Sad Things

BroncoStory has met its end… It looks like Snapchat is blocking access to the API we used to run the service. We don’t know why we specifically; the reverse engineered kit we were using for access itself seems to be fine, but for some reason accessing only the BroncoStory account through it doesn’t seem to work.

At the peak, BroncoStory had over 1400 unique views to its snaps, and plans for monetization were on the horizon… but alas, no more. It was fun while it lasted though!

Wow! Users are awesome!

Get Git has surpassed 280 users on the Chrome Web Store, and BroncoStory, a social media venture I’ve been developing on campus, now has over 600 unique viewers on each piece of crowdsourced content. Stay tuned for updates on BroncoStory monetization (because who doesn’t love hundreds of advertising impressions for pennies on the dollar?).

Nothing much substantial to say; just been pleased with how ventures have been moving over the last few weeks! Thank you to all my readers and users who help to get word out and around!

So in the 24 hours since I’ve released Get Git, it’s gotten quite a bit of attention on Reddit and a few forums. I wanted to update with two things.

First, Get Git is not illegal (and especially not a felony, as one Redditor suggested). It does nothing other than browse publicly accessible web pages for exposed files. It doesn’t download the files, it doesn’t disrupt the sites (unless you consider a couple HTTP requests with a 404 response disruption, in which case your site is being disrupted by tens to thousands of people a day), and it does nothing illegal. The files it looks for are, if present, 100% publicly accessible. Using this plugin is as illegal as using Google (in fact, Google does what this tool does on a massive scale – check out this Google Dork).

**Get Git **is a Chrome extension that I hammered out today, inspired by these slides. Get Git recursively traverses the websites you browse, hunting for misconfigured web accessible Git repos what are web accessible — and of course, once you have access to the .git/ directory, it’s open season on source code, API keys, hard coded passwords, and even internal network structure if they’ve liberally set up remote origins.

There’s actually a lot of sensitive info available in Git repos, and I was interested how many sites I browse are revealing things. Get Git also handles websites with directory listings turned off, so even half baked security won’t hide the repo.

Some exciting work in the pipeline; working on a handy toolchain for 23andMe genetic data analysis and breakdown — conversion to VCF, SNP effects, annotated mutation and protein defect analysis, the whole shebang. It’s gonna be pretty extensible and easy to use too…

In code, simplicity is a minimalism borne of competency in tool use. Elegance is a minimalism borne of insight into the problem. No solution will be truly beautiful until the problem is understood, from all angles and in its entirety.

Just wanted to give some visibility to a utility I discovered and contributed some code to called 23andme2vcf. This is a nifty little perl script that will transcribe 23andMe’s raw SNP codes into the much more industry-standardized VCF format, using the human genome reference.

It’s a really fast utility and helps to set up your SNP data for important into more powerful genetic analysis tools like SnpEff. I made some tweaks to the code to bring it up to date with VCFv4.2, which is the most recent standards revision, so it now works with some more picky software suites (my pull requests were merged just a few minutes ago :D).

New Chrome plugin!

I took a break during studying for midterms and decided to try and hammer out a Chrome plugin that would take me less than 20 minutes. I got down the first draft of Show MyMathLab Score in about 15, and spent about 2 hours slamming my head against a proverbial brick wall before understanding why what I was asking of Chrome was impossible (who needs spec documents? I’m a MAN. I’ll write my extension without reading the documentation for that feature. ugh. never again.)

I just received a spit kit from 23andMe, a biotech company that does genomic SNP analysis.

SNPs (pronounced snip; plural snips) are** single nucleotide polymorphisms**, which are sections of the genome that vary from person to person (humans share almost all of their genomic data with each other, as is common in a species). 23andMe detects your allele for these SNPs and reports it to you. They used to provide analysis and health predictions based on current studies of the impact of different SNPs, but were shut down by the FDA for providing medical advice. Now, they provide ancestry data (if I have any cousins who have also sequenced, I’ll be able to communicate with them through 23andMe — even if we’re fifth or sixth cousins.

I’m proud to announce my first Chrome extension — Regex Replace. It’s a simple engine to do regular expression replace on pages. No more cloud-to-butt and s/leopard/leopard extensions cluttering your valuable page load time! This extension rolls any regex replacement you want into a simple but elegant package!

Check it out in the Chrome Web Store! (And, as always, it’s open source — be forkful and multiply.)