Bed Against The Wall

Tabular ML: Solved, But Still Risky

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 14:14:00 +0200

Right before the arrival of the first LLMs, I co-authored a book on Model Risk from a machine learning perspective. Rather than taking a (purely) financial view on the topic, we wanted to break open the term Model Risk to cover all predictive modelling failure cases that lead to harm …

Keeping uv Virtual Environments Out of Google Drive

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 18:41:00 +0200

I have a nasty habbit of starting quick new Python projects somewhere in my chronologically organized Google Drive, uv init-ing them, and start adding packages.

By default, this means every project gets a .venv directory alongside its pyproject.toml. That works perfectly on a single machine. It also works …

Solving Enclose.Horse With CP-SAT

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 18:54:00 +0100

Yesterday (6 Jan), someone showed off a small clever puzzle game on Hacker News, called enclose.horse.

An example puzzle looks like this:

The game is played on a grid of grass or water tiles. The goal is to place walls so that the horse cannot escape (i.e. exit …

Books I’ve Read in 2025

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 12:00:00 +0100

Last year: 2025, and doing this again this year.

Not so many books as the year before, sadly, but overall still a good haul of books I read this year:

Title	Year	Author	Rating
Not a Speck of Light: Stories	2024	Laird Barron	good
The City and Its Uncertain Walls …

Solving LinkedIn Queens With CP-SAT

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 10:45:00 +0200

On LinkedIn, you can play a variant of the N-Queens problem. A community version of the puzzle can be found here.

An example puzzle looks like this:

The idea is that each row, column, and colored region must contain exactly one queen. Queens cannot be placed in adjacent cells, including …

Installing PyTorch and PyTorch Geometric on Mac M* With uv And Without Homebrew.

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 11:40:00 +0200

A huge mess at the moment. Binary wheels point to the wrong location (“Library” Python install). I don’t want to use Homebrew on this Mac so resorted to compile from source.

First set up a project directory:

mkdir pygtest 
cd pygtest

Init with a Python version and Torch version …

Maybe Some Games I Look Forward To

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 20:49:00 +0200

The last time I did this was in 2017, but I’m in some mood to do it once again. With Summer Games Fest, Next Fest, the PC Gaming Show, the Future Games Show, Fan Fest, and so, so many more shows, even a hardcore fan of gaming would be …

Books I’ve Read in 2024

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Tue, 24 Dec 2024 12:00:00 +0100

At the end of 2023, certain events in my life led to a realization that I was spending way too little time on reading in the years past, even though I have always been an avid reader in my youth and adult life. Facing some “weltschmerz” and not finding enjoyment …

Some Fun With Wave Function Collapse

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Sat, 29 Jun 2024 09:22:00 +0200

If you’re at all interested in procedural generation, digital art or game development, it’s very likely that you’ve heard about the wave function collapse (WFC) algorithm before. It’s incredible popular, has been ported to virtually every language and engine, and used in several games.

Adding New Levels to a Keras Embedding Layer Without Having to Completely Retrain It

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Mon, 14 Jun 2021 20:57:00 +0200

A friend of mine recently asked whether there was an easy way to introduce new levels (i.e. items) to an embedding layer in Keras and only training the embedding layer for those new levels, i.e. keeping the weights for the existing indices fixed.

Note that this is not …

reMarkable 2 Screen Capture on Windows 10

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Thu, 14 Jan 2021 12:50:00 +0100

I’ve recently bought a reMarkable 2 and am happy with it. Since teaching is still happening online for the most part at the moment, I was curious whether I could use it as a drawing tablet, share the screen with my machine, and then pick that up in e …

Does It Make Sense to Tune the Cutoff of Trees in a Random Forests?

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Tue, 05 Jan 2021 10:03:00 +0100

TL;DR: very likely not.

