The Adventures of a UCSB Computer Science Ph.D. Student
It has been over twelve years since I last wrote to my blog, ending with a letter to my recently deceased brother. While my writing frequency had already dwindled during graduate school as depicted in Figure 1, Daniel s death ended my blog writing. I had little desire to write …
Dear Daniel, I have put off writing this letter as long as I could. Its anticipation has consistently brought me to tears, and will continue to do so throughout the writing process. I welcome the tears but wish there were no reason for them. Today would have been your 26th …
This is my first pelican post using markdown. I have yet to import all my old blog entries as I first need to make sure I can make it work from scratch. Below is the skeleton python program that I always start out with: #!/usr/bin/env python import os …
Bryce Boe Ph.D. Proposal Tuesday, June 4, 2013 10:30 AM in 1132 HFH Committee: Diana Franklin (chair), Kevin Almeroth, Danielle Harlow (Education Department), Timothy Sherwood Title: Submission and Feedback Tools to Support Growth in Computer Science Education Abstract: The increase in popularity of teaching using visual programming languages …
Many people in the US show appreciation for their mother on the second Sunday of May. While Mother s Day may be more commercial, and directed differently than originally intended [ ref ], I will use the day to thank two women, both mothers, who have made and continue to make a …
Early yesterday morning many people gained an extra hour by repeating the second hour of the day. Those people in time zones that were previously on daylight saving time switched back to standard time and thus may have observed their digital devices record the following sequence of times: 2012-11-04 01 …
Two weeks ago I attended SIGCSE 2012 in Raleigh, NC . The plane on my return flight had Internet access through Gogo s Inflight Internet . While I think it s incredibly awesome that Internet access is readily available to those who travel by plane, I personally feel it is not worth …
Major Area Exam Bryce Boe March 12, 2012 2:00 PM HFH 1132 Committee: Diana Franklin (chair), Tim Sherwood, Kevin Almeroth Title: Automated Feedback and Assessment of Student Submitted Code Abstract: Increases in class sizes pose a problem for computer science instructors. With a larger number of students to educate …
A few days ago I wrote about a few differences between using C and python to handle a process-based job management system . My discussion covered performance, development time, dependencies, and portability. I ended with the conclusion that despite C being vastly superior in performance, the relative difference in performance between …
I had an interesting discussion with my buddy Ali after he read my previous post, Python Multiprocessing Pool and KeyboardInterrupt Revisited . The discussion was around the question, what are the benefits of using the python multiprocessing.Pool class over writing a simple process-based job management system in C? We started …
Earlier today I was in the process of cleaning out some Chrome bookmarks when I came across a post by John M. Reese I bookmarked titled, Python: Using KeyboardInterrupt with a Multiprocessing Pool . I had bookmarked John s post a number of months ago as it referenced my previous post …
I m currently in Chicago, having just attended the 18th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security , where Adam Doupé presented our paper, Fear the EAR : Discovering and Mitigating Execution After Redirect Vulnerabilities . As always, when I m traveling, the problem of how to connect to the Internet arises. Fortunately …
Yesterday, October 7, 2011, the graduate students of UCSB s Computer Science department, including myself, hosted the 6th annual Graduate Student Workshop on Computing ( GSWC ) . The workshop is a great opportunity for other students, faculty, and industry professionals to get an overview of the work performed by our department. Part …
For the third year, I competed with team Shellphish in the Defcon quals. We pulled through with some amazing points at the end to finish in 8th place . My successful contributions, however, were really only with respect to Forensics 100 and 300. My write up for the following are below …
Last night Adam Doupé wrote up his description on our Execution After Redirect Vulnerability which I wanted to link my followers to. Adam s primary focus on this project has been adapting a static ruby analyzer to find instances of the EAR vulnerability in thousands of Ruby-On-Rails projects from github …
Update 2011/02/23 11:02 PST Added the lift tag and updated the list. Update 2011/02/22 13:19 PST Added the jsf tag (java server faces) and updated the total question count for each item on the list. Update 2011/02/22 11:14 PST Adding spring-mvc …
The Usenix security deadline is quickly approaching, and that means finalizing everything on my research project. Therefore, today I wanted to quickly parallelize some of my analysis code to take advantage of the eight virtual processors on my machine. I previously wrote about python multiprocessing and keyboard interrupts , so the …
Each year the Security Lab at UCSB hosts the International Capture the Flag competition, an approximately eight-hour security competition pitting security groups at various universities around the world against each other. Last year I had the privilege of contributing significantly to the setup on the iCTF, and later publishing and …
Recently I ve done a lot of work requiring heavy computation on large datasets. While python is not a great choice for speed, it can be extended by modules written in C for those speed critical moments. For such moments I always try to find solutions written as C modules …
