How to convert a CVS repo to git

Doing this conversion basically requires a Linux environment. My first attempt was in Windows using the various Unix tooling and I just could never get everything to work the way it needed to. It was less work to just spin up a VirtualBox vm with Ubuntu Server and do everything in bash. This document is going to assume you have access to a suitable Linux environment (this will have a Debian-esque flavor being Ubuntu, but any major distro should work).

I’m also assuming you have zero prior CVS knowledge (like me), so I’ll explain a few of the basics around CVS.

Exploiting the YOP Poll WordPress plugin

Somewhere in the vast expanses of the wild internet, there is a site I sometimes frequent that likes to put surveys in their blog posts.  Quite by accident, I discovered that if I reload the page in an incognito window, I could vote in these surveys multiple times.  Being hopelessly curious about what's going on behind the curtain, I ventured down the rabbit hole that led me to spammy scripts and purple underwear (No, seriously...).

Legacy Berkeley course material pulled over accessibility

One of the earliest sources of free education materials I stumbled upon was webcast.berkeley (right up there with MIT OCW).  Seeing these institutions of higher learning release their lectures and course content free, to the masses, made me envision a time when the entire education system could be transformed.  Today, with Coursera, Udacity, and edX, we are well on the way to that revolution.  But despite these (arguably more sophisticated) offering, I always found myself returning to that well.  No more...

Making assertions with jUnit against log4j console output

I will open by saying that making assertions against your log output is probably a bad idea.  Probably violates every rule of good testing.  That said, I found myself writing characterization tests against some legacy code and I wanted to make sure I didn't break the logging.  So I decided to write some flakey, brittle unit tests.  It was several hours of pain, and I figured it would be a good idea to document my pain so you can avoid some of it (hopefully by not following in my footsteps at all... sigh)