Experimental Playground - Randomness

we're back!

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 13:44:00 -0400

Replacement parts have been installed and we are back. I apologize for the outage and the issues with the Workshop that it caused. I've had the new patch ready to go since the day of the failure but I'm going to plan to release it tomorrow after I've reworked the auto-update system of the Workshop so in the case that an outage like this happens again (I know it won't as I'm knocking on thinly veneered wood) the Workshop will remain operational.

SQL - The package path referenced an object that cannot be found

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 19:33:00 -0400

What do you do when you see this error in SQL Server 2005? Look further down the error message and you may notice something like this... "Could not set \Package\Job.Disable value to false" This is usually caused by the dynamic linked library (dll) dts.dll becoming unregistered. Whether due to an in-place upgrade or service pack install, even some hot fixes may cause this. Never fear though - crack open a DOS prompt or Start->Run and issue the following command regsvr32 dts.dll You should receive a message from the OS stating that the dll was successfully registered. Try to run your job again and you should find that it runs this time.

Terabase!

Thu, 20 May 2010 01:07:00 -0400

Ok, so maybe I'm obsessing a bit but I just couldn't help myself. I have created a... 1TB (yes that's terabyte) database on my home PC. Not only is the database itself 1TB but there is also a 500GB log file and 500GB tempdb (all pre-grown) to total 2TB of database goodness. Now, why the madness you ask? If you read the two previous posts, those probably have something to do with it. You see my web server ran out of space trying to do this little exercise so I had to change venue. To date I have generated permutations of strings from 1 to 6 characters in length to total a a staggering 2,238,976,116 rows of data. (yes that's billion with a B) How long does a query take to execute? Oh, just a few milliseconds. The first query against the data took about 23 seconds, not bad considering this is on what is classified as a "home PC" sporting a quad core 2.8GHz processor with 8GB of RAM and a 7TB RAID 5 on 6 disks. After the query plan is cached, it takes merely the blink of an eye to return a word from the dictionary. To populate this table took an ever increasing amount of time. The first strings of length 1 to 4 took from only a blink to just under 30 seconds. 5 characters took just over 9 minutes with 6 characters pushing 13 hours. What's next? Why 7 character strings of course, that will put this at over 70 billion rows and pushing 600GB of data space.

Dictionaries Continued...

Sat, 15 May 2010 13:51:00 -0400

One word of caution, if you decide to actually generate a dictionary, you will need loads of disk space. Let's do some math! In order to calculate the number of permutations you need the follow information:

How large is your base set (alphabet in our case) for this example that I've laid out that number would be 36, 26 letters and 10 numbers
How long is the string you are constructing?

Knowing this information, we can plug this into the formula n^r where n = base set size and r = length of string to construct. You can see how this can get out of control quite quickly :) Here is a list containing the number of permutations for a given string length from 1 to 10

36
1296
46656
1679616
60466176
2176782336
78364164096
2821109907456
101559956668416
3.65615844006298e+15 (big damn number)

Let's take this a step further. If we are going to store the permutations we need to know how much disk space we're going to need. In order to get a rough estimate let's assume we are going to store this as non-unicode data so 1 byte per character. That would give a result of 548,549,148,672 bytes (548 GB) to store all of the permutations of a 7 character string! How much for 10 you say? 3.65615844006298e+15 * 10 = 3.65615844006298e+16 bytes so that gives us 36.5 Petabytes :) This brings us to the question, how long of a password is good enough to escape most brute force attacks? It depends on who your attacker is, but if you look at the data it would take quite awhile to produce let alone process a list of passwords longer than 6 characters. Keep in mind however that most dictionaries are just that, dictionaries containing all words in a given language so don't choose something that's in one! ever! and you might just be ok, then again...maybe not :)

Pages are once again working

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 19:56:00 -0400

There was a problem during the upgrade of the site software that was causing the pages (Downloads, About, etc...) not to display. This has been corrected.

Woot! New HTPC

Sun, 27 Dec 2009 20:06:00 -0400

More, and clearer pictures to come, along with details on hardware and such :) and it plays DAoC @ 1600x1200 with all the settings cranked up, no lag. but its real purpose is blu-ray decoding :)

lolsql...yes indeed

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 15:43:00 -0400

excerpt from the site...


HAI!
I'M IN UR `table`
PLZ MAKES `column` LIEKS `value`
I CAN HAZ `column` NO WAI LIEK `value`
KTHNXBYE

http://www.aaronbassett.com/2009/i-can-haz-lolsql/ there's even a parser...yeah, wow... http://github.com/jnthn/lolsql/blob/master/icanhazsql.p6

Links are working...my bad

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 22:27:00 -0400

OK! The blog is working as it should, navigation, comments, etc... Turned out to be a problem with a BlogCFC setting all along (who0ps) :)

Another Disk Failure

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 21:14:00 -0400

I swear, you give me a hard drive that promises to be reliable and stable and it'll croak faster than a (fill in your choice of colorful euphemism here) Time to break out the cold pads and crank down the freezer...again. This time for a western digital passport drive. Apparently it liked where it was and didn't appreciate being moved.

Site Migrated...

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 02:20:00 -0400

Accidentally ahead of schedule...What I mean is, yeah...I meant to do that. Now to get rid of that ugly orange theme. and...what gives with the links not working! grrr oh, and Lyla too...damn you! why can't things just work when you want them to?

Wordpress to BlogCFC ( wp2blogcfc )

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 02:00:00 -0400

The Wordpress to BlogCFC migration tool has been submitted and approved on RIAForge, project files were just uploaded this morning. I'll be migrating the Playground to BlogCFC just as soon as I find a suitable skin for it, and figure out why the hell the SEF URLs are not working. http://wp2blogcfc.riaforge.org/index.cfm

Wordpress to BlogCFC Migration

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 02:00:00 -0400

My migration tool is nearly complete. So far it successfully imports: Users Pages Categories Blog Entries and creates the appropriate Entry-Category relationships. it ended up being MUCH easier than I had originally anticipated, I'll have code posted soon along with a possible submission to RIAForge

Wordpress2BlogCFC

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 02:00:00 -0400

I'm currently working on a migrator for BlogCFC that will pull data from Wordpress into BlogCFC goodness. This will work for the current version of Wordpress 2.8.4 and BlogCFC 5.9.4

Coldfusion j2eeSessionScopeStub cannot cast...

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 02:00:00 -0400

While working on a customer solution, we ran into an interesting error.


Error casting an object of type coldfusion.runtime.J2eeSessionScopeStub cannot be cast to coldfusion.runtime.J2eeSessionScopeStub to an incompatible type. This usually indicates a programming error in Java, although it could also mean you have tried to use a foreign object in a different way than it was designed. 
coldfusion.runtime.J2eeSessionScopeStub cannot be cast to coldfusion.runtime.J2eeSessionScopeStub

This problem occurred on a load balanced server pair running Coldfusion 8.01 with Cumulative Hotfix 3. Each server is running a separate instance which is then clustered. From what I've been able to gather from others in the community is that uninstalling the hot fix alleviates the problem, however in this case the hotfix is required for the successful operation of the customer's site. Luckily, the site did not need the session scope and I shut off J2EE sessions as well as session replication. I eagerly await a fix from Adobe on this, if there's anyone else in the community that has run across this problem and have successfully mitigated it, I invite you to share your solutions.

New Server!

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 02:00:00 -0400

We're up and running on our own server, let the madness begin!