Brian Rivas

brian's picture

I'm an aspiring technology specialist with an interest in everything from industrial machine work to 3D computer graphics. I've been narrowing my professional aspirations to software programming, and am a recent graduate of the Camosun College Computer Systems Technology programme. I'm currently looking for work in the field.

What I've been up to:

Brute force attacks

Submitted by brian on Thu, 2012-01-05 22:14

I was recently working on something on my web server when I noticed that apache was using an inordinate amount of CPU time. After investigating the log files to look for clues, I found that the traffic was a high volume of login attempts on my website.

James McRae Slow Down

Submitted by brian on Mon, 2011-08-08 14:07

James is a good friend of mine who I also helped develop a website for years back. He enlisted my help in the creation of some CD artwork, which was a process that taught me a few things, and was perhaps one of my first really intense graphics assignments.

Brahmayoni Logo

Submitted by brian on Mon, 2011-08-08 13:33

While working at Sierra Club I had the fortune to work with Rahman Saleem, someone who i've remained friends with since we both moved on in our different paths (which happened to ironically lead us both to Camosun College). His wife Stephanie has been working on promoting her Yoga business which is called Brahmayoni (http://brahmayoni.com/). My part to play in all this was to create some of the graphics to be used in promotional materials including web and print.

James Website

Submitted by brian on Mon, 2011-08-08 12:08

James (http://www.theiconoclast.ca) has been a friend of the family for many years, and a close personal friend of mine. it has been an interesting process trying to help him to adapt to the new communications options that have come about from the inception of the world wide web and later content management systems.

The CLI website

Submitted by brian on Fri, 2011-08-05 14:02

The CLI website (http://cli.rivas.ca/) is a project that I started during school, because i thought it would be amusing to create a unix-like shell that runs as a web based interface. The original idea was simply to embed certain functions into the JavaScript code running on the website client side. I began by making a shell that echos user input by writing it into a div from a standard HTML input. Then i realized that i could use AJAX to make calls back to the webserver to complete requests that were carried by the http POST method.

Syntax Highlighting modules

Submitted by brian on Sat, 2011-02-26 04:49

One of the website elements i've been very interested in lately is syntax highlighting for programming code, because the main thing that i am interested in using my own website for is to share code in a way that could be useful not only for others, but also as reference for myself later.

compiz on netbook

Submitted by brian on Sat, 2010-09-04 15:00

I'm taking a break from the frustration of video stuff by fiddling around with my fresh install of ubuntu 10.04 netbook remix on my Acer Aspire One netbook.

I was thinking that the windowing looked a bit choppy and i was wondering i could switch to compiz for some nice smoothing out of the graphical interface. Turns out you can. Here's how i did it...

Drupal and high CPU usage

Submitted by brian on Wed, 2010-09-01 23:19

I just spent about an hour trying to figure out what went wrong with my apache that was causing the process to take up about 90% of the cpu time on my nifty linux server. In the log of one of my drupal instances i found that it was a call to a missing php page, from a module that wasn't quite properly installed. So it turns out that it's quite possible to chew up the bulk of your CPU time if you're not careful with drupal configurations, just as it is with any process capable of infinite loops or recursion.

phpmailer

Submitted by brian on Wed, 2010-09-01 14:39

I'm SO excited that I can finally enable e-mail on my self-hosted drupal sites! This is going to make the whole thing much more fun.

The long and short of this story is that when you set up a drupal powered website on your computer at home you can try to use the built in e-mail systems, but nothing will happen. The reason is that your home server most likely doesn't have email subsystems installed, and even if it did your ISP no doubt blocks outgoing e-mail ports to prevent spam from being sent by home users.

terminal - zen sub theme

Submitted by brian on Sun, 2010-08-29 11:16

I've created a new theme for my website. I called this theme "terminal" with the idea of making it look like a set of unixy terminal windows or something.

Building a visual theme in Drupal is typically done by starting from a template theme such as clean, 960 or zen. I chose to work from a zen sub-theme. I developed all of the graphics that make up the bits and pieces of the visual style using photoshop.

Random Quote

“If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra