Author Archives: cloudnthings
Adding images to your comments in JIRA
Even though I’ve been training JIRA for years, I still learn new things all the time. The latest thing I came across was embedding images into the comments area from within a JIRA issue. The wiki markup to use is !my_image.png! Don’t try it with a word doc.
To build from source, binary or tarball?
It’s a lot quicker and less hassle to build from a tarball but lets face it, it’s just not as fun :). Let’s go through a simple sample process. There is an open source code call cpuminer that turns your computer into a bitcoin miner. Back in the days, this is how bitcoin mining all… Read More »
Basics of OSX .bashrc v .profile v .bash_profile
The key to understanding what all this means it is important first understand the difference between a login shell and a non-login shell. Types of Shells A login shell is when you are logging in remotely to another machine via ssh. You generally need to login. A non-login shell is when you are already logged into… Read More »
What do bitcoin miners do all day long?
Long story short, miners literally search for needles in haystacks. The haystack changes in size every 2 weeks depending on how fast or slow each needle is found. Let’s start from the beginning. What is a node? A node is the bitcoin software that forms the backbone of the bitcoin network. Full nodes contains the entire history… Read More »
Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies
By Arvind Narayanan, Joseph Bonneau, Edward Felten, Andrew Miller, Steven Goldfeder. A wonderful free book in pdf format that explains lots of different concepts very clearly with great examples. If there were “answers” to the exercises at the end of each section it would be been even better. The best part was the way the… Read More »
How to connect a Raspberry Pi to OSX 10.11 El Capitan via USB Cable
If you want to connect your raspberry pi to your Mac with a USB to TTY cable, the easiest and quickest way is to visit the Profilic website and grab the right driver. This is assuming your USB to TTL Serial Cable is running a PL2303 chip like this one here: http://www.adafruit.com/product/954. On this page,… Read More »
Mac OSX fatal error: ‘openssl/sha.h’ file not found
If you have come across this sha.h not found error on a Mac, it is because Apple dropped support for openssl. Apple deprecated its OpenSSL shared libraries a while back (with OS X 10.7). That’s because OpenSSL doesn’t offer release-to-release binary compatibility, so we can’t update the shared libraries to the latest OpenSSL without breaking… Read More »
Need to learn about structures in C?
Very neat resource and clear explanations with diagrams. https://www.cs.swarthmore.edu/~newhall/cs31/resources/C-structs_pointers.php
What exactly is a bitcoin address?
At a high level, a bitcoin address comprises of 256 1’s and 0’s pushed through some algorithms to result in a ~34 character string that can be given out to receive funds. That’s the short version. Here is the long version. What does a bitcoin address look like? Here is a sample bitcoin address: “18BgGGrBms3eGCRj2Vvrxso4XzWjJEEMBv” A… Read More »