Need for Speed
Every startup needs to go fast. How am I going to do that?
Effectiveness of Not Micromanaging
The title is somewhat misleading, but not micromanaging has many positive effects.
I need better patience
From my vacations to my relationships to aquarc, I've found some problems with how I look at the world and how I can improve my patience, and my team in general.
So.. what happened?
Here's how I've changed in the last few months.
Back to Linux Sanity
It took me two months and eight days to realize how important convenience is to me.
LUKS Alpine Setup
How I set up alpine with LUKS.
On HackTCNJ 2024
The past weekend was a whirlwind of coding, learning, and teamwork at HackTCNJ 2024. It was my first hackathon experience, and I'm still processing the rollercoaster of emotions and insights that came with it.
Petition Signing Finally Setup!
Before, you had to send me an email, or be lucky enough to be at my in person signing events to sign my petition... but no longer! You can now sign the petition on the homepage or here. It only took me 2 days to reprogram the site, it being static initially...
How did you do it?
The petition signing uses a raw HTML form. I wanted the frontend to be as minimalist as possible and for most of the work to be handled by the backend, which did pose some pretty big difficulties.
The config for the server currently looks something like this:
server "omraheja.us.to" {
listen on * port 80
root "/htdocs/omraheja.us.to"
location "/pub/*" {
directory auto index
}
}
OpenBSD httpd is pretty straightforward, so all I did was change it to this:
server "omraheja.us.to" {
listen on * port 80
root "/htdocs/omraheja.us.to"
location "/pub/*" {
directory auto index
}
location "/vote.cgi" {
fastcgi socket "/run/slowcgi.sock"
root "/cgi-bin"
}
}
...and then in /cgi-bin I wrote about 200 lines of vulnerable C. It's really been a while, I had almost forgotten how to use stdio's file API.
Hardest parts
This project is not complicated at all, it was just frustrating; it managed to prove how rough my C programming had became.
You may ask why I chose C for such a project. Typically for CGI scripts, perl is used for its simplicity and support. The thing is, perl is an interpretive language, and this tiny vm I'm using has very limited resources. Having to run an actual executable instead of reading files is already a lot slower, so why not just put it in a native, compiled, language?
Besides, I've been using C as my main language for 2 years. On the rare occasion that I decide to code, C is almost always my language of choice.
That being said, the hardest part was supporting application/x-www-url-formencoded. Parsing it myself actually wasn't that difficult once I realized that anything thats not alphanumerical or a period will be encoded as a hex with a % sign before.
strtol(3) is pretty garbage for this job, so I decided to parse it myself. For something like %2a in
name=om%2a
The respective C code was as simple as:
real = (hex_to_char(first) << 4) | hex_to_char(second);
In simple words, it converts the '2' to a 2 and stores it in the upper 4 bits and 'a' to 10 and stores it in the lower 4 bits. It's pretty efficient.
Once I relearned the file API and figured out how to make it append to a csv file, I had to mess around with permissions for the chroot directory until I realized a simple chmod a+w signatures.csv would do the job.
The biggest problem right now is ratelimiting, because I don't want bot based spam. I don't want to IP rate limit, because then I will have a lot of trouble at public signing events.
The final solution to this would be to implement something like SimpleCaptcha. It could be implemented easily server side and would require little to no JavaScript. It's not so annoying that it would prevent public signing events, but would allow only the more advanced bots to spam my form.
Source code?
I love making my projects open source, and this is no exception. I'm going to get a git hosted locally soon for my organization.
Tags: coding, waste-of-time
Snow Day
Today is a beautiful snow day with a day off from school, yet I am at home, inside, studying. We had a snow day on Tuesday, which I also didn't go out on.
What's going on?
