Hacking

Music Sanity

Music libraries can quickly bloat with duplicate files and disorganized structure due to moving computers, re-downloading already purchased music or re-ripping CDs. The music sanity project is a music organization tool that cleans up a user’s music library. It eliminates duplicates using a variety of detection methods, retrieves missing ID3 metadata and sorts files into a logical directory structure.

Access Log Visualization

While there are various robust and insightful tools for analytics, I decided to brew my own. This Ruby tool parses raw access logs and extracts all or matching entries. The visualizer does a reverse IP lookup to identify the origin of access and uses the Google Visualization Toolkit to produce a geographical heat map based upon frequency of access from IP addresses.

Cognitive Cryptography

Cryptography is cool. Some cryptograhic algorithms are easy to break, and some are hard to break. Decrypting something often means running an algorithm that tries a bunch of approaches and stops when some heuristic is reached.

However, what if you could encrypt information such that verifying a correct decryption requires the presence of a person? This approach would build upon the idea that there are certain abilities that humans had that are very hard (or currently impossible) for computers to mimic. This particular project forays into cognitive science, artificial intelligence and cryptography.

Knitting

The Wave Blanket

I spent five months knitting my first big project ever, the wave blanket.

Materials

• Size 9, 48-inch circular needles
• 17 skeins of Blue Sky Alpacas Multi Cotton Yarn
• Lots and lots of patience -- sorry, no link

You can see the end result in my blog entry!