1561
Coroutines make robot code easy
Our FIRST Robotics team struggled with autonomous code for years. Coroutines were the missing piece.
1562
Cisco can't stop using hard-coded passwords
There’s a new Cisco vulnerability in its Emergency Responder product: This vulnerability is due to the presence of static user credentials for the root account that are typically reserved for use during development. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by using the account to log in to an affected system. A…
1563
Sierra Creative Interpreter – Scripts
Gentlemen... BEHOLD! I Have Decompiled!
1564
Amiga ASCII Art
My thesis on Amiga ASCII art translated to English.
1565
M3 Macs: there's more to performance than counting cores
A look at some of the factors determining the performance of new M3 chips compared to the M1 and M2 versions, and how not to compare them.
1566
Local async executors and why they should be the default
Imagine you are new to Rust and you want to learn some async programming. Writing a chat server is a common way to start, scope is small enough to contain in a blog post, yet it is complex enough to learn most of what you'll need to build async servers in Rust. One DuckDuckGo query and we are off to the races…
1567
Ode to the M1
It is not often I am blown away by a piece of hardware. My Hall of Fame features the 1991 Super Nintendo, the 1995 3dfx1, and the 2010 Intel's Serie 520 SSD [1] . This past month my 2021 MacBook Pro M1 [2] joined the club.
1568
Breaking java.lang.String
Let's abuse a bug in java.lang.String
1569
I discovered caching CDNs were throttling my everyday browsing
Update: 28 Nov 2023 Zen Internet and I have amicably parted ways over this matter. Their technical response has been added to this post.
1570
A data corruption bug in OpenZFS?
The Thanksgiving long weekend (23-26 November) in 2023 was an interesting one for OpenZFS, that I managed to land myself in the middle of. The short version of events is that an apparent silent data corruption bug was discovered, which is kind of the worst case scenario for a data storage system. It was a pretty…
1571
Exploring the Halo 1 System Link Protocol
One of my all-time favorite games is Halo: Combat Evolved that launched together with the original Xbox in 2001. One major part of the game was multiplayer, up to 16 people at a LAN party could play together by connecting four Xbox consoles over Ethernet , referred to as System Link .
1572
The combined power of F# and C#
Where C# is the most dominant language in the .NET world, other languages are built on top of the Framework that deserves their respective place. F# is strong when it comes down to functional programming! In this blog post, we will leverage the power of F# and C# to showcase where both excel!
1573
Beyond introvert vs. extrovert
This 100-year-old binary classification of human interaction holds us back. It's time to move past it.
1574
The anatomy of a Godot API call
UPDATE: This article has started an ongoing conversation with the Godot devs. They care about the issues raised, and would like to improve things. Significant improvements will almost certainly be made, although it’s still early days and it’s unclear what will change and by how much. I am encouraged by the response. I…
1575
1576
Filenames and pathnames in shell: How to do it correctly (2020)
This article explains how to correctly handle filenames in Bourne shells (the primary shell of Unix/Linux/POSIX systems), based on the issues discussed in 'Fixing Unix/Linux/Filenames'. Many programs fail to work properly on filenames that include spaces, begin with dash (-), include newlines, and so on, because…
1577
Perfect Circle
How good are your circle drawing skills?
1578
1579
Lisping at JPL Revisited
It has been over 20 years since I wrote " Lisping at JPL ", half memoir and half geeky screed (and all of it half-baked) about how an obscur...
1580
SMS phishers harvested phone numbers, shipment data from UPS tracking tool
The United Parcel Service (UPS) says fraudsters have been harvesting phone numbers and other information from its online shipment tracking tool in Canada to send highly targeted SMS phishing (a.k.a. “smishing”) messages that spoofed UPS and other top brands. The missives addressed recipients by name, included details…
1581
Private spies hired by FBI and corporations infiltrate Discord, Reddit, WhatsApp
Leading “threat intelligence” firms are creating fake online personas to gain access to every corner of the web.
1582
Five Kinds of Friends (2022)
The word “friends” has at least five different meanings: Allies Backstage intimates Fun friends Mutual interests friends Soc...
1583
SQLite performance tuning: concurrent reads, multiple GBs and 100k SELECTs/s
SQLite is an embedded SQL database. It’s extremely easy to setup, buildable as a single C file with libraries existing for basically all common programming languages. It doesn’t need any server setup or configuration since the SQL logic is run in the host process, and the database consists of only
1584
My first superoptimizer
I heard about these mythical programs that find optimal code through a brute-force search, but I didn't know how they worked. So I made one.
1585
A new approach to domain ranking
This is a very brief post announcing a fascinating discovery. It appears to be possible to use the cosine similarity approach powering explore2.marginalia.nu as a substitute for the link graph in an eigenvector-based ranking algorithm (i.e. PageRank). The original PageRank algorithm can be conceptualized as a…
1586
Leo Tolstoy on why people drink (2014)
“The seeing, spiritual being, whose manifestation we commonly call conscience, always points with one end towards right and with the other towards wrong, and we do not notice it while we foll…
1587
It's not microservice or monolith; it's cognitive load
How understanding cognitive load and team capacity can help you decide on an architectural style
1588
Moving my PC into my rack in a 2U case
This week I finally moved my gaming/Linux PC into my little office rack—it's that 2U box above the UPS at the bottom: I remembered seeing Linus Tech Tips' 4U build in a video a couple years ago—but he has a full 42U rack in his basement. I don't have that much space—just 2U (technically 3U if I wanted) in my little…
1589
“Internet in space” will transform the satellite imagery industry
(First, Some Background)
1590
BSD on Windows: Things I wish I knew existed
It’s 1995 and I’ve been nearly two years in the professional workspace. OS/2 is the dominant workstation product, Netware servers rule the world, and the year of the Linux desktop is going to happen any moment now. If you weren’t running OS/2, you were probably running Windows 3.1, only very few people were using that…