A student once asked me whether it would make sense to tune the probability cutoff (a.k.a. threshold) for trees in a random forests. Let’s explain first what we mean by that exactly. Assume a binary classification setting. Say we’ve trained a …

Revisiting Discovery of Interaction Effects

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Sun, 03 Jan 2021 11:37:00 +0100

In 2019, I wrote on the topic of discovering which features interact in a model agnostic manner, using an approach from a paper by Friedman and Popescu entitled Predictive Learning Via Rule Ensembles. I wanted to revisit the topic briefly and expand on it somewhat, given that scikit-learn has progressed …

An Exploration of Cellular Automata and Graph Based Game Systems: Part 4

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Sun, 08 Nov 2020 22:31:00 +0100

Rigging Match 3 Games

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Wed, 04 Nov 2020 22:30:00 +0100

List of Apps (2020)

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 20:11:00 +0200

It’s time to setup a new machine, so once again I’m jotting down a list of apps I generally install right away, slightly updated again.

Chrome
Google Drive
FileZilla
Microsoft Office (including Skype for Business)
Microsoft Teams
7-Zip
Everything
f.lux
Paint.NET
Sumatra PDF and Adobe Reader …

And Now, Time for Another Rant

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Tue, 07 Jan 2020 22:01:00 +0100

I was going to spew this out as a Twitter “thread” as is the fashion these days, but I decided against it. Blogging is still cool. Especially once I realized this is not the first time I’ve done this…

… Meaning that I’m sitting at my machine and realize …

My course.fast.ai Notes

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Fri, 01 Nov 2019 17:45:00 +0100

Like many others, I’m a huge fan of Jeremy Howard’s fast.ai courses. Even when having worked in the machine learning field for years, I still find the material to be packed full with interesting …

List of Apps (2019)

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Sat, 18 May 2019 21:23:00 +0200

It’s time to setup a new laptop, so once again I’m jotting down a list of apps I normally install right away, slightly updated again.

Web

Optional:

qBittorrent install once required
Dropbox to be replaced with Google Drive completely, after their 3 device limit …

A Tour of Open MongoDB Instances

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Sun, 07 Apr 2019 12:36:00 +0200

Earlier last month, a security researcher called Victor Gevers sent out a tweet stating that he had stumbled upon a number of open MongoDB databases hosting what was apparantly logged chats from a number of Chinese applications such as Weixin (WeChat) and QQ:

Around 364 million online profiles and their …

Rendering Minecraft Maps with R’s rayshader Package

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Sat, 06 Apr 2019 19:02:00 +0200

About two weeks ago, Hacker News was discussing a new R package called brickr, which relies on another relatively new and excellently crafted R package called rayshader to enable its rendering goodness. The latter package was originally constructed as a means to generate good-looking “2D and 3D hillshaded maps of …

Discovering Interaction Effects in Ensemble Models

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Fri, 22 Feb 2019 20:10:00 +0100

Update: this post now has a follow-up with some further details.

Throughout the past year or so, both R and Python focused data science practioners have picked up on a paper by Friedman and Popescu from 2008 entitled Predictive Learning Via Rule Ensembles. Interestingly enough, the “meat” of the paper …

An Exploration of Cellular Automata and Graph Based Game Systems: Part 3

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Fri, 03 Aug 2018 21:09:00 +0200

List of Apps (2018)

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Thu, 10 May 2018 12:23:00 +0200

It’s time to setup a new laptop, so once again I’m jotting down a list of apps I normally install right away, slightly updated again.

Web

Skype is avoided, use web version once again.

General

Microsoft Office
7-Zip
Everything to locate files …

Predicting Voobly Age of Empires 2 Matches

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Tue, 24 Apr 2018 20:13:00 +0200

I think that Age of Empires II is probably the game I’ve been playing on or off for the longest amount of time. In fact, it is this game which pushed me to write a custom tool to prevent DirectDraw palette issues more than eight years ago, before custom …

An Exploration of Cellular Automata and Graph Based Game Systems: Part 2

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Tue, 19 Dec 2017 18:05:00 +0100

Note to Self: Fast Android Screen Capture

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Thu, 07 Dec 2017 17:10:00 +0100

Getting a reliable, real-time screen of an Android device is more challenging than one might think, e.g. for the purpose of training a reinforcement learning agent.