I'm working on:
my AP exams
my GPA (yes, my grades are really bad, even though they've improved a lot from freshman year)
my petiton: I'm working on getting approval from my school and other schools in my district's administration to spread my petition on school grounds. It's not bound to be very effective, but since I spend most of my time here, I may as well start here. Since I live near bustling universities, I probably will contact them too.
my business: I definitely need a website for my business with good SEO so that people can look me up and feel confident. I've got it all outlined out and me and my team are working on the CSS for the site (which will definitely look way better than my main site) but it seems like it is better to hire a freelancer on fiverr; they charge low rates and they make decent websites. I've found several people with React and CSS experience for as low as $5. However, my team has agreed to give the CSS an attempt first, and then consider hiring an actual developer. I agree with this decision, but the idea of hiring a freelancer will remain in all of our heads.
swimming: We have the county championships coming up at our school in about a week. I will be swimming my favorite, 400 free, but I need to tighten up my game before I go out there and race.
FBLA: I have yet to finish selling candy bars to fund our State Leadership Conference. In addition to that, I have to prepare for my Computer Problem Solving objective test, and the Business Ethics team presentation.
Should I take a break?
I love to get my work done, and I have a lot of work on my hands. I recall the last time we had snow in 2022, there was nothing stopping me from getting out there. But that was also 2 years ago, and things have really changed since then. The January of 2021, being the one during COVID and middle school is particularly memorable to me, because I just allowed myself to roll all over, throw snowballs, build a fort and whatever with my sibling.
As with most things in life, it's a tradeoff. I don't know if I still enjoy running everywhere in the snow, and I don't think we are getting more snow days this year. Therefore, it may be worth the experience?
Tags: development, waste-of-time
General Reflection
It is currently late at night, and instead of sleeping, I am up writing this blog post. I'm likely to wake up the next morning in utter confusion of what I have wrote here tonight.
BashBlog (continued)
I tried to configure bashblog to work better, by perhaps intregrating the blog and the frontpage together, but such a project is not for me. I don't want to poke around with the internals of this 1,000 line script any more than I've done already. If I feel like pursuing this later, you'll see the site look a lot more unified and improved.
There also seems to be this weird glitch with an unnamed post in my blog, which caused the timestamp "January 08, 2024" to randomly appear at the top. I don't know how to fix it yet, but I will because I don't like it. That being said, once the front page hits its post limit, it may also disappear.
That being said, I probably will unify the CSS in some way later, and will definitely work on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) first.
FBLA Summit
I went to a Future Business Leaders of America regional summit on Friday, and I learned quite a bit. Let me sum it up for you: - I improved my confidence a lot more, because of the networking and law session that I chose. I can't say I liked one more than the other, as I met people from vastly different environments who had a keen interest in the business world and who also would like to make new friends. The law one was my favorite, because it enforced some of the concepts I was taught in my JSA experience, and how statistics along with theoretical makes your argument more convincing. - I gained a lot of useful knowledge and contacts. More than business related knowledge, I think I gained a new outlook on life. I came up with a better process to present myself in the professional world involving a set of rigid core values, which I followed already but going to summit helped me enforce those values. I met people who could help me accomplish my hopes and dreams and saved their contact information. - I had fun. It's not everyday I get to take time off from school, much less I get to meet new people. I don't dislike school, but a break is appreciated from time to time. Alongside of being a professional summit, it was generally a place for me to be social and for me and my friends to enjoy ourselves.
Personality Change
Think it's kind of strange, but I'm picking up on developments in my own personality over time. I don't know how common this is or anyone else who notices changes like these, but I thought I would write about it anyways, since it seems interesting.
A quick google search of personality change doesn't yield much, except for the bipolar disorder, and the like. I am highly doubtful that there is any correlation between my experience and mental disorders, but instead a response to my environment.
As time goes on, it seems as if I idolize things or people much less. I recall at the start of this school year, I was very disappointed to find out that I would not be able to spend as much time with a friend from a neighboring district. At the time, she meant the entire world to me, and I'm glad that I was able to express that even though it took me a few days to get all my thoughts and emotions out.
