A year or two ago I decided to create a retirement calculator to help me figure out my finances for when I was getting ready to retire. It occurred to me earlier today that I have done a poor job of keeping it current, so I decided to spend a few minutes and get it fully updated (I think) for 2022.
Recently I’ve been in the process of building an offline repository of software for a project at work. The idea is that we’ll be able to completely install all required software completely disconnected from the Internet. When it got time to deal with containers…challenges abounded.
For day 9, we’re trying to break a simple encryption scheme. Our input starts with a preamble of 25 numbers. From there, it continues with a series of additional numbers. Each number must be equal to the sum of any two of the previous 25 numbers. We’re trying to find the first number that doesn’t meet that rule.
Day 7 threw me for a loop. Basically what you have is a remake of the Matryoshka Dolls where you have a doll inside of a doll, only in this case it was bags within bags. We’re provided with a list of rules telling us which bags are within which bag. Ultimately we want to find how many bags can contain a “Shiny Gold Bag” within it.
So day 6 of Advent of Code was looking for you to help out a planeload of fliers with their customs forms. Our input file was a multi-line file where each line represented an individual person with groups separated by an empty line. To solve this problem, I decided to make use of the defaultdict function.
Once again, this year I decided to challenge myself to work on my python and complete The Advent of Code. My goal was to stick to each and every day, and for the most part, I was able to stick with that. Here is Days 1-5.
So since this whole COVID-19 thing started, I’ve had a lot of free time on my hands. Yes, I’ve suddenly become a teacher (I’m taking care of my oldest, while Liz takes care of our youngest) but I am only working at the office one week out of every three. That gives me a lot of time. I decided among other things to work on my Python (a lot). So I went back to the 2015 Advent of Code and just started going away. So here are the first five days of the 2015 Advent of Code.
Many years ago I was looking for a network drive that I could attach to my home network to centrally save data. Life was good until a year or so ago when the NAS itself stopped working. I had used the drive for a variety of reasons, among them as a place to put all of our family photos.
I was doing some research for my firewall project that I wrote about the other day and wanted to add some system monitoring. I figured that the server that I host signal-chief off of didn’t currently have any monitoring going so I would use that (cause why test in the lab when you can test in production?). The system I decided to use was Tripwire which is an opensource project that is part of the Epel Linux repo. I put this together with help from a couple of different tutorials that I found online and combined.
This post is probably going to be updated a few times as it’s a work in progress as I figure things out. As I’ve noted before a few times, I like to write things out as I figure them out so that I don’t have to research time and again. Today’s project, replacing a pfSense firewall with a Centos server and Firewalld.