Recent content on Polaris64's blog
I recently started playing around with the p5.js web editor and I created what I called the “Verlet Physics Playground”. That got me interested in other libraries in other languages that could be used for building real-time simulations like this.
The rabbit hole I ended up in first took me to Common Lisp’s Sketch library. I love using Common Lisp and I’m especially enamoured with the interactive/REPL-driven development workflow. I had a lot of fun rebuilding the p5.js version using Sketch.
This is a small post in appreciation of Rust, the programming language, and its ecosystem.
If you’ve read my other posts you’ll know that I have a strong interest in Rust. I have been using Rust for quite a number of years and I have released several posts about it, for example the performance of Rust when compiled to WASM. I’ve also built some software using Rust: Lishwist, Syswall and the Rust/WASM graphics library.
I’ve just released a beta version of a new project that I’ve been working on: Lishwist!
Lishwist is a web app which allows you to create and share wish-lists. There’s no registration requirement: just create a new wish-list (called a Wist) and bookmark the page! You can then share the list with others (one share per person) and these people can “claim” items to mark their intent to get the item for you. People to whom you’ve shared your Wist can see who has claimed an item (to avoid people buying the same thing), but you can’t see that yourself (so as not to spoil the surprise).
Last year, the UK government, through the UK Research and Innovation’s programme Strength in Places, granted CSconnected £43.7 million to form “the world’s first Compound Semiconductor Cluster.”
The cluster is a consortium of organisations directly involved with the research, development, and manufacturing of compound semiconductors, which power most technological devices. The programme aims to develop new supply chains for unmanned aerial vehicles and new packaging platforms for emerging communications applications. This funding comes three years after the Cardiff Capital Region cabinet was awarded a £37.9 million investment, this time to establish an advanced semiconductor foundry.
This is a quick post to describe a little Rust crate that I created for fun: a WebAssembly graphics library.
The library is not meant for any serious work; it has no hardware acceleration and is not highly optimised. I created it to help me to learn Rust, WebAssembly, general graphics routines and unit testing and benchmarking in Rust. I’m sharing it mainly for fun, but also with the hope that it might help someone who is learning this type of thing too.
I have been using Org mode to keep a daily journal of useful notes for around a year now. One such type of note is the amount of exercise I’ve done on a particular day. While this is a useful record, I wanted to expand upon it and to produce a table at the end of each month so that I can track how I’m (hopefully) progressing.
This post details how I used Emacs, Org mode and a sprinkling of Elisp to do this.
I am currently in the process of creating this Hugo blog and I decided to create my own theme in order to learn Hugo internals. While testing this theme I of course needed content, so I thought “why not document the process of creating the theme as the first post in the blog?”. This is that post!
After creating a base Hugo site with: -
Hello, and welcome to Polaris64.net!
This website is intended to be a place where I can show some of my work and also write about the industry and other areas that interest me.
A while back I started thinking about software and how it does what it does. Perhaps even more importantly, I started thinking about how we can know what software does, without relying on the software’s marketing pitch.
Software can be good and can also be bad; this is what we know as malware. For malware, a lot of time and effort is spent reverse-engineering the program’s machine code in order to figure out what it does and how it does it. This is a highly specialised skill, requiring a huge amount of time and effort to be able to perform this reverse-engineering successfully. We also use virtual machines (VMs) in order to execute untrustworthy executable files in a safe environment in order to limit their effectiveness when performing an analysis.
Further to my recent post comparing the performance of a WebAssembly module written in Rust to plain JavaScript and WebGL shaders for rendering the Mandelbrot set, I have added an additional example comparing the performance of WebAssembly and plain JavaScript for the Floyd-Steinberg dithering algorithm. Check out the demo!
The Floyd-Steinberg dithering algorithm is used as a way to distribute quantization errors to neighbouring pixels in an image.
Many articles, including my own, make references to code obfuscation. This article takes a look at what this actually is, as well as why it is often used by attackers to hide malicious code.
Obfuscation is the process of converting something to a form where its meaning and purpose is less apparent. When related to computer source code, this can be done for many reasons; sometimes as a challenge, sometimes even for art!. However it can also be used for more sinister purposes which is what we’ll investigate today.
As a follow-up to the previous article about my Web Exploit Detector, I am happy to announce that I have just made the project available as an NPM module. This allows the application to be installed, used and updated much more easily than before.
This article is intended to be a brief introduction to the Web Exploit Detector as an NPM module, as well as a brief introduction to NPM itself for those that are unfamiliar with it.
