My oldest kid wanted a Minecraft server for them and their friends, but I didn’t want to pay to run one 24/7. What should have been an easy project turned into a lot of discovery learning. Save yourself sometime and read this.
I recently had to do some throughput testing on a firewall using TRex. What should have been a pretty simple process honestly took a little bit of troubleshooting.
I’ve been doing dev work for years but have never taken the time to document how I like my setup which means every time I do it again, I have to figure it all out again.
A couple of weeks ago I talked about using SSLSplit to at as a proxy so that I could examine the mechanics of a Docker pull. I decided to go ahead a set up a purpose-built VM just for this so I could easily do this again in the future. I wanted to go ahead and document (and share) the steps that I went through for this.
A year or two ago I decided to create a retirement calculator to help me figure out my finances for when I was getting ready to retire. It occurred to me earlier today that I have done a poor job of keeping it current, so I decided to spend a few minutes and get it fully updated (I think) for 2022.
Recently I’ve been in the process of building an offline repository of software for a project at work. The idea is that we’ll be able to completely install all required software completely disconnected from the Internet. When it got time to deal with containers…challenges abounded.
For day 9, we’re trying to break a simple encryption scheme. Our input starts with a preamble of 25 numbers. From there, it continues with a series of additional numbers. Each number must be equal to the sum of any two of the previous 25 numbers. We’re trying to find the first number that doesn’t meet that rule.
Day 7 threw me for a loop. Basically what you have is a remake of the Matryoshka Dolls where you have a doll inside of a doll, only in this case it was bags within bags. We’re provided with a list of rules telling us which bags are within which bag. Ultimately we want to find how many bags can contain a “Shiny Gold Bag” within it.
So day 6 of Advent of Code was looking for you to help out a planeload of fliers with their customs forms. Our input file was a multi-line file where each line represented an individual person with groups separated by an empty line. To solve this problem, I decided to make use of the defaultdict function.
Once again, this year I decided to challenge myself to work on my python and complete The Advent of Code. My goal was to stick to each and every day, and for the most part, I was able to stick with that. Here is Days 1-5.