This post describes a basic approach:

adb shell screencap -p

Sadly, adb mangles binary output and has a tendency to convert \n to …

Bypassing Android Cert Pinning Using a Rooted Emulator (AVD)

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Wed, 29 Nov 2017 18:25:00 +0100

A while ago I was interested in performing some HTTPS MITM analysis on an Android app, without having to rely on a real device but instead using an Android Virtual Device, or in other words: an emulated device. It turns out that this is surprisingly tricky with a lot of …

Note to Self: Using Tesseract to Extract Subtitles

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Mon, 13 Nov 2017 14:30:00 +0100

Say you have video such as this one on Facebook. Most of these come with hardcoded subtitles, which we’d like to extract (for whatever reason).

Opening the page in Chrome and inspecting the network requests quickly uncovers the media URL:

https://video-bru2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t42.9040-2/10000000_703970666457205_4416008794480312320_n …

An Exploration of Cellular Automata and Graph Based Game Systems: Part 1

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Thu, 09 Nov 2017 12:00:00 +0100

And Now, Time for a Rant

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Wed, 08 Nov 2017 08:18:00 +0100

I’ve been interested in computing since I was a kid. The ability to tinker with the internals of a machine, the brutalism of DOS, Windows 3.1 and Windows 95’s interfaces (those big grey buttons)… It was a great time for young persons to get started with IT …

Cleaning Up a Gmail Inbox

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Mon, 14 Aug 2017 22:12:00 +0200

Update: code is available at https://github.com/Macuyiko/gmail-cleaner.

I’ve been getting increasingly frustrated by my overflowing Gmail inbox lately. I’ve been using Gmail as a primary e-mail service since 2005 and have collected tens of thousands emails over the years.

Lately, I’ve been finding it …

Word Spellchecking in Python

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Tue, 10 Jan 2017 08:36:00 +0100

In case you’d ever want to integrate Word’s spell checking capabilities on top of your Python app, here’s how you would do so:

The only requirement is having Word installed (with the language packs installed for the languages you want to check), as well as the Python …

Some Games to Look Forward to in 2017

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Mon, 09 Jan 2017 19:10:00 +0100

2016 turned out to be a great year for gaming, with Dishonored 2, The Witness, Doom, Overwatch, Superhot, Thumper, Hyper Light Drifter, Cogmind, Devil Daggers, Furi, Brigador, Age of Empires 2 HD keeping me entertained throughout most of the year.

Which games am I looking forward to in 2017? Below …

SmoothLife in Processing

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Sun, 08 Jan 2017 17:44:00 +0100

Conway’s Game of Life is one of the most popular examples of cellular automaton. However, did you know that Stephan Rafler proposed a version of Game of Life in 2011 which works over a contious domain, called SmoothLife?

Cool, isn’t it? The basic idea is that the grid …

Some Quick Spatial Kriging Fun With Aqicn.org

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Fri, 06 Jan 2017 16:52:00 +0100

Our local Belgian media was just reporting on a study showing that air pollution has a negative impact on the cognitive abilities of children (link in Dutch).

With that in mind, I was reminded of the World Air Quality Index team, which keeps track of pollution values across the world …

How To Send HTML Mails With OAuth2 And Gmail In Python

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Sat, 24 Sep 2016 15:59:00 +0200

If you’ve been trying to send e-mails from a program using your Gmail account, you’ll probably have encountered the following error message:

SMTP Error: Could not authenticate. Error: SMTP Error: Could not authenticate.
535 5.7.1 Username and Password not accepted. Learn more at
535 5.7 …

Fun With Audiosurf 2 And Mitmproxy

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Sat, 24 Sep 2016 15:57:00 +0200

I enjoy firing up Audiosurf 2 from time to time to have some rythmic musical fun. One of the things that has been bothering me, however, is the fact that Audiosurf 2 only integrates with Soundcloud for its music streaming. You can use local files, but since I stream all …

Converting Plain Text References To BibTeX, Updated

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Sat, 24 Sep 2016 15:31:00 +0200

This blog post is an update for this one. I was recently contacted regarding the original post no longer working. Indeed, the scholar.py version used there is being blocked by Google Scholar.

