REST-API testing: Reqres

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

I am back again and developing some smaller APIs for my own use.

As I am learning a new programming language and framework (SwiftUI) and for my little learning project I need to also implement a server backend. Implementing a RESTful service is quite straight-forward but for testing and UI prototyping I actually want to do some testing before really setting up the server side.

To easily test RESTful calls without actually implementing anything I found that Reqres is a quite useful tool to have in the toolbelt:

Apart from some pre-set-up API endpoints with dummy data (like users, …) it also features a request mirror service.

With that you can simply throw a JSON document into the general direction of Reqres and it will put a timestamp on it and return it right away.

Like so:

Writing Network Drivers in C#

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

Somebody had to do it. Maximilian Stadlmeier did:

User space network drivers on Linux are often used in production environments to improve the performance of network-heavy applications. However, their inner workings are not clear to most
programmers who use them. ixy aims to change this by providing a small educational user space network driver, which is gives a good overview of how these drivers work, using only 1000 lines of C code.
While the language C is a good common denominator, which many developers are familiar with, its syntax is often much more dicult to read than that of more modern languages and makes the driver seem more complex than it actually is.

For this thesis I created a C# version of ixy, named ixy.cs, which utilizes the more modern syntax and additional safety of the C# programming language in order to make user space network driver development even more accessible. The viability of C# for driver programming will be analyzed and its advantages and disadvantages will be discussed.

The actual implementation (with other programming languages as well) can be found here.

Apparently it’s not as slow as you might think:

Hack-The-Planet Podcast: Episode 10

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

Shownotes

Odometer for the HUD

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

Since I am back at developing the Head-Up-Display app I was writing about in February (yeah, mornings got darker again!) I want to leave this nice looking Odometer Javascript library here:

Odometer is a Javascript and CSS library for smoothly transitioning numbers. See the demo page for some examples.

Odometer’s animations are handled entirely in CSS using transforms making them extremely performant, with automatic fallback on older browsers.

odometer

Musashikosugi Curry Fest

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

If you do not know japanese curry yet you are missing out big time.

Unfortunately due to typhoon 19 the Musashikosugi Curry Expo had been cancelled along the overall Kosugi Festival 2019.

But the curry stamp rally did start earlier than the typhoon hit the city and carries on still until end of october.

It works like this:

You go to each restaurant. You eat a meal. You get a stamp.

The more stamps you collect the higher valued the prices. More meal coupons even electronics!

But anyway. It’s all about japanese and indian curry. And for that

As you too might want to tick all 28 restaurants of your bucket list take this map I made of all 28:

As you can see – on the iPhone Google Maps app you even get a nice progress bar of those you already visited. I’ve been to parco curry already – so that counted.

Understand Maladay

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

Boomtime 5 Aftermath: The Apostle Malaclypse the Elder’s Holyday. A wandering Wiseman of Ancient Mediterrania (“Med-Terra” or middle earth), who followed a 5-pointed Star through the alleys of Rome, Damascus, Baghdad, Jerusalem, Mecca and Cairo, bearing a sign that seemed to read “DOOM”. (This is a misunderstanding. The sign actually read “DUMB”.)

Hack-The-Planet Podcast: Episode 009

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

TIL: iPhone Visual Voicemal is IMAP

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

Today I learned that the Apple iPhone re-purposes the IMAP protocol to implement the voice mail feature.

By sniffing the network traffic it was possible to examine the IMAP protocol revealing username and the corresponding hashed password (which allows to repeat a successful login) and of course all voicemail files. We want to highlight, that all the voicemail files have been transferred unencrypted.

Assessment of Visual Voicemail from 2012

replacing MyFitnessPal

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

Well, it’s about time to do something about MyFitnessPal. In our family we’re using their service by the daily. But just for logging. No reports, no further features used.

But still, we were using it for quite a time now:

almost 5 years logged every-single-day.

The service has started to roll out ads for some time now in their apps. There are only iOS / Android apps available. And a mediocre website.

Just recently they started to announce that their free service will restrict how many years back are going to be stored. From those 5 years we will loose 3.

In addition the whole integration has never gotten to a point where I would have decided to upgrade to the paid premium version. No functionality ever got added. No interfacing with scales, no optimizations for UI/UX, …

But they now reduce the functionalities and service and want me to cough up a bit of money:

I am not generally against subscriptions. But I am not getting 9,99 Euro of value out of the service. A shared google sheet would almost achieve parity. And the price itself is just not value based. For 2 Euro I probably would not feel the urge to move on. For 9,99 (times 2 for 2 accounts) make me move.

So I’ve sat down with my wife and we scribbled up some things we want to have in a replacement. The content and feature-set is agreed. Now I’ll throw up a prototype app.

It’ll be integrated with the MQTT scales. And with the flow we came up with we hopefully will reduce the interactions dramatically over MyFitnessPal. And it’ll never stop saving history. And I’ll learn something new.

ASCII browser games

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

A lot is going on in browsers these days. They are becoming increasingly powerful and resource-demanding.

So it just feels natural to combine high resource usage infrastructure with low resource using graphics to get the worst of both worlds.

Not quite, but you get the idea.

There’s a guy on the internet (haha) who dedicates time to write ASCII / character based graphics engines and games with it.

Meet MrGumix:

Of course, what’s that games and graphics?

Exhibit #1:

And the more advanced Exhibit #2:

One Soundcard to rule them all

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

The first sound card I got as an upgrade to a PC without sound back in 90s was the glorious Sound Blaster 16:

By Konstantin Lanzet – Camera: Canon EOS 400D, GFDL

There were several different sound card options back in the days and all sounded a bit different.

A sound card (also known as an audio card) is an internal expansion card that provides input and output of audio signals to and from a computer under control of computer programs. The term sound card is also applied to external audio interfaces used for professional audio applications.

Wikipedia

With the synthesizers and audio processing each series and make produced a distinctive sound. Some of us want to bring these sounds back. But keeping the (old) hardware running is an increasingly difficult task.

For example: The interface used by the above mentioned Sound Blaster 16 card is the ISA bus interface. This interface was introduced in 1981 and replaced in 1993. If you want to hear how such a sound card sounds today you would have to run hardware from this time period.

But some people are working towards getting at least some authentic sound back.

In this talk, Alan Hightower takes a look at the complexities, challenges, and even current progress at integrating all of the above cores into one FPGA based ISA sound card.

This is what the concept would bring if done:

Oh that would be soooooo nice to have all these vintage sound interfaces available and to be able to actually use them for audio output.

Remember Habeas Corpus day

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

Setting Orange 66 Bureaucracy: A Discordian Holy Day of Fondle and Gropage, when all Discordians should grab their Legislative Representatives by the goolies and cry out “Where’s my Bill of Rights, you bastard?!”

On this day in 3025 YOLD (12 October 1859 AD), His Imperial Majesty, Emperor Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico, ordered the Congress of the United States to dissolve.

“Fraud and corruption prevent a fair and proper expression of the public voice; that open violation of the laws are constantly occurring, caused by mobs, parties, factions and undue influence of political sects; that the citizen has not that protection of person and property which he is entitled.”

Habeas Corpus Day

a source of iptv streams

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

Collection of 8000+ publicly available IPTV channels from all over the world.

Internet Protocol television (IPTV) is the delivery of television content over Internet Protocol (IP) networks.

Github: iptv-org/iptv

Using the streams is as simple as it gets: Just open the provided playlilst files in your favorite media player. The above example is th VLC media player.

global QR code scavenger hunt

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

I like location based stuff. I like QR codes. There is something that combines both.

Meet Munzee:

Munzee is the next generation in global scavenger hunt games.

Track down QR Codes hidden in the real world and capture them for points. Whether you are a casual player, an avid explorer, or a hardcore competition enthusiast, Munzee helps you rediscover the world around you.

more blacker

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

A month ago I wrote about a very black paint. This month brings me a papepr about an even blacker substance.

The synergistically incorporated CNT–metal hierarchical architectures offer record-high broadband optical absorption with excellent electrical and structural properties as well as industrial-scale producibility.

Paper: Breakdown of Native Oxide Enables Multifunctional, Free-Form Carbon Nanotube–Metal Hierarchical Architectures

Magnificent app which corrects your previous console command

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

We all know this. You typed a loooong line of commands in your shell and you made one typo.

That’s the worst.

Now. There’s a command that aims to help:

It is rather simple. But extremely effective.

The Fuck attempts to match the previous command with a rule. If a match is found, a new command is created using the matched rule and executed.

Grab it on github. Install it right away. It went into my toolbelt in an instant.

Why the MS-DOS floppy disk cache was valid 2 seconds…

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

If you’re old enough to have used MS-DOS you know the benefits a read cache introduced back at the time for floppy disks. Without such a cache everything data intensive was magnitudes slower.

Now after all these years more and more stories emerge about how certain thresholds and timeings where set back in the days.

This is such a story:

Mark Zbikowski led the MS-DOS 2.0 project, and he sat down with a stopwatch while Aaron Reynolds and Chris Peters tried to swap floppy disks on an IBM PC as fast as they could.

They couldn’t do it under two seconds.

So the MS-DOS cache validity was set to two seconds. If two disk accesses occurred within two seconds of each other, the second one would assume that the cached values were still good.

Raymond Chen blog

There are more links in the original article – so go there and down that rabbit hole!

Experimental Audio Tool: SuperCollider

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

SuperCollider is a platform for audio synthesis and algorithmic composition, used by musicians, artists, and researchers working with sound. It is free and open source software available for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

SuperCollider features three major components:

scsynth, a real-time audio server, forms the core of the platform. It features 400+ unit generators (“UGens”) for analysis, synthesis, and processing.

sclang, an interpreted programming language. It is focused on sound, but not limited to any specific domain. sclang controls scsynth via Open Sound Control.

scide is an editor for sclang with an integrated help system.

By User:Sooberkollydr, CC BY-SA 3.0,

type like you’re a movie hack0r

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

HACK LIKE A PROGRAMMER IN MOVIES AND GAMES!
GeekTyper was inspired by the various media where hacking is usually portrayed incorrectly.
Simply randomly mash your keyboard and code will be simulated on your screen.

This is hilarious! :-) I’ve had way to much fun poking keys while trying it out…

Of course there’s also a screensaver that you can install. Recommended for office use. Not recommended on airplanes and other public spaces.

I’ve just checked with a real person. I’ve used the Visual Studio skin and typed away. Oh the aww.

For those on macOS: