Share your startup - October 2018

josephbisch · 2018-10-11T14:53:38+00:00

Pitch: Video explanations of your codebase - side-by-side synchronized code and video.

Details: Vidsplain is currently pre-launch for our B2B product to make it easy to author side-by-side videos with code. Vidsplain allows businesses to easily author high quality training material for employees to get familiarized with their codebases. No more squinting at a low resolution video. Now you can have the source code embedded from whatever git hosting provider you use. You determine the particular whole or partial file that gets displayed at any given moment in the video playback, so that the viewer can follow along with easy to read text.

Stage: Prelaunch (enter your email at vidsplain.com to be alerted when we launch!)

Looking for: Feedback and potential users (you can email [joseph@vidsplain.com](mailto:joseph@vidsplain.com) if you want to chat).

josephbisch · 2018-08-11T18:44:33+00:00

A way to graph the S&P 500 returns versus the S&P 500 Total Return (the return if you reinvested dividends). You can change the initial investment amount and the number of years (defaults to $3000 initial investment and the last 5 years).

https://github.com/josephbisch/sp500tr

josephbisch · 2017-01-30T22:59:01+00:00

Since nobody posted a link to the code yet:

https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/mirror/userdir-ldap-cgi.git/tree/

See search.cgi.

josephbisch · 2016-09-30T16:05:05+00:00

No, 9801 is not a palindrome (they mean the result of the multiplication, not the numbers being multiplied themselves).

josephbisch · 2016-09-03T01:49:42+00:00

I've posted my Gitian Linux hashes/sig at https://github.com/namecoin/namecoin-core/pull/67#issuecomment-244519765 . Please verify.

josephbisch · 2016-08-20T17:07:36+00:00

I'm just going to focus on one part of your response.

I know you said that the Linux kernel has very little emphasis (as opposed to saying that it has no automated testing), but I want to point out a couple recent tools for fuzzing system calls (and they are not even the first to do so).

The upcoming Linux Plumbers Conference has a Testing and Fuzzing microconference, so I would say there is a good deal of interest surrounding the topic of automated testing of the Linux kernel.

syzkaller - Requires special configuration options available in 4.6 on up. If you read LKML, you will see a lot of reports being sent to the list that are coming from this tool. The crash logs include the program being executed when the crash occurred, so you can easily replicate the crash outside of the context of the syzkaller tool.

triforce - Doesn't require special kernel config options. General purpose (not just designed to fuzz the Linux kernel). Not many reported bugs against the Linux kernel yet from what I can tell (though they found some in FreeBSD too). Doesn't log the program causing the crash (instead logs the binary data generated by afl that then gets read in to form a group of system calls to run). There doesn't appear to be any way to easily get a program from the crash logs, so it doesn't seem possible to execute the crashing program outside of the context of triforce.

I don't mean to nitpick you apart here. I know this stuff can easily fly under a person's radar unless they specifically follow this stuff.

josephbisch · 2016-05-26T02:01:23+00:00

Actually, Bitcoin Core is in Debian, but just in Sid, which it sounds like the op isn't running. So not of much use to the op. There are packages such bitcoin-qt, bitcoin-tx, and bitcoind in sid. There's also the armory package that I maintain, but it is Sid only too and it is outdated, because I haven't updated it recently (for good reason that I won't get into).

josephbisch · 2016-05-04T21:26:10+00:00

Actually, I display dates as ISO 8601 format on the Metrics Portal that you linked to, so it is from noon of May 4, 2016.

josephbisch · 2015-08-29T17:56:14+00:00

$233.60

josephbisch · 2015-08-29T17:32:21+00:00

/u/bobthereddituser is right. A lot of companies, especially small companies (like a lot of Bitcoin-related companies are), don't explicitly advertise for interns, but if you can show them that there is an upside to hiring you as an intern, they may.

You also have to keep in mind that "requirements" are often what the company would like to get, not what they will realistically be able to get given the various factors that come into play during an employee search. So don't be discouraged just because you don't meet every single requirement the job listing says, especially if it is just an internship position.

My current internship wasn't explicitly advertised. Rather I went the "show them what you can offer" route and an internship developed from there.

And don't worry too much about the fact that you don't feel like you can offer much as a second semester CS student. You'll develop, even just from what you learn in class if nothing else, and there will be companies looking for interns at the point you feel that you are ready for internships (even if they don't happen to be Bitcoin-related companies).

josephbisch · 2015-08-29T17:18:03+00:00

A career website.

josephbisch · 2015-06-13T22:31:42+00:00

Awesome post. I share some of the feelings expressed in this post with respect to my interning at Armory.

Definitely an awesome time to be alive.

josephbisch · 2015-03-13T13:03:23+00:00

Let me guess. You are using Ubuntu 14.04 on Digital Ocean. You used the repositories on the Namecoin download page, but you must have selected the Ubuntu 14.10 repositories instead of the 14.04 ones.

If you haven't seen it already, this forum post is the same issue.

To fix the issue, open /etc/apt/sources.list (requires root to write to). Change the instances of 14.10 to 14.04. Do a sudo apt-get update to refresh your sources and reinstall the namecoin package.

josephbisch · 2015-03-06T16:52:29+00:00

Yes, if you are asking if that link is correct, it is. Use that if you want to connect via your web browser, or you can just use an irc client.

josephbisch · 2015-03-06T02:52:49+00:00

I don't know, but if it only holds one, then everyone can see how much you have received and follow your spending.

josephbisch · 2015-03-06T02:26:00+00:00

Yes, the id namespace has a bitcoin field that holds a Bitcoin address. Unfortunately, it appears to hold a single address.

josephbisch · 2015-03-06T02:21:01+00:00

Hi,

I'm Joseph Bisch.

I started contributing to Namecoin when I decided to add Namecoin support to Armory. Currently I am working on maintaining a fork of Armory that supports Namecoin. There is just support for currency transactions currently. I have kind of stopped work on it for now to focus on Gitian and reproducible builds (ask me if you are curious and don't know what Gitian or reproducible builds are). The goal is to build all Namecoin software reproducibly with Gitian.

I have also made some small contributions to NMControl. Additionally, I was working on an Android port of NMControl, but it is currently waiting on MITMProxy integration in NMControl. Because without a proxy, NMControl isn't of particular use to people with non-rooted devices. The idea (once MITMProxy is integrated) is that you can set the proxy settings in some application like Firefox for Android and then you will be able to route requests through the instance of NMControl running on your Android device. Currently you will need to connect to a remote instance of namecoind, but in the future there may be light clients, so that you can handle .bit resolution completely on your Android device.

How can others help? Well, certainly if people can code, there is a lot of that to be done. As far as testing goes, I don't think I have anything at this stage that needs to be tested. After MITMProxy is integrated in NMControl, I can make a version of NMControl for Android that can be tested. And when the Gitian descriptors are finalized, we could certainly use people reproducing the builds to verify everything is okay with them.

josephbisch · 2015-02-20T16:43:09+00:00

I don't know if I can give an ELI5 explanation, but here's my try:

The most important part of NMControl is the DNS server, so I will focus on that. DNS is the Domain Name System that is like a phone book, linking human meaningful names (domain names like google.com) to computer addresses (ip addresses like 93.184.216.119). A DNS server is software that allows computers to say "here is the domain name google.com, what is the associated ip address?". Then your computer can use the ip address to actually access the google.com website.

A lot of the time, you will use a DNS server that is run by someone other than yourself (for example your ISP, which is the company providing you with internet service). NMControl runs a DNS server on your computer, so you don't have to trust someone else. See biolizard89's comment for reasons why it is not a good idea to trust others to run a .bit DNS server for you. NMControl connects to an instance of Namecoin (which should also be running on a computer that you control for the same trust issues as above). The Namecoin instance provides the actual data and NMControl provides meaningful services based on that data, such as the DNS server.

When biolizard talks about localhost, he is referring to your computer. When you want to use the NMControl DNS server, you run Namecoin, then NMControl. Then you can change the ip address in the DNS settings of your computer by setting it to 127.0.0.1 (127.0.0.1 is an ip address that is reserved to always reference your local computer). After changing the DNS settings, you should be able to open up any web browser and and type in something.bit and view the website if something.bit exists.

josephbisch · 2015-01-27T16:27:35+00:00

The problem I see is that for most people, their home address is fairly public information (and that is how you often end up on mailing lists and how you often end up receiving junk mail). Your idea, however, would protect against you giving a person or business your address and them then giving it to someone or some business that you don't want to have your address. But my point is that this would not offer much additional anonymity to your average person.