After detecting some new exploits on one of my web servers, I decided to start work on a new application called the “Web Exploit Detector”. This project is open-source and hosted on GitHub, meaning that it’s free for anyone to use and, more importantly, anyone can contribute their own rules to make the tool better.
I now use this tool on my own servers to check for infections on a daily basis and it works well so far. It is my hope that, given time and the help of others, it can become even more useful and capable of detecting even the most recent of exploits.
In the second of my series of articles about different exploits seen for WordPress sites, I discuss a particular attack that causes all pages on an infected site to redirect to a page of the attacker’s choice, which in this case was an affiliate link. This attack involves adding malicious code to jQuery .js files based on the assumption that jQuery is probably going to be included in every page request.
The Cybersecurity blog is a place where I can write about all topics relating to online security, web-based attacks, “hacking”, exploits, vulnerabilities, penetration testing, etc.
In my work I operate many servers which are connected to the Internet, for myself, my company and my clients. Having a server connected to the Internet exposes it to a huge threat from online evildoers, and I see a fair share of this on a daily basis.
I recently noticed that a number of our client sites had some suspicious code added to the top of the functions.php file for each of the installed themes. This is an investigation into this code and details of how to remove it.
I am making this information available in the hope that it will be a useful resource for anybody that suffers this attack on their own WordPress sites. I strongly believe that by making this information public I can help others to combat these types of attacks. So, I hope you find the following analysis useful!
It has been quite a while since I created the original Shared Canvas, so I decided it was a good time for an upgrade…
So here is Shared Canvas, mark 2! Well almost; it’s still an early alpha and there’s a lot still left to do. But feel free to have a play with it in its current state :) Currently multi-user chat and drawing is supported, and multiple rooms (with passwords) can be created.
For another university assignment, I was tasked to create a mobile game using Unreal Engine 4. The game concept could be anything, but it couldn’t be a first-person game or a shooter. I came up with the idea of a top-down maze game where the player must collect keys in order to escape at the exit.
The maze is extremely dark and filled with malevolent statues which creep up on the player when the player is not looking. The player has a torch which often is the only source of illumination.
Here’s a new game that I created for a university assignment called “Tank Battleground!”
The assignment required me to create a 3D game which used physics and demonstrated OpenGL and GLSL. I decided to use the idea of an arcade tank game so that I could demonstrate physics for movement (acceleration, velocity and displacement), projectile trajectories, friction, recoil, etc.
The game was written from the ground up using C++, OpenGL, GLSL, GLFW, SDL_mixer, FreeImage and FreeType. I first coded a game library (simple engine) and then used that to build the game.
I have just finished an early alpha version of the tool, called “SG2D script editor”, which will be used to generate the Python script used to drive the engine.
The tool currently has the following features: -
Here’s a video of the tool in action: -
Move’m is a housing review site specifically aimed at students and student accommodation all over the UK. It empowers students by allowing them to review student properties, landlords and letting agents, the overall goal being to provide students with a useful resource when looking for places to live and for landlords and agents to provide the best service possible!
The site was designed by the owners of Move’m Ltd and was developed by myself.
My first development task was to add a scripting interface to the engine. This allows the game logic to be separated from the engine code and loaded in as with any other asset such as a sprite or audio clip.
I chose Python for scripting due to its power, flexibility, popularity and ease of integration. I am using IronPython for the .NET support with XNA, but I am being careful not to introduce any .NET dependencies as the engine needs to be portable, and game scripts should be able to be run with any version of the engine. The script itself is loaded during initialisation of a “script harness” executable, which is the framework under which the game runs in the engine. The engine can of course still be used directly by coding natively in XNA and using the engine assembly as a library.
For development of my project I decided to use an engine and set of tools that I have already built: the SG2D engine and the SGDK set of tools.
My dissertation project will involve converting these two elements so that they will become an effective tool for game creation for both programmers and non-programmers. This will involve adding a scripting interface to the engine and visual scripting interface to the tool kit. The ultimate goal is to allow designers and programmers to work together using one set of tools.
“To investigate development of an extensible 2D game engine for use by programmers and non-programmers”
I am currently working on a final-year university project and dissertation and this blog is used to track my progress. I’ll post regular updates as the project progresses so please check back to see what’s happening!
This is a “Weeping Angel” from Dr. Who that I modelled for a university assignment. The task was to create a low-polygon model suitable for a game (1,500 polygons maximum). The model had to include high-frequency detail so the base mesh (created in Blender) was exported to ZBrush for sculpting. Normal, ambient occlusion and cavity maps were then applied to the base mesh to provide the extra fidelity required while maintaining the low polygon count.
