As a member of the Security Lab at UCSB I had the privilege to help create and run this year’s iCTF Hacking Competition. The six-year-old competition was very unique this year. Unlike CTFs seen before in which teams try to protect their services whilst attacking other teams’ services, our …

Last year I was a teaching assistant for two quarters giving me two opportunities to see how well I could share my knowledge with students. Aside from my knowledge of the material, and my ability to relate to many of the undergrads at UCSB (having previously been one myself) I …

Update 2011/02/25 12:07
Updated the code such that it doesn’t rely on a coin of denomination one.

I assisted in hosting the UCSB Programming Competition again this year. Doing so rekindled my love for dynamic programming algorithms, thus why I prepared an example similar to this …

Wow, where has the time gone? In my absence a great deal has happened in my life so I’m going to break it up into a few chunks starting with stuff prior to the summer.

As I briefly mentioned in Flat Stanley’s Adventures, winter quarter I TAed the …

I was just watching the keynote for Google I/O in which Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt said, “I’m one of these people who believes Computer Science is at the center of the Universe.” I think this is one of my new favorite quotes. Quote at 4:34 in …

I previously mentioned that I was the Teaching Assistant (TA) for the Operating Systems class this quarter. It’s going quite well, though just as I remember, this class is a lot of work for the students, and a hell of a lot of work for the TA. I recently …

This past weekend my littlest brother pitched for the first time. Word has it that he pitched 3 consecutive strikeouts! Go Connor. However, this word needs to be taken with a grain of salt as it comes from our mom, who as most moms do, occasionally neglect unfavorable details.

My …

I turned my computer on this morning and to my dismay my 9 month old 1TB harddrive could no longer be detected. It is still under warranty so it’s no big deal about the hardware going bad, however it is a big deal that I didn’t have a …

Update 2011-07-18: As Ernesto correctly points out in the comments, this algorithm selects N independent random lines from a file.

The following is my python implementation of choosing N random lines with equal probability from a file. This implementation is both memory and time efficient unlike other solutions. This problem …

Next quarter I am TAing the Operating Systems course at UCSB, which was one of my favorite classes (I even mentioned it here- see junior year), despite it being considered the most difficult required Computer Science course. For our class of ~50 students we had 3 TAs for whom this …