post-thumb

Yii2 vs Symfony2 - First Impressions

So a few weeks ago I started in on a ground-up rewrite of an existing project. Its currently using a framework that based around my CWFC libraries. It works very well, but its starting to show its age. As more and more features got added to the project, things have gotten more and more cumbersome to maintain in a clean way. I started off by ripping out all of the backend code and migrating it to C++ (see my posts on Protocol Buffers here and here), leaving only the front-facing code left to work with.

Continue Reading
post-thumb

New Gaming Headset

So last week for my birthday, Jessica told me that I had to buy myself a present to open up in front of our oldest son. She wants to stress the importance that all birthdays aren’t about him (he’s three). I’d been looking at a new headset with microphone to use at the office for a few months now. After moving offices six weeks ago, I find myself in an office that is very noisy at times, and other times absolutely silent. Since they’re “executive suites”, the types of businesses that are in the offices around me varies. There are a couple of realtors, and a couple of recruiters. When they’re in the office, its loud with voices, otherwise its very quiet. Headphones are almost mandatory to focus on writing code.

Continue Reading
post-thumb

Existing LUKS Partition and New Primary Boot Drive on Ubuntu 14.04

Yesterday I attempted to upgrade from Ubuntu 13.10 to 14.04 on my office system. It failed. Everything appeared to go smoothly, but after rebooting, I got a black screen. No grub menu, no grub failure menu. I attempted to reinstall grub from a live image, but that failed too. I had an extra Intel 160GB SSD so I decided to a fresh install. Its been over a year since I did a clean install so I had a lot of cruft installed, so a clean install would take care of that, and would probably take less time than repairing the install.

Continue Reading

Cisco/Linksys ATA Exploit?

So I’ve encountered a strange exploit being attempted against the VoIP system I maintain.  Its not actually against the softswitch, though, but rather against the end customer’s ATA.  We first saw this particular exploit three or four months ago, and its a rather strange, but at the same …

Continue Reading