Archive for the 'Programming' Category

SWEBOK indeed

Thursday, May 29th, 2008

I suppose it’s entirely indicative of the software industry, but I was still saddened when I noticed that the embedded ‘title’ field of the PDF version of the IEEE Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge, is “Microsoft Word - Title_page 2004.rtf”.
The meta-data shows that the file was created using version FIVE of adobe’s […]

25-Year-Old Bug Fixed in BSD

Monday, May 12th, 2008

Marc Balmer has a wonderful writeup of a bug in the BSD directory handling code that laid dormant for 25 years. The only tragic thing was that Samba programmers encountered and worked around the bug several years ago and somehow the message never got back to the BSD folks.

The other day, I got an […]

Levers, a game of balance

Sunday, June 18th, 2006

The game of levers is a wonderful little toy where the goal is to keep the stuff out of the water. Each time you succeed, the ante is raised by giving you more things to balance. Like a mobile, the key to winning is evening out the weight among all the hooks you […]

Daily UML

Saturday, June 10th, 2006

I’ve started a new website, Daily UML which is intended to serve as a regularly updated site giving examples and discussion of UML issues. The first post is up and with luck I’ll be able to keep up a five-posts/week schedule. Since it has a specific technical focus, I’m hoping the update schedule […]

NIST DADS

Saturday, June 10th, 2006

For many years, NIST has hosted the online Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures. It’s an excellent resource for any computer science student or practitioner. It contains concise, complete definitions of most important aspects of computer science. From the obvious quicksort to the obscure Fisher-Yates Shuffle. Bookmark worthy any day.

Why IIS on Win32 Fails

Saturday, April 15th, 2006

The pictures to the right from Richard Stiennon’s post on Threat Chaos show the paths of the system calls used by IIS on Win32 and Apache on POSIX to service a single HTTP request. This pictures demonstrates, fundamentally, why IIS on Win32 is simply a bad engineering choice when it comes to security.
Every system […]

Port Knocking is Worthless

Sunday, January 22nd, 2006

As I read about Port Knocking and whether or not it qualifies as security through obscurity, it strikes me that not only is Port Knocking useless, it’s wrong minded as well. It fails to solve the very problem it purports to address, and creates the illusion of greater security. I believe this is […]

mpd as a communal stereo solution

Wednesday, September 7th, 2005

In our computer lab we have a communal stereo system which enables people to play their personal MP3s through the speakers at one end of the lab. This has greatly reduced the music mayhem that previously occurred when people w/o headphones wanted to listen to music, or people wanted a way to listen to […]

The Lights Are Bright

Sunday, August 21st, 2005

I decided that my grifcat utility for controlling the Griffin Powermate wasn’t useful enough and so I modified it enabling you to tweak the LED’s brightness and pulsing display. For those of you who have a powermate under linux, there’s also a linux driver available which can be used with the linux event interface. […]

Scriptable Access to the Griffin Powermate

Wednesday, August 17th, 2005

Griffin Technology makes a nifty device called the Griffin Powermate (Available at ThinkGeek). It’s essentiall a knob+button you put on your desktop. However, unless you have software that can take advantage of it, it’s basically a lighted paperweight. I got fed up not having an easy way to monitor/read this device […]