Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Do you have any code or projects of your own you would like to talk about instead?

news.ycombinator.com

1–10 of 106 posts

Re: Ask HN: Do you have any code or projects of your own you would like to talk about instead?

#3
Right now (please call me on this sometime, it'd help me) I'm working on a clone of Burp, the industry standard web penetration testing tool, in Cocoa. I started with RubyCocoa, but I've ditched it for Objective C. It is (surprisingly) liberating to work in C after spending a year in Ruby; any time something looks expensive or naive, you just tell yourself, "what I'm doing here can't possibly be more expensive than what MRI Ruby would have done", and you go about your day. Highly recommended.

The last code I managed to publish was Ruckus:

http://github.com/tqbf/ruckus/

(a better description: http://wiki.github.com/tqbf/ruckus/crash-course)

Ruckus is a Ruby DSL replacement for Peach Fuzz, Mike Eddington's famous Python fuzzer library. It is distinguished by being about 100 times slower, using a DSL instead of XML, and providing a DOM-style interface to any packet format (you can tag fields, arbitrarily nested in a tree structure, with classes and id's, and then fuzz them using CSS selectors).

I have a JDWP JVM debugger (or rather a thin protocol driver) written in Ruckus if anyone's interested in seeing what it actually looks like. We never get to publish the actual protocols we build with this.

My programming "day job" (I'm one of 4 developers on the project) is Playbook:

http://runplaybook.com

Re: Ask HN: Do you have any code or projects of your own you would like to talk about instead?

#5
I'm working on a programming language that has builtin support for reloading code at runtime. It'll also support various ways of modifying code at runtime, like with visual interfaces. The primary usage is for making interactive graphical apps, like games.

Intro is here: http://andyfischer.github.com/circa/intro.html

code is here: http://github.com/andyfischer/circa/tree/master

Re: Ask HN: Do you have any code or projects of your own you would like to talk about instead?

#6
Great idea, I have a ton of one-off side projects I'd love to share (and get some awesome hacker critique as well)

I've written a simple ruby worker management "framework" known as theman, which is a thin wrapper atop rufus-scheduler and god: http://github.com/jcapote/theman

Also, there's fieldy, a simple fixed-width field reader/writer library for ruby exposed as DSL: http://github.com/jcapote/fieldy

Lastly is AtomLog, a way to parse and expose ruby's Logger output to an atom feed: http://github.com/jcapote/atomlog

Re: Ask HN: Do you have any code or projects of your own you would like to talk about instead?

#7
Right now I'm working on adding extensions to Chrome. The majority of the system is in this directory:

http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/chrome/brows...

And what I've been working on most recently is the code that renders little HTML-based toolbars. My most recent change fixed a race that caused them to not render correctly on the first run:

http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome?view=rev&revision=...

I think one of the coolest parts of the system is the way that api methods are routed from JS running in extension processes to the browser process and back. The core of that is here:

http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/chrome/brows...

Re: Ask HN: Do you have any code or projects of your own you would like to talk about instead?

#8
I've been working on my Z-Machine interpreter library again. It basically started as a project to turn Frotz into a Ruby extension (Frotz, probably the most popular interpreter, is written in C).

The code has undergone quite a few transformations now. Frotz uses a lot of static memory -- it's basically setup to run a single zcode program at a time. Which makes sense, of course.

For my library, I wanted to be able to run more than one program (or multiple copies of the same program) at the same time. So, I basically rewrote the core of Frotz. All the memory for a Z-Machine is broken up into structs which are passed around.

There were some fun memory management issues related to running multiple programs. The typical zcode program consists mostly of static memory (lots and lots of strings and code), so that static memory can be shared between programs. I have a test where I load something like 100,000 copies of minizork into memory and the process size "only" jumps to 118MB. Of course, normal code doesn't need that many simultaneous Z-Machine instances so garbage collection keeps memory pretty reasonable.

Last time I worked on dorothy, I setup a demo webapp here:

http://ifrotz.org

Which illustrates why I wanted to be able to run multiple programs. The demo runs minizork, dynamic memory is dumped and restored between requests. The hints, exits, and history feature is possible because the server "listens in" on your game and the games others have played.

Lately I've been working on more memory inspection stuff, and now I have to work on some of the unfinished Z-Machine features (I've only implemented the v3 screen model).

The code is on Github:

http://github.com/eki/dorothy/tree/master

Re: Ask HN: Do you have any code or projects of your own you would like to talk about instead?

#9
Mentioned in some comment thread, but I just fixed [link redacted], my YouTube search/download/rip tool using youtube-dl and ffmpeg, to correctly rip the audio stream from the downloaded video without transcoding to 64 kbps MP3 (oops). It's called [name redacted] because it does a "feeling lucky" YT search for the terms you type in. Code is at [link redacted] .

No code for this project, but UmBus [link redacted] is my pet project to let UMich students get the GPS-estimated arrival times for the uni buses via text messaging. If I weren't so late to the party, I would try to compete with www.nextbus.com .

Re: Ask HN: Do you have any code or projects of your own you would like to talk about instead?

#10
I'm actually looking for a new name for my project, so maybe someone here will have a good idea?

It's a framework for writing, running and analyzing simulations. It could take any kind of simulation: Physics, game theory, epidemic spread, electronics, whatever.

It's in Python.

This is where it currently lives:

http://github.com/cool-RR/physicsthing/tree/master

(Keep in mind it's still a very young project)

The readme there was written when I had mostly physics simulations in mind. Now I've generalized the project to take any kind of simulation. I'll update the readme soon to reflect that, but I would really like to find a good name. Maybe something with a suffix or prefix of "Sim", but maybe not.

Anyone has any ideas?

Post reply on HN