Josh Rieken joshrieken

Basecamp was under network attack

The attack detailed below has stopped (for the time being) and almost all network access for almost all customers have been restored. We're keeping this post and the timeline intact for posterity. Unless the attack resumes, we'll post a complete postmortem within 48 hours (so before Wednesday, March 26 at 11:00am central time).

Criminals have laid siege to our networks using what's called a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) starting at 8:46 central time, March 24 2014. The goal is to make Basecamp, and the rest of our services, unavailable by flooding the network with bogus requests, so nothing legitimate can come through. This attack was launched together with a blackmail attempt that sought to have us pay to avoid this assault.

Note that this attack targets the network link between our servers and the internet. All the data is safe and sound, but nobody is able to get to it as long as the attack is being successfully executed. This is like a bunch of people

Description

This simple script will take a picture of a whiteboard and use parts of the ImageMagick library with sane defaults to clean it up tremendously.

The script is here:

#!/bin/bash
convert "$1" -morphology Convolve DoG:15,100,0 -negate -normalize -blur 0x1 -channel RBG -level 60%,91%,0.1 "$2"

Results

Heil PR40 Package - http://www.bswusa.com/Dynamic-Microphones-Heil-Sound-PR40-Package-P7628.aspx

This is a great deal, and is a perfect mic for this stuff.

OC White Boom - http://www.ocwhite.com/broadcast-arms/proboomtm-elite-extended-reach-mic-arm-with-riser-45-reach-12-vertical-riser.html

The kit comes with a boom. It is decent, I guess, but this OC White boom is badass prostyle with a 4' reach and a 15" riser that lets it live behind my monitor.

From No Coding to Web Dev

I get asked frequently about how people should become a Ruby on Rails developer -- that's such a broad range of topics it's hard to give just one path. You not only need to learn how to program, but you need to master Ruby, JavaScript, databases, TDD, and at least a little bit of graphics design (CSS).

Here's my path to a great web and Rails developer:

How to install PhantomJS on Ubuntu

Version: 1.9.8

Platform: x86_64

First, install or update to the latest system software.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential chrpath libssl-dev libxft-dev

Bearded's Hourly Contract

Date: [[Date of Document]] Between [Our Company] and [Your Company]

Summary

We’re not big on formality, but sometimes it’s best to have a few simple things written down so that we’re all on the same page. In this contract you won’t find complicated legal terms or large passages of unreadable text. We have no desire to trick you into signing something that you might later regret. We do want what’s best for the safety of both parties, now and in the future.

	#!/bin/bash

	# Following the guide found at this page
	# http://programmingarehard.com/2014/03/17/behat-and-selenium-in-vagrant.html

	echo "\r\nUpdating system ...\r\n"
	sudo apt-get update


	# Create folder to place selenium in

	#!/usr/bin/env ruby
	# coding: utf-8

	abort "Usage: fuck you <name>" unless ARGV[0] == "you" && ARGV.size == 2

	a = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvqxyz".each_char.to_a
	b = "ɐqɔpǝɟƃɥıɾʞʃɯuodbɹsʇnʌʍxʎz".each_char.to_a
	ws = Hash[a.zip(b)]
	ws.default = ->(f){f}

	// do it live: http://jsfiddle.net/apinstein/2kR2c/1/

	// in DOM
	<div ng-controller="MyCtrl">
	<p ng-click="bumpA()">a: {{a}}</p>
	<p ng-click="bumpB()">b: {{b}}</p>
	<p>a^2 = {{aSquared}}</p>
	<p>a + b = {{aPlusB}}</p>
	</div>

	# So, this is pretty horrible. If we just encode using btoa, any UTF-8 chars cause an error.
	# If we use either of the workarounds on MDN[1], the £ sign is encoded wrong. I suspect
	# Excel totally sucking at encodings is the reason why. So, the workaround is, to use
	# the MDN workaround on chars with values > 255, and allow chars 0-255 to be encoded
	# as is with btoa. Note that if you use either of the workarounds on MDN, chars
	# 128-255 will be encoded as UTF-8, which includeds the £ sign. This will cause excel
	# to choke on these chars. Excel will still choke on chars > 255, but at least the £
	# sign works now...

	# [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Base64_encoding_and_decoding