Looking at the scholar.py GitHub page, we do find an updated version from about 8 months …

Programming Languages To Try

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Mon, 13 Jun 2016 10:44:00 +0200

I routinely use Python, R and Java during my day-to-day tasks, but have been itching recently to get up to speed or try out some of the following languages.

This list basically serves as a note to myself to start experimenting with some of them:

Haxe — basically in combination with …

Fixing Flask url_for When Behind mod_proxy

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Fri, 22 Apr 2016 10:01:00 +0200

Imagine you have an Apache server set up with a virtualhost configuration listening to some domain, e.g.

my.domain:8080

You have a Flask app running at:

localhost:5000

You want to add a mod_proxy directive so that:

http://my.domain:8080/app_location/  --->  http://localhost:5000

Most resources will …

List Of Apps (Updated)

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Sun, 27 Sep 2015 15:21:00 +0200

Again that time of the year where Windows’s being reinstalled, so once again I’m jotting down a list of apps I normally install right away, slightly updated versus last year.

(This list last updated in May 2016.)

Web

Skype is back. The web version was not robust enough …

A Quick Look At Java Decompilers

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Mon, 11 May 2015 19:34:00 +0200

I’ve been looking at various Java decompilers recently for a project I’ve been working on in spare time.

Java code obfuscation is something I have an interest in for no particular reason, mostly because you see a variety of cool approaches popping up in the wild to prevent …

Removing Background Color From A PDF Presentation

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Sun, 08 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0100

Ever ran across a PDF export of a Powerpoint which looks like this?

Turns out it is not so easy to convert this to printable design (at least not without having access to the original presentation file, that is). Adobe Reader already allows to do the following:

Press Ctrl+K …

Rebuilding Our Jython Console Plugin For Minecraft

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Wed, 21 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0100

Summary and Changes

This post describes how you can create a Python interpreter for a CanaryMod Minecraft server, providing access to the full internal Canary API (CanaryLib). Commands are issued on a separate console window and do not require players or server administrators to be running the game itself.

Following …

Some Games To Look Forward To In 2015

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Sun, 18 Jan 2015 11:39:00 +0100

I though it was just me, what with being busy and older and all, but it kind of looks like everybody agrees that 2014 has been a generally shitty year for gaming. Summarized, the arguments boil down to one of the following:

Triple-A titles are released on-schedule, instead of on …

This Is What The Chinese Cloud Looks Like

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Mon, 29 Dec 2014 22:34:00 +0100

Introduction

It should not come to a surprise that the Chinese technology giants are — just as their western counterparts, rolling out their respective versions of cloud storage services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive.

They are approaching it like most of their offerings:

Explore and learn from foreign competitors …

List Of Apps

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Sun, 30 Nov 2014 22:34:00 +0100

I’ve been reinstalling a lot of Windows machines lately (cleaning house and such), and just wanted to jot down a list of apps I’ll install before doing anything else. To get the base system running, so to speak, mostly as a reminder to my future self.

Web

Chrome …

Joomla 1.5 Security Fixes

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Wed, 10 Sep 2014 14:44:00 +0200

Although I now have moved on — for most part — from PHP, I am still maintaining a number of websites build on top of Joomla. Ever since Joomla 3.0 was released, Joomla 1.5 has reached end-of-life status, meaning that there will be no more updates nor security fixes for …

Small jr.js (Junior) Modification

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Sun, 03 Aug 2014 15:19:00 +0200

Just a small post. I’ve been using this project lately to set up some quick static-only-but-Markdown-enabled project pages for a while now.

Basically, it allows you to set up a static website with minimal theming, but with the content rendering offloaded to the browser (in Javascript) instead of relying …

Windows 8 Annoyances

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Thu, 31 Jul 2014 12:04:00 +0200

This was going to be a short “list” post, but expanded to something a little bit larger.