VirusTotal is a web service that essentially performs a virus scan of an uploaded file, or url against many of the top virus scanners ( see full list ). I recently needed to submit over 100 binaries to VirusTotal, and being a computer scientist I knew this task, like many other things …
Update 2012/02/14: Added post: Python Multiprocessing Pool and KeyboardInterrupt Revisited Update 2011/02/03: Added commentary regarding Georges s comment about this stackoverflow thread . Update 2011/01/28: There is an issue with this code when passing large objects through the queue. While the code listed below will …
Buz s and my previous web hosting recently expired and thus on Sunday I moved all our stuff over to our new server hosted with WebFaction which I ve thus far been incredibly happy with. While I was previously used to working with cpanel, their more advanced interface produces a …
Edit 2010/08/27 : I thought I should update this page stating that the AWS S3 Console was updated about a month ago with a feature to convert entire folders to/from Reduced Redundancy. Additionally the boto source has moved to GIT , thus a few changes are needed to run …
I previously wrote about my preparation for leaving Facebook. This morning I have finally completed the last few things I wanted to do. Those last few things were to store the photo captions, photo comments, and photo tags for each photo downloaded. Yesterday, in order to extract this information from …
This weekend I competed in the Defcon 18 Qualifiers with team Shellphish. We unfortunately only placed 15th, nonetheless, it was an exciting and challenging weekend. Below is my write up for the Forensics 200 challenge. I don t recall the phrasing they gave (if you remember it please let me …
Update 2010/05/27: I ve made further updates to photograbber. Read about them in my post titled, Facebook Photograbber Updates . The patch file linked to from this page has been updated to include those changes. I started using Facebook in October of 2004, during my freshmen year of college …
Last week I wrote about the awesome message my brother left me regarding what he wanted for his birthday. Naturally I felt compelled to splurge a little for his birthday so my other younger brother and I purchased him an orange iPod nano. He happened to be with my mom …
I was working away one day and I missed a phone call. Just mom s cell, so not usually worth investigating but this call was different. I am notified via email when I have a voice mail as I use Google Voice for voice mail and when I finally played …
This is a ridiculously silly post however I predict it will work out in my favor and if not at least it only required a minuscule amount of my time. Besides I needed something to post on my blog anyway. I was just texting with a friend who happens to …
Warning: This post contains pictures most people would never want to see of me, and a few vulgarities. If you asked me just six months ago if I liked to run, I would have said Hell no! I have hated running for as long as I can remember, aside from …
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 …
My brother Connor recently mailed me a letter that read: Dear Friends and Family, In Social Studies we have been discussing communities and what makes them work. To help us learn more about other places, we would like to ask you for your help. Included in this letter is our …
So much has happened this quarter that it s now difficult to recall specifics, but knowing all too well that it only gets more difficult with time I ll try to recall some of the more awesome events. Early in the quarter the computer science department hosted an industry related …
The drive back down to Santa Barbara was awesome. I really got to enjoy Verena and test out the roof rack system with my bike on top. Despite having more stuff than I came up with, the increased space in Verena left me with plenty of visibility. Upon arriving in …
Damn it s been over 8 weeks since I last wrote, and how I ve missed it. As you may have guessed I ve been terribly busy since my last post, especially in the most recent weeks. Since there is too much information for a single post, I ll split …
This evening I went to dinner at the American Table cafe with Steve. Tonight s selection was amazing! I had: A bit of grilled wild boar bratwurst with sauerkraut, caramelized onions, mushrooms, shoestring celery root, turnips, brandy, Guinness A bit of pacific almandine tilapia with crunchy almonds, lemon teriyaki and …
Around three a few of us headed over to the hub for coffee, and as usual there is a different treat of the day. Today my snack time consisted of: A few profiteroles An iced mocha special made from the friendly barista A little piece of chocolaty goodness About 10 …
Today I had lunch at Google s newest Cafe, Big Table. I headed there at noon and met up with some Santa Barbara Googlers. I didn t eat that much since breakfast held me over quite well. 2 Falafel patties(?) with Tahini and Yogurt Cucumber Mint Sauce Caesar Salad with …
I ve been meaning to do this at least once all summer. I arrived at Cafe Moma for breakfast at approximately 9:15 and I filled my plate with the following: 2 Pancakes which I put a very light amount of raspberry syrup on A piece of Sourdough French Toast …
My last week at Google is finally here. It seems like just yesterday I was driving up to the Bay Area in the Porsche loaded to the roof with my stuff. Oh it s been a great summer, but it s not over yet! Week 12 gave me the opportunity …
First I d like to mention the obvious; I sold the Porsche this morning. Hmm ok maybe that s not the obvious. Anyway my 944 of 6 years is finally gone, and it s sad. Maybe someday when I have money to play with and a child who is into …