Geek Wisdom

I started Victoria day with a "long sleep in", by that I mean I didn't get up until about 10:00am. I then proceeded to spend most of the day tunnelling away at AES encryption in PHP. It was rather frustrating and not working quite the way I wanted. Several problems I ran into including: Not saving the Initialisation Vector (IV), which (upon encrypting) generates a random series of bytes. The idea of this is that if you encrypt the same phrase multiple times, each time you will get different crypted values.  The problem however is that if you don't somehow save / remember the (IV) it will not decrypt properly. Not saving the 'TAG'. I didn't even know what the 'TAG' was. Apparently, when encrypting, the 'TAG' is a self-check or 'finger print' of the encrypted string.  One the problems with many encryption algorithms (particularly based on 'XOR') is that when you decrypt you can't really be sure the decrypted message

Most of the morning was spent playing TryHackMe . I completed 2 rooms and earned level 3 with 728 points and got this nice shinny badge I didn't do a lot of coding, as we went out for lunch with our 'bubble' family to Dunbar falls. A lot of water around the area this time of year, and I counted about a dozen cars, though I did not see near that many on the trail itself. The trail was pretty challenging with all of the water everywhere a few spots you have to get down and crawl. We then headed from their out to the Princeville Suspension Bridge, but we got a little lost doing a 'Google Maps' for Princeville doesn't really get you where you want to be. For those planning to head their yourself. I recommend setting the destination as 'McNamee' your google maps. We ended the day with a BBQ at my sisters and a game of washer toss. I spent about an hour later in the evening working on some encryption stuff.

Shh? - I love documentation. I know...I know...can I be a 'real' programmer if I love to document things? What is with this contradiction I have been working (steadily?) on the development of the GeekWisdom tools / shared components over the past few years. However on the 'back burner' has been a severe lack of documentation. How can I expect others to take advantage of these amazing tools if programmers / developers don't know how to use them. Documentation Today I started a github documentation repository, and completed documentation for two of the components ( GWSettings and GWLogging ). I also pointed the existing tool repositories README.md to point to the new tools... Binged TV Last half of Hackers (started last night on plex.tv) Upload (from Amazon Prime) The Outsiders (CraveTV) Hacking TryHackMe ->  https://tryhackme.com/ Completed Up to Level 3

Announcing my 2nd annual Weekend of Coding event For my second year, follow along on twitter , YouTube , Facebook and this blog, as I continue to explore my inner geek. Plus this year, in addition to my usual Patreon page, you can help support GeekWisdom's mission, by ordering your very own GeekWisdom T-Shirt and Mug Starting Bid Just $0.99 - Get it on E-Bay Do you have what it takes to come along for the ride? Interested in last year's activities??  => Check them out at #ProgrammingWeekend2019