Recently, I’ve acquired a shiny new Dell XPS laptop. The exact specs are not important; compared to almost a decennia ago, phones, laptops, desktops and tablets have gained such a commodity-status that …

Replacing BibTeX References With DBLP Entries

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Sun, 29 Jun 2014 16:05:00 +0200

Update (2014-08-08): commenters on Twitter have notified me about this script which aims to accomplish something similar, without DBLP, however. Fellow researcher Joos Buijs has also started working on a DBLP-enabled BibTeX cleaner over here.
Update (2014-10-17): all code is now up on a separate GitHub repository. Let me …

Converting Plain Text References To BibTeX (or Endnote, or…)

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Wed, 26 Feb 2014 20:21:00 +0100

Update: new post and source code here.

So last weekend, I’d almost finished editing a Word manuscript draft to submit to a particular journal, except for one final item on the todo list: converting the existing list of references (inserted and formatted as a plain text list) to another …

Note To Self: Setting Up VNC Desktop For Remote User

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Sun, 20 Oct 2013 18:15:00 +0200

Another one of these things I always end up forgetting: setting up a Linux (in this case: Ubuntu) server so that users can login using a VNC client and get a (slim) desktop.

First thing you need to do is make sure you have a VNC server (tightvncserver), desktop apps …

Pelican Switch Follow-Up

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Wed, 31 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Phew, all internal links on the blog should work fine now. There are a bunch left which link to the old Blogger pages, but that’s fine I guess; I’ll fix these as they come.

I promised to follow-up with some more details, so here goes…

Quickly after writing …

I Did Switch To Pelican

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Thu, 11 Jul 2013 01:05:00 +0200

Just a quick heads up to let you know that this blog will look a bit different — once again!

Although indicated otherwise about a week ago, I’ve nevertheless decided to move away from Blogger and migrate to Pelican.

I’ll make sure to go into the details in a …

A Bukkit Jython Console Plugin For Minecraft

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Sat, 29 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Summary and Changes

This post describes how you can create a Python interpreter for a Bukkit Minecraft server, providing access to the full internal API. Commands are issued on a separate console window and do not require players or server administrators to be running the game itself.

Following list provides …

I Almost Switched To Pelican, A Static Blog Engine

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Visitors familiar with my blog will notice a pretty big change when viewing this post. The blog’s been due for a redesign for some time now, so a few days ago I finally went through with it.

The redesign took more time than expected, since I spent quite a …

Raring / Digital Ocean Server Setup

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Two years after having moved to Linode, coming from Slicehost, it seems that a new competitor is once again at the horizon, namely Digital Ocean.

I’d heard good things about them already, especially on Hacker News, praising their competitive pricing and clean dashboard. However, being newcomers to the field …

Games I’ll Keep An Eye On In 2013

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0100

In the same spirit as last year, this is a (preliminary) list of game I’m interested in, releasing in 2013.

First of all, let’s revisit 2012… Here are the games I was interested in last year, together with the outcome — at least according to me:

Star Wars: The …

Ubuntu 12.04: “fixed channel mon0: -1”

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Tue, 22 May 2012 00:00:00 +0200

Still having problems in Ubuntu with the fixed channel being -1 when using aircrack and friends? Luckily, the solution does not require patching this time (as it used to), as the following solution (obtained from this forum post) now works for me. The problem is basically that the channel can …

An Attempt At Making A Javascript/HTML5 SliceIt! Clone, And A (Failed) Attempt At A Genetic Algorithm Based Solver

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Sun, 13 May 2012 00:00:00 +0200

One of the niceties of owning a smartphone is the huge amount of apps available for download, many of which games.

Some time ago, one of these games which was keeping me occupied was SliceIt! from Com2uS. Don’t worry if you don’t know the game or haven’t …

Gibbed’s Mass Effect 3 Audio Extractor: “IO.Path.Combine path1 cannot be null”

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0100

I was trying to use Gibbed’s Mass Effect 3 Audio Extractor recently, but it failed with:

IO.Path.Combine path1 cannot be null

To fix this, use regedit to go to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\BioWare\Mass Effect 3 (on 64 bit machines)
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\BioWare\Mass Effect 3 (on …

The nvmcp64.sys Blue Screen

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0100

This issue has been plaguing my Windows 7 installation since the beginning of time, or, well — the beginning of this particular Windows 7 installation…

Every once in a while, my computer would blue screen displaying a DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL error due to a certain nvmcp64.sys, often with any playing audio looping …

Games I’ll Keep An Eye On In 2012

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Big-budget releases

In order of release date. Some release dates are an estimate. Unannounced games are not listed here.

