern. Any engineer worth a dime hates writing the same code over and over again. So we are going to refactor these tools to abstract away the common boiler-plate code and end up with something that’s reusable, yet more powerful.

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If you want to track visitors to know where they are coming from, the normal un*x’ish way of doing this is to grab maxmind’s geoiplookup (or apt-get/rpmfind) and then run it against the web server logs. That’s so not Web 2.0. *ugh*

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I’ve blogged about CouchDB before and we use it on pcapr. While I love CouchDB, it takes a a certain amount of unlearning, especially if you have years of SQL under your belt. What if you can visualize the internals of CouchDB in an interactive way?

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If all you have is a pcap with some protocol packets in it, how would you know how much of the actual protocol specification (the possible set of fields that the packets could carry) is being covered? This is a useful metric to have when writing a dissector or IPS/DPI signatures. This is much in the spirit of code coverage.

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