University sure is neat.

What have I been up to?

This is the stuff I’ve done in the past 6 months:

Participated in Actonis CTF, my first attack/defence CTF
Contributing to The Cutting Room Floor
Finishing the loop labyrinth game
Studying at a university

Actonis CTF

In addition to Jeopardy-style web challenges, it had a series of two challenges where my team had to defend a cloud server from automated attacks. I had to do it alone with lots of advice from a team member much more experienced than I was.

In the first challenge, we had to defend a website server. I fixed all the obvious bugs in the server’s code with an automated scanner and the help of that teammate, but we still did poorly.

The second challenge was much more cryptic, we had no source code and we could only access the server with a terminal. We were supposed to remove a malicious program disgused as a system service, but we couldn’t figure it out, so we also did poorly.

The Cutting Room Floor

The Cutting Room Floor wisas one of my favourite online encyclopedias because you can read all about video game secrets there. Unfortunately, the article for Spore, one of my favourite strategy/animal simulator games, was still very empty. I took the initiative and included most of the secrets I knew about the game, going so far to write game modifications to help document them.

The loop labyrinth game

I have finally completed the game, under the title Gluing Together Space and without a level editor. In the final game, you have to guide balls into holes, the catch being that two balls can’t cross paths. You can find it on itch.io below.

Progress on other side projects

IR blaster that controls lights: I tried to replace the wires on the infrared LEDs and they still didn’t work. This project is still dead.