January

- Star Wars: The Old Republic

February

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning
Binary Domain
SSX
Syndicate
Jak and Daxter Collection
The Darkness 2

March

I am Alive
Mass Effect 3
Diablo III …

Oneiric / Linode Server Migration

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Sigh… I’m sorry, Slicehost, but I’m leaving you. I’ve been a long (and very happy) Slicehost customer for the past few years. The service offered was perfect for anyone knowing their way around SSH, Linux administration and setting up a server — and all that for just 30 …

Rooting Kindle Fire

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0100

The following overview is just a reminder, mainly aimed at myself in the future, on how to root the kindle fire.

1. Install Android SDK

Download from http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html
Update packages

2. In Kindle: “Allow Installation of Applications From Unknown Sources”

3. Edit android_winusb.inf …

Quick Fix: Windows 7 Service Pack 1 Error 80073701

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0100

If your Windows 7 service pack upgrade is failing with error code 80073701, you might be able to fix it with the following steps. I’ve had to search around quite a bit before resolving this error, mainly because I saw the first and second solutions listed below pop up …

Running A SSH Honeypot With Kippo: Let’s Catch Some Script Kiddies

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Introduction

While exploring Fail2Ban during one of my previous posts, it amazed me how many break-in attempts I received, trying to brute force passwords on the SSH daemon. To recap, Fail2Ban does this:

Fail2ban scans log files like /var/log/pwdfail or /var/log/apache/error_log and bans IP that …

MotionInJoy Appcrash When Loading Driver

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0100

When trying to install the MotioninJoy driver using the GUI, the program crashes.

Manually running the driver installation works. To do this, open a cmd window with administrative privileges. Make sure you have followed the other MotioninJoy steps and the controller is plugged in.

cd to the “ds3” directory, located …

Slowloris And Mitigations For Apache

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Introduction

If you are the least bit interested in network security, you’ll undoubtedly have heard about Slowloris by now.

Slowloris is a piece of software written by Robert “RSnake” Hansen which allows a single machine to take down another machine’s web server with minimal bandwidth and side effects …

Compiling Firesheep On Linux

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0100

If you follow the (security) news a bit, you’ve undoubtedly heart about Firesheep. This tool makes it very easy to listen in on public WiFi connections and intercept HTTP Cookies from a plethora of social networking sites and mail services.

This has been possible for a long time (some …

Aircrack Quick Tutorial (Wireless WEP Cracking)

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0100

Speaking of wireless…

The following is just a quick note-to-self, because I always forget the exact commands and end up crawling around the Aircrack wiki for a bit. I though I’d posted this before, but I can’t seem to find it.

TTY1

sudo airmon-ng start eth1
# Assume monitor …

Ubuntu 10.10: “fixed channel mon0: -1” Aircrack Problem With iwl3945

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0100

Update for Ubuntu 12.04 users: see this post.

After upgrading to Ubuntu Maverick recently, the Aircrack suite stopped working for me.

After setting airodump to a channel (like usual):

airodump --channel **X**

It still displayed its status as:

fixed channel mon0: -1

Some forum users advised to use:

airodump …

Solving Color Problem In DirectDraw Games Update

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0200

I’ve received a few more e-mails and blog comments containing input and information about the famous DirectDraw palette problem which messes up colors in older games.

In particular, Windows contains compatibility entries in the registry, and Jari Komppa has written a ddraw.dll which wraps DirectDraw.

I’ve updated …

Missing Icons In Notification Area (Tray Bar)

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0200

A few days ago some of my programs stopped showing their icons in the Windows (7) notification area. A quick peek at the Task Manager revealed that they were, in fact, running.

Changing the notification settings and peeking around in the task bar configuration revealed nothing.

It turns out that …

Oldie But Goodie: Privilege Escalation In Windows

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0200

Number One:

Replace C:\Windows\system32\sethc.exe with cmd.exe (e.g. by renaming and/or using a repair CD: with the Vista repair CD you can open “notepad” in the command prompt and execute file manipulations from the Open Dialog).

