Chapter 5 in Godel, Escher, Bach, section Recursion in Language, has a great example of how my writing needed to be simplified for technical writing. It describes how asides in writing, created by commas and parentheticals, are similar to pushing and popping the writing’s context to a stack. There is always a way to simplify that writing, it suggests.
Pretty smart…
… Read more »Ok, here’s a great blog post by Chris Shiflett about a crazy-creative SQL injection technique: http://shiflett.org/blog/2006/jan/addslashes-versus-mysql-real-escape-string
Very cool. His technique relies on tricking addslashes into breaking up a two byte character with a slash, creating a valid two byte character followed by a valid one byte character. He mentions that this (specific attack) is impossible with UTF-8 because all two (or more) byte characters have continuation bytes that start with 0b10. Hrm.
… Read more »Here’s a creative idea I’d never considered before. I’ve written code like this, but accidentally, and then it looks wrong so I change it back. Here’s a quick example:
if ( 42 == myInt ) as opposed to if ( myInt == 42 )
The former may be better to use because occasionally we all forget to put that second “=” in there, and we accidentally turn our comparison operator into an assignment operator. Compilers will complain if you try to assign a value to “42”, but not if you try to assign 42 to a variable, and that’ll make it easier to catch your mistake.
… Read more »I’ve never built anything with an LCD on it before, but it seems like it’d be useful. Here’s some good info on creating an project with an LCD and an Arduino:
http://arduino.cc/en/Reference/LiquidCrystal
It’s a library of functions that make it very easy to work with the LCD controller. The controller has to be compatible with the HD44780 controller’s instruction set, but that’s basically an industry standard. Mouser has a selection of 20x4 character displays:
… Read more »http://960.gs/
960 Grid System seems like a great, easy way to setup the layout of a webpage using modern HTML and CSS techniques. Very cool.
Blueprint CSS is also something to check out.
… Read more »I was writing C++ in Linux - gvim + aterm is my development environment of choice. I needed to turn my code into a Windows DLL, though, and the following webpage was really helpful.
http://www.mingw.org/wiki/sampleDLL
I installed Cygwin in a Windows XP virtual machine, used Cygwin to install MinGW, modded my code and Makefile a bit based on the samples on that page, then ran “make windows” in that virtual machine. Everything built great and let me put my code into LabView on a computer which didn’t have Cygwin libraries. Job done. Thanks MinGW and Cygwin.
… Read more »Marshall Cline’s C++ FAQ is great - very comprehensive. It covers topics useful to everyone from beginners to intermediate/advanced users. It’s at:
http://www.parashift.com/c++-faq-lite/
… Read more »http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7184
This is a great Linux Journal article where they write a kernel module to hook Netfilter. It’ll probably be useful to me at some point.
What other things in the kernel can be hooked? I’m sure the list is freakin long, but this would be fun to experiment with.
… Read more »I’m gonna use this to record interesting/useful information on computer security. Starting off with a post on switch hardening - these are complex switches we’re talking about:
http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=6910&rss;
Well, I’m disappointed by the way Picasa handles geotagging photos in Linux. It looks like the newest version doesn’t support geotagging. Not only that, but when it resizes images to upload to Picasa on the web, it kills any EXIF information that may have specified a location. What the heck Picasa? Why you gotta clobber my shit?
I can preserve the geotags by uploading directly from my G1 (slow), or by going to the Picasa website and uploading from there (can’t do a batch upload, also can’t resize automatically).
… Read more »