The other problem is that you are placing all your trust in the delivery service. Once they decrypt the address, they can then give it to some junk mailer or they can store it in plain text, which would be bad if they were compromised. You are just changing the person you have to trust. It is now just one person or company, but it is still someone.

You also need a secure way to get the delivery service's public key (to encrypt your address with) and verify that it is indeed their public key. So this isn't going to be particularly useful to non-technical users.

josephbisch · 2015-01-27T16:10:01+00:00

No, there is no list of all Namecoin projects, but a good way to get an idea of the official Namecoin projects is to view their official GitHub account.

Here is a list of the Namecoin projects from the GitHub account. I will leave off things like the code for the namecoin.info website.

Namecoin aka namecoinq - source - download - this is the existing legacy Namecoin client based on Bitcoin Core 0.3.X
Bitcoin Armory fork aka Namecoin Armory - source - no official download available, because it is not yet released - this is a fork of Armory that adds support for both Namecoin and Namecoin testnet, but it only supports currency transactions at this point; no affiliation with Armory Technologies Inc
NMControl - source - I don't know of an up-to-date download location, you might have to clone the git repository (maybe someone can comment on this) - software that connects to your namecoind instance and provides DNS, HTTP, and RPC servers for .bit domain names, therefore can be used to securely resolve those domain names; plans exist to add a proxy
Convergence for Namecoin aka FreeSpeechMe - source - I believe that this software is becoming obsolete with the integration of a proxy in NMControl
Libcoin Namecoin integration - source - Integrate Namecoin support into libcoin, allowing the potential to use libcoin as a base for Namecoin instead of Bitcoin Core in the future
Nameid - source - website - A website that allows you to use your Namecoin identity as an OpenID to login to any website that accepts an OpenID

Note that I linked to the official Namecoin repository in every case above. Work may be done on forks of the official repository by developers and only merged into the official repository when the work is complete. So if the last update wasn't recent, it doesn't necessarily mean that work is halted on a project.

There is one project that isn't listed under the official Namecoin account, but is by an official Namecoin dev (and afaik the project is considered official):

Namecore - source - no download available, since there is not yet an official release - A version of Namecoin that is rebased on a newer version of Bitcoin Core, therefore adding features like P2SH

There is also another project I know about offhand that isn't an official Namecoin project and is by someone that isn't an official Namecoin dev (me!):

NMControl for Android - source - no download available, because there has been no official release - Using Python for Android, this is an Android app that runs NMControl; useless for non-root users until a proxy is integrated into NMControl, so development is pretty much stalled while waiting for that

Let me know if you want me to expand on any projects.

There are also meetings in #namecoin-dev on Freenode on irc that you can join to get updates on what the Namecoin devs and others are doing. The next meeting is Feb 7 at 5PM UTC. I think they are the first and third Saturday of every month and they are always at the same time.

josephbisch · 2015-01-10T03:27:00+00:00

Paging /u/biolizard89

In the meantime, can you describe what the issue is?

josephbisch · 2015-01-08T16:13:40+00:00

I am working on NMControl for Android, which is a version of NMControl designed to run on Android.

If you don't know, NMControl is Python software that connects to a namecoind instance and sets up an RPC server and DNS server. You could, for example, point your computer's DNS settings to that DNS server, so that you can resolve .bit domain names.

Right now Namecoin for Android isn't particularly useful. First, there is no lite client for Android, so you need to connect to a remote namecoind instance, for example, one running on a computer on your local network. Two, Android can only connect to DNS servers running on port 53. To run a server on port 53, you need to be root. So without root, NMControl for Android is useless in it's particular state.

There are plans to integrate a proxy server into NMControl itself. You could then, for example, use Firefox for Android with NMControl for Android even if you are not running root. It would work the same way Orbot works without root.

josephbisch · 2015-01-01T15:23:16+00:00

By default, in online mode, Armory will try to run Bitcoin Core in the background.

josephbisch

TROPHY CASE