Last week, I attended my first in-person KubeCon at KubeCon North America 2023. I learned a lot and it gave me a lot to think about in connection with my team’s work.
For the previous post click here.
Since we last checked in, Pumpkin Man’s cybernetic brains developed the ability to start up automatically and self-update. Also, there’s a new control interface for operating all eight relays. And perhaps most importantly, the team working on his physical form have made great strides. He now stands triumphantly!
My friend Sam DuBois has enlisted my help in building Pumpkin Man for Halloween 2020. Pumpkin Man is set to be a larger-than-life being with a 🎃 for a head who interacts with passersby. The project is reuniting Sam, Kai, and me, the team behind 2019’s Avenue Adventure. My primary focus is on developing the computer control systems to bring Pumpkin Man to life.
Just for fun, I signed up for the DEF CON CTF 2020 Qualifiers this weekend. I didn’t successfully solve any challenges besides the (deliberately easy) welcome challenges. But I spent a while working on “uploooadit,” a web challenge focusing on a Flask app. This post is a write-up of my unsuccessful attempts at solving the challenge. The Challenge The challenge links to a simple website and provides the source code, written in Python with the web framework Flask:
Yesterday, this site went down for about four hours. Complaints started rolling in from my millions of ardent followers, spurring me into action. Join me as I deconstruct what went wrong, how I fixed it, and how I tried to prevent the problem from occurring again.
I erased all of my cronjobs by accident due to a simple typo.
When working with cron jobs, the command crontab -e is used to edit your
crontab. This command is one letter off from crontab -r, which erases your
cron jobs without any confirmation prompt. On a QWERTY keyboard,
the e and r keys are adjacent, which makes it especially easy to type the
wrong one by accident. I accidentally typed the wrong thing, and
*poof*, my cronjobs disappeared.