cranklin.com

Cracking software is fun. In fact, it’s so fun that I used to sit at home and download password protected software and trial software just to crack them.

Yet, in all my years of blogging, I never posted a tutorial on cracking software. The only time I even mentioned it was in a 2011 blog post: https://cranklin.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/crack-this-password/

I sincerely apologize.…

That Time I Got Pwned For .2 ETH

Allow me to share my pride-swallowing story…

I was up late at night working on Cranky Coin. I was working on the persistence layer and wanted to store block headers in levelDB. I finished implementing this only to realize it wasn’t going to work. You see, Python GIL threads are effective for I/O operations, not to gain performance via parallel processing. In order to achieve this, you must either…

Let’s Build An Ethereum Lottery Contract With Scheduled Triggers

If you’ve written a Solidity smart contract, then you’re familiar with the benefits of decentralization. You’re also probably aware of its limitations. One such limitation is the smart contract’s inability to execute on a schedule. In order to execute a method on the contract, it would have to be triggered from the outside. In order to demonstrate this weakness, I shall build an Ethereum Lottery…

Proposal For a New Consensus Mechanism

I enjoyed reading the original bitcoin whitepaper because it is simple, effective, and pure. It doesn’t read like a sales pitch nor does it make unrealistic promises. It is a clever integration of existing engineering concepts which achieves a truly decentralized ledger. It is the pioneer of cryptocurrency and it actually works.

I dare not claim to improve upon the original design of Satoshi…

Understanding Cryptocurrencies & the Blockchain

Bitcoin… Ethereum… You’ve heard it all. You’re hearing about blockchains and cryptocurrency with increasing frequency. People are getting wealthy off this stuff, and some of you are too embarrassed to admit it; you don’t know what the heck they’re talking about. Okay. I jumped the gun. You might be an expert trader, miner, or even an Ethereum smart contract developer. I’ll assume nothing. I got…

Let’s Create Our Own Cryptocurrency

I’ve been itching to build my own cryptocurrency… and I shall give it an unoriginal & narcissistic name: Cranky Coin.

After giving it a lot of thought, I decided to use Python. GIL thread concurrency is sufficient. Mining might suffer, but can be replaced with a C mining module. Most importantly, code will be easier to read for open source contributors and will be heavily unit tested. Using…

How to Create a Virus Using the Assembly Language

The art of virus creation seems to be lost. Let’s not confuse a virus for malware, trojan horses, worms, etc. You can make that garbage in any kiddie scripting language and pat yourself on the back, but that doesn’t make you a virus author. You see, creating a computer virus wasn’t necessarily about destruction. It was about seeing how widespread your virus can go while avoiding detection. It…

Taking a Crack at Asymmetric Cryptosystems Part 1 (RSA)

In my boredom, I was exercising manual pen/paper RSA cryptography. I was calculating public/private key pairs (with very small prime numbers) and calculating the “d” (inverse e modulo t) without the use of the Extended Euclidean Algorithm (hereinafter referred to as EEA at my discretion). In the process, I thought I had made a discovery. Silly me. (Mathematicians, don’t laugh) While trial/erroring…

Testing The Right Way

I’ve heard a lot of developers talk about other developers’ code. “His/her code sucks” “He/she writes sh*t code” “He/she doesn’t know how to code”

Let’s assume the code functions properly: doesn’t suffer from scaling issues, performance issues, security issues, memory leaks, etc. If the code functions properly and you’re passing judgment based on syntax, some standard, different ways of doing the…

I love my job. I love what I do. But sometimes, we need to remind ourselves of why we love what we do. It is often necessary to recall what made us fall in love in the first place and re-kindle that fire. When you love what you do, it is inevitable that you will still burn out for reasons beyond your control. I have experienced this several times throughout my career. I want to share how I…

Artificial Intelligence Applied to Your Drone

I noticed that drones have become very popular for both business and personal use. When I say drones, I mean quadcopters. I admit, they’re pretty cool and fun to play with. They can take amazing videos and photos from high altitudes that would otherwise be difficult or costly. As cool as they are, the majority of the consumer market uses it for one purpose: a remote control camera. What a waste!…

The Math and Physics Behind Sporting Clays

I apologize. It has been too long. I took a long break from blogging because I was busy and burnt out. Without getting into too much detail as to why I felt burnt out, I shall briefly state that working with a couple incompetent partners back to back is enough to burn anybody out. After witnessing all the drama, the greed, the deception, and even the swindling of company funds, I have had enough.…

My Fishy Story

I love animals. I own two loving huskies and it hinders me from being away from home for too long.…

Bots Rule The World

I’ve been offered generous pay to artificially increase the views on youtube videos to which I…

Why Your Website Is Insecure - Cryptosystem Basics

We have witnessed lots of new websites and mobile apps sprouting out of this tech bubble; many of…

Engineers, stay agile. I became a software engineer for many reasons. I love to code. I love to create. I love solving puzzles. I love exploring different technologies. I love the rewards. I chase the knowledge. I desire to make a difference. Chanc…

Converting Geographical Coordinates to Cartesian Coordinates

I was working on an interesting short term project through Project C for an upcoming movie called O…