Cat's Page

This is Catalin Patulea's little corner of the Web. This is mostly a collection of programming and electronics projects, but there's some other stuff too.

My e-mail address is: cat@vv.carleton.ca

Interested in live music in Montreal or Ottawa? Check out EPHEMERIS!

Blog blag blog: http://i-cat.blogspot.com/

My Stuff

• Hints on Spam Filtering with SpamAssassin
• PHP Photo Album Tutorial
• A really bad HTML Chat in PHP; messages.html must be Apache-writable
• A PHP Directory Listing Script that emulates Apache's (for when you cannot do Options +Indexes)
• Web-based Lyrics Database in PHP with MySQL; searches Google for new titles and caches in local database; schema and typical queries in lyrics.txt
• Web-based Movie Event Management System (automated movie list retrieval, poll, ticket management) in PHP with MySQL
• Interactive Parabola Coefficient Solver in C (source code, screen shot); fairly straightforward, see readme for more information
• Server Availability Monitor in C (source code); see readme
• "Handy", a tiny, invisible, desktop hotkey utility (source code, screen shot); read the readme!
• "JoyBoard", a small joystick-to-keyboard converter (source code, screen shot); more information in the readme
• FrameGrabber.cpp, sample DirectShow still frame grabber
• "GGraph", a data acquisition and graphing program (screen shot, source code)
• "LEDVis", a Winamp visualization plugin for LEDs attached to the parallel port (source code, hardware schematic, ports on the left are from the parallel por (power is supplied off-board, not from the parallel port), photos from top, top with power adapter, underside)
• "Strip3", an ID3 tag remover (source code); filenames given as arguments, recurses into directories
• "Temper", temperature sensor software (source code, hardware information coming soon, photo)
• Simple Web-based Collaboration Platform in PHP and MySQL; written for the student council of my high-school
• About the DWL-650+ wireless CardBus adapter
• "TorCap2", a transparent SOCKS redirector based on TorCap (source code zip, GitHub); more information in the readme
• MiniMedia, a tiny (2 KB) media player written purely in assembly (assembly source file, source package); read the readme!
• GDMode, a small utility that allows you to switch the Google Desktop display mode from the command line (source code, readme) Warning: Broken in recent GD builds!
• Desktop Netstat, a Google Desktop plugin to monitor your current network connections in realtime v1.3a
• MsgLookup (download link down since WinUpack gets flagged as malware), a small utility (19K packed with WinUpack) that searches a list of over 1000 Windows messages by value and by name (source code, screenshot)
• A guide to making a band-stop audio filter in VirtualDub (sorry, it's in Romanian, but it's mostly screenshots)
• "SocketStd", a code snippet in C for redirecting a console application's I/O to a socket
• Magnifier, another Google Desktop plugin to magnify the active part of your screen
• A guide on Opening EXE Files Directly in Firefox (Use with care!)
• An algorithm for merging two ordered lists into a third ordered list (or for generating both set differences) in O(m+n) time
• "Minimalist In-Process Interface Marshaling: Implementing in-process cross-apartment COM interface marshaling without type libraries or registry changes.", article on CodeProject
• ShareIt, a Google Desktop gadget that allows you to easily share items with your Google Talk friends: text snippets, web addresses, images and pictures, files!
• Carleton Central Timetable Enhancer Greasemonkey script
• alameda 0.1, an open-source Linux JAD (Java Application Descriptor) downloader for Motorola phones (see the readme)
• SYSC 2001 Assignment 2 Test Harness, helps test the implementation of the instruction set thoroughly and automatically
• SSD0303 AGSI Simulation Module, simulates a SSD0303 display controller as in the Stellaris LM3S811 Evaluation Board
• linloader, a Linux boot loader for the Olympus m:robe 500i personal portable media player; read the readme!
• "Lessons from RMI Hell", explanations of some more subtle issues when RMI interacts with hash tables, garbage collection and dynamic stubs
• "Drawing Circles on a Tight Budget", a presentation for IEEE Carleton University Student Branch's IEEE Papers Competition about "using an 8-pin PIC12F675 microcontroller, harmonic oscillator theory and software PWM to generate in-phase sine and cosine signals" (source code)
• Reverse engineering a remote controlled fan: RF electronics and home automation

My Contributions

Here are small things I've contributed to various projects or communities:

• "Drastically" improving query speed of the Metasploit Opcode Database (see 2.4 Release Readme, under "The Opcode Database now includes ...")
• Patches to the WINE Project, to fix Unicode output in winedbg (in CVS 30/06/2003) and to make winedbg understand both Unix and DOS-style pathnames (in CVS, but deprecated)
• Patch to net-tools 1.60's netstat -p to properly handle processes that muck up their argv[0] (ala setproctitle(3), i.e. sshd's child processes)
• Patch to procps 3.2.3's w command to allow filtering by group, sorting by username (instead of tty) and display of IP address when hostname is too long
• Patch to class.jabber.php 0.4.2, implementing an SSL connector for Jabber servers supporting SSL on a separate port (such as the Google Talk server)
• Contributed in Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2006-57: JavaScript Regular Expression Heap Corruption
• Patches to Neuros Technologies' OSD product, including fixing kernel build warnings, fixing busybox kconfig-style configuration, integrating some drivers into the kernel tree, minor fix to bootloader configuration.

About Me

Master's Software Engineering student at Carleton University; member of SCESoc. Here's a map of the Carleton campus with two-letter building codes.

Programming is a hobby for me, and I'm good at it in Windows and Linux... but I've been known to program for the NES, Palm, PICs and NIOS. C, C++, Java, Visual Basic, Perl, Bash, PHP, ASP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL, the works.

Links

• "Structured Procrastination", a great article by John Perry
• Wikipedia - amazing!
• BT Tracker Tracker
• MSDN Library - good reference for lots of things
• Visibone Colorlab - very handy
• Graph of TCP state machine - explains many of those "mysterious" FIN_WAIT_1, CLOSE_WAIT, etc. states you see in netstat.
• The CCS2 "Box Model" at the W3C
• A very interesting post on CodeGuru about the internal storage of floats and doubles in C++.
• Refrence of C++ I/O manipulators (endl, setw, setprecision, etc.)
• "HyperPhysics", a very comprehensive educational site about physics, chemistry and other sciences
• "Hello World" Programs *chuckle* *chuckle*
• Changing xterm's definition of a "word" when it comes to double-click selections
• Assembly Language Programming Resources ("ASM Gems")
  • Collection of assembly gems (Intel and Motorola) and "Tiny Programs" such as 61-byte Mandelbrot generator, 80-byte Pi calculator, etc.
  • Integer multiplying by constants, multiplying by constants without using MUL (but instead combinations of SHL, ADD, LEA, SUB and MOV)
  • Integer division by constants, the same idea but different mathematical basis (a little more advanced; includes obtaining both quotient and remainder)
  • Assembly Language Lab, collection of assembly algorithms and in-depth analysis of impact of prefetching, pipelining, caching and MMX/SSE
  • In the same vein - Bit Twiddling Hacks
  • Agner Fog's "How to optimize for the Pentium family of microprocessors"
• FXT: a library of algorithms
• "A few frequently used SSL commands" (openssl)
• "ActiveX Control Fundamentals", an article on writing a fully-compliant minimal ActiveX control in 8 functions (no ATL or MFC)
• SVK, a "decentralized version control system built with the robust Subversion filesystem", and related workflow, tutorials and single-user guide; provides an elegant solution to many problems which can, to varying degrees, be described as repository mirroring, local branches, disconnected repository access, etc.
• "How to crack a Linear Congruential Generator", by Haldir[RET]
• Explorer Suite, "[c]reated by Daniel Pistelli, a freeware suite of tools including a process viewer and a PE editor".
• Implicit Type Conversion Operator with a Good Piece of Pi

005956 since 06/10/2005