Eventually, it came to a time where we would not be able to meet each other for almost a month at a time, which at the beginning was pretty degrading on my emotional health, but as time passed, those emotions started to disappear. In fact, the first time around, it seemed as if the inverse had occured, that I hadn't met her in so long, that I didn't want to meet her at all. I didn't want those powerful emotions to be invoked again.
And when I met her after that, it was as if I was a different person. I became completely distant and she wasn't sure what to do with me, which is funny in retrospect. The pattern continued, and by the end of this arbitrary cycle my interactions with her became completely distorted, but in a more positive manner.
These interactions, in fact, are what helped me to realize this change. A few months ago, maybe in the start of September, I was more reserved, very honest and didn't really say much other than deep talk. Now, I wouldn't say I'm the complete opposite, but I'm much more outgoing and a burst of energy. It's easier for me to form interactions this way, now that my confidence has improved, which came from a lot of public speaking in JSA. My interaction type in September wasn't bad, it was just less like myself. I'm a lot more goofy than most people are.
That brings me to another point. It was commonly accepted in my area that being goofy was a simple way to protect yourself from real emotions. In retrospect, that is partially true if you are concealing your real emotions, but my heart desires me to do stupid things and make stupid jokes, so that itself is part of my personality. Whether it protects myself from "real emotions", or is negative in general and lowers my reputation or whatever, it doesn't matter in the end because this new interaction type has made me a lot happier and has definitely improved my confidence.
As another example, I had this other close friend who I wasn't able to understand, and was under the severe misconception that she disliked me because she wanted to get work done during free study. Now, I spent the majority of my school day with her, knowing her only for 2 months but we had already gotten so close together, irrespective of our differences. The next day, I went to school without talking to her, and felt like garbage. I decided to tell another friend how I was feeling, even though we weren't that close. It eased the pain a little. The next day came, and it hurt a lot, but this time a little less. I quickly moved to make new friends because I realized that if I continued to get hurt through my lack of interaction with her I wouldn't last very long.
A few days later, I wasn't able to take it anymore, because she was sitting right in front of me and doing her work during free study. On a completely divided basis, I decided to go sit next to her and finish my work, not knowing what else to do. And so I made up a stupid excuse to sit next to her, and she saw right through it... but I sat there anyways and didn't say anything and just finished my work.
She looked at me a couple of times, confused, and scrolled through some reels on her phone. I glanced at her from time to time but I was bent on finishing my work, and that's what I did for the most part. Eventually she saw a funny reel and showed me and we both started laughing, and it reduced the intensity of the mood a lot. By the end of it, I asked her if she was mad at me, and after hearing her response I felt significantly relieved.
I did not sit with her with the intention that the conflict would be resolved. It was a risky decision and could have hurt me potentially, but I was confident that I could take the risk, knowing very little about her emotions, I did.
To simplify, it seems as if my personality development has stemed from a confidence change. I can project much better, make jokes in front of a whole group of people, laugh at my own mistakes, and feel good too. At the beginning, I mentioned that I stopped idolizing people and things. For people, it came to me that I can form deep connections with any kind of people, I just have to stay confident throughout the process.
I'm also experiencing personality change in other parts, of my life, not just my connections. I stopped worrying about my grades and whether my GPA would permit me to go into any college, and started focusing more on enjoying the work I did at school. It wasn't necessarily easy nor is it anything I want to do, but I took an interest in it and the process of learning and my grades have reached much higher than they have before.
In swimming, I'm not always sure about whether I can beat the competition or my own personal records at all, but I've been working harder in practice since November, to increase my confidence as a swimmer. This can also be extended to other parts of my life, as my willingness to purchase stocks with my own hard-earned money (after thorough research), asking for letters of recommendation for various summer programs, and so forth. My personality change seems to be constructed out of a push for confidence, which definitely has created a lot of upsides and has also made me unrecognizable to my friend listed above, as well as my other friends, family, past teachers, and colleagues. I would infer then, that a confidence boost has a significant amount of indirect upsides through the modifications of my own physcology. However, I still have a lot of improvements to make, so I will continue to work on my confidence.
Tags: waste-of-time, growth, development