Oscar scanner followup

 Posted on August 2, 2014  |  1 minutes  |  74 words  |  David Mitchell

Oscar scanner is a project I mentioned in an earlier post. I wanted to follow up on that with my progress. It’s basically working now, more or less, after some hiccups trying to run it on Arch, and lack of time or motivation, ordering wifi adapters, etc. I have a video up demonstrating it’s use.

I have a short video of my the Adafruit UPC scanner in its 3D printed case being used here:

python 

Spinning Wheels

 Posted on June 12, 2014  |  4 minutes  |  797 words  |  David Mitchell

I don’t know if its because I’m now settled into the dad life or what, but I’ve been taking on more personal projects lately, working on them until I loose interest or find something else. Of course, leaving them in various states of completion, some times returning later. Sometimes its just lack of motivation, sometimes I hit a wall, a few cases are delays since continuing requires hardware or something that costs money. [Read More]
python  docker  flask  android  vm 

Koding with Flask

 Posted on January 25, 2014  |  1 minutes  |  161 words  |  David Mitchell

Koding is a cool site that provides a web-based development environment that is perfect for budding programers and veteran programmers who want an easy to use sandbox environment to develop in. For free you get a VM that that comes pre-setup so that you can develop in several languages including Python, plus database backends ability to install more resources (you get full root access to your VM). A lot of coders use it to stage or live demo a project, and of course the VM automatically shutsdown when you log off. [Read More]
python  koding  flask 

Oscar scanner

 Posted on January 5, 2014  |  1 minutes  |  146 words  |  David Mitchell

Oscar is a Python project utilizing the Raspberry Pi w/ UPC barcode reader to scan barcodes on items you keep stocked in your pantry or fridge, when scanned, ideally when you run out of an item just before throwing the packaging or container away, it will populate your grocery list with the item reminding you that you need to pick up more of that item on your next shopping trip. Since it’s written in Python, it could easily be adapted to run on almost any device with Linux on it and a USB port that is networked. [Read More]
python 

Python indicator applet

 Posted on December 14, 2013  |  2 minutes  |  252 words  |  David Mitchell

In my attempt to code more, I’ve been looking for a purpose or a problem to which I can apply what I’ve learned or use as a reason to acquire new knowledge. One of the things I’ve been working on a clone of a Mac OS X application an acquaintance of mine is writing. This has begun my foray into writing using the PyGObject API for GTK along with the Ubuntu GTK indicator API. [Read More]
python  qt  gtk 

Python for fun and profit

 Posted on October 12, 2013  |  2 minutes  |  230 words  |  David Mitchell

I have been honing my Python skills on a couple of projects recently. One is the famous (or infamous) Python Challenge which has been interesting, but its not where I have spent the bulk of my time. The other is some work related scripting in jython for Websphere automating some tasks for developers (pausing and resuming activation specifications) in their test environment. But was has challenged me the most and captured the majority of my attention is the Matasano Crypto Challenge. [Read More]
python  crypto 

PyDev and wsadmin unite

 Posted on February 23, 2013  |  2 minutes  |  317 words  |  David Mitchell

Those of us that use WebSphere Application Server in our environments as our J2EE application server have a very powerful tool to administrate or automate tasks from the command line, wsadmin. wsadmin is a command line utility that allows you to issue commands in a single server or network deployment (multiple servers in a single administrative domain or “cell”). If you are reading this you probably know all about it and its support for Python, or Jython environment as a language to issue commands and run scripts to handle a variety of tasks. [Read More]
python  pydev  websphere 

My first post using Pelican

 Posted on February 10, 2013  |  2 minutes  |  320 words  |  David Mitchell

This is my first post using Pelican as my new blogging platform. I had considered using OctoPress but encountered too much trouble getting the ruby stack to work properly without dependency problems, even following directions or tutorials. So I looked for a Python alternative and found Pelican. I found it was much simpler to get running just following the directions. Plus, I know Python, so I’m obviously more comfortable with it then Ruby. [Read More]
python  pelican 

Reverse XOR'ing WebSphere Passwords

 Posted on January 1, 0001  |  3 minutes  |  505 words  |  David Mitchell

Some of the lessons I’ve learned from the Matasano Crypto Challenge has already had unexpected practical application for a common issue I encounter at work. Sometimes, people forget things, don’t document things especially in dev environments (hopefully not so much in production), one of those things is passwords, passwords for database accounts, or for an account that has some authorization the application needs. If a dev forgets a password or can’t find where it was documented, it’s many times better to just recover the password, rather then reset the password, especially if the account is used by the application in local dev environments, etc. [Read More]
ibm  websphere  crypto  python  security