Restart. At the login screen press “Shift” five …

Note To Self: Remote VNC (Listen) Connection

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0200

Because I always forget these commands and end up double checking them…

Client (Me) - Listening:

vncviewer -listen PORT

(Using UltraVNC on Windows.)

Server - Initiating:

x11vnc -connect IP:PORT

Get A List Of Steam Games (As Of May 2010)

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Sun, 16 May 2010 00:00:00 +0200

Using Python and Beautiful Soup. This updates the previous script posted on this blog.

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
from urllib import urlopen
import re

CATEGORY_GAMES     = '998'
CATEGORY_VIDEOS    = '999'
CATEGORY_DEMOS     = '10'
CATEGORY_MODS      = '997'
CATEGORY_PACKS     = '996'
CATEGORY_DLC       = '21'

html_text = urlopen('http://store.steampowered.com/search/?sort_by=&sort_order=ASC&category1='+CATEGORY_GAMES).read().decode …

Python Web Scraping Tools

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Fri, 14 May 2010 00:00:00 +0200

Just a note for myself, a list of interesting Python tools for my next web scraping project:

urllib2: extensible library for opening URLs
PyQuery: jQuery-like traversing and selecting for Python
mechanize: stateful programmatic web browsing in Python
Beautiful Soup: not supported/maintained that much anymore. Latest versions are rather slow …

Installing Heroes Of Might And Magic III (3) On Linux (Ubuntu)

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0200

…to remind myself because I always seem to forget how to.

1. Put the contents of the CD somewhere (e.g. /tmp/heroes).

2. Install:

/tmp/heroes$ ./setup.sh

3. Download and run patch with --keep:

/tmp/heroes$ wget ftp://mirrors.dotsrc.org/lokigames/updates/heroes3/heroes3-1.3.1a-unified-x86.run …

The University Of Waterloo CS Club Tron Challenge, And Some Minimax In General - Part 2

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0100

(This is the second and final part in the University Of Waterloo CS Club Tron Challenge post series. You can find the first part here.)

Now that the contest is finished, congratulations go out to the first place winner: a1k0n, well done!

I also wanted to pass on a few …

The University Of Waterloo CS Club Tron Challenge, And Some Minimax In General

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0100

(This is the first part in the University Of Waterloo CS Club Tron Challenge post series. You can find the second part here.)

The Computer Science Club of the University of Waterloo is currently organizing an AI challenge, sponsored by Google. I’m (as always) a bit late with my …

Get A List Of Steam Games

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Update: see herefor a new version which works on the new steam site.

Using Python and Beautiful Soup. Just a quick (ugly) script thrown together for future reference.

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
from urllib import urlopen
import re
import codecs

html_text = urlopen('http://store.steampowered.com/search/?advanced=0 …

Building A Presenter View For Linux

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Recently, I had to give a presentation and wanted to use a “presenter screen”, allowing to view a clock, current and next slide, and slide notes on my laptop screen. Of course, the audience only sees the current slide fullscreened on the projector screen.

Powerpoint comes with this option built-in …

Don’t Get Caught In This Steam Phishing Scam - How Phishers Work

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100

So I just got this mail in my inbox:

Needless to say, I was pretty surprised, I didn’t know Steam accounts could expire. Sure enough the e-mail looks legit, it’s mailed from support@steam.com, didn’t get caught by Gmail’s spam filter, and the corporate footer …

Solving Color Problem (Red Grass, Purple Water) In Age Of Empires 2: Age Of Kings (The Conquerors And Others Too) On Vista And Windows 7

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0200

Legacy note: this program was pretty popular around 2010-2012, but now has fallen out of use, since most games have been patched to prevent this issue. The source code and last binary release have been moved to GitHub, as Google was thinking it was malware and flagging my blog.

Changelog …

Solving A Tetris Cube, Recursive Backtracking, Algorithm X, Oh My!

