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Profile first!
I was using my code to parse a medium-sized CVS log and it was being slow (~1min). So, like an idiot I said: I know that the algorithm is quite slow, so I optimize it. Here is a version which is twice as fast as the original version: use strict; use warnings; use Test::More tests…
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You’ve come a long way baby!
In the spirit of Fatboy Slim’s Right Here / Right now Comes the following video about Yahoo Mail: Communication Evolution @ Yahoo! Video I got started on Yahoo Mail back in the day and it always served me well. Thank you! PS: Cat and dog saying Yahoo Mail
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Interesting media
Short updates from Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller fame on the pennsays YouTube channel. My only grief is that a few videos are unavailable due to “age or location restrictions”, which really seems just an oversight, since the content most probably isn’t published anywhere else (like TV) to warrant such restrictions. I tried to…
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Breaking into a process before the TLS gets executed
I found out about this from the SANS blog: you can make Olly break before the TLS get executed. Just Debugging Options –> Events and set “Make first pause at” to “System breakpoint” instead of “WinMain”. Cool! (until now I was patching executables with TLS to avoid them being executed).
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Nessus not returning any results?
I mentioned the problem briefly in my GFI Languard review, but just wanted to document it more clearly, maybe it will be useful to somebody: with the default settings my Nessus setup didn’t seem to return any results for a non-firewalled XP host. A quick packet capture seemed to indicate that Nessus was trying to…
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StackOverflow lightning talk
Below is a short presentation which hopefully I will give later today about Stack Overflow to the Transylvania JUG: Lightning talk about stackoverflow View more Microsoft Word documents from cdman83. Update: the presentation went well (IMHO) and hopefully it will add a few more people to the StackOverflow userbase. Funny thing though: you know the…
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Hidden Java concurrency bugs
Question: how can the following line of Java code throw the exception shown below? priv.addAll(common); Exception in thread "Thread-1" java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException at java.lang.System.arraycopy(Native Method) at java.util.ArrayList.toArray(Unknown Source) at java.util.ArrayList.addAll(Unknown Source) at TestConcurrentList$ConsumeThread.run(TestConcurrentList.java:34) Answer: because of bad synchronization. The scenario is the following: one thread is continuously modifying the list “common” while the second thread tries to…
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GFI LanGuard review
Disclaimer: I never worked as a professional network admin and all my experience was gathered in small testing environments. Also, I received a 12 month evaluation key from GFI for the purpose of writing this review, however aside from the key, I didn’t receive any form of compensation from anyone for writing this review. As…
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Pidgin/Yahoo issues
It seems that Yahoo has dropped support for legacy way of login, causing some problems with Pidgin. Possible solutions: Update to version 2.5.7 (works for me :-)) Accounts -> Edit account (to yahoo account) -> Advanced -> and to Pager Server erase “scs.msg.yahoo.com” and put instead 66.163.181.189 Further info: The bug on Launchpad – also…