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0200

A few days ago I got my hands on one of these:

A Tetris Cube. Twelve pieces, and a box of 4 by 4 by 4. Your task: to put the pieces neatly in the box again. The box said there are more than 9000 solutions, but I knew nonetheless …

Ubuntu Jauntu: Skype Worked Before, Now: “Problem With Audio Capture”

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0200

There are two things I currently not like about Ubuntu or Linux in general: the whole sound mess, and the whole graphics mess (but both are getting better). This problem is about the first mess.

Skype was working perfectly in Interprid, now in Jaunty it was telling me that there …

Vice City (And Perhaps Other Games) In Wine - CD Error With ISO

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0200

So, you’ve just gotten yourself two .iso’s for Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (your backups, of course), which you want to play in Wine. What do you do?

That’s easy, you say:

sudo mkdir /media/isoimag
sudo mount -o loop ./cd1.iso /media/isoimage

And start the …

Modern Genetic (And Other) Algorithms Explained: Part 7 - Conclusion

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0100

(This is the final part in the Modern Genetic Algorithms Explained series, click here to go to the first post, or browse through all the parts with the Table Of Contents at the end of this post.)

In the past series, we have looked at genetic algorithms, simulated annealing, ant …

Modern Genetic (And Other) Algorithms Explained: Part 6 - Tabu Search

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0100

(This is part 6 in the Modern Genetic Algorithms Explained series, click here to go to the first post, or browse through all the parts with the Table Of Contents at the end of this post.)

Tabu search is not really “modern” anymore, but still widely used nonetheless.

The pseudocode …

Modern Genetic (And Other) Algorithms Explained: Part 5 - Ant Colony Optimization

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0100

(This is part 5 in the Modern Genetic Algorithms Explained series, click here to go to the first post, or browse through all the parts with the Table Of Contents at the end of this post.)

First, let’s go to Wikipedia for a definition:

The ant colony optimization algorithm …

Modern Genetic (And Other) Algorithms Explained: Part 4 - Simulated Annealing

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0100

(This is part 4 in the Modern Genetic Algorithms Explained series, click here to go to the first post, or browse through all the parts with the Table Of Contents at the end of this post.)

First of all: Simulated Annealing is not a genetic algorithm, but it is a …

Nokia N95, 3G, Bluetooth, And Ubuntu Intrepid - 3G Tethering Howto

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0100

The following steps are instructions to surf the web using a Nokia N95 with 3G, connected to your Intrepid laptop via Bluetooth.

1. Make sure you have the required packages installed:

sudo apt-get install bluez-utils bluez-pin ppp

2. Find out the phone’s MAC address. Enable Bluetooth on phone and …

Modern Genetic (And Other) Algorithms Explained: Part 3 - CHC Eshelman

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0100

(This is part 3 in the Modern Genetic Algorithms Explained series, click here to go to the first post, or browse through all the parts with the Table Of Contents at the end of this post.)

In this part, we will look at a “special” genetic algorithm, CHC by Eshelman …

Modern Genetic (And Other) Algorithms Explained: Part 2 - Genetic Algorithms

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0100

(This is part 2 in the Modern Genetic Algorithms Explained series, click here to go to the first post, or browse through all the parts with the Table Of Contents at the end of this post.)

Let’s take another look at the blog post on which we will base …

Modern Genetic (And Other) Algorithms Explained: Part 1 - Introduction

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0100

A few days ago I saw this on reddit, linking to a well-written article about genetic algorithms (GA):

Genetic algorithms are a mysterious sounding technique in mysterious sounding field—artificial intelligence. This is the problem with naming things appropriately. When the field was labeled artificial intelligence, it meant using mathematics …

Trying Google’s Native Client

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0100

From Google Blogoscoped:

Google has released something to the open source world they call the Native Client. It is meant as a way for website developers to execute rich code faster within the browser… by having it run “natively” on the computer. This could help any program needing fast graphics …

Trying Arch Linux

Seppe "Macuyiko" vanden Broucke — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0100

I’ve been hearing some good things about Arch Linux lately, and I wanted to see how it compares to Ubuntu, which I’ve been using for a few years now. I loaded up a new VMWare virtual machine and mounted the iso. Let’s